Around 40,000 years Before Present, during the last ice age of the Pleistocene, explorers walked from Wilson’s Promontory, the Australian mainland’s southern-most projection, to northeast Tasmania, crossing an isthmus exposed by falling sea levels. In time, the entire Bassian Plain was exposed — wider than the island itself — and other explorers crossed, settling in the northwest. The globe warmed, and by about 12,000 BP, glacial melts again submerged the plain. The population, then numbering several thousand, which had arrived in perhaps four waves of migration, became isolated.
Explorers, settlers. In First Tasmanians: A Deep History, Shayne Breen’s long view puts Aboriginal experience at the centre of Tasmanian history, subverting its foundation story. But here deep history is more than an extended chronology of human–environment interactions. As Indigenous scholar Greg Lehman writes in the book’s foreword, it conveys the profound meaning of being on Country and tells the story of living in a place that we must all come to know and respect.
Breen has published widely on Tasmanian environmental, social and Indigenous history, and the depth of his scholarship and commitment to pedagogy — he helped establish Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania — is evident in this ambitious book.
Breen’s long view is revealed through the book’s three sections, covering the deep past, collective Aboriginal Life and the colonial period, and the recent past. Each section draws sequentially on environmental history and archaeology, cultural anthropology and history, with genocide and trauma studies informing the final section. The skill with which Breen weaves these strands together is one of the book’s accomplishments.
The title is carefully chosen, emphasising prior occupation and affiliation with a wider polity. First Tasmanians squares off, rhetorically and thematically, with Tom Haydon’s 1978 film The Last Tasmanian, featuring young ANU archaeologist Rhys Jones.
Jones interpreted data from his excavations at Rocky Cape, on Tasmania’s northwest tip, along with readings of historical sources including G.A. Robinson’s journals documenting his attempts to relocate Tasmanians to Flinders Island, to paint a picture of isolation and cultural decline. Tasmanians, Jones claimed, had a far simpler toolkit than mainland populations. Archaeological data suggested they ceased to eat scale fish about 3,500 years BP and, Jones argued, had lost the ability to make fire. Increase ceremonies did not feature in ritual life. All were markers of a fatal trajectory that began with the separation of Tasmania and the mainland and was dramatically hastened by colonisation in 1803.
The film’s opening scenes show the reburial ceremony of Trukanini (the last “full blood” Tasmanian) off Bruny Island in 1976 and includes footage of two Cape Barren Islanders saying they did not consider themselves Aboriginal. Those statements bolstered Haydon’s extinction narrative. For Breen, they revealed a lived experience of oppression and marginalisation.
He doesn’t dwell on the film, although he identifies Jones, along with N.J.B. (Brian) Plomley, editor and annotator of Robinson’s journals, as “firmly located in the evolutionist framework.” Since the film’s release, further research — including excavations in southwest Tasmania, new understandings of environmental conditions, food resources and diet, and re-examinations of earlier archaeological evidence and written sources such as Robinson’s journal — has revealed the extent of occupation, patterns of resource management and trade, and the complexity of religious and cultural life of the first Tasmanians.
The debate over eating scale fish, Breen remarks drily, has been blown out of all proportion. To be fair, Jones and others conceded the point. Indeed, Jones participated in the important Kutikina cave dig that revealed Ice Age occupation of the southwest “wilderness.” But the damage had been done. As Indigenous Tasmanians asserted their political rights, Jones ceased to work there.
The book’s second and longest section deals with collective life, with chapters on people, country and culture. “Apart from a few short articles,” Breen notes, “there are no extended accounts of Tasmanian collective life that use methods and insights from cultural anthropology.” Reinterpreting historical British and French sources, he describes a complex, organised and culturally rich society.
Breen challenges the emphasis on Tasmanians’ isolation by drawing parallels with Indigenous populations in mainland Australia, South Africa and North America. Similar techniques of land management, such as mosaic patterns of burning, are evident in each region. He argues that burning country “produced an island-wide infrastructure of well-maintained hunting and gathering niches that were well stocked with staple foods — and a range of less common delicacies.” Colonial surveyors found country that was “cultivated and diversified.” Some parts looked like “freshly ploughed fields,” other parts exhibited “the most beautiful verdure from the sprouting of young grass and rushes.”
