Aboriginal Tasmanians (palawa kani: Palawa, Pakana) are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, a large island south of mainland Australia. Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania for tens of thousands of years before European settlement. Around 6000 BCE, rising sea levels flooded the Bass Strait and separated Tasmania from mainland Australia. This left the island's Aboriginal communities geographically isolated from other Aboriginal Australian groups for about 8,000 years.
Before British colonisation in 1803, Tasmanian Aboriginal communities maintained distinct languages, cultural traditions, and regional identities across Tasmania, with communities organised through family and clan groups connected to particular territories and seasonal movement patterns. Estimates of the population before colonisation generally range from 3,000 to 15,000 people.
During the first decades of British settlement in the 19th century, Aboriginal communities in Tasmania were devastated by introduced diseases, frontier violence, dispossession, and forced removal during the Black War. Between 1830 and 1835, most surviving Aboriginal people were removed to the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. Historians continue to debate whether these events constituted genocide under the United Nations Genocide Convention.
For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, colonial writers and popular media incorrectly described Aboriginal people in Tasmania as an extinct people following the deaths of Truganini in 1876 and Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1905, two women wrongly presented by colonial writers as the "last" Aboriginal Tasmanians. Tasmanian Aboriginal communities survived, particularly through descendants of Aboriginal women in Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands, and continued to maintain and revive cultural traditions and community identity.
In the 21st century, thousands of people in Tasmania identify as Aboriginal Tasmanian. Contemporary Palawa communities continue cultural revival projects, including the reconstruction and use of palawa kani, a composite Tasmanian Aboriginal language.
Name and identity
Aboriginal Tasmanians are the Aboriginal people of the Australian island of Tasmania, located south of the mainland.
For much of the 20th century, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were widely, and erroneously, thought of as extinct and intentionally exterminated by white settlers.
Since the mid-1970s, Tasmanian Aboriginal activists such as Michael Mansell have sought to broaden awareness and identification of Aboriginal descent. After campaigning by Tasmanian Aboriginal people in April 2023, UNESCO removed a document claiming they were extinct.
Contemporary figures (2016) on the number of people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent vary depending on the criteria used to determine this identity, ranging from 6,000 to over 23,000.
A dispute exists within the Tasmanian Aboriginal community, however, over what constitutes Aboriginality. The Palawa, mainly descendants of white male sealers and Tasmanian Aboriginal women who settled on the Bass Strait islands, were given the power to decide who is of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent at the state level (entitlement to government Aboriginal services). Palawa recognise only descendants of the Bass Strait Island community as Aboriginal and do not consider as Aboriginal the Lia Pootah, who claim descent, based on oral traditions, from Tasmanian mainland Aboriginal communities. The Lia Pootah feel that the Palawa-controlled Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre does not represent them politically.
Since 2007, initiatives have been introduced to introduce DNA testing to establish family history within descendant subgroups. This is strongly opposed by the Palawa and has drawn an angry reaction from some quarters, as some have claimed "spiritual connection" with Aboriginality distinct from, but not as important as, the existence of a genetic link. The Lia Pootah object to the current test used to prove Aboriginality as they believe it favours the Palawa; a DNA test would circumvent barriers to Lia Pootah recognition, or disprove their claims to Aboriginality.
In April 2000, the Tasmanian Government's Legislative Council Select Committee on Aboriginal Lands discussed the difficulty of determining Aboriginality based on oral traditions. An example given by Prof. Cassandra Pybus was the claim by the Huon and Channel Aboriginal people who had an oral history of descent from two Aboriginal women. Research found that both were non-Aboriginal convict women.
Language
Pre-contact language The archaeological, geographic, and linguistic record suggests successive waves of occupation in Tasmania and the coalescence of three language groups into a single broad group. Colonial settlers found two main language and ethnic groups in Tasmania upon their arrival, the western Nara and eastern Mara. The admixture of Nara toponyms in the Eastern territory of the Mara languages seem to be a relic of ancient conquests mirroring the hostilities during colonial times.
Pleistocene Palawa language group – the first ethnic and language group in Tasmania; absorbed or displaced by successive invasions except for a remnant group on the Tasman Peninsula. Absorbed populations in eastern Tasmania combined with Victorian speakers to form the Mara language group across broader eastern Tasmania. Furneaux speakers displaced Palawa in north-east Tasmania as far south as Orford. They later disappeared or were absorbed into the Mara language group, a composite of Pleistocene Palawa, Furneaux, and Victorian speakers. Nara speakers invaded Tasmania but were later pushed back into western Tasmania. This movement has been associated with the Western Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
Mairremenner The North Midlands language has been classified as "mairremenner". It was spoken by the Ben Lomond and North-east nations, as well as by the Luggermairrenerpairer clan of the Central Highlands. This language group is likely to have derived from three earlier Tasmanian languages.
