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Tasmanians. Tasmanians: technology and material culture, economy, social order, religion, art

This text was written by Stanislav Drobyshevsky specially for the portal ANTROPOGENEZ.RU.
Place of first publication: http: //antropogenez.ru/zveno-single/637/

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A. Sokolov
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The racial status and origin history of the Tasmanian aborigines are the gray spots of anthropology. This is mainly due to the total destruction of the aborigines themselves in the middle of the 19th century by the British. To a lesser extent, by the destruction of paleoanthropological and craniological materials at the end of the 20th century.

Despite these complexities, little is known about the Tasmanians. V.R. Cabo gave a comprehensive and best-of-all overview of all available materials (Cabo, 1975). The craniology of the Tasmanians is detailed in several monumental works (Macintosh et Barker, 1965; Morant, 1927, 1939; Wunderly, 1939).

The Tasmanian skulls are characterized by a small volume, in fact, a record on a global scale (perhaps less only among the Andamans). The length of the skull is medium, the width and height are small; the skull is dolicho-, ortho- and metriocranial. The greatest width of the skull is usually high, although the lateral walls of the vault are almost or completely parallel when viewed from the rear.

The forehead is medium wide, rather sloping, with a flattened cerebral part. The superciliary relief of the Tasmanians is strong, emphasized by a strong depression of the bridge. The sagittal ridge of the frontal bone is often pronounced, although weaker than in Australians, it rarely reaches the parietal bones, although the transverse profile of the fornix is still roof-like. The forehead is moderately sloping: stronger than that of Europeans, but less than that of Australians. The temporal lines are high, although not as close to the sagittal line as in the Australians. The occipital part of the skull is somewhat elongated back, but not as much as in the Australians; the occiput is medium wide, but slightly widened in comparison with the width of the entire skull. The occipital relief is rather weak, than the Tasmanians differ sharply from the Australians; the same can be said about other elements of the muscle relief on the skull. The surface of the bones is generally very smooth, and all possible edges are rounded. The temporal fossa is weakly expressed, flattened. The scales of the temporal bone are very elongated, low, with a straightened upper edge; parietal notch rather weakly expressed.

Typical skull of a Tasmanian woman.
Source: Morant G.M. Note on Dr. J. Wunderly "s survey of Tasmanian crania // Biometrika, 1939, V. 30, No. 3/4, p. 341.

The face is very low, but medium wide, eurienic, mesognathic, although alveolar prognathism can be pronounced. A characteristic feature of the Tasmanians is a sharp upper horizontal profiling. The zygomatic arches are thin, in contrast to the Australians. The eye sockets have smooth edges, rectangular in shape, with parallel upper and lower edges, absolutely very low and medium wide, relatively chameconch. The nose is very low, but wide, hyperhameric, as a result of which

the relative width of the nose of the Tasmanians is one of the greatest in the world, surpassing Australian values.

The nasal bones are concave and extremely short; the ratio of their width to length is a record in the world. The width of the nasal bones is less than that of the Australians; at the same time, the bones are often sharply narrowed towards the end, and their transverse profile is very convex. The nasal spine is often extremely poorly developed, possibly weaker than in all other groups of people, and the edges of the nasal opening (and the lateral ones too) are rounded and smoothed; as in all equatorials, supra-nasal fossae or gutters are often developed. The cheekbones are very small, than the Tasmanians are in stark contrast to the Australians. Unlike the Australians, the infraorbital space is small. The canine fossae are often deep, although less developed than those of the Australians. The mandibular notches are not very strong. The alveolar process of the upper jaw is very low, usually sharply directed forward. The palate is long and medium wide, leptostaphylline, shallow to moderate depth, never deep, unlike the voluminous in the Australians. The sagittal ridge is often developed on the palate. The alveolar arch usually has parallel rows of canine teeth and is straightened anteriorly. In the lower jaw, the height of the symphysis is usually higher than the height of the body in the back. The chin prominence is moderately developed, the ascending ramus of moderate proportions, without excessive widening.

The sizes of the teeth of Tasmanians are very large, close to the world record, although, apparently, smaller than those of the Australians. This is associated with the usually good development of third molars, which almost always come into contact with antagonists. Teeth have a complicated enamel structure.

Of the specific features, it is possible to note the absence of a groove above the supraorbital foramen, typical for other human races. In the lambdoid suture and asterion, there are almost always intercalated bones.

Even more unique is the relatively frequent occurrence of the fourth molar.

In general, the structure of the Tasmanian skull, although it has a certain specificity, is very similar to that of the Southeast Australians: so much so that many of the largest racialists considered it possible to combine them within the same type as local variants (Hrdlicka, 1928, pp. 81-90; Thorne, 1971, p. 317). Yet the differences between Tasmanians and Australians are greater than those between Australians (Morant, 1927). One of the most significant differences between Tasmanians and Australians is the difference in the latitudinal dimensions of the skull: in the former, the greatest width of the skull is greater, and all other dimensions, including facial ones, are smaller (Morant, 1927). It is clear that here we have not just a change in size, but a change in shape, and a very significant one. The same feature is perceived to the eye as a good expression of the frontal and parietal tubercles and, accordingly, the pentagonoid of the skull when viewed from above in Tasmanians and the absence of tubercles in Australians when their vault is ovoid (Wunderly, 1939). At the same time, the width of the forehead relative to the width of the skull in Tasmanians is noticeably smaller than in Australians. In the facial skeleton, attention is drawn to the sharp difference in the upper horizontal profiling: it is very large in the Tasmanians and somewhat weakened in the Australians; the Tasmanians are mesognathic and the Australians are prognathous.

Tasmania was probably inhabited by about 34 thousand years ago. (eg Jones, 1995), some evidence of which was found in the southwestern part of the island at Fraser Cave (Kiernan et al., 1983), Bluff Cave and ORS7 (Cosgrove, 1989). The existence of the population on the islands of the Bass Strait can definitely be judged by the guns on Hunter Island - 23 thousand years ago. (Bowdler, 1984) and Flinders Island - 14 thousand years ago. (Sim, 1990), but apparently people have lived here before.

Most likely, people got to Tasmania by land, located on the site of the present Bass Strait during a time of low sea level during the next ice age, which fell on the interval of 37-29 thousand years ago. (Cosgrove et al., 1990). After the formation of the strait 12-13.5 thousand years ago. (Chappell et Thom, 1977; Jennings, 1971) people hardly crossed it many times, and perhaps did not cross it at all until the arrival of the Europeans.

