Aborigines of Tasmania.

Autumn

In just 30 years, 1803-1833, the number of Tasmanian Aborigines dropped sharply from 5,000 to 300, largely due to diseases brought from Europe and conflicts with British settlers. One of the last purebred Tasmanians, Truganini, died in 1876. Many people descended from Tasmanian Aborigines through intermarriage are alive today, and they maintain traditional Palawa culture.

Legislative definition of "Aboriginal"

In June 2005, the Tasmanian Legislative Council approved a new definition in the Aboriginal Lands Act. The law was passed so that Aboriginal people could elect their own Aboriginal Lands Council (and without a definition of the term “Aboriginal” it was not clear who had the right to elect this council).

By law, a person has the right to be called a "Tasmanian Aboriginal" if he meets the following criteria:
origin (ancestors)
self-identification

community recognition

Compensation for the “stolen generation”

On August 13, 1997, the Tasmanian Parliament adopted a Statement of Apology (referring to the previously widespread policy of removing children from Aboriginal families to place them “for re-education” in orphanages). The application was adopted unanimously.

Earlier, in November 2006, Tasmania became the first Australian state to offer financial compensation to the "stolen generation" - the descendants of Aboriginal people forcibly removed from their families by government agencies and church missions between 1900-1972. Up to 40 descendants of Aboriginal people were entitled to compensation totaling AUD 5 million.

Famous Tasmanians
Truganini and Fanny Cochrane Smith, the last purebred Tasmanians. According to Fanny Smith, records of the Tasmanian language remained.

William Lann or "King Billy"

Links

Tasmanian skull as a political instrument // Non-cultural anthropology
Records Relating to Tasmanian Aboriginal People from the Archives Office of Tasmania “Brief Guide No. 18"
Statistics - Tasmania - History - Aboriginal occupation (from the Australian Bureau of Statistics)
"Native Fiction" a sympathetic New Criterion review of Keith Windschuttle’s book casting doubt on a supposed Tasmanian genocide.
Reconciliation Australia
1984 Review of Tom Haydon's documentary "The Last Tasmanian" (1978)
“Tension in Tasmania over who is an Aboriginal” Article from The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper by Richard Flanagan
A history from the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
Transcript of current affairs television program Sunday with Keith Windschuttle, Prof. Henry Reynolds, Prof. Cassandra Pybus, Prof. Lyndall Ryan, and others

Notes

Literature

Alexander, Alison (editor) (2005) The Companion to Tasmanian History Center for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart. ISBN 186295223X.
Robson, L.L. (1983) A history of Tasmania. Volume 1. Van Diemen’s Land from the earliest times to 1855 Melbourne, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195543645.
Robson, L.L. (1991) A history of Tasmania. Volume II. Colony and state from 1856 to the 1980s Melbourne, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195530314.

Wikimedia Foundation.

2010.

How the British exterminated the Tasmanians June 5th, 2013
...Are we dealing with intelligent monkeys or with very underdeveloped people?
Oldfield, 1865
The only reasonable and logical solution regarding the inferior race is its destruction.

H. G. Wells, 1902

One of the most shameful pages in the history of English colonial expansion is the extermination of the native population of the island. Tasmania., British settlers in Australia, and especially Tasmania, systematically destroyed indigenous people and undermined the foundations of his life. The British “needed” all the lands of the natives with favorable climatic conditions

. “Europeans can hope to prosper because... the blacks will soon disappear...

However, those gentle and kind-hearted people whom Cook visited half a century earlier turned out to be not as submissive as on the mainland.” After farmers took the land from the indigenous people (primarily in Tasmania, where the climate was colder), the natives, with spears in their hands, tried to resist the newcomers armed with firearms. In response, the British organized a real hunt for them. In Tasmania, such human hunting took place with the sanction of the British authorities: “Final extermination in on a large scale could only be carried out with the help of justice and the armed forces... The soldiers of the fortieth regiment drove the natives between two boulders and shot them

all the men, and then pulled women and children out of rock crevices to blow their brains out” (ISSO). If the natives were "unaccommodating [unaccommodating]," the British concluded that the only way out of the situation was to destroy them. The natives were “hunted incessantly and hunted down like deer.” Those who were caught were taken away. In 1835, the last surviving local resident was removed. Moreover, these measures were not secret, no one was ashamed of them, and the government supported this policy.

“So the hunt for people began, and as time went on it became more and more brutal. In 1830, Tasmania was placed under martial law; a chain of armed men was built across the island, trying to drive the Aborigines into a trap. The indigenous inhabitants managed to get through the cordon, but the will to live left the hearts of the savages, fear was stronger than despair...” Felix Maynard, a doctor on a French whaling ship, recalled systematic roundups of natives. “The Tasmanians were useless and [now] all dead,” Hammond opined.
* Hammond John Lawrence Le Breton (1872-1949) - historian and journalist.

Europeans found the island quite densely populated. R. Pöch believes that about 6,000 natives could exist in Tasmania on the products of hunting and gathering. Wars between the Aborigines did not go beyond minor inter-tribal feuds. Apparently there were no hunger strikes; at least the Europeans did not find the natives exhausted.

The first Europeans were greeted by the Tasmanians with the greatest friendliness. According to Cook, the Tasmanians, of all the “savages” he saw, were the most good-natured and trusting people. “They did not have a fierce appearance, but seemed kind and cheerful without distrust of strangers.”

