tasmania: best laid plans…

The final solution down under in Tasmania….

…It was perhaps the most farcical campaign in the history of British imperial arms. The plan called for a steady advance on a front that would begin by being 120 miles long, but would narrow in the course of the march until its two flanks, swinging in an arc around the island, were united like a noose in the peninsula.

No man was to be farther than sixty yards from his neighbor, and the beaters were to maintain contact by shouts and bugle calls. Strict military precepts prevailed. Dispatches were sent back to Macquarie House by equerry; requisitions were made for ammunition, food, clothing, and three hundred pairs of manacles. When a skeptical civilian expressed doubts to one officer about this scheme, the colonel replied, “Oh, this is an entirely military manouevre, which you, as a civilian, would not understand.”

---John Webber's sketch of a possum, 1777, one of the earliest European works of art in Tasmania (ALMFA, SLT) ---click image for source...

—John Webber’s sketch of a possum, 1777, one of the earliest European works of art in Tasmania (ALMFA, SLT) —click image for source…

Nothing went right. In that severe terrain the cordon was impossible to maintain. When they came to a defile, the soldiers predictably moved into single file; when they came to a particularly prickly patch or shrub, they naturally avoided it. Soaked through by incessant rains, their clothes torn, their rations inadequate, their muskets often unserviceable, their whereabouts distinctly uncertain, soldiers and volunteers alike soon lost interest in the aborigines and were concerned only with getting themselves dry, fed, and settled in the next bivouac.

Nerves were frayed, tempers rose, volunteers slipped away home, and not even Colonel George Arthur himself, galloping indefatigably along the line and writing numerous dispatches, could maintain the morale of his exhausted campaigners. ( to be continued)…


---Dowling’s re-presentations of Bock’s images found their way to the Ethnological Society of Britain and the Royal Academy where they fed the interest in anthropology and primitive societies.  Although these paintings were created in London, using sketches from Bock’s originals and they eventually found their way back to Australia as part of the swirl of cultural artefacts throughout the Empire.---Read More:http://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/

—Dowling’s re-presentations of Bock’s images found their way to the Ethnological Society of Britain and the Royal Academy where they fed the interest in anthropology and primitive societies. Although these paintings were created in London, using sketches from Bock’s originals and they eventually found their way back to Australia as part of the swirl of cultural artefacts throughout the Empire.—Read More:http://residentjudge.wordpress.com/2010/07/08/

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Today, around 16,000 Tasmanians define themselves as Aborigines, which is significantly more than the estimated 5,000 that existed at the time of colonisation. Admittedly, none of the present-day Aborigines are full-bloods and none live a lifestyle that even remotely resembles the Aborigines at the time of colonisation. In that regard, the Tasmanian Aborigines are extinct, as Isaacs declared in 1987.

European diseases and interbreeding explain the reasons for the Aborigines’ extinction. Because the Aborigines had been cut off from the mainland for 10,000 years, they had become inbred with little genetic diversity. This lack of diversity was disastrous when exposed to new diseases. Tribes also suffered breakdowns due to women being traded to white men in exchange for sugar, flour and axes, or choosing to live with white men. In a very short period of time, the loss of members to disease an


ss of women to whites resulted in the tribes losing the ability to reproduce themselves in both the cultural and physical sense.

In 1833, George Augustus Robinson, a Christian missionary, persuaded around 300 Aborigines to move to Flinders Island, with the promise of food, housing, and clothing. Over the following 14 years, 250 died of the flu or other diseases. The last one, Truganini, died in 1876.

Even though Robinson’s policy led to the rapid extinction of the full bloods, he had intended to ensure their survival. However, the only way that the Aborigines could have survived was if they bred with whites to increase their children’s resistance to disease. Unfortunately, in the interests of protecting Aborigines from immoral whites, Robinson tried to stop genetic mixing from occuring. Just like many whites who have tried to help Aborigines for the past 40 years, Robinson was well-intentioned, but naive. Read More:http://www.convictcreations.com/history/aborigines.html

 

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