List of multiple killings of Aborigines in Tasmania: 1804-1835

Tasmania (known as Van Diemen’s Land until 1855) was occupied for at least 30,000 years by a hunter-gatherer people, the Tasmanian Aborigines, whose population in 1803 was estimated at 7,000 (Lourandos 1997:244; Calder 1875:17). Contrary to a long and widely held belief that they were a stone age people who were destined to die out as a result of 10,000 years of isolation from the Australian mainland, more recent research indicates that they were a dynamic people who not only reshaped their culture and society during the Holocene, but were increasing in population at British colonisation in 1803. (Lourandos 1997:281) By 1835 only one family remained in Tasmania. The vast majority had been killed, or had died from introduced disease, or had been forcibly removed from their homeland. The only survivors were those who escaped government control - in a sealing community on the Bass Strait islands.