Tasmanian, Aboriginal

The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Aboriginal name: Parlevar) are the Indigenous people of the island state of Tasmania, Australia.

Before British colonization 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.

Geoffrey Blainey wrote that by 1830 in Tasmania: "Disease had killed most of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating."

(Geoffrey Blainey, A Land Half Won, Macmillan, South Melbourne, Vic., 1980, p75).

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, persuades 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, on the main island of Tasmania.

There, a woman called Trugernanner (often rendered as Truganini), who is widely believed to be the last of the 'full-blooded' Aboriginal person, dies in 1876.

However, in 1889 Parliament recognizes Fanny Cochrane Smith (d:1905) as the last surviving 'full blooded' Aboriginal Tasmanian, giving her a land grant of 300 acres (120 ha) and an annuity of £50.

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.

Other Aboriginal groups within Tasmania use the language words from the area where they are living and/or have lived for many generations uninterrupted.

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