The Aboriginal Genocide  

            The Aboriginal princess, Truganini, was born in 1812 which was just after the Christians had invaded Tasmania. She was the last “full-blooded” Aboriginal, and the last one who knew the Aboriginal language. In her lifetime she played an important role in the Christian mission that gathered the last 200-300 Aboriginals and took them to a desolate, guarded camp on a barren island where they perished one by one. She, ironically, also joined an insurrection against the Christians on the mainland Australia Truganini died in 1876, at age 64. Her skeleton was shown at the museum in the capital Hobart, showing people of all ages a people that were completely exterminated and the horrible story of the Aboriginal genocide.

            The Aboriginal genocide is called “the world's most thorough and fastest executed genocide”. The Aboriginals lived on Tasmania, an island right outside of Australia, and when the first white settlers came there were about 5,000 Aborigines living in Tasmania. Then in 1828 Governor Arthur set martial law that banished all Aboriginal people from the settled areas of Tasmania, and licensed white people to shoot the Aborigines on sight if they tried to come on their land. In 1832 the white settlers took extreme measures to wipe out the Aborigines by holding a massive chain hunt with more than 2,000 men, and by 1835 the Christians relocated the remaining Aborigines (besides Truganini) to Flinders Island where most died within a few years. The effects of this genocide were that it wiped out a whole culture. The language and traditions were lost.

            This genocide can teach us many things about how far people will go for religion and power. An example is the chain hunt, the army just walked across Tasmania and killed all the Aboriginals that they saw. The Christians just erased an incredibly important part of Tasmania's history, the people who lived there before any white settlers. In a way this genocide it similar to the Native American genocide, because they were pushed off of their land because the white settlers wanted more land and thought of them as inferior.

This genocide also relates to the holocaust and the Diary of A Young Girl because in both genocides part of the reason of the genocide was religion, however in the Aboriginal genocide all of the people were wiped out, where as not all the Jewish people were killed.

            Universally, from all the genocides that have happened in the past we can learn that many of the times that there is genocide the people that kill everyone are usually looked down upon and put in prison. However, the Tasmanian Genocide is not well known like the Holocaust, and therefore the Christians have not been as looked down upon, unlike the Nazis. Another, larger factor that we can learn from genocides is that it is morally and just wrong in general. For example in the Trail of Tears around 4,000 Cherokees died, in the Armenian genocide around 1,500,000 Armenians died, in the Holocaust around 5.1 million Jews died, and the genocide today in Darfur has already claimed the lives of as many as 400,000 black Sudanese people. Statistics can show us the horrors of genocide, so it makes us wonder; if we already know the devastating results of genocide, why does it still happen?

By: Karen Richardson