As for the "woman", wasnt this Ryan broad was it, she was on the sunday program, ..what a pile of twisting and weaving she went through to justify here "black armband views"...
Keith Windschuttle: History as a travesty of truth
09dec02
TASMANIA, or Van Diemen's Land as it was known until 1855, is widely regarded today as the site of the most violent relations between Aborigines and colonists in Australian history. It is our worst-case scenario. Authors such as Lyndall Ryan claim the Tasmanian Aborigines were subject to "a conscious policy of genocide". International writers now routinely compare the actions of the British in Tasmania with the Spaniards in Mexico, the Belgians in the Congo, the Turks in Armenia and Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Black War from 1824 to 1831 and the Black Line of 1830 are two of the most notorious events in the history of the British Empire.
However, after examining all the archival evidence and double-checking the references cited by the most reputable academic historians of the subject, I have concluded that most of the story is myth piled upon myth, including some of the most hair-raising breaches of historical practice ever recorded. Here are some of the transgressions by its leading historians. Lloyd Robson claims that settler James Hobbs in 1815 witnessed Aborigines killing 300 sheep at Oyster Bay and the next day the 48th Regiment killed 22 Aborigines in retribution. However, between 1809 and 1822 Hobbs was living in India, the first sheep did not arrive at Oyster Bay until 1821 and in 1815 the 48th Regiment never went anywhere near Oyster Bay.
Robson and four other authors repeat a story that 70 Aborigines were killed in a battle with the 40th Regiment near Campbell Town in 1828. But all neglect to say that a local merchant told a government inquiry that he went to the alleged site with a corporal on the following day but could find no bodies or blood, only three dead dogs. "To tell you the truth," the corporal then confessed, "we did not kill any of them."
Ryan cites the Hobart Town Courier as a source for several stories about atrocities against Aborigines in 1826. But that newspaper did not begin publication until October 1827 and the other two newspapers of the day made no mention of these killings.
Ryan cites the diary of the colony's first chaplain, Rev Robert Knopwood, as the source for a claim that between 1803 and 1808 the colonists killed 100 Aborigines. The diaries, however, record only four Aborigines being killed in this period.
Ryan claims that in 1826, police killed 14 Aborigines at Pitt Water. But none of the three references she provides mentions any Aborigines being killed there in 1826 or any other time.
Ryan claims a band of white vigilantes massacred the Port Dalrymple Aborigines in December 1827. None of the five sources she cites mentions either vigilantes or a massacre.
Between 1828 and 1830, according to Ryan, "roving parties" of police constables and convicts killed 60 Aborigines. Not one of the three references she cites mention any Aborigines being killed, let alone 60. The governor at the time and most subsequent authors regarded the roving parties as completely ineffectual.
Ryan says the Black War began in 1824 with the Big River tribe launching patriotic attacks on the invaders. However, all the assaults on whites that year were made by a small gang of detribalised blacks led by a man named Musquito who was not defending his tribal lands. He was an Aborigine originally from Sydney who had worked in Hobart for 10 years before becoming a bushranger.
Henry Reynolds claims the chief agent of the Van Diemen's Land Company, Edward Curr, was one of the settlers making "increased demands for extermination" of the Aborigines. The full text of the statement Reynolds cites, however, is a pessimistic prediction of what might possibly happen if Aboriginal violence continued, not an advocacy of their extermination. "I am far from advising such a proceeding," Curr wrote.
Reynolds claims lieutenant-governor Arthur recognised from his experience in the Peninsular War against Napoleon than the Aborigines had adopted Spanish tactics of guerilla warfare, in which small bands attacked the troops of their enemy. However Arthur's military career never included Spain. The full text of the statement Reynolds cites talks not about troops coming under attack by guerillas but of Aborigines robbing and assaulting unarmed shepherds on remote outstations.
Arthur inaugurated the Black Line in 1830, Reynolds claims, because "he feared 'a general decline in the prosperity' and the 'eventual extirpation of the colony' ". But Arthur never made the statement attributed to him. Reynolds has altered his words.
The truth is that there was nothing on the Aborigines' side that resembled frontier warfare, patriotic struggle or systematic resistance of any kind. The so-called Black War was a minor crime wave by two Europeanised black bushrangers, followed by an outbreak of robbery, assault and murder by tribal Aborigines. All the evidence at the time, on both the white and black sides of the frontier, was that their principal objective was to acquire flour, tea, sugar and bedding, objects that to them were European luxury goods.
True, the full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines did die out in the 19th century. But this was almost entirely a consequence of two factors: the long isolation that had left them vulnerable to introduced diseases, especially influenza, pneumonia and tuberculosis; and the fact that they traded and prostituted their women to such an extent that they lost the ability to reproduce themselves.
Despite its infamous reputation, Van Diemen's Land was host to nothing that resembled genocide, or any intention to exterminate the Aborigines. In the entire period from 1803 when the colonists first arrived, to 1834 when all but one family of Aborigines had been removed to Flinders Island, the British were responsible for killing only 118 of the original inhabitants. In all of Europe's colonial encounters with the new worlds of the Americas and the Pacific, the colony of Van Diemen's Land was probably the site where the least indigenous blood of all was deliberately shed.