When in 1803 the first English settlement was founded on the island; the Tasmanians also treated the colonists without any hostility. Only the violence and cruelty of Europeans forced the Tasmanians to change their attitude towards whites. In the sources we find numerous colorful examples of these violences and cruelties. “Someone named Carrots,” says H. Parker, “killed a native whose wife he wanted to take away, cut off his head, hung it like a toy around the neck of the murdered man and forced the woman to follow him.” The same author reports on the exploits of one seal hunter, who “captured 15 native women and settled them on the islets of Bass Strait so that they would catch seals for him. If, by the time of his arrival, the women did not have time to prepare the required number of skins, he would punish them by tying the perpetrators to trees for 24-36 hours straight, and from time to time he would flog them with rods.”

In the early 1820s, Tasmanians attempted organized armed resistance to European rapists and murderers. The so-called “black war” begins, which soon turned into a simple hunt by the British for Tasmanians, completely defenseless against white firearms.

H. Hull directly says that “hunting for blacks was the favorite sport of the colonists. They chose a day and invited neighbors and their families to a picnic... after lunch, the gentlemen took guns and dogs and, accompanied by 2-3 exiled servants, went into the forest to look for Tasmanians. The hunters returned in triumph if they managed to shoot a woman or 1-2 men.

“One European colonist,” says Ling Roth, “had a jar in which he kept the ears of the people he killed as hunting trophies.”

Pictured: Tasmania's last Aboriginal people

“Many blacks with women and children gathered in a ravine near the city... the men were sitting around a large fire, while the women were busy preparing food for dinner. The natives were taken by surprise by a detachment of soldiers who, without warning, opened fire on them and then rushed to finish off the wounded. One soldier bayoneted a child crawling near his dead mother and threw him into the fire.” This soldier himself spoke about his “feat” to the traveler Hull, and when the latter expressed indignation at his cruelty, he exclaimed with sincere surprise: “It was only a child!”

In 1834 everything was finished. “On December 28,” says E. Reclus, “the last natives, pursued like wild animals, were driven to the tip of one elevated cape, and this event was celebrated with triumph. The happy hunter, Robinson, received an estate of 400 hectares and a significant amount of money as a reward from the government.

The prisoners were first transferred from island to island, and then all the Tasmanians, numbering two hundred, were imprisoned in one swampy valley on the island. Flinders. Within 10 years, 3/4 of the exiles died.

In 1869, William Lanny, the last Tasmanian, died on the shores of Oyster Bay, near Hobart.

In 1860 there were only eleven Tasmanians left. In 1876, the last Tasmanian woman, Truganini, died, and the island turned out to be, in the words of English official documents, completely “cleared” of natives, except for an insignificant number of Europeanized mestizos of Anglo-Tasmanian origin.

“Charles Darwin visited Tasmania during the Holocaust. He wrote: “I am afraid there is no doubt that the evil happening here and its consequences are the result of the shameless behavior of some of our fellow countrymen.” This is putting it mildly. It was a monstrous, unforgivable crime... The Aborigines had only two alternatives: either resist and die, or submit and become a parody of themselves,” wrote Alan Moorehead. Polish traveler Count Strzelecki,

(* Strzelecki Edmund Pawel (1796-1873) - Polish naturalist, geographer and geologist, explorer of America, Oceania and Australia) who arrived in Australia in the late 1830s, could not help but express horror at what he saw: “Humiliated, depressed, confused... emaciated and covered with dirty rags, they - [once] the natural owners of this land - [now] are more like ghosts of the past than living people; they vegetate here in their melancholy existence, awaiting an even more melancholic end.” Strzelecki also mentioned “the examination by one race of the corpse of another - with the verdict: “She died overtaken by God’s punishment.” The extermination of the natives could be considered as hunting, as a sport, because they seemed to have no souls.
True, Christian missionaries opposed the idea of the “lack of soul” among the “aboriginals” and saved the lives of a considerable number of the last indigenous inhabitants of Australia. However
However, the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, which was in force already in the post-war years, ordered (Article 127) “not to take into account the Aborigines” when calculating the population of individual states. Thus, the constitution rejected their participation in the human race. After all, as early as 1865, Europeans faced with indigenous peoples were not sure whether they were dealing with “clever apes or very inferior humans.”

Caring for “these beast people” is “a crime against our own blood,” Heinrich Himmler recalled in 1943, speaking of the Russians who should have been subjugated to the Nordic master race.
The British, who were doing “unheard of things in colonization” in Australia (according to Adolf Hitler), did not need this kind of instruction. Thus, one message for 1885 reads:
“To calm the niggas down, they were given something amazing. The food [that was distributed to them] half consisted of strychnine - and no one escaped his fate... The owner of Long Lagoon, using this trick, destroyed more than a hundred blacks.” “In the old days in New South Wales it was useless to ensure that those who invited blacks as guests and gave them poisoned meat received the punishment they deserved.” Некий Винсент Лесина еще в 1901 г. заявил в австралийском парламенте: «Ниггер должен исчезнуть с пути развития белого человека» - так «гласит закон эволюции». “We did not realize that by killing blacks we were breaking the law... because it used to be practiced everywhere,” was the main argument of the British, who killed twenty-eight “friendly” (i.e., peaceful) natives in 1838. Until this massacre at Myell Creek, all actions to exterminate the indigenous people of Australia remained unpunished. Only in the second year of Queen Victoria's reign were seven Englishmen (from the lower strata) hanged for such a crime as an exception.

