The Palawa were not extinct. They were declared so — by settlers and historians — while their grandchildren were still alive in the Bass Strait islands[8].
- Territory
- lutruwita / Van Diemen's Land / Tasmania
- Pre-contact population
- ≈5,000 – 10,000
- Black War
- c.1820 – 1832
- By 1835
- Fewer than 200 Palawa on mainland Tasmania
- Settler population (1835)
- ≈40,000 Europeans
- Sovereign
- British Crown (Van Diemen's Land Company; from 1856, Tasmania)
The setting
A small island, a fast frontier
British settlement of Tasmania began in 1803 as a penal extension of New South Wales. Within twenty years, sheep-grazing had pushed settler land into the heart of Palawa hunting grounds — particularly the Big River and Oyster Bay country in the island's centre. Conflict accelerated through the 1820s as the colonial population doubled, then doubled again.
The Black War
Settler killings and government bounties
Settler killings of Palawa men, women, and children were widespread, often unrecorded, and rarely prosecuted. Lyndall Ryan's 1981 reconstruction The Aboriginal Tasmanians identified at least 75 documented massacres in the period 1804–1834; her later Tasmanian Aborigines (2012) revised the count upwards as more colonial records were digitised[8].
In 1830 Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law and offered bounties — £5 for an adult Palawa, £2 for a child. The same year he organised the "Black Line": more than 2,200 soldiers and settlers in a single human chain attempting to drive every Palawa east into the Tasman Peninsula. The Line was a military failure (it captured two people) but established the political will to remove every Palawa from the main island.
Robinson's removal
From the bush to Wybalenna
George Augustus Robinson — a Methodist builder appointed "Conciliator of the Aborigines" — undertook a series of "friendly missions" between 1830 and 1834, persuading the surviving Palawa to surrender on the promise that they could return to their country once peace was restored. They never could. They were instead transported to Wybalenna on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.
At Wybalenna disease, depression, and the systematic suppression of Palawa language and ceremony killed most of those who had survived the wars. By 1847, when the survivors were moved again, to Oyster Cove south of Hobart, only 47 remained.
“It was a sequence of events that, today, we would unhesitatingly call genocide.”
The extinction myth
What was happening in the Bass Strait
While colonial Tasmania was telling itself a story of "the last of the Tasmanians" — culminating with Truganini's death in 1876 — Palawa women taken or escaped to the Bass Strait islands had been raising families with European sealers since the 1810s. The Pakana and Trawlwoolway communities of those islands are the direct ancestors of today's roughly 25,000 Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
The extinction narrative served settler conscience and settler land title. Its dismantling, led by Aboriginal activists from the 1970s onwards, is still in progress.
Casualty math
A 95% collapse
Chronology
Key dates
1803
British penal settlement at Risdon Cove.
1804
Risdon Cove massacre — first major settler killing of Palawa.
1820s
Frontier killings accelerate as sheep-grazing expands.
1830 Nov
The 'Black Line' — 2,200-strong cordon attempts to clear the island.
1832
Most surviving Palawa surrender to Robinson and are removed to Flinders Island.
1847
Wybalenna closed; 47 survivors moved to Oyster Cove.
1876
Truganini dies; settler press declares Palawa extinct.
1976
Truganini's remains cremated and returned to country.
1995
Tasmanian Aboriginal Lands Act returns 12 sites.