Tasmania's Black War: Undermining the foundations of terra nullius

 A couple of years ago I quipped to my friend Alec Coles, who had recently taken up the position of CEO at the West Australian Museum, that the spirit of terra nullius lurks beneath the floorboards of every museum and art gallery in Australia. Apparently, he has dined out on this slightly parsimonious comment once or twice since. Alec likes to raise the stakes in discussions with his colleagues about the responsibilities that history demands of them as leaders of major collecting institutions—each with its own problematic legacy in terms of respecting and representing Indigenous culture. 

Nowhere in Australia are these expectations more acute, and the cultural setting more concentrated, than in Tasmania. Violent invasion and ad hoc massacre of Indigenous people in the process of “peaceful settlement” occurred across the Australian continent. But only in Tasmania, with its bounded, island geography did the Governor, the press and the popular colonial imagination aspire to cleanse the jurisdiction completely of its most irritating ethnic problem. The putative success of this process was such that we Tasmanian Aborigines have the dubious distinction of being best known for our absence. I have lost count of the number of times someone has awkwardly jibed, “Really? I thought we’d shot you all out!” Only in Tasmania are you expected to join in a joke about the genocidal treatment of your own family.

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