Tasmania - The World's Only Complete Genocide (so far).

It was George Santyana, rather than Winston Churchill who had said that 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' Except for those with magic powers, the ability to recall them, implies initial exposure to facts or faces. It follows therefore, that it would be impossible to remember, and consequently to draw lessons from, any set of facts either completely out of the public domain, or only in restricted circulation. For the time being, genocides are quite rare.

However, even the most widely-published attempts at Genocide are routinely justified by being turned into entertainment. Take the child's game - Cowboys and Indians, and its justificatory tag - 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian.' Lessons are never learnt, but that may not be completely a bad thing, for the very good reason that even the very smallest changes in human mentality would set in train modest changes, which after a suitable evolutionary interval, would alter the cognitive abilities of Homo Sapiens out of all recognition. In short we would be so perfect, we would cease to be human.

Even if it were endowed with only the smallest capacity to learn from our mistakes, the human species would evolve out of its present situation as pond life (at least in matters of Perception), to possess incredible powers of Rationalization, Foresight, and unimpeachable moral resources. But would that necesarily be a good thing? In other words, with the possible exception of extreme behaviour such as genocides, human beings need to remain as evil as they have always been, in order just to remain human.

This is one of the ways in which we can rationalize the photographs of Indian Hunters, greeted as heroes after the Massacre at Wounded Knee, rifles in hand, posing at the edge of a trench containing the bodies of Red Indians (before they had won the right to be recognized as Native Americans), with those of Hitler's SS, in an identical scenario during the Second World War; and the piles of slaughtered Armenians before the War to End all Wars. All of these were failed attempts at genocide,. but perhaps because of the common feature of an unsuccessful conclusion, no lessons would appear to have been learnt.

Bosnia, Rwanda-Burundi,and Armenia, are all featured in Wikipedia's list of Genocides. But what about Tasmania? Tasmania is universally accepted as the most complete genocide ever achieved. Accounts vary, with the same powerful lobby of holocaust-deniers as in the case of the Final Solution, or the Armenian Genocide, which was not even recognized as such until quite recently.

Every genocide can be proved to have been the result of Legitimate Defense by the perpetrators to protect themselves form blood-thirsty natives, or usurious fellow-citizens. This has been the usual defence throughout history, and it still features strongly in justifying the extermination of the Native Tasmanians.

Three justificatory approaches are usually adopted. The first is that the disappearance of the Tasmanian native was as mysterious as that of the population of Easter Island. The second is that they died from over- indulgence, and the third is that their living conditions were execrably unhygenic. All of these are usually adopted as adjuncts to the primary accusation of the treachery and excessive violence committed by the indigenous population against the settlers

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In Tasmania, even after the death of the woman accepted as the Last Aborigine, the tradition of Denial remains as powerful as ever. After losing her family to what has been described, not as Genocide or a policy of Extermination, but simply as 'physical violence', she worked tirelessly to unify the remnants of her people, forcibly removed from their homelands. Although perhaps this 'forcible removal' was not as protracted as later examples, it follows a very familiar pattern.

'In 1830 ,... a Christian missionary was hired to round up the rest of the indigenous population ... and he settled them on Flinders Island. [the missionary] helped...in this venture in the hope that removing them would protect them from further violence. Unfortunately, the shock of resettlement, combined with the unsanitary conditions...proved fatal. The result was the virtual annihilation of the one hundred or so people left - mainly due to malnutrition and illness.' As in the case of Native Americans, the Tasmanians had been moved to Reservations for their own safety: but unlike them their numbers have already shrunk to less that 100. before they were killed with the kindness of Transportation.

The last survivor died in 1876.

Her skeleton remained on display in the Tasmanian Museum from 1904 to 1907, and her remains were interred in 1976. The article from which the above quotes were taken, ends on an upbeat note, maintaining that the last survivor was not in fact anything of the sort,

'as the population of mixed- descent Aboriginal people living in Tasmania readily attests to. Nevertheless, the story of her life and death remains immensely important, not only as a symbol of the plight of indigenous Australians, but as an example of the insensitivity of museum practices.' Genocide is thereby rationalized with the accidental fact that the pre-extermination activities of the victims had guaranteed the survival of offspring of mixed parentage..

I have not been able to obtain proof that the death of the last remants of the aboriginal population on the Reservation on Flinders Island was in fact an early example of a successfully-executed program of genocide - an antipodean version of the 'Final Solution,' but the circumstances invite conjecture.

The extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines reflects in microcosm, the reaction between the American Pioneers and the People of the First Light, the British Colonists and the Africans, and other instances which have demonstrated that the Moral Philosophy taught in the universities of Western Europe does not enable the Human Race to detach itself from the rest of 'nature red in tooth and claw,' and that Genocide is the unavoidable instinct deployed by humanity against other members of its own family, in succumbing to the Territorial Imperative.

Correction

My first mistake was in my choice of title, but I recognized the error in 'The First Successful Genocide' and corrected it to 'The First Complete Genocide', because 'Successful' put too positive a spin on the most execrable of all human activities - Genocide.

The Native American population was just beginning to recover from the epidemic of 1617-1919. They were still in the midst of a 'post-apocalyptic vulnerabilty'. 90% of the population had perished from epidemics imported by European sailors. The first English settlers attributed this devastation to God, and interpreted it as a sign to them, 'the chosen people', to wipe out the heathen. Genocide was a divine mandate.

But the question remains 'What if the Wampanaug ' the People of the First Light', had not taken the decision to support and nourish the Pilgrim Fathers in their struggle to make a home in the first settlements in North America? Not to dwell on the events between that gesture of friendship and the begining of the European program of Genocide, the European settlers eventually decided that the Native Americans were 'a pernicious people' , and 'a people who knew not God' and therefore needed to be wiped off the face of the earth.

Eventually. the first settlers began to exchange Land for Medication. A few hundred acres would be demanded by the new arrivals in exchange for medicines to stave off the mysterious illnesses imported from Europe, and against which the Native Americans had not developed medication or resistance.

It is a long story, but the final decision is yours Dear Reader. When the first settlers arrived in New England, the confederation of Algonquin tribes included the Nipmuc, the Massachusett, the Mohegan, the Narragansett and the Pequot. What do you think happened to them, and in what way is this connected with the fate of the Tasmanian Aborigines? Could all of them have fallen victim to Genocide?

• References
• The Australian Women's Register, 2010. Truganini (1812-1876)
• We Shall Remain.British TV documentary

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