Toponymy Little is recorded about the toponymy of their country, but some local placenames have survived and are likely to belong to the "Nara" language group. Tamar River: kunermurluker, morerutter, ponrabbel Low Head: Pilerwaytackenter Georgetown area: Kennemerthertackenloongentare Launceston (Port Dalrymple): Taggener, Lorernulraytitteter North-Esk River: Lakekeller Mt Barrow: Pialermaligena
Recording and loss Much of what is known about the original Tasmanian Aboriginal languages survives through fragmentary wordlists recorded by European visitors, explorers and colonists between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because many languages disappeared before systematic documentation occurred, linguists disagree on the exact number and classification of Tasmanian languages. The surviving records were compiled using inconsistent spellings and transcription methods, making reconstruction difficult.
More than twenty individuals documented words and phrases during the colonial period, including English, Scottish, Danish, and French recorders.
There are no living speakers of the original Tasmanian languages. Spoken recordings are extremely rare, with the best-known examples being recordings of Fanny Cochrane Smith singing traditional songs in 1899 and 1903. Smith is often described as the last fluent speaker of a Tasmanian Aboriginal language.
By the late nineteenth century, only fragmentary records of the original languages remained. Some language groups had already been severely affected by introduced diseases before large-scale British settlement began in 1803. As Aboriginal communities were displaced and reduced in number during the colonial period, many languages disappeared before they could be properly documented.
Palawa kani and language revival Although the original Tasmanian Aboriginal languages are no longer spoken fluently, some words survived among Palawa communities descended from Tasmanian Aboriginal women and European sealers in the Furneaux Islands.
In recent decades, efforts to reconstruct and revive elements of the languages have continued through the development of Palawa kani, a reconstructed language created from surviving historical wordlists and linguistic records.
Hunting and diet Aboriginal Tasmanians were primarily nomadic people who lived in adjoining territories, moving based on seasonal changes in food supplies such as seafood, land mammals, and native vegetables and berries.
Approximately 4,000 years ago, Aboriginal Tasmanians largely dropped scaled fish from their diet, and began eating more land mammals, such as possums, kangaroos, and wallabies. Aboriginal Tasmanians had employed bone tools, but it appears that they switched from worked bone tools to more efficient sharpened stone tools. The significance of the disappearance of bone tools (believed to have been primarily used for fishing) and fish in the diet is heavily debated. Some argue that it is evidence of a maladaptive society, while others argue that the change was economic, as large areas of scrub at that time were changing to grassland, providing substantially increased food resources. Fish were never a large part of the diet, ranking behind shellfish and seals, and with more resources available, the cost/benefit ratio of fishing may have become too high. Archaeological evidence indicates that around the time these changes occurred, the Tasmanian people began expanding their territories, a process that continued when Europeans arrived.
Prehistory
Aboriginal Tasmanians crossed into what is now Tasmania approximately 35,000 years ago during the Late Pleistocene, when lower sea levels during the Last Glacial Period exposed the Bassian Plain, a broad land bridge linking Tasmania to mainland Australia. Archaeological evidence suggests that Tasmania was colonised by successive waves of Aboriginal people from southern Australia during periods of lower sea level associated with glacial maxima.
Archaeological and geographic evidence indicate that Aboriginal Tasmanians and their ancestors lived in a colder and drier environment than exists today. During glacial periods, arid conditions extended from southern Australia into the midlands of central Tasmania, interrupted by warmer and wetter intervals. People moving into Tasmania would have crossed stretches of seawater and dry country before reaching more habitable environments, including the highlands of what is now King Island in Bass Strait.
Evidence from caves and occupation sites across Tasmania demonstrates long-term Aboriginal occupation during the Pleistocene. Excavations at Warreen Cave in southwest Tasmania demonstrated occupation from as early as 34,000 BP (approximately 32,000 BCE), making Aboriginal Tasmanians among the southernmost known human populations in the world during the Pleistocene era. Archaeological investigations in southwest and central Tasmania, including the island's highland regions, also produced evidence dating from approximately 35,000 to 11,000 BP (about 33,000-9,000 BCE), providing some of the richest archaeological evidence from Pleistocene Greater Australia.
Deposits dating to approximately 19,000 years ago at Kutikina, or Fraser Cave, in western Tasmania, demonstrate continued occupation of Tasmania's highlands during the Ice Age and Last Glacial Maximum. Oral traditions have also been studied alongside archaeological evidence in research into the environmental history of the Bassian Plain and the formation of Bass Strait.
Between about 14,000 and 12,000 BCE, rising sea levels submerged the Bassian Plain and formed Bass Strait, separating Tasmania from mainland Australia. Aboriginal Tasmanians remained isolated from mainland Aboriginal populations for approximately 8,000 years, until European exploration in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.