At least according to archaeological evidence, no new or different cultural elements have emerged in Tasmania (Jones, 1977); rather, some of the old ones have disappeared.

Many hypotheses have been put forward regarding the ancestors of the Tasmanians. The main ones can be considered "Australian" and "Melanesian".

"Australian" appears to be more grounded geographically, archaeologically, ethnographically and linguistically (Kabo, 1975; Macintosh et Barker, 1965; Pardoe, 1991; Pietrusewsky, 1984). According to her, the Tasmanians descended from the aborigines of the southeast of Australia, from whom they differ very little, mainly in curly hair.

The "Melanesian" hypothesis is based mainly on the curly hair of the Tasmanians, which is not typical of the Australian aborigines. Of all the diverse melanesoid groups, New Caledonians are most often proposed as ancestors to Tasmanians (Howells, 1976 ; Huxley, 1870; Pulleine, 1929; Jones, 1935; Macintosh, 1949). However, from New Caledonia to Tasmania, the path is not short, and it remains completely unclear why it was necessary to undertake a sea voyage of more than two thousand kilometers, if it was possible to safely go to Tasmania on dry land or, in the worst case, cross the not so wide Bass Strait? In addition, fragmentary descriptions of living Tasmanians seem to indicate that there were wavy-haired individuals among them, and statistics inexorably record curly hair in all groups of Australians, and not in such a small percentage.

According to an intermediate version, the Tasmanians are close to the Barrines tribes living in the rainforests of Queensland (Birdsell, 1949, 1967; Tindale et Birdsell, 1941-3). It is assumed that both are descendants of the first wave of migration to the Australian mainland, preserved in the most inaccessible areas. On the one hand, these ancestors clearly had a relationship with the Melanesians, on the other hand, the difference between the Tasmanians and the southeastern Australians is recognized as exaggerated. The version is beautiful, but so far it does not have any special proofs, for there are no craniological data for the Barrines, and somatometric data for the Tasmanians; in both groups there are no genetic ones. The similarity comes down again to curly hair and subjective external similarity. The argument against was a major difference in height - pygmy for Barrines and quite average for Tasmanians; this sign, however, could obviously change over thousands of years in the course of adaptation to local environmental conditions.

It seems that reducing the Tasmanians' problem to the "Australian", "Melanesian" or "barrinoid" versions is an undue simplification.

The difficulty, in fact, is that at the time of the settlement of Tasmania, there were simply no Australoids or Meanesoids in their modern form. We can only talk about common ancestors.

The solution to the problem could be the study of paleoDNA or the peculiarities of the genotype of the European-Tasmanian mestizo, in some number living in Australia and Tasmania, but there are no such works yet.

Paleoanthropology has little to offer to resolve the issue. Indeed, ancient finds have been made in only three places.

Male skull, presumably a Tasmanian-Australian mestizo.
Morant G.M. Note on Dr. J. Wunderly "s survey of Tasmanian crania // Biometrika, 1939, V. 30, No. 3/4, p. 346.

On King Island in the Bass Strait, in a coastal cave (which, however, in ancient times was located 20-25 km from the coast), a human skeleton was excavated in 1989 (Sim et Thorne, 1990; Thorne et Sim, 1994). The date of the burial is 14.27 thousand years ago. However, the bones were buried back almost immediately, so that they were not actually examined. Subsequent debate over whether the King Island person was male or female (Brown, 1994a, 1995; Sim et Thorne, 1995) makes little sense in the absence of any additional information. It has been noted that the King Island man is different from the Kouswompans, but is similar to Keylor, and is also within the Southeastern Australian Aboriginal variation, which is why he was classified as a "gracial" group. The vault is long, low, rounded; the relief of the skull, including the muscular one, is strong. In the literature, you can find the statement that the brow does not protrude forward, but from measurements it follows that the bridge of the nose is depressed by almost a centimeter, so the development of the brow was obviously significant. The extreme length of the frontal bone, combined with the very short parietal length, suggests that the skull was deformed; in the absence of published photographs, verification of this fact is problematic. The shape of the face is similar to that of the aborigines. Noteworthy is the combination of a very large upper face width with a moderate average; the height of the face is large. The face is noticeably flattened, but the cheekbones do not protrude forward. The absence of prognathism was noted. The interorbital width is extreme, the width of the nose is very large. The palate is enormous and very deep. The lower jaw, apparently, was large, at least that is exactly in relation to the ascending branch. The skeleton is described as gracile, with a relatively short femur with a large head size.

The above description is more in line with the appearance of Australians than modern Tasmanians, but the problem is that we do not know equally ancient Tasmanian skulls. Considering that during the life of a person, King Island Bass Strait was land, it can be assumed that he is a representative of the ancestors of the Tasmanians. In this way, specific traits the Tasmanians must have formed after fourteen thousand years ago.

In Tasmania itself, only a few paleoanthropological finds have been made. The oldest is the scales of the occipital bone from the Nanwun Cave in the Florentine River Valley, dating back more than 16 thousand years ago. (Jones et al., 1988). The bone has a rounded shape, small thickness and slight relief, that is, typical of the Tasmanians. It is similar in form to that of the Mango and Keilor people (Webb, 1988), but it would be too risky to speak of a close relationship on this basis.

A fragmentary skull was found on the small islet of New Yire, located off the northwestern coast of the much larger King Island in the Bass Strait (Murray et al., 1982). The find has an indefinite age - from the Late Pleistocene to the middle of the 19th century, but stratigraphically the most reliable date is from 12 to 6 thousand years ago. The skull is small in volume, very long, but very narrow and very low, with a very wide forehead and a wide occiput. The greatest width of the skull is high. The frontal bone is short, extremely sloping, with a weak superciliary relief. The depression of its longitudinal contour is most likely due to posthumous or intravital artificial deformity, which is thought to be responsible for the exaggerated length of the entire skull and excessive sloping of the forehead. The parietal and occipital bones are smoothly rounded, the parietal tubercles are moderate, the occipital relief is weak. The nose was wide; there is a tray gutter. The alveolar process of the upper jaw is small, which indirectly indicates a small height of the face. The palate is wide and shallow. The chin protrusion is moderate; the height of the symphysis of the lower jaw is higher than its body in the posterior part. The teeth are large.

The morphological complex is most consistent with the features of the Tasmanians, differing in the shape of the frontal bone. If the skull is really ancient, it may represent the transition from the "proto-Australoid type" to the Tasmanian proper.

