Not many people know this story.
I thought some of you might be interested to hear it.
It is about the indigenous people of Tasmania.
Having lost the skills of sewing, fishing and making fire, the indigenous people of Tasmania lived more simply even than the Aboriginals on the Australian mainland from whom they had been isolated by rising sea levels around ten thousand years ago. When the ships bearing European settlers arrived in Tasmania in 1772, the indigenous people seem not to have noticed them. Unable to process a sight for which nothing had prepared them, they returned to their ways.
They had no defences against the settlers. By 1830 their numbers had been reduced from around five thousand to seventy two. In the intervening years they had been used for slave labour and sexual pleasure, tortured and mutilated. They had been hunted like vermin and their skins sold for a government bounty. When the males were killed, female survivors were turned loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were usually castrated. Children were clubbed to death. When the last indigenous Tasmanian male, William Lanner, died in 1869, his grave was opened by a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Dr George Stokell, who made a tobacco pouch from his skin. When the last 'fullblood' indigenous woman died a few years later, the genocide was complete.
I thought some of you might be interested to hear it.
It is about the indigenous people of Tasmania.
Having lost the skills of sewing, fishing and making fire, the indigenous people of Tasmania lived more simply even than the Aboriginals on the Australian mainland from whom they had been isolated by rising sea levels around ten thousand years ago. When the ships bearing European settlers arrived in Tasmania in 1772, the indigenous people seem not to have noticed them. Unable to process a sight for which nothing had prepared them, they returned to their ways.
They had no defences against the settlers. By 1830 their numbers had been reduced from around five thousand to seventy two. In the intervening years they had been used for slave labour and sexual pleasure, tortured and mutilated. They had been hunted like vermin and their skins sold for a government bounty. When the males were killed, female survivors were turned loose with the heads of their husbands tied around their necks. Males who were not killed were usually castrated. Children were clubbed to death. When the last indigenous Tasmanian male, William Lanner, died in 1869, his grave was opened by a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Dr George Stokell, who made a tobacco pouch from his skin. When the last 'fullblood' indigenous woman died a few years later, the genocide was complete.