However, in Queensland ( northern Australia) at the end of the 19th century. невинной забавой считалось загнать целую семью «ниггеров» -мужа, жену и детей - в воду к крокодилам… Во время своего пребывания в Северном Квинсленде в 1880-1884 гг., норвежец Карл Лумхольц(*Лумхольц Карл Софус (1851-1922) - норвежский traveler, naturalist and ethnographer, explorer of Australia, Mexico, Indonesia) heard the following statements: “You can only shoot blacks - you cannot treat them differently.” One of the colonists noted that this was a “hard... but... necessary principle.” He himself shot all the men he met in his pastures, “because they are slaughterers, women - because they give birth to slaughterers, and children - because they [will] still be slaughterers. They don’t want to work and therefore are not good for anything except getting shot,” the colonists complained to Lumholtz.

How the British exterminated the Tasmanians June 5th, 2013
Oldfield, 1865
Oldfield, 1865
H. G. Wells, 1902

Pictured: Tasmania's last Aboriginal people

H. G. Wells, 1902

British settlers in Australia, and especially Tasmania, systematically destroyed the indigenous population and undermined their livelihoods for the sake of their own prosperity. The British “needed” all the lands of the natives with favorable climatic conditions. “Europeans can hope to prosper because... the blacks will soon disappear...

If the natives are shot in the same way as crows are shot in some countries, the [native] population must in course of time be greatly reduced,” wrote Robert Knox in his “philosophical study of the influence of race.” Alan Moorehead described the fatal changes that befell Australia: “In Sydney the savage tribes were killed. In Tasmania, they were completely exterminated... by settlers... and convicts... they were all hungry for land, and none of them was going to let the blacks stop it.

However, those gentle and kind-hearted people whom Cook visited half a century earlier turned out to be not as submissive as on the mainland.” After farmers took the land from the indigenous people (primarily in Tasmania, where the climate was colder), the natives, with spears in their hands, tried to resist the newcomers armed with firearms. In response, the British organized a real hunt for them. In Tasmania, such a hunt for people took place with the sanction of the British authorities: “Final extermination on a large scale could only be carried out with the help of justice and the armed forces ... The soldiers of the fortieth regiment drove the natives between two stone blocks and shot

“One European colonist,” says Ling Roth, “had a jar in which he kept the ears of people he managed to kill as hunting trophies.”

However, in Queensland (northern Australia) at the end of the 19th century. невинной забавой считалось загнать целую семью «ниггеров» -мужа, жену и детей - в воду к крокодилам… Во время своего пребывания в Северном Квинсленде в 1880-1884 гг., норвежец Карл Лумхольц(*Лумхольц Карл Софус (1851-1922) - норвежский traveler, naturalist and ethnographer, explorer of Australia, Mexico, Indonesia) heard the following statements: “You can only shoot blacks - you cannot treat them differently.” One of the colonists noted that this was a “hard... but... necessary principle.” He himself shot all the men he met in his pastures, “because they are slaughterers, women - because they give birth to slaughterers, and children - because they [will] still be slaughterers. They don’t want to work and therefore are not good for anything except getting shot,” the colonists complained to Lumholtz.

Tasmania cannot be missed even on a small-scale map. It looks like a medallion - a heart suspended on an invisible chain under the Australian mainland. Europeans learned about the existence of this island in 1642. Then it was not yet called Tasmania, but bore the name Van Diemen's Land, given to it in honor of the Dutch Governor-General of the East Indies, who sent Abel Tasman to discover new lands in the southern Indian and Pacific oceans. At that time, sea travel in these waters was extremely dangerous. Legend has it that Van Diemen sent Tasman to his death to prevent the sailor from marrying his daughter Maria. However, the brave sailor managed not only not to die, but also to perpetuate his own name by opening New Earth. And the name of the governor’s daughter was preserved in the name of one of the northern capes of Tasmania.

It is interesting that during the voyage the navigator bypassed, that is, did not actually notice, Australia and landed on west coast Tasmania. Abel Tasman, on behalf of Holland, took possession of the new land, but it was even less useful than (as they thought at that time) Australia: cold climate, wild nature. gloomy rocks and no treasures. Local residents did not react in any way to the silver or gold that the sailors generously showed to the natives. These strange, in the eyes of savages, objects had no value. From which it followed that there was nothing like this here, and could not be, and the local tribes were in a blissful primitive state, not having the slightest concept of property, much less money.

After a short time, Abel Tasman moved on. Surprisingly, Tasman was lucky again. He has the honor of discovering another land, which he apparently stumbled upon quite by accident, once again without noticing Australia! From the ship he saw the western shores South Island New Zealand. This land was still unknown to anyone. But the Dutchman did not engage in detailed research: the indigenous Polynesian population of the island, the Maori, were openly hostile to the newcomers. Four crew members were killed. Tasman did not start a military campaign against a numerically superior enemy and went to Batavia, as Jakarta was then called, the Dutch starting point for exploring the southern lands. Having made stops along the way on the islands of Fiji and Tonga, Abel Tasman safely reached his base in East India. Two years later, he made a second voyage along the northern coast of New Holland, but this time he was unable to discover anything significant. Interestingly, it was thanks to Abel Tasman’s expedition of 1642, when a European navigator first visited New Zealand’s South Island, that this land is still called New Zealand to this day. Tasman named her Staten Landt. It was this name that was transformed by Dutch cartographers into the Latin Nova Zee/andia in honor of one of the provinces of the Netherlands - Zealand (Zee/and). Later, British navigator James Cook used the English version of the name, New Zea/and, in his writings, and it became the official name of the country.