A skull from Mount Cameron West, or Premingan, at the extreme northwestern tip of Tasmania, was found surrounded by the charred remains of a wigwam-type structure known from ethnography as typical of Tasmanian burial practices. The skull was dated to 4.26 thousand years ago. The skull is referred to as belonging to the "Tasmanian type" and at the same time being part of the variability of the Australian aborigines (Flood, 2004).

According to the good tradition of Australian science, the find was destroyed, so it is impossible to find out its real features.

Cremated remains were found at West Point Midden, 60 km west of the Rocky Cape (Jones, 1964a, b). The cremations have been dated between 1800 and 800 years ago. Due to their fragmentation, these fragments do not provide anything for solving the question of the origin of the Tasmanians.

Summing up, we have to state once again that the history of the formation of the Tasmanian race is covered with a thick fog of antiquity. Yet the efforts of archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists, ethnographers, geologists and other specialists have not been unsuccessful. It can be confidently asserted that Tasmania was inhabited about 34 thousand years ago, or even somewhat earlier. Most likely, people came here from the southeastern tip of Australia by land, during a period when vast land stretched on the site of the present Bass Strait. At this time, there was apparently no anthropological difference between the populations of Australia and Tasmania; this population can be called "proto-Australoid". After twelve thousand years ago, when the strait was formed, contact between Australians and islanders ceased. In conditions of isolation, the biological traits of the Tasmanians were transformed as usual.

Significantly, the Tasmanians have changed much more than the Australians compared to the original "proto-Australoids."

Most likely, this is explained, firstly, by adaptation to a new specific climate, and secondly, by the small number and isolation of the islanders in comparison with the mainland "superpopulation": under such conditions, genetic-automatic processes lead to rapid changes.

... Are we dealing with intelligent monkeys or with very underdeveloped people?
Oldfield, 1865
The only reasonable and logical solution to the inferior race is to destroy it.
H. J. Wells, 1902

In the photo: the last indigenous people of Tasmania

One of the most shameful pages in the history of British colonial expansion is the extermination of the native population of Fr. Tasmania.,

British settlers in Australia, and especially in Tasmania, systematically destroyed the indigenous population and undermined the foundations of their life for their own prosperity. The British "needed" all the lands of the natives with favorable climatic conditions. “Europeans can hope for prosperity as ... blacks will soon disappear ...

If the natives are shot in the same way that crows are shot in some countries, then the [native] population should be greatly reduced over time, "wrote Robert Knox in his" philosophical study on the influence of race. " Alan Moorehead described the fatal changes that befell Australia: “In Sydney, the savage tribes were killed. In Tasmania, they were massacred ... by settlers ... and convicts ... they were all hungry for land, and none of them was going to let the blacks prevent it.

However, those gentle and kind-hearted people whom Cook had visited half a century before were not as submissive as on the mainland. " After the farmers took the land from the indigenous people (primarily in Tasmania, where the climate was colder), the natives with spears in their hands tried to resist the aliens armed with firearms. In response, the British organized a real hunt for them. In Tasmania, such a hunt for people took place with the sanction of the British authorities: “The final extermination on a large scale could only be carried out with the help of justice and the armed forces ... The soldiers of the fortieth regiment drove the natives between two boulders, shot

all men, and then dragged women and children out of rock crevices to blow their brains out ”(ISSO). If the natives were "unfriendly [non-compliant]," the British concluded that the only way out of this situation was to destroy them. The natives were "incessantly hunted, hunted down like a fallow deer." Those who could be caught were taken away. In 1835 the last surviving local resident was taken out. Moreover, these measures were not secret, no one was ashamed of them, and the government supported this policy.

“So the hunt for people began, and over time it became more and more brutal. In 1830, Tasmania was put under martial law, and a chain of armed men was lined up across the island to try to drive the natives into a trap. The indigenous people managed to get through the cordon, but the will to live left the hearts of the savages, fear was stronger than despair ... ”Felix Maynard, doctor of a French whaling ship, recalled the systematic raids on the natives. "The Tasmanians were useless and [now] everyone is dead," Hammond believed.
* Hammond John Lawrence Le Breton (1872-1949) - historian and journalist.

The Europeans found the island quite densely populated. R. Pöh believes that about 6,000 natives could have existed in Tasmania by the products of hunting and gathering. The wars between the aborigines did not go beyond petty tribal strife. Apparently, there were no hunger strikes, at least the Europeans did not find the natives exhausted.

The first Europeans were greeted with the greatest friendliness by the Tasmanians. According to Cook, the Tasmanians of all the "savages" he had seen were the most good-natured and trusting people. "They did not have a fierce appearance, but seemed kind and cheerful without distrust of strangers."

When in 1803. the first English settlement was founded on the island, the Tasmanians also reacted to the colonists without any hostility. Only the violence and brutality of Europeans forced Tasmanians to change their attitude towards whites. In the sources we find numerous colorful examples of these violence and atrocities. “Someone named Carrots,” says H. Parker, “killed a native from whom he wanted to take his wife, cut off his head, hung it like a toy around the neck of the murdered man, and forced the woman to follow him.” The same author reports on the exploits of a seal dealer who “captured 15 native women and resettled them on the islets of the Bass Strait so that they would hunt seals for him. If by his arrival the women did not have time to prepare the prescribed amount of skins, he would tie the culprits to the trees for 24-36 hours in a row as punishment, and from time to time he would beat them with rods. "

In the early 1820s, Tasmanians attempted organized armed resistance to European rapists and murderers. The so-called "black war" begins, which soon turned into a simple hunt by the British for the Tasmanians, completely defenseless against white firearms.

H. Hull directly says that “hunting for blacks was the favorite sport of the colonists. They chose a day and invited neighbors with their families to a picnic ... after dinner the gentlemen took guns and dogs and, accompanied by 2-3 servants from the exiles, went into the forest to look for Tasmanians. The hunters returned in triumph if they managed to shoot a woman or 1-2 men.

"One European colonist," says Ling Roth, "had a jar in which he kept the ears of the people he was able to kill as hunting trophies."

“Many blacks with women and children gathered in a ravine near the city ... the men sat around a large fire while the women were busy preparing food for dinner. The natives were taken by surprise by a detachment of soldiers who, without warning, opened fire on them, and then rushed to finish off the wounded. One soldier stabbed a child crawling beside his murdered mother with a bayonet and threw him into the fire. This soldier himself talked about his "feat" to the traveler Hull, and when the latter expressed his indignation at his cruelty, he exclaimed with sincere surprise: "After all, it was only a child!"

