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Aboriginal Tasmanians Erotic

Homeland

Tasmania (lutruwita) and its Bass Strait islands, notably the Furneaux Group, in Australia.

Language

English today, with palawa kani, a revived language built from records; historically several Tasmanian languages (unclassified, links to mainland languages unresolved).

Religion

Traditional beliefs tied to country and ancestral beings; today mostly Christian or nonreligious, with renewed cultural and spiritual practice.

Subgroups

Historically about nine nations, including Oyster Bay, Big River, North Midlands and South East, each made up of smaller bands; today includes the Furneaux Islands community. Part of Aboriginal Australians.

Region

Australia / New Zealand

About Aboriginal Tasmanians People

Aboriginal Tasmanians are defined first by an island and by roughly eight thousand years of isolation. When rising seas flooded Bass Strait, the communities already living there were cut off from mainland Australia, and they carried on alone, developing their own languages and ways of living. Many now call themselves palawa or pakana, and call the island lutruwita. Before British settlement in 1803, Tasmania held several distinct nations, usually counted as about nine, each made up of smaller bands with their own country. People moved with the seasons between the coast and inland valleys, used fire to keep grassland open for game, and crossed to offshore islands in canoes of bundled bark. Their languages survive only in scattered word lists taken down by Europeans. How many there were, and whether they connect to any mainland language family, is still unresolved.

The break came quickly. Frontier violence between settlers and Aboriginal people grew through the 1820s into the Black War, and martial law was declared in 1828. In the early 1830s the government agent George Augustus Robinson gathered most of the survivors and moved them to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, where many died. The colony later cast Truganini, who died in 1876, as the last of her people, and her skeleton was put on public display in Hobart. Her remains were not cremated and scattered on the water until 1976. The claim was false. Fanny Cochrane Smith lived until 1905 and sang into wax cylinders, making the only known recordings of Tasmanian Aboriginal song. On the Bass Strait islands, families descended from Aboriginal women and European sealers built a lasting community around Cape Barren Island. Some practices there never stopped: women still string maireener necklaces from tiny iridescent shells, and families still go muttonbirding each autumn to harvest young shearwaters. Today Aboriginal Tasmanians live across the state and beyond, in Hobart, Launceston and the north west as much as on the islands. They have won back land, including Cape Barren Island in 2005, pushed museums abroad to return ancestral remains, and rebuilt a shared language, palawa kani, from the surviving records. Its names now sit beside English ones on the map, as with kunanyi for Mount Wellington.

Related ethnic groups

Groups that share Aboriginal Tasmanians's homeland, region, language, or religious tradition. These are likely candidates for comparative phenotype reference.

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