The island of Tasmania is located in the zone of incessant westerly winds of the Southern Hemisphere, the strength of which often reaches gale force. Once upon a time, in the “good old days of wooden ships and iron men”, the British dubbed these winds “good news”, and the area of their distribution - between 39 degrees and 43 degrees south latitude - the “roaring forties”. Tasmania is located in these latitudes, so that for one third of the year winds of force 7-9 prevail there, bringing heavy rains from the ocean. Their streams, mixing with myriads of splashes of the ocean surf, cover the rocky shores of the island with an impenetrable haze from the eyes of sailors for many days, and sometimes weeks. At times, “good news” brings fog: it envelops both the sea and the coast for many miles around in a thick gray-greenish veil. Days like this when there is fog - local residents They call it “pea soup” - there are at least sixty here a year. The shores of Tasmania, constantly washed over by furious waves with fragments of icebergs and fogs brought by “good news” from the ocean, have long been the scourge of sailors.

The island of Tasmania is separated from Australia by the Bass Strait. So it was named in honor of the English captain George Bass who discovered it. But for some reason this name did not catch on among the sailors, who still call it the Strait of Danger. Although its width is 130 miles and its depth is 500-600 meters, it is classified by navigators as a ship graveyard. The danger lies in numerous islands and rocks, underwater reefs and strong variable currents, not to mention fog and stormy winds. The islands of King, Hunter, Three Hammock and Robbins stand in the way of ships traveling through the strait from west to east. The shores of these islands and the passages between them are dotted with underwater reefs and the hulls of sunken ships. A study of shipwrecks on King Island showed. that on the coastal rocks of the island, which is about 50 miles long and about 15 wide, more than fifty ships were lost. During the course of this research, a number of valuable information was obtained about currents, straits, underwater reefs and shoals. This data was later used by hydrographers to produce detailed nautical charts of Tasmania.

But it turns out that it was not underwater rocks and strong currents that destroyed most of these ships. Maritime chronicles of Tasmania indicate that the cause of their death was most often pirates. They appeared in Bass Strait at the very end of the 18th century and began to rob the whalers and sea beaver and elephant seal hunters who hunted here (they say that these animals were once found here in great numbers). Having “smoked out” the hunters and whalers, they moved on to robbing merchant ships. And since the pirates did not have well-armed ships and they did not like boarding battles, they began to place false lighthouses on the Bass Strait islands. The deceived captains changed course, leading their ships onto sharp reefs. The robber islanders could only transport the cargo of the lost ship to the shore.
The pirates Stalis Monroe and David Hope were particularly cruel to shipwrecked people. in the mid-19th century they were called "the uncrowned kings of Bass Strait". The first was the master of the eastern part of the strait and controlled the islands of Flinders, Cape Barren, Swan, Goose, Preservation and others. Monroe reigned in these waters for exactly thirty years. David Hope established his residence on Robbins Island, where he lived in plunder and violence until 1854. Both leaders wore a gold earring in their ear, kaftans made of kangaroo skins and hats made of fur seals. Each of the leaders had a huge wine cellar, where the stocks of rum and gin they captured were stored.

Due to the false lighthouses of Monroe and Hope, a huge number of ships were lost in the Bass Strait area. For example, in August 1845, the English corvette Catarac sailed to the false Hope lighthouse. The ship crashed on the reefs and sank, taking the lives of more than three hundred immigrants from England. In the same way, on the King's reefs, the corvette Seaguy of Melbourne was lost in 1853, the barque Waterung and the schooner Braten in 1854. How many ships were lost off the coast of Tasmania? Australian historian Harry O'May tried to answer this question. For ten years, he carefully studied archival files related to the accident rate of maritime transport in Australia and Tasmania. He managed to establish the names of the ships that died in the area of the island from 1797 to 1950 About two hundred ships on O'May's list remained unnamed, although he knew the places of their wrecks. An Australian historian believes that from its discovery to the present day, more than a thousand ships, not counting fishing boats, have been lost around Tasmania. Several dozen ships out of the ill-fated thousand took with them valuable cargo, in particular gold, to the seabed. Of particular interest to underwater gold miners is the American clipper Water Witch, which sank on the reefs of King Island on August 13, 1855. It is reliably known that at the time of its death there was gold bullion on board, which is currently valued at more than $5 million.

The information about the lost ships published by O" May caused a real stir among adventurers in Tasmania and Australia. But it was not so easy to get to these underwater treasures! Sharp reefs, constantly rolled by the surf or ocean swell, reliably protect the ships lying off the coast. And that’s all -Despite the dangers, the scuba divers continue their search for Animal. vegetable world Tasmania is very original - a large number of representatives are endemic - for example, the Tasmanian devil). Even those arriving from mainland Australia are subject to additional environmental controls in Tasmania, similar to those arriving in Australia. In Tasmania, 44% of the territory is covered by rainforests, and 21% of this area is occupied by national parks. Such ratios are rare. Tasmania's rain forest recognized natural heritage humanity. It is one of the last remaining temperate wilderness areas in the Southern Hemisphere. And, perhaps, Tasmania is one of the standards of wildlife on our planet.

