[1] Are the Tasmanians dead? On the Indigenous Australians, part I

When I was a child, I had a book about the history and evolution of human species. In this book I found a picture of ‘the last [indigenous] Tasmanian’, who was a woman called Truganini.

Here’s the picture, taken circa 1866:

Truganini, supposed to be ‘the last Tasmanian’, died in 1876 in the Tasmanian capital Hobart. Until her twenties she had being taken part of her native culture and that state was disrupted by European invasion and eve of the Black War – a war between ‘Blacks’ (Australian Aborigines) and Anglo-Celtic settlers in Tasmania that lasted from the mid-1820s to 1832. There is no doubt the war was a genocide: the death toll was as big as 90% (or even more) of island’s population.

At the end of the war the remaining Aboriginal population (100 persons) was moved – voluntarily of forcibly – to Flanders Island located north to Tasmania. The settlement organized by the Protector of Aborigines, George A. Robinson did not last much time; in 1856 few survivors (47 persons) with Truganini amongst them were removed to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart. In 1873, Truganini being the last survivor of the Oyster Cove group, was moved to Hobart and became an anthropological oddity.

Her status as the last of her kind remains controversial; although she is widely considered as such,  there are also sources claiming that there were on Kangaroo Island in State of South Australia three native Tasmanian women, named Sal, Suke and Betty, who outlived Truganini (prior to the European collonisation of South Australia the island’s population consisted of white sailors and women kidnapped from Tasmania or Australian mainland, their wifes and virtually slaves). Additionally, in 1889 a woman named Fanny Cochrane Smith who was a first child born on Flanders Island after the population transfer of Tasmanians was recognized by government of Colony of Tasmania as being ‘the last Tasmanian’. She bore 11 children to an Englishmen and a significant portion of present-day Tasmanians of Aboriginal descendent are her offspings.

The dispute whenever she or Truganini was the last full blooded Tasmanian continues, but without a doubt we can say she was the last speaker of a Tasmanian language – more exactly a Tasmanian lingua franca that came to being after the resettlement to Flinders Island, because the Tasmanian languages were not mutually intelligible. The Tasmanian languages are extinct and lost, but there are some sources (like recordings of some Aboriginal songs made by Mrs. Smith) on which are based attempts to reconstruct a generic Aboriginal Tasmanian language, called by its revival movement ‘Palawa kani’.

The extinction?

A canonical science-fiction novel, “The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells from 1897 telling a story of Martian invasion of Earth contains a famous quote about Tasmanians:

“And before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished Bison and the Dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?”

Contrary to the popular belief spread probably by this book and the legend of Truganini, the Tasmanians or Palawa (as they call themselves in their own language) are not extinct as ethnicity. Even if Truganini or Mrs. Smith were the last full blooded Tasmanians, they should not be considered as the last Tasmanians in general, because race does not equal ethnicity. Despite being erroneously considerate to be extinct, there are nearly as many as 26 000 people who identify as Palawa (they are mixed with white settlers, obviously, but they are still descendants of native population). They have their political and cultural representation, like for example Michael Mansell, an Aboriginal activist who has been fighting for awareness of Aboriginal Tasmanian identity since 1970s. There is also the mentioned above movement for reconstruction and reintroduction of the Tasmanian (or ‘Pan-Tasmanian’) language - Palawa kani. The reconstructions started in 1999 and the language has no ISO code yet.

Here is a picture of Michael Mansell; in the background the flag of Aboriginal Australians, one of the official flags of Commonwealth of Australia:

 

Ya tawatja!¹

^{1. Palawa kani for 'good day'.}

^{Szymon Czarnecki}