THE TASMANIANS STORY OF DOOMED RACE Truganini AUSTRALIA

The Tasmanians

The Tasmanian Problem
 

The origin of the ancient and unique aboriginal race which once roamed the island of Tasmania remains to this day an unsolved mystery. Where the first Tasmanians came from, and the means by which they reached their island home are two questions which form the so-called 'Tasmanian Problem'. It is a problem which no anthropologist has succeeded in solving to the general satisfaction of his fellows.

The last pure-blooded Tasmanian was a woman, Truganini, who died at the age of seventy or so at Hobart in 1876. Within this one woman's lifetime the entire aboriginal population of Tasmania became extinct. It was a lifetime which spanned a single generation of English settlement on the island. With the death of old Truganini all that remained of the Tasmanians was little more than a handful of bones and skulls in the museums, a few early photographs and drawings, and some pitiful artifacts garnered as mementoes by certain colonists.

The paucity of scientific information about this doomed people has never deterred scholars from advancing theories about the origin of the first Tasmanians. Indeed, the very lack of definite knowledge seems to have encouraged the speculative rather than the analytical approach to the problem. It is interesting to trace the development of anthropology as a sophisticated science by examining some of the ideas put forward at various times to account for the Tasmanians.

The first Europeans to glimpse the shy and retiring aborigines were adventurers and seamen engaged on voyages of discovery in the Pacific. These gentlemen had little interest in a native race which possessed neither silver nor gold. Early explorers dismissed all black skinned races as 'indians' and most cared little for their origins.

Some later explorers pursued their voyages in a more detached and scientific manner. Captain James Cook, although convinced by contemporary charts that Tasmania (then called Van Diemen's Land) was part of the newly discovered New Holland (Australia), was quick to observe that the natives of the 'south' were different in several respects from their 'northern' fellows. During the nineteenth century scholars were inclined to draw more from the imagination than from observation. This less than scientific method led to the strange theory that the first Tasmanians had migrated northwards from the icy wastes of Antarctica!

The Age of Queen Victoria was also the age of the great savants. In Great Britain the expansion of the Empire was accompanied by an even greater expansion of learning. It was a time of great excitement in the academic world, and saw the birth of a new science: anthropology. The careful midwife was Thomas Henry Huxley. Wielding the sword forged by Charles Darwin, Huxley had sliced through the ecclesiastical chains which had for centuries bound shut the book of knowledge. He made it respectable to seek man's place in nature and to investigate the origins of mankind. The first of a future horde of anthropologists went wandering off across the face of the earth searching for their ancestors.

Unfortunately for anthropology the Tasmanians had in the meantime become extinct. By a scant year or two scientists missed a last opportunity to study the living fossils of this Australian island. Strange as it may seem, the Royal Society of Tasmania had been founded in 1843, but the learned gentlemen who gathered there appear to have taken little interest in the dying remnant of an ancient race. The members of this scientific society sipped their tea and discussed botany while the unique Tasmanian people passed into oblivion a few miles from Hobart Town.

Huxley himself attempted to solve the Tasmanian Problem in 1870 but certain other distinguished men of science preceded him with their own solutions. Captain Fitzroy of HMS Beagle, being an old sea-dog, sought his answer in the sea. He put forward the idea that the first Tasmanians had been castaways, blown by severe storms across the ocean from their home on the East African coast. Another seaman, R. H. Davies, who skippered a trading schooner around the Tasmanian coast, narrowed Fitzroy's idea down to his own limited horizon. Davies agreed that the first Tasmanians were castaways, but from the coast of South Australia.

Neither of these theories can be accepted today. Polynesia was populated by such a hazardous method but the Tasmanians were neither African nor South Australian in origin; not, at least as Davies and Fitzroy imagined. James Bonwick, the champion of the last Tasmanians and their first historian, was certain that the aborigines reached the island by way of a long submerged land-bridge from New Zealand. Bonwick would have been nearer the mark had he turned his charts upside down. A land-bridge did exist in ancient times, but it joined Australia at its northern coast to South-East Asia.

Over the years other scholars exercised their minds with the problem, each convinced that his was the only true solution. Unlike scientists of the present day, Victorian savants delighted in uproar and rowdy debate. The professor declined to hedge and refused to prevaricate. He looked at his evidence, drew his conclusions and published his theories. The gauntlet was thrown down with a dogmatic flourish. Those who dared to disagree were either fools or knaves; and very probably both.

It is doubtful if their students gained much knowledge from these noisy debates but they certainly enjoyed much first class entertainment. Some of these dogmatic assertions about the origins of the Tasmanian aborigines were fanciful in the extreme. One such theorist explained the Tasmanians away as being an autochthonic race; that is to say, he believed that they had evolved quite spontaneously on the island. Another scholar having read his Bible, examined his maps and announced that the Tasmanians were the descendants of an ancient Babylonian tribe which had wandered far and wide across the world until, like the Hebrews, they had found the promised land. Both of these ideas, put forward in all seriousness, now belong with the 'Antarctic' theory in the museum of curious notions.

The most forceful and for many years the most influential and widely accepted theory was that proposed in 1870 by Thomas Henry Huxley . . .