In 1834 everything was finished. “On December 28,” says E. Reclus, “the last natives, pursued like wild animals, were driven to the tip of one elevated promontory, and this event was celebrated with triumph. The lucky hunter, Robinson, received an estate of 400 hectares and a significant amount of money as a reward from the government.

The prisoners were first transferred from one island to another, and then all the Tasmanians, including two hundred, were imprisoned in one swampy valley of about. Flinders. Within 10 years, 3/4 of the exiles died.

In 1860, only eleven Tasmanians remained. In 1876, the last Tasmanian woman, Truganini, dies, the island turns out, according to English official documents, to be completely "cleared" of natives, except for an insignificant number of Europeanized mestizos of Anglo-Tasmanian origin.

“During the Holocaust, Charles Darwin visited Tasmania. He wrote: "I am afraid there is no doubt that the evil that is happening here and its consequences are the result of the shameless behavior of some of our fellow countrymen." That's putting it mildly. It was a monstrous, unforgivable crime ... The Aborigines had only two alternatives: either to resist and die, or to submit and become a parody of themselves, ”wrote Alan Moorhead. Polish traveler Count Strzelecki,

(* Strzelecki Edmund Paul (1796-1873) - Polish naturalist, geographer and geologist, explorer of America, Oceania and Australia) who arrived in Australia in the late 1830s, could not help expressing horror from what he saw: “Humiliated, depressed, confused ... emaciated and covered with dirty rags, they are [once] the natural masters of this land - [now] rather ghosts of the past than living people; they vegetate here in their melancholic existence, waiting for an even more melancholic end. " Strzheletskiy also mentioned "the examination of the corpse by one race by another - with the verdict:" She died, overtaken by God's retribution. " The extermination of the natives could be viewed as hunting, as a sport, because they did not seem to have a soul.
True, Christian missionaries opposed the notion of "no soul" among the "aborigines" and saved the lives of a large number of the last native inhabitants of Australia. However
less, the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, which was in force in the post-war years, prescribed (article 127) "not to count the aborigines" when counting the population of individual states. Thus, the constitution rejected their involvement in the human race. After all, back in 1865 Europeans, when faced with the indigenous people, were not sure whether they were dealing with "smart monkeys or with very underdeveloped people."

Caring for “these beastmen” is “a crime against our own blood,” Heinrich Himmler recalled in 1943, speaking of the Russians who should have been subordinated to the Nordic race of masters.
The British, who were doing "unheard-of colonization" in Australia (in the words of Adolf Hitler), did not need this kind of instruction. Thus, one report for 1885 reads:
“To calm the niggas down, they were given something amazing. The food [that was given to them] was half strychnine - and no one escaped their fate ... The owner of Long Lagoon used this trick to destroy over a hundred blacks. " "In the old days in New South Wales it was useless to get those who invited blacks over and gave them poisoned meat to be punished." Некий Винсент Лесина еще в 1901 г. заявил в австралийском парламенте: «Ниггер должен исчезнуть с пути развития белого человека» - так «гласит закон эволюции». “We didn’t realize that killing blacks was breaking the law ... because it used to be practiced everywhere,” was the main argument of the British, who killed twenty-eight “friendly” (ie, peaceful) natives in 1838. Prior to this massacre at Myell Creek, all acts of extermination of indigenous people in Australia went unpunished. Only in the second year of the reign of Queen Victoria, seven Englishmen (from the lower strata) were hanged as an exception for such a crime.

However, in Queensland (northern Australia) in late XIX in. An innocent fun was considered to drive a whole family of Niggners -Muja, wife and children - into the water to crocodiles ... During his stay in North Queensland in 1880-1884, Norwegez Karl Lumholz (* Lumholz Karl Sofus (1851-1922) - Norwegian traveler, naturalist and ethnographer, explorer of Australia, Mexico, Indonesia) heard such statements: "Blacks can only be shot - you cannot treat them differently." One of the colonists remarked that this is "a tough ... but ... necessary principle." He himself shot all the men he met in his pastures, “because they are cattle-killers, women - because they give birth to cattle-killers, and children - because they [will] be cattle-killers. They do not want to work and therefore are not good for anything but getting shot, ”the colonists complained to Lumholz.

The colonization of Australia and Tasmania became a vivid example of how the Anglo-Saxon race, exterminating the aborigines, conquered living space.

In 1803, a small party of settlers was sent to the island of Tasmania from Sydney under the command of John Bowen in order to prevent French claims to the island. They were faced with the task of developing agriculture and industry.

The natives greeted the colonists without hostility, but soon changed their attitude towards whites. For the sake of their own prosperity, British settlers took land from the indigenous people, who were killed, raped and enslaved. Attempts by the aborigines in the early 1820s to provide resistance, called the "black war", were brutally suppressed by the colonial army:

The final extermination on a large scale could only be carried out with the help of justice and the military ... The soldiers of the fortieth regiment drove the natives between two boulders, shot all the men, and then pulled women and children out of rock crevices to blow their brains out.

Tasmanians with spears in their hands were completely defenseless against Europeans armed with firearms, so very soon the "black war" turned into a real hunt for the British for the aborigines, which took place with the sanction of the British authorities.

In the testimonies of those events, there are descriptions of this cruel and bloody entertainment of the British: inviting neighbors with their families for a picnic and having dinner, the gentlemen took guns, dogs, 2-3 servants from the exiles and went into the forest to look for the black ones. The hunt was considered successful if it was possible to shoot a woman or 1-2 men.

American biogeographer Jared Diamond cites other facts of the bloody fun of the gallant and noble English:

One shepherd shot nineteen Tasmanians with a falconet loaded with nails. Four others ambushed the natives, killing thirty people and throwing their bodies off the mountain now called Victory Hill.

The colonialists viewed the extermination of the natives as a sport and were proud of their "achievements". One of the soldiers told the traveler Hull about the "feat":

Many blacks with women and children gathered in a ravine near the city ... the men sat around a large fire while the women were busy preparing food for dinner. The natives were taken by surprise by a detachment of soldiers who, without warning, opened fire on them, and then rushed to finish off the wounded. One soldier stabbed a child crawling beside his murdered mother with a bayonet and threw him into the fire.

In 1828, the governor of Tasmania banned the indigenous people from appearing in the part of the island where Europeans lived. Any aborigine who violated this prohibition was allowed to be killed on the spot.