Trout-infested lakes, rivers and waterfalls, replenished by rain and melt water, feed forests where Euphoria tirucalli, Eucalyptus regal and Ganna, Myrtaceae, Nothophagus Cunningham, Acacia, Sassafras, Eucryphia splendensum, Phyllocladus asplenifolia, Dicksonia antarcticum and Dacridium franklinii grow. Environmentalists are constantly at war with miners, paper manufacturers and hydroelectric power plant builders. The barren desert of Queenstown, a mining town, is a grim reminder of the consequences of thoughtless waste of natural resources. Once upon a time, Tasmania, like Australia and New Zealand, together with Antarctica, South America, Africa and India, was part of the colossal southern continent of Gondwana, this was about 250 million years ago. The huge continent occupied more than half the globe, and a significant part of it was covered by temperate rain forest. A significant portion of this forest remains in western Tasmania, and in 1982 it was unique phenomenon The birthplace was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The nature of Tasmania is exceptional, it has no analogues in the world. The heart of the Tasmanian wilderness - National Park Wild Rivers of Franklin-Gordon. Here you can see amazing mountain peaks, tropical forests, deep river valleys, picturesque gorges. And among all this splendor, protected rivers meander. Almost a quarter of the territory of this island has not yet experienced human influence. Impenetrable forests and jungles, strange forest animals, a huge number of rare bird species, and a wide variety of fish in mountain lakes and rivers have been preserved here. One of the legendary inhabitants of the forests of Tasmania is the Tasmanian devil. IN Lately The number of this exotic wild animal has decreased significantly. although he is not in any danger of disappearing. With its powerful jaws, this muscular, 6 to 8 kilogram carrion gatherer can eat a dead kangaroo whole, head and all. Of enormous interest is also cultural heritage this region, which was the southernmost area of human habitation on our planet. There are more than 40 Aboriginal sacred sites here, which are still of exceptional importance for the modern indigenous population of Australia. Archaeological finds from this region have made up invaluable exhibits stored in many museums not only in Australia, but throughout the world.

Tasmania is a small (its area is 67,897 km2) island off the southeastern coast of Australia, separated from the mainland by the Bass Strait (224 km wide). Resting on a common base with Australia and being connected with it by numerous islands, Tasmania in its geological structure is part of the mainland. Abel Tasman, who discovered the island on November 24, 1642, took it for part of the mainland. That Tasmania is an island was established only in 1798 by Flinders and Bass, who were the first navigators to circumnavigate Tasmania.

Geographical conditions

The coasts of Tasmania are indented by numerous bays. Two mountain ranges cross the island from north to south. Interior The islands are a plateau covered with grass. The mountain slopes are overgrown with dense forest (eucalyptus trees, tree ferns). The climate is temperate, humid; Snow often falls in winter. The vegetation is generally of the same nature as in southeast Australia, but there are also local forms characteristic of colder climates. The fauna is also similar to that of southeastern Australia, but is much poorer in species.

Indigenous people and their fate

Europeans found a fairly large population on the island. Exact figures are not available. The first observers determined the size of the indigenous population very differently: from 1 thousand (Backhouse) to 20 thousand (Melville) 1. There is reason to believe that about 6 thousand people could subsist on hunting and gathering in Tasmania.

The colonization of Tasmania by the British led to the rapid disappearance of the island's indigenous population from the face of the earth. The first meetings of the Tasmanians with the whites seemed to show no signs of such an outcome. European sailors who visited the island invariably met with the friendliest attitude. According to Cook, the Tasmanians, of all the “savages” he saw, were the most good-natured and trusting: “They did not have a fierce or wild appearance... but seemed kind and cheerful, without distrust of strangers.”

When the first English settlement was founded on the island in 1803, the Tasmanians also at first did not show the slightest hostility towards white newcomers. Only the violence and cruelty of Europeans forced the Tasmanians to change their attitude.

Numerous examples of these violences and cruelties can be found in the sources. So, in Parker we read: “A man named Carrots killed a native whose wife he wanted to take away, cut off his head, hung it like a toy around the neck of the murdered man’s wife and forced the woman to follow him.” The same author talks about the “exploits” of one seal hunter, who “captured ten to fifteen native women and settled them on the islets of Bass Strait so that they would catch seals for him. If the women did not have time to prepare the required amount of skins by the time of his arrival, he tied the perpetrators to trees for 24-36 hours as punishment, and from time to time flogged them with rods; sometimes he killed the disobedient ones” 2.

One colonist cattle breeder had a female slave, whom he kept tied with bull fetters. “There is no doubt,” says an eyewitness to this incident, “that this and even worse treatment of the natives by the white cattle breeders served as the first and main reason for the hostility with which the latter now treat all whites.”

In the early 1820s, Tasmanians began to attempt organized armed resistance to European rapists. A “black war” broke out, which soon turned into a real hunt by the colonists for the Tasmanians, completely defenseless against the firearms of the colonialists.

G. Hull directly says that “hunting for blacks was the favorite sport of the colonists. They chose a day and invited neighbors with their families to a picnic... after dinner, the gentlemen took guns and dogs and, accompanied by two or three exiled servants, went into the forest to look for blacks. .. Sometimes they managed to shoot a woman or one or two men.”

Ling-Roth gives a vivid example of the merciless cruelty with which the British waged the “Black War”: “A number of blacks with women and children gathered in a ravine near the settlement ... the men sat around a large fire, and the women were busy preparing possums and bandicoots for dinner . The natives were taken by surprise by a detachment of soldiers who, without warning, opened fire on them and then rushed to finish off the wounded.”

