Van Diemen's Land (British colony)

Major-General Ralph Darling, appointed Governor of New South Wales in 1825, visits Hobart Town in the same year, and on December 3 proclaims the establishment of the independent colony of van Dieman’s Land, of which he actually becomes Governor for three days.

After many years of conflict, known as the Black War, between British colonists and the Aboriginal Tasmanians, Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur of Tasmania, or Van Diemen's Land as it is known at this time, calls upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain, which now sweeps across the settled districts.

The human chain moves south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island).

As few Aboriginal Tasmanians are captured, the incident is commonly seen as a costly fiasco.

However, it is also generally accepted that the incident has shaken the Aboriginal population so much that they were willing to accept the mediation of George Augustus Robinson, a builder and untrained preacher, and allow themselves to be removed to the Flinders Island settlement, where the population will dwindle until repatriation to Tasmania in 1847.

Marginalization to Flinders Island completes the Black Line’s objective of ethnically cleansing the local Aboriginal population.

As a direct result, and in contrast to the other Australian regions, Tasmania today has very few aborigines or preserved native culture of note.

Britain accelerates the immigration of free settlers to Australia, having claimed the entire Australian continent by 1830.

Their numbers now beginning to swell, the settlers drive the aboriginal population farther off into the marginal lands—when not slaughtering them wholesale (as they have done in Van Diemen’s Land and will do in that portion of New South Wales that will eventually be known as Queensland. The settlers, having perpetrated total genocide in Van Diemen’s Land, will nearly annihilate the Queensland aborigines.)

By the early 1830s, the search for additional sheep-grazing land has caused settlers to spill over from Van Diemen’s Land to the mainland, where they establish the free settlement of Portland, on the west coast of what is now Victoria.

From 1833, following the suspension of transportation to New South Wales, all transported convicts have sent to Van Diemen's Land, where British Arctic explorer Rear Admiral Sir John Franklin begins service as governor in 1836.

Male convicts serve their sentences as assigned labor to free settlers or in gangs assigned to public works.

Only the most difficult convicts are sent to the Tasman Peninsula prison known as Port Arthur, mostly re-offenders.

Female convicts are assigned as servants in free settler households or sent to a female factory (women's workhouse prison), of which there are five in Van Diemen's Land.

HMS Beagle, after completing extensive surveys in South America, returns via New Zealand, Sydney, and Hobart Town (February 1836), to Falmouth, Cornwall, England, where she will arrive on October 2, 1836.

British Royal Navy officer John Franklin, after six years as governor of van Diemen’s Land, has not endeared himself with the local civil servants, who particularly dislike his humane ideals and his attempts to reform the Tasmanian penal colony.

Removed from office in 1843, he returns to northern climes to resume his Arctic explorations.

Launceston Grammar School is founded in Tasmania on June 15, 1846, the and the Reverend Henry Plow Kane is chosen as its founding Headmaster.

The School begins in temporary premises on the South-East corner of George and Elizabeth Streets, but soon after will commence building on the site immediately behind St John's Church, beginning an enduring and close relationship between St John's Church and the Launceston Grammar School.

On the day after Grammar opens its doors, twenty-four boys of varying ages are enrolled and Launceston is described as "a small town with a population of about 8000 people and the town was little more than a scattered village."

The school is today the longest continuously running independent school in Australia and Tasmania, and the oldest form of private secondary education in Tasmania.

The school is also the second-oldest form of education in Tasmania, after Christ College, Tasmania, the oldest form of education in Australia, now used as a residential college of the University of Tasmania.

Launceston Grammar today is widely regarded as one of Australia's most prestigious schools.

Christ College, Van Diemen's land, opens on October 1, 1846, with the hope that it will develop along the lines of an Oxbridge college, and provide the basis for university education in Tasmania.

By the twenty-first century it will be the oldest tertiary institution in Australia.

Convict shipments to Tasmania cease in 1853.

Van Diemen's Land is separated administratively from New South Wales, and granted self-government on May 1, 1855.