Tasmanian Aboriginal People

Tasmanian Aboriginal people, self-name Palawa, any member of the Aboriginal population of Tasmania. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people are an isolate population of Australian Aboriginal people who were cut off from the mainland when a general rise in sea level flooded the Bass Strait about 10,000 years ago. Their population upon the arrival of European explorers in the 17th and 18th centuries has been estimated at about 4,000. Historically, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people spoke languages that were unintelligible to mainland Aboriginal peoples.

The island was divided among several peoples who spoke different dialects, each with a delimited hunting territory. Subsistence was based on hunting land and sea mammals and collecting shellfish and vegetable food. In warm months the Tasmanian Aboriginal people moved through the open forest and moorlands of the interior in bands or family groups of 15 to 50 people, and in colder months they moved to the coast. Occasionally, bands gathered together for a corroboree (a dance celebrating important events), for a hunt, or for protection against attack.

Wooden spears, waddies (clubs, or throwing sticks), and flaked-stone tools and weapons were produced. Bone implements, basketry, and bark canoes for coastal travel were also made. A few rock carvings depicting natural objects and conventionalized symbols have survived.

The first permanent white settlement was made in Tasmania in 1803. In 1804 an unprovoked attack by whites on a group of Tasmanian Aboriginal people was the first episode in the Black War. The whites treated the Aboriginal people as subhumans, seizing their hunting grounds, depleting their food supply, attacking the women, and killing the men. Attempts by Tasmanian Aboriginal people to resist were met with the superior weaponry and force of the Europeans. Between 1831 and 1835, ostensibly in a final effort at conciliation and to prevent the extermination of approximately 200 Tasmanian Aboriginal people, they were removed to Flinders Island. Their social organization and traditional way of life destroyed, subjected to alien disease and attempts to “civilize” them, most of them soon died. The death in 1876 of Truganini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman who had aided the resettlement on Flinders Island, gave rise to the widely propagated myth that the Aboriginal people of Tasmania had become extinct.

Nevertheless, Aboriginal identity remained alive in the Furneaux Group of islands among the offspring of Aboriginal women and European sealers. The focus for this community became Cape Barren Island, on which in 1881 a reserve was established for “half-castes,” the official designation for mixed-race individuals, who were discriminated against even as their Aboriginal identity was negated (the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act of 1912 , for example, identified the islanders as a distinct people requiring special regulation by the government but did not recognize them as Aboriginal people).

By the 1970s a movement for Aboriginal rights in Tasmania had begun to gain steam, led by activists who pointedly identified themselves as Aboriginal people rather than as the “descendants” of Aboriginal people. Soon the movement’s goals moved beyond recognition of Aboriginal identity to the pursuit of land rights. With the adoption of the Aboriginal Lands Act of 1995 , the Tasmanian government began returning control of significant places (including most of Cape Barren Island in 2005) to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. In the 2011 census, more than 19,000 Tasmanians identified as Aboriginal people, though disputes arose within the Aboriginal community over the authenticity of some of those claims.