The Tasmanians’ landscape management was likely part of an overall pattern of ancestral design, Breen argues, fulfilling ritual obligations necessary to assure social order and fertility. The surveyors, though, were on the lookout for new territory to incorporate in the “settled region” of Van Diemen’s Land. That process involved overcoming Indigenous resistance, eliminating any threat to enlarging the sheep walk.
This process was facilitated by declaring an “open emergency” and martial law in the late 1820s, followed by the infamous Black Line manoeuvres designed to sweep the remaining Tasmanian population into the island’s southeast corner. That operation, Breen argues, is conventionally seen as a fiasco, a failed exercise in hard power replaced by Robinson’s “friendly mission” to remove the dwindling Tasmanian population from the island. Breen connects both strategies within a wider pattern of oppression.
Here, Haydon’s film is a point of flexion where a narrative of the passing race is confronted by one of resistance and revitalisation. Trukanini’s reburial campaign was a significant event for a new generation of activists, part of a wider strategy of self-determination that included repossession of ancestral remains, land rights, and language revival. A turning point was a 1971 meeting in Launceston of three communities — southern, northwest and Islander — to establish the Aboriginal Information Service. In 1977 the organisation became the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. TAC-led protests picketed Haydon’s film in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney, but its international distribution kept the narrative of a doomed race in circulation.
In the book’s final section, The Recent Past, Breen steps back to give voice to Tasmanian Aboriginal writers, activists and artists to tell their own story, through the lenses of invasion, resistance, trauma and revitalisation. The political and cultural significance of language is a key theme. Seeking a conceptual vocabulary to adequately describe the historical experience of colonisation, Tasmanian writers and activists began using the term genocide from the 1980s.
The term was coined by the Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland for the United States in 1941. The description of Nazi attempts to “Germanify” Polish society was later extended by Lemkin into a global history of genocide which, Breen points out, included a chapter on Tasmania. There, Lemkin drew mostly on the work of nineteenth-century historian James Bonwick, who had a better understanding of Tasmanians than most of his contemporaries.
Cultural genocide, Lemkin argued, had two phases, first imposing the occupier’s society, economy and culture on the country stolen from local owners, and second — in response to resistance by the colonised group — destroying collective life through assimilation policies and outright violence. Later scholars, seeking to rescue the term from its immediate application to the Holocaust (which, Breen argues, also enabled colonial states to avoid judgement on their actions) theorised colonial genocide, a wider historical process in which the colonial power permanently occupies Indigenous lands, enacting policies of assimilation and cultural erasure that might take centuries to unfold.
Imposing a colonial culture has, almost everywhere, involved eradication of Indigenous language. The anthropologist Wade Davis has described Indigenous languages as old growth forests of the mind, a metaphor that seems appropriate in the Tasmanian context. The reconstruction and use of palawa kani, a composite language built from historical records including Robinson’s journal and from fragments of living memory, has been central to the revitalisation of Tasmanian Indigenous culture. This patient work of several decades has produced fluent speakers and a range of palawa kani teaching resources.
Colonisation’s legacy is complex. Palawa are unable demonstrate continuous practice of traditional laws and customs to claim rights under native title legislation. In 1995 the Tasmanian government, the first in Australia to apologise for past treatment of Indigenous people, handed back significant archaeological and cultural sites, and the Australian government has facilitated the purchase of other land parcels for agricultural enterprise and training in environmental management.
The Tasmanian government suspended the process of gazetting palawa kani place names in 2019, and Palawa experience greater disadvantage in education, housing, employment and encounters with the justice system than the wider Tasmanian population. Yet, as Breen concludes, “for a people on the edge of oblivion just 200 years ago, the revitalisation is a triumph of human resistance.”
This is a marvellous book, deeply researched and accessible. Future printings should, though, correct an error on the foreword’s first page. The Australian parliament was not opened on 1 January 1901, as stated. That day saw the proclamation of the Australian constitution in Sydney’s Centennial Park, when the colony of Tasmania, as it was renamed in 1856, became part of the new Federation. The national parliament first convened in the Melbourne’s Exhibition Building on 9 May 1901. •
First Tasmanians: A Deep History
By Shayne Breen | Miegunyah Press | $49.95 | 336 pages