In addition, the Europeans were engaged in "catching blacks" and selling them into slavery. Felix Maynard, a doctor on a French whaling ship, described the raids on the natives:

So, the hunt for people began, and over time it became more and more brutal. In 1830, Tasmania was put under martial law, and a line of armed men was lined up across the island to try to drive the natives into a trap. The indigenous people managed to get through the cordon, but the will to live left the hearts of the savages, fear was stronger than despair ...

The French geographer and historian Elise Reclus wrote:

On December 28, the last of the natives, pursued like wild beasts, were herded to the tip of an elevated promontory, and the event was celebrated with triumph. The lucky hunter Robinson received a 400-hectare estate and a significant sum of money as a reward from the government.

As a result, by 1833 about three hundred aborigines remained on the island out of five to six thousand who had lived there before the conquest of Tasmania by the British. Almost all of them were relocated to Flinders Island, where three quarters of them died within 10 years.

In 1876, Truganini, the last representative of the indigenous people of Tasmania, died, and the island, according to English official documents, became completely "cleared" of natives, except for an insignificant number of Europeanized mestizos of Anglo-Tasmanian origin.

The British historian and journalist Hammond John Lawrence Le Breton cynically summed up the outcome of the Tasmanian genocide: "The Tasmanians were useless and everyone died."

In Australia, the entertainment of English gentlemen was not much different from the entertainment of their neighbors on the island of Tasmania. The Australian government, modeled on the Tasmanian government's punitive squads, has created a mounted police unit — the so-called “savage cops”.

This unit carried out the order "to find and destroy": the aborigines were either killed or driven from the inhabited territories. Most often, the police surrounded the Aboriginal parking lot at night, and at dawn they attacked and shot everyone.

The last massacre of a peaceful tribe, which is confirmed by documents, was committed by a detachment of police officers in 1928 in the North-West: the inhabitants were captured, shackled to the back of their heads, and then all but three women were killed. After that, the police burned the corpses and took the women with them to the camp. Leaving the camp, they also killed and burned the women.

Poisoned food was also widely used by the white settlers to exterminate the natives. One of the colonialists in 1885 boasted:

To calm the niggas down, they were given something amazing The food they were given was half strychnine, and no one escaped their fate ... The owner of Long Lagoon, using this trick, destroyed more than a hundred blacks.

The trade of native women flourished among Anglo-Australian farmers, and English settlers hunted them in groups. A 1900 government report notes that "these women were passed from farmer to farmer until ultimately thrown away as trash, leaving them to rot from sexually transmitted diseases."

At the end of the 19th century, Anglo-Saxon racists entertained themselves by driving entire families of aborigines into the water to the crocodiles.

The colonists did not receive direct instructions from London to exterminate the Aborigines, but it cannot be said that none of the British thinkers "blessed" them. For example, Benjamin Kidd categorically argued that "slavery is the most natural and one of the most reasonable institutions."

The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, which was already in force in the post-war years, prescribed (article 127) "not to count the aborigines" when counting the population of individual states. Thus, their involvement in the human race was constitutionally denied.

Back in 1865, Europeans, when faced with the indigenous people, were not sure whether they were dealing with "smart monkeys or with very underdeveloped people."

В 1901 году политик-лейборист из Квинсленда Винсент Лесина заявил в австралийском парламенте: «Ниггер должен исчезнуть с пути развития белого человека» - так «гласит закон эволюции».

The British colonists openly committed atrocities against the aborigines of Australia and Tasmania, not only because of the land or even racial hatred, but just for pleasure, showing their cruelty, moral abomination, greed and inner meanness.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Tasmanians, self-name palava- the aboriginal population of about. Tasmania, Australia.

From 1803-1833, within just 30 years, the number of Tasmanian aborigines fell from 5,000 to 300, mainly due to diseases brought from Europe and conflicts with British settlers. One of the last purebred Tasmanians, Truganini, died in 1876. Today, many people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent through mixed marriages are still alive, and they maintain the traditional Palawan culture.

The ancient population of Tasmania was divided into tribes, which, in turn, were subdivided into communities and families. The largest of them is considered the Paredarerme tribe from the Ostricheskaya Bay, which included 10 community groups and numbered up to 800 people.

Coming of Europeans

Notable Tasmanians

Truganini is the last purebred Tasmanian.
Fanny Cochrane Smith, of mixed ancestry, from which the records of the Tasmanian language remained.
William Lann or "King Billy"

Culture and art

As mentioned above, the life of the Tasmanians was very simple. The Tasmanians did not know how to fish and ate mainly plants, shellfish and the meat of local animals, which were killed with stone tools. It is argued that the Tasmanians did not know how to make fire and were only able to support it, and if the fire was extinguished, they had to follow the fire to the neighboring community, which sometimes resulted in a fight; today, however, some scholars dispute this opinion. They carried their few belongings in wicker baskets. Tasmanians moved not only on foot, but also by canoe made of bark.

The Tasmanians did not know sewing and dressed in crudely bonded animal skins. They adorned themselves with shell necklaces, feathers and flowers and painted their faces and bodies with charcoal and ocher, and inflicted decorative scars on themselves, probably in the course of some kind of ritual. Ocher mixed with fat was also used to fix hair.

From the testimonies of European colonists, it is known that the Tasmanians knew how to paint, usually with the help of the same ocher. Unfortunately, most of their drawings have not survived due to the fragility of the materials: as a rule, they painted on the bark from which canoes and huts were built. They depicted both abstract patterns and relatively "realistic" scenes of hunting or fighting. The Tasmanians loved to sing and dance: some of their folk songs have come down to us in the recordings of Fanny Cochrane Smith.

Little is known about the beliefs of the Tasmanian aborigines. According to the testimony of missionary George August Robinson, who took care of the last Tasmanian community on Flinders Island, the Tasmanians believed that "two men from heaven" brought them fire. European colonialists and missionaries reported that Tasmanians believed in two spirits, good and evil: one governing the day, the other at night. In addition to these two main spirits, there were others, good and evil: seeing off a loved one on a long journey, the Tasmanians sang songs to appease the spirits and persuade them to send down protection to the traveler. The Tasmanians believed in the immortality of the soul; according to the same Robinson, the other world in their minds mixed with England, which they called "a distant land", and when asked where the dead go after death, they answered: "To England, where there are many relatives." They burned the bodies of the dead. Other natives believed that after death they would be reborn on their home island. They carried the bones of deceased loved ones with them as amulets, attributing to them the ability to heal diseases.

