A lot has been written about 1770 and good ol' Cook but it was the Dutch navigator Abel Janszoon Tasman who on this day in 1642 skirted the southern shores of Tasmania on his voyage from Batavia (Jakarta) to find a sea passage eastward to Chile and to explore New Guinea.
The Tasmanians were a distinct people, isolated from Australia and the rest of the world for 12,000 years. They differed markedly from the Aborigines on the Australian mainland by being wholly naked, had woolly hair and did not catch or eat fish. They did not even know how to make fire, having always to transfer a flame from one stick to another. In 1803, British colonisation began and in 1876, Truganini died. She was the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal. Within her one lifetime, a whole society and culture were removed from the face of the earth.
"The Last Tasmanian", a documentary by Dr Rhys Jones, archaeologist and anthropologist, aroused considerable controversy when it was released. Many Aboriginal people from Tasmania who are descendants of the original population objected to the film's implication that their people had been wiped out. The controversy provoked much debate, although no-one denied the enormity of the colonialists' assault upon the Aboriginal population of the island.
A very sad episode in Australia's story of colonisation, rather glibly remarked upon in W. Somerset Maugham's play "The Breadwinner": "You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct." A lesson to us all.
