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war in 1820s
Official government policy was to treat Aboriginal Tasmanians with friendship but, by the 1820s, there was a state of war in eastern Tasmania. In 1828 Governor Arthur ordered Aboriginal people out of all settled districts. In 1830 more than two thousand soldiers, convicts and settlers were formed into lines for a drive to capture all the Aboriginal people in the area of conflict or drive them through the narrow strip of land that forms Eaglehawk Neck and into the Tasman Peninsula, where they cou -
exile, disease, despair
From 1829 to 1834, George Augustus Robinson, a Methodist lay preacher, 131 working on behalf of the government, travelled among the survivors. Robinson believed that they would be wiped out if they remained in Tasmania and he convinced some of them to agree to what they believed would be a temporary move to an island off the Tasmanian coast. They were deceived. -
a people destroyed
There is no reliable evidence of how many Indigenous people lived in Tasmania before colonisation. The most common estimate is between 4000 and 7000 people. But by 1832 there were just 203 survivors and by 1856, when Van Diemen's Land was renamed Tasmania, there were even fewer.