Almost all of this evidence is collected in the already mentioned very conscientious work of Ling-Roth "Aborigines of Tasmania", which is a good summary of what is known about the Tasmanians. The book provides information about those persons (their names are also given) from whom Ling-Rot borrowed his material.

In 1834, the “Black War” was over.

“On December 28,” says Elisée Reclus, “the last natives, pursued like wild animals, were captured at the tip of one elevated cape, and this event was celebrated with triumph. The happy hunter Robinson received an estate of 400 hectares and a significant amount of money as a reward from the government; in addition, the public subscription gave him about 200 thousand francs. The prisoners were first transferred from islet to islet, and then all the Tasmanians, numbering two hundred, were imprisoned in one swampy valley on Flinders Island. They were given food supplies and catechism lessons. Within ten years, more than three-quarters of the exiles had died.” In 1860, there were only eleven Tasmanians left. In 1876, the last Tasmanian, Truganina, died. nicknamed "Lalla Rook" by the British.

The island, in the words of English official documents, was completely “cleared of natives,” except for an insignificant number of Europeanized mestizos of English-Tasmanian origin.

Technology and material culture

The culture of the Tasmanians, due to their rapid extermination, remained little studied: researchers are forced to base themselves on fragmentary evidence from old travelers and on archaeological material in the form of stone tools found on the island. The latter were studied purely formally, and it is not surprising that we find in the literature comparisons of them with tools from all Paleolithic eras. Thus, Balfour, who examined 5 thousand samples of stone tools from forty sites in the northern and eastern districts of Tasmania, brings their technology closer to the Mousterian and Aurignacian and finds that the similarity with the Aurignacian culture is more clearly expressed. The most common in Tasmania, as Balfour points out, is the “scraper with a beard,” which is one of the characteristic tools of the Late Paleolithic. Sollas draws an analogy between the Tasmanian and Acheulean (!) cultures. S. Johnston points out the similarity with pre-Aurignacian forms and especially with the known forms of the Mousterian industry. These purely formal comparisons are completely incorrect, and equally incorrect are the conclusions that were drawn from them, the conclusions about some unusually low level of development at which the Tasmanians exterminated by the colonialists supposedly stood. Much more likely is the convergence of Tasmanian tools with the crude forms of Early Neolithic “macroliths”.

The vast majority of stone tools (terro-watta) found in Tasmania are apparently obtained by simply beating fragments from a single stone (core) and show no traces of further processing. According to the description of the colonist Rainer, whose observations date back to 1813-1818, the aborigines broke the stone into pieces by hitting it against a rock or another stone, and from the resulting fragments they selected those that had sharp cutting edges. The worker, throwing one stone onto another lying on the ground, jumped back, spreading his legs wide so as not to be wounded by the fragments. The favorite material for the Tasmanian terro-watta servants is hornfellow, rich deposits of which are located near Dismal Creek. As an exception, there are samples that indicate more careful beating, through which they were deliberately given a certain shape.

Although there is thus evidence of the existence of specialized forms among the Tasmanians, most stone tools had a universal use. Using terro-watt, the Tasmanians skinned kangaroos and other marsupials, cut meat, made notches in trees to make it easier to climb them, smoothed and sharpened spears and clubs; the same terro-watta was used for shaving the hair on women's heads, scarification, scraping red ocher, which, mixed with fat, was used to lubricate the hair.

The universality of terro-watt is indicated by the absence in Tasmanian dialects of words for the designation different types tools: all types of stone tools were designated by the same word ( touch , trowutta , terro - watta , derived from trona , or teroona - stone).

Balfour mentions one example of a tool with a ground working edge. He attributes the origin of this weapon to the "Australian Empire"; Australians, a small number of whom were transported to Tasmania by the British in the middle of the 19th century, brought, in his opinion, stone axes with a handle found in Tasmania in isolated samples: the Tasmanians are believed to have not known the latter.

Bone processing was completely unknown to the Tasmanians. The so-called “spoons” are really just kangaroo brooches; they show no traces of processing.

The shells were used in their raw form as drinking vessels. Sometimes the Tasmanians used rakorshuy instead of stone for sharpening spears. Small shells, namely Elenchus, served as material for necklaces.

The combat and hunting weapons of the Tasmanians were spears and clubs. The spears were sharpened sticks 2-3, even up to 4 m long and as thick as a finger. They could be thrown no more than 40 m. The northern tribes used spears with a jagged end. There are indications that Tasmanians sometimes poisoned spears, using cadaveric poison for this purpose. The Tasmanians, unlike the Australians, did not know spear throwers.

Tasmanian clubs are described as short sticks, about 2.5 cm thick, pointed at both ends, equipped at one end with frequent rough notches to prevent slipping in the hand. When throwing, the club was held in a horizontal position; being thrown, it went into a rotational motion, which one author compares to the flight of a boomerang. But the Tasmanians did not know a real boomerang.

The Tasmanian weaving technique is characterized as spiral-roller. The examples of baskets available in the British Museum are very similar to the Australian ones. Along with wicker baskets and bags, there are much more primitive ones: made of bark, leaves, algae.

The dwellings of the Tasmanians were often the simplest barriers from the wind, but huts were also built in the shape of a hemisphere or cone, with a frame made of poles, covered with bark and branches.

The Tasmanian boats were unique. They were a cross between a raft and a boat and were made from large pieces of bark from different types of eucalyptus, rolled into a tube, nested one inside the other and wrapped with grass ropes. These tubes were connected in three places, the middle one was longer (4.5 m), the outer ones were shorter. Such a vessel resembles the “balsa” (reed raft) of the Indian tribes South America, lifted up to six people; it was driven by sticks 2.5-3 m long; in low water these sticks were used as hooks, in high water they were used as oars, rowing while standing or sitting on bundles of grass.