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Notes (edit)

William Dalrymple(HTML). The Sunday Times.14 October 2007. Retrieved March 14, 2008.
Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel(1999 ed.). Norton. p. 492. ISBN 0-393-06131-0.
Taylor, Rebe Aboriginal History Journal, Vol 32, 2008, at ANU E Press
Manne, Robert (2003). Whitewash... 317-318: Schwartz Publishing. ISBN 0-9750769-0-6.
Ryan, Lyndall: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Second Edition, Allen & Unwin, 1996, ISBN 1-86373-965-3
Flood, Josephine: The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People, Allen & Unwin, 2006 ISBN 978-1741148725.
STOLEN GENERATIONS PUBLIC RELEASE, Premier Paul Lennon www.premier.tas.gov.au/speeches/stolen.html
Friedrich Max Müller Anthropological Religion... Asian Educational Services, 1986

Literature

Cape W.R.Tasmanians and the Tasmanian Problem. - M .: Nauka, Main edition of oriental literature, 1975. - 200 p .: ill.
Sword S. Australia and Tasmania. - M .: Type. I. N. Kushnereva, 1898. - 3rd ed. - 150 p.
Alexander, Alison (editor) (2005) The Companion to Tasmanian History Center for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, Hobart. ISBN 1-86295-223-X.
Robson, L.L. (1983) A history of Tasmania. Volume 1. Van Diemen's Land from the earliest times to 1855 ISBN 0-19-554364-5.
Robson, L.L. (1991) A history of Tasmania. Volume II. Colony and state from 1856 to the 1980s Melbourne, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-553031-4.



Caucasoid race

Negroid race

Mongoloid race

Americanoid race

Australo-Vedoid race

Ancient and extinct races

Excerpt from Tasmanians

- Voulez vous bien ?! [You go to ...] - the captain shouted angrily frowning.
Drum yes yes yes, yes, yes, yes, drums crackled. And Pierre realized that a mysterious force had already completely taken possession of these people and that now it was useless to say anything else.
The captured officers were separated from the soldiers and ordered to go ahead. There were about thirty officers, including Pierre, and about three hundred soldiers.
The captured officers released from other booths were all strangers, were much better dressed than Pierre, and looked at him, in his shoes, with distrust and aloofness. Not far from Pierre was a fat major in a Kazan dressing gown, belted with a towel, with a plump, yellow, angry face, apparently enjoying the general respect of his fellow prisoners. He held one hand with a pouch in his bosom, with the other leaning on the shank. The major, puffing and panting, grumbled and was angry at everyone because it seemed to him that he was being pushed and that everyone was in a hurry when there was nowhere to hurry, everyone was surprised at something when nothing was surprising. Another, a small, thin officer, spoke to everyone, making assumptions about where they were being led now and how far they would have time to go today. An official, in felt boots and a commissariat uniform, ran from different directions and looked out for the burnt-out Moscow, loudly reporting his observations about what had burned down and what this or that part of Moscow was visible. The third officer, of Polish origin by accent, argued with the commissariat official, proving to him that he was mistaken in defining the quarters of Moscow.
- What are you arguing about? The major said angrily. - Whether Nikola, whether Vlasa, all one; you see, everything burned out, well, the end ... What are you pushing, isn’t there a little road, ”he angrily turned to the one walking behind and didn’t push him at all.
- Ay, ay, ay, what have you done! - could be heard, however, now from one side or the other, the voices of prisoners looking around the conflagration. - And then Zamoskvorechye, and Zubovo, and in the Kremlin, look, there is not half ... Yes, I told you that all Zamoskvorechye, there is.
- Well, you know what burned down, well, what is there to talk about! - said the major.
Passing through Khamovniki (one of the few unburned quarters of Moscow) past the church, the whole crowd of prisoners suddenly shrank to one side, and exclamations of horror and disgust were heard.
- Look you scoundrels! That is infidel! Yes, the dead, the dead is ... Smeared with something.
Pierre also moved up to the church, which had something that caused exclamations, and dimly saw something leaning against the fence of the church. From the words of his comrades who saw better than him, he learned that it was something like a corpse of a man, standing upright by the fence and smeared with soot in his face ...
- Marchez, sacre nom ... Filez ... trente mille diables ... [Go! go! Damn it! Devils!] - were heard the curses of the escorts, and the French soldiers, with renewed anger, dispersed the crowd of prisoners with their cleavers, looking at the dead man.

