Aboriginal Tasmanians

The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Tasmanian: Parlevar or Palawa) are the indigenous people of the Australian state of Tasmania, located south of the continent of Australia.

Before British colonisation in 1803, there are an estimated 3,000–15,000 Parlevar.

A number of historians point to introduced disease as the major cause of the destruction of the full-blooded Aboriginal population.

Other historians regard the Black War as one of the earliest recorded modern genocides.

By 1833, George Augustus Robinson, sponsored by Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, had persuaded the approximately 200 surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians to surrender themselves with assurances that they will be protected, provided for and eventually have their lands returned to them.

These 'assurances' are in fact lies - promises made to the survivors that play on their desperate hopes for reunification with lost family and community members.

The assurances are given by Robinson solely to remove the Aboriginal people from mainland Van Diemen's Land.

The survivors are moved to Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island, where diseases continue to reduce their numbers even further.

In 1847, the last 47 living inhabitants of Wybalenna are transferred to Oyster Cove, south of Hobart.

Two individuals, Trugernanner (1812–1876) and Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905), are separately considered to have been the last people solely of Tasmanian descent.

All of the Indigenous Tasmanian languages have been lost.

Currently, there are some efforts to reconstruct a language from the available wordlists.

Today, some thousands of people living in Tasmania and elsewhere can trace part of their ancestry to the Parlevar, since a number of Parlevar women were abducted, most commonly by the sealers living on smaller islands in Bass Strait; some women were traded or bartered for; and a number voluntarily associated themselves with European sealers and settlers and bore children.

Those members of the modern-day descendant community who trace their ancestry to Aboriginal Tasmanians have mostly European ancestry, and did not keep the traditional Parlevar culture.

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