The Tasmanians wore kangaroo skins as clothing: women wore them as aprons, the sick and old people wore them as cloaks to protect them from the cold. But often, even in the cold season, Tasmanians walked completely naked.

Of the three methods of making fire known on the Australian mainland: Drilling, plowing (the so-called “fire plow”) and sawing, the Tasmanians knew the first two. Drilling was the predominant method. They tried to maintain the fire, and when they moved, women always took smoldering bark torches with them. The Tasmanians had very low technology for processing food supplies: they did not have grain graters, and there was no earthen oven, which existed among the Australians; they did not know the art of cooking; they only knew roasting over a fire and baking in ashes.

The Tasmanians were familiar with the intoxicating drink. They made deep cuts on the trunks Eucalyptus resinifera , which the colonists called the “cider tree,” and collected the sweet juice that flowed out in abundance into a hole dug at the foot of the tree. The juice quickly thickened, turning into a kind of molasses. The holes were covered with a flat stone for protection from animals and birds. After some time, the juice began to ferment, it was mixed with water and an intoxicating drink like cider was obtained.

Farm

Hunting and gathering played a leading role in the Tasmanian economy. Hunted for the big one

Game (kangaroos) and marine mammals (seals and stranded whales). The Tasmanians did not know any traps; the main hunting weapons were throwing spears and clubs. The usual method of hunting was round-ups with burning of grass and bushes. Women also took part in the hunt, mainly in raids as beaters.

Gathering items included mushrooms, large bulbs, berries, bird eggs, edible algae, mollusks, and larvae. Next to gathering, it is necessary to include fishing for crustaceans and hunting for small animals (possum, bandicoot).

The Tasmanians did not engage in fishing at all, even on the sea coast. They did not eat fish, feeling disgust for it - this fact is very difficult to explain. Therefore, they did not have any fishing gear, no hooks, no nets. But they willingly caught and ate various shellfish and other sea animals. Catching them was the specialty of the women, who very skillfully swam and dived after them. Women's business was also the hunting of seals, which they killed with blows of clubs on the head* as they do in our North.

Regarding the distribution of hunting and gathering products, the sources only indicate that the spoils of a collective hunt were distributed among all participants, and each individual probably also shared the surplus of individual production with other members of his group, since canning and storing food was unknown to the Tasmanians.

Social order

The social structure of the Tasmanians has remained almost completely unstudied. It is known that they were divided into about twenty tribes, each of which had

has its own dialect. The tribes, in turn, had divisions called “hordes” or “clans” in sources. Apparently there were no more than fifty people in each unit. Furneaux (Cook's companion) says that he never saw a camp consisting of more than four huts, each of them accommodating three or four people. O'Connor estimates the size of the group of Tasmanians wandering together at ten to thirty people. La Billardiere recounts a meeting with a “horde” of 42 people. Elsewhere the same author mentions a "horde" of 48 people (ten men, 14 women and 24 children).

Each group moved in a certain territory, the boundaries of which were strictly observed. In some places there was a transition to settlement, mainly on the northwestern coast of the island, where the “hordes” remained all year round in the same place, collecting shellfish. However, according to general rule, and seasonal movements took place there: the winter was spent in valleys protected from sea winds, and the summer on the seashore.

The sources do not contain accurate data about the true nature of the Tasmanian tribal divisions. These divisions were probably primitive clans. According to Milligan, Tasmanians avoided* marrying within their division and “wives were more often kidnapped or openly captured from neighboring clans.” In other words, they had exogamy. The account of kinship was apparently matrilineal. At least Bonwick reports that "in Australia and Tasmania, men were considered related to their mothers' relatives." Comparison with Australian customs makes this message plausible, because in 1870, when these words were written, the tribes known in Australia were mainly those who actually considered kinship through the female line.

Marriage among the Tasmanians, apparently, was a pair marriage, but along with it, remnants of group marriage were also preserved. In West we read: “polygamy was tolerated; Lately women have been living in bigamy.” Milligan points out the extreme ease of divorce among Tasmanians. The widow was considered the property of the entire group: all men had a right to her. Comparing data from sources, we can come to the conclusion that the traditions of group marriage predominate among the Tasmanians.

All sources agree that the Tasmanians did not have real clothes. But some observers saw them as tribal leaders, however, with very limited power (Davis, Breton, Dixon, Jeffreys, Robinson, Walker), while others believed that these were simply the heads of individual families (Backhouse, West). Any quarrels were resolved by self-destruction or by the warring parties united.

Religion

Even less is known about the religious beliefs of the Tasmanians than about the social system. Reports from observers about this are contradictory and unreliable. Some - like Widowson, Breton, Jorgensen - generally denied any religion among them. Others - the majority - acknowledged the existence of religious beliefs, but described them in very contradictory ways. Almost everyone, however, agrees on one thing: the natives were afraid of the night spirit, or spirits wandering in the dark. Some indicate the name of this night spirit: Raego Wrapper (Robinson) or Namma (Davis). Others reduce it simply to a superstitious fear of the dark (Line, Walker, West). There is a message about the cult of the moon (Lloyd, Bonwick); in any case, on moonlit nights the Tasmanians staged their “corrobories”. There are also reports of belief in a day spirit, but they are very vague. Father V. Schmidt tried to find traces of “primitive monotheism” in these messages, but there is no basis for this.