The prisoners walked along the lanes of Khamovnikov alone with their convoy and carts and wagons belonging to the convoy and driving behind; but when they went out to the grocery stores, they found themselves in the middle of a huge, closely moving artillery train mixed with private carts.
At the very bridge, everyone stopped, waiting for those who were driving ahead to move forward. From the bridge, endless rows of other moving carts opened up behind and in front of the prisoners. To the right, where the Kaluga road curved past Neskuchny, disappearing in the distance, endless rows of troops and carts stretched. These were the troops of the Beauharnais corps that left first; back, along the embankment and across the Stone Bridge, Ney's troops and carts stretched.
Davout's troops, to which the prisoners belonged, marched through the Crimean ford and already partly entered Kaluzhskaya Street. But the carts were so stretched out that the last carts of Beauharnais had not yet left Moscow for Kaluzhskaya Street, and the head of Ney's troops was already leaving Bolshaya Ordynka.
Having passed the Crimean ford, the prisoners moved a few steps and stopped, and again moved, and from all sides the carriages and people were more and more embarrassed. After walking for more than an hour those several hundred steps that separate the bridge from Kaluzhskaya Street, and reaching the square where Zamoskvoretsky and Kaluzhskaya streets converge, the prisoners, compressed into a heap, stopped and stood for several hours at this intersection. From all sides one could hear incessant, like the sound of the sea, the rumbling of wheels, and the stamping of feet, and incessant angry screams and curses. Pierre stood pressed against the wall of a burnt house, listening to this sound, which merged in his imagination with the sounds of a drum.
Several captured officers, in order to see better, climbed the wall of the burnt house, next to which Pierre was standing.
- To the people! Eka to the people! .. And they piled on the cannons! Look: furs ... - they said. - You see, the scoundrels, they robbed ... That one in the back, on the cart ... After all, this is from an icon, by God! .. These are the Germans, it must be. And our man, by God! .. Ah, scoundrels! .. You see, he’s loaded up, he goes by force! Here are those on, droshky - and they captured! .. See, I sat down on the chests. Fathers! .. Fight! ..
- So it in the face then, in the face! You can't wait that way until evening. Look, look ... and this is surely Napoleon himself. See, what horses! in monograms with a crown. This is a foldable house. Dropped the bag, does not see. Again they fought ... A woman with a child, and not bad. Yes, how can they let you through ... Look, there is no end. Russian girls, by God, girls! How calmly they sat in the carriages!
Again a wave of general curiosity, as in the vicinity of the church in Khamovniki, pushed all the prisoners to the road, and Pierre, thanks to his height over the heads of others, saw what had so attracted the curiosity of the prisoners. In three carriages, mingled between the charging boxes, they rode, closely sitting on top of each other, unloaded, in bright colors, rouged, something screaming in squeaky voices of women.
From the moment Pierre realized the appearance of a mysterious force, nothing seemed strange or scary to him: not a corpse smeared with soot for fun, not these women hurrying somewhere, not the conflagration of Moscow. Everything that Pierre now saw made almost no impression on him - as if his soul, preparing for a difficult struggle, refused to accept impressions that could weaken it.
The women's train has passed. Behind him were carts again, soldiers, wagons, soldiers, decks, carriages, soldiers, boxes, soldiers, and occasionally women.
Pierre did not see people separately, but saw their movement.
All these people, horses seemed to be chased by some invisible force. All of them, during the hour during which Pierre watched them, floated out of different streets with the same desire to pass quickly; all of them in the same way, when faced with others, began to get angry, to fight; white teeth bared, eyebrows frowned, all the same curses were thrown around, and on all faces there was the same youthfully determined and cruelly cold expression, which in the morning struck Pierre at the sound of the drum on the corporal's face.
Already before the evening, the convoy commander gathered his team and, with a shout and disputes, squeezed into the carts, and the prisoners, surrounded on all sides, went out onto the Kaluga road.
We walked very quickly, without resting, and stopped only when the sun began to set. The carts moved one on top of the other, and people began to prepare for an overnight stay. Everyone seemed angry and displeased. For a long time, curses, angry screams and fights were heard from different sides. The carriage, which was driving behind the escorts, moved over the convoy's wagon and pierced it with a drawbar. Several soldiers from different directions ran to the wagon; some beat the horses harnessed to the carriage on the heads, turning them around, others fought among themselves, and Pierre saw that one German was badly wounded in the head with a sword.
It seemed that all these people were experiencing now, when they stopped in the middle of a field in the cold twilight of an autumn evening, the same feeling of unpleasant awakening from the haste and impetuous movement that gripped everyone when leaving. Having stopped, everyone seemed to understand that it was not yet known where they were going, and that on this movement there would be a lot of hard and difficult things.
The prisoners at this halt were treated even worse by the escorts than during the march. At this halt, for the first time, the meat food of the prisoners was given out in horse meat.
From the officers to the last soldier, there was a seemingly personal bitterness against each of the prisoners in everyone, so unexpectedly replacing the previously friendly relationship.
This anger intensified even more when, when counting the prisoners, it turned out that during the fuss, leaving Moscow, one Russian soldier, pretending to be sick from the stomach, fled. Pierre saw a Frenchman beat a Russian soldier for walking far from the road, and heard the captain, his friend, reprimand the non-commissioned officer for the escape of the Russian soldier and threaten him with court. On the excuse of the non-commissioned officer that the soldier was ill and could not walk, the officer said that it was ordered to shoot those who would lag behind. Pierre felt that the fatal force that crushed him during the execution and which was invisible during the captivity now again took possession of his existence. He was scared; but he felt how, in proportion to the efforts that the fatal force was making to crush him, a life force independent of it grew and grew in his soul.
Pierre had supper with a soup of rye flour with horse meat and talked to his comrades.
Neither Pierre and none of his comrades spoke about what they saw in Moscow, nor about the rude treatment of the French, nor about the order to shoot, which was announced to them: everyone was, as if in rebuff to the worsening situation, especially lively and cheerful ... They talked about personal memories, about funny scenes seen during the campaign, and hushed up conversations about the present situation.
The sun has set long ago. Bright stars lit up somewhere in the sky; the red, fire-like glow of a rising full month spread over the edge of the sky, and a huge red ball vibrated surprisingly in the grayish haze. It was getting light. The evening was already over, but the night had not yet begun. Pierre got up from his new comrades and walked between the fires on the other side of the road, where, he was told, the captured soldiers were standing. He wanted to talk to them. On the road, a French sentry stopped him and told him to turn back.
Pierre returned, not to the fire, to his comrades, but to the unharnessed cart, which had no one. He tucked his legs and bowed his head, sat down on the cold ground at the wheel of the cart and sat for a long time motionless, thinking. More than an hour passed. Pierre was not disturbed by anyone. Suddenly he burst out laughing with his thick, good-natured laugh, so loudly that people looked around in surprise at this strange, apparently lonely laugh.
- Ha, ha, ha! - Pierre laughed. And he spoke aloud to himself: - The soldier did not let me in. Caught me, locked me up They hold me captive. Who me? Me! Me - my immortal soul! Ha, ha, ha! .. Ha, ha, ha! .. - he laughed with tears in his eyes.
Some man got up and came over to see what this strange big man was laughing about. Pierre stopped laughing, got up, walked away from the curious, and looked around him.
The huge, endless bivouac, which had previously loudly rustled with the crackling of bonfires and the chatter of people, fell silent; the red fires of the bonfires went out and faded. A full month stood high in the bright sky. Forests and fields, previously unseen outside the camp, now opened up in the distance. And even farther away from these forests and fields could be seen a light, wavering, inviting endless distance. Pierre looked into the sky, into the depths of the departing, playing stars. “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! Thought Pierre. “And they caught it all and put it in a booth, enclosed by boards!” He smiled and went to go to bed with his comrades.