The Tasmanians practiced initiation, but all we know about its rituals is that one of them was scarring on the body. Bonwick mentions rotating tablets, but only as an instrument of magic, and not as an accessory to initiation rites; women were forbidden to look at them. Regarding witchcraft, it is known that everyone knew and used magical techniques, but in each group there were also individuals considered especially skilled in magic; the British called them doctors. The magical techniques were simple and very similar to those practiced by the Australians. According to Bonwick, the usual method of treatment was rubbing the sore spot, accompanied by the recitation of spells, and the imaginary removal of a bone or stone from the patient’s body. Backhouse says that the sorcerers kept pieces of glass with them, with which they made deep wounds in the diseased part of the patient's body. Obviously, glass replaced magic crystals, which among the Australians were a necessary accessory for a sorcerer. One of the best means for treating diseases was considered to be the application of a dead man’s bone to a sore spot, as well as ingestion of particles scraped from the dead man’s bone and water in which the bone was soaked. Milligan says that Tasmanians often wore an arm or leg bone or lower jaw bone, or sometimes even the skull of a deceased relative, around their necks as an amulet to protect them from all harm.

Sometimes the sick were placed near the deceased for healing. Backhouse says that after the death of one woman, her relatives built a platform of poles and, at sunset, laid the corpse on it; they then placed the sick around the platform. According to the aborigines, the deceased had to get up at night and drive out the evil spirits that caused the disease from the sick.

The sources are silent about the techniques of harmful magic. Only Brow-Smith mentions that the Tasmanians believed that a person could be harmed by taking possession of his hair. Tasmanians believed in the spirits of the dead, who during the day hide in caves and crevices of rocks, hollow trees, secluded valleys, and roam the earth at night. It was believed that spirits were generally benevolent creatures, although they were capable of harming the living when angry.

The afterlife was considered a continuation of the earthly one. There was an idea of a land of the dead, rich in game and berries. Tasmanians knew three methods of burial: burying in the ground, cremation, sometimes with a preliminary display of the corpse on a platform, and burial in caves or hollow trees. The “sacred stones” of the Tasmanians mentioned by Brow-Smith and Backhouse are interesting. They provide a remarkable analogy with the Australian churingas and at the same time evoke the famous painted pebbles from the Mas d'Azil cave in France (Mesolithic era). Apparently, they served as amulets and talismans. According to Backhouse, the black and red stripes painted on these stones represented "absent friends." More likely, however, is Bonwick’s assumption that here we are not talking about missing living people, but about the dead, who were spoken of as “set off on a long journey.”

There are some indications of totemic beliefs. More than once, observers noted various food prohibitions: some Tasmanians refused to eat the meat of a male wallaby, others refused to eat the meat of a female. An interesting story is about a woman who had a superstitious attachment to one of the trees in the forest. When this tree was damaged by a group of men, she angrily rushed at her offenders with a burning brand 1. There was a ban on eating fish, but the reasons for this ban remained unknown.

Art

Ling-Roth in his work "Aborigines of Tasmania" questions the existence of Tasmanians visual arts before the arrival of Europeans, since “information about this is insufficient.” However, already among the early travelers we find references to works of fine art, the origin of which cannot be attributed to European influence. Thus, Peron (1802) discovered in a grave he excavated pieces of bark on which signs were applied, similar to those with which the natives tattoo their forearms. Henry Gellier (a source not mentioned by Ling-Roth) found a charcoal drawing of the moon on the wall of a hut in Surry Hills in 1827. Ross (1836) mentions images of human figures, quadrangles, circles, scratched on the bark. Calder reports finding “several extraordinary charcoal drawings” on the walls of the huts. Some of them were conventional, and he could not understand their meaning, others depicted a dog, an emu, people throwing spears at some animal, apparently a kangaroo. Calder calls a “masterpiece” a “battle painting” that depicts people fighting, running and dying.

The arrival of Europeans provided new themes for Tasmanian artists. Thus, in 1828, shortly after the inhabitants of Surry Hills first saw the oxcarts of a caravan of colonists passing through the area, the scene that struck them was reproduced on the wall of one of the huts. There are references to drawings on bark, as well as images on trees and rocks. In one of his books 2, Bonwick reproduces images of the sun, the moon, people in a boat, painted by Tasmanians on tree trunks. Of the rock paintings, he mentions only one, namely, a human hand painted in red ocher. Until recently, no other rock art had been found in Tasmania. Therefore, the relief images found by A. L. Meston on the rocky cape of Mersey Cliff, on the north-western coast of the island, not far from the “kitchen heap” at the site of the camp, are of great interest. Some images are conventional (concentric circles, large ovals with smaller ovals inscribed in them), others are realistic, such as images of a snake curled into a ring, a bird’s head, a shell Haliotis (the main food of the inhabitants of this district). Most bas-reliefs are characterized by their great depth, which was not easy to achieve due to the hardness of the rock (diabase). According to Meston, the images were carved with a sharpened piece of quartzite, which was struck with another stone, like a hammer.

Primitive forms of musical creativity are also known to Tasmanians. The melody was marked with parallel thirds. The content of the lyrics related to hunting, military clashes, etc. Rolled skins were used as a percussion instrument; they beat on them, keeping time. The beat was beat when performing dances 3. The dances were apparently similar to the Australian corroboree 4 .

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