In early October, another envoy came to Kutuzov with a letter from Napoleon and a proposal for peace, deceptively indicated from Moscow, while Napoleon was already not far ahead of Kutuzov, on the old Kaluga road. Kutuzov responded to this letter in the same way as to the first one sent with Loriston: he said that there could be no talk of peace.
Soon after that, a report was received from the partisan detachment of Dorokhov, who was walking to the left of Tarutin, that troops appeared in Fominsky, that these troops consisted of the Brusier division and that this division, separated from other troops, could easily be exterminated. Soldiers and officers again demanded activity. The staff generals, excited by the memory of the ease of victory at Tarutin, insisted on Kutuzov's execution of Dorokhov's proposal. Kutuzov did not consider any offensive to be necessary. The middle came out, what was to be accomplished; a small detachment was sent to Fominskoye, which was supposed to attack Brusye.
By a strange coincidence, this appointment - the most difficult and most important, as it turned out later - was received by Dokhturov; that same modest, little Dokhturov, whom no one described to us as making up battle plans, flying in front of regiments, throwing crosses on batteries, etc., who was considered and called indecisive and imperceptible, but the same Dokhturov, who during all the Russian wars with the French, from Austerlitz until the thirteenth year, we find in command wherever the situation is difficult. In Austerlitz, he remains the last at the Augest dam, gathering regiments, saving what is possible, when everything runs and dies and not a single general is in the arieguard. He, sick with a fever, goes to Smolensk with twenty thousand to defend the city against the entire Napoleonic army. In Smolensk, as soon as he dozed off at the Molokhov Gate, in a paroxysm of fever, he was awakened by a cannonade across Smolensk, and Smolensk held out all day. On Borodino day, when Bagration was killed and the troops of our left flank were killed in a ratio of 9 to 1 and the entire force of the French artillery was sent there, no one else was sent, namely the indecisive and unprecedented Dokhturov, and Kutuzov was in a hurry to correct his mistake when he sent it there another. And small, quiet Dokhturov goes there, and Borodino is the best glory of the Russian army. And many heroes are described to us in poetry and prose, but almost not a word about Dokhturov.

Tasmania is a small (67,897 km 2) island off the southeastern coast of Australia, separated from the mainland by the Bass Strait (224 km wide). Resting on a common base with Australia and being connected with it by numerous islets, Tasmania in its own way geological structure is part of the mainland. Abel Tasman, who discovered the island on November 24, 1642, took it for a part of the mainland. That Tasmania is an island was established only in 1798 by Flinders and Bass, who were the first navigators to sail around Tasmania.

Geographic conditions

The shores of Tasmania are indented by numerous bays. Two mountain ranges cross the island from north to south. The inner part of the island is a grassy plateau. The mountain slopes are overgrown with dense forest (eucalyptus, tree ferns). The climate is moderate and humid; snow often falls in winter. The vegetation is generally the same as in southeastern Australia, but there are also local forms characteristic of colder climates. The fauna is also similar to that of southeastern Australia, but significantly poorer in species.

Indigenous people and their fate

The Europeans found a fairly large population on the island. There are no exact figures. The first observers determined the size of the indigenous population very differently: from 1,000 (Backhouse) to 20,000 (Melville) 1. There is reason to believe that about 6 thousand people could have existed by hunting and gathering in Tasmania.

The colonization of Tasmania by the British led to the rapid disappearance of the indigenous population of the island from the face of the earth. The first encounters of the Tasmanians with whites did not seem to bode well for such an outcome. European sailors who visited the island invariably received the most friendly attitude towards themselves. According to Cook, the Tasmanians of all the "savages" he saw were the most good-natured and trusting: "They did not have a fierce or wild appearance ... but seemed kind and cheerful, without distrust of strangers."

When the first English settlement was founded on the island in 1803, the Tasmanians also did not at first show the slightest hostility towards the white newcomers. Only the violence and brutality of Europeans made the Tasmanians change their attitude.

Many examples of these violence and atrocities can be found in the sources. Thus, in Parker we read: "Someone named Karrots killed a native from whom he wanted to take his wife, cut off his head, hung it like a toy on the neck of the murdered man's wife and forced the woman to follow him." The same author tells about the “exploits” of a seal owner, who “captured ten to fifteen native women and resettled them on the islets of the Bass Strait so that they would hunt seals for him. If by his arrival the women did not have time to prepare the required amount of skins, he tied the culprits to the trees for 24-36 hours as punishment, and from time to time beat them with rods; sometimes he killed the disobedient ones ”2.

One cattle-breeder had a female slave, which he kept bound by bull bonds. “There is no doubt,” says an eyewitness to this incident, “that this and even the worst treatment of the natives by white pastoralists was the first and main reason for the hostility with which the latter now treat all white people.”

In the early 1820s, Tasmanians began to make attempts at organized armed resistance to European rapists. The "black war" broke out, which soon turned into a real hunt for the colonists for the Tasmanians, completely defenseless against the firearms of the colonialists.

Mr. Hull directly says that “hunting blacks was a favorite sport of the colonists. They chose a day and invited neighbors with their families to a picnic ... after dinner the gentlemen took guns and dogs and, accompanied by two or three servants from the exiles, went into the forest to look for blacks. .. Sometimes they managed to shoot a woman or one or two men. "

Ling Roth gives a vivid example of the merciless cruelty with which the British waged the "black war": "A number of blacks with women and children gathered in a ravine near the settlement ... the men sat around a large fire, and the women were busy cooking possums and bandicoots for dinner. ... The natives were taken by surprise by a detachment of soldiers who, without warning, opened fire on them, and then rushed to finish off the wounded. "

Almost all of this evidence is collected in Ling-Roth's already mentioned very conscientious work, The Aborigines of Tasmania, which is a good summary of what is known about the Tasmanians. The book provides information about those persons (their names are also given) from whom Ling-Roth borrowed his material.

In 1834 the Black War was over.

“On December 28,” says Elise Reclus, “the last natives, persecuted like wild beasts, were captured at the tip of an elevated promontory, and this event was celebrated with triumph. The lucky hunter Robinson received an estate of 400 hectares and a significant amount of money as a reward from the government; in addition, a public subscription gave him about 200 thousand francs. The prisoners were first transferred from island to island, and then all Tasmanians, including two hundred, were imprisoned in one swampy valley of Flinders Island, and they were given food and catechism lessons. Within ten years, more than three-quarters of the exiles died. " In 1860, only eleven Tasmanians remained. In 1876, the last Tasmanian woman, Truganina, died. nicknamed by the British "Lalla Rook".

The island, in the words of English official documents, was completely "cleared of natives", except for an insignificant number of Europeanized mestizos of English-Tasmanian origin.

Technique and material culture

The culture of the Tasmanians, due to their rapid extermination, remained poorly studied: researchers are forced to rely on fragmentary testimonies of old travelers and on archaeological material in the form of stone tools found on the island. The latter were studied purely formally, and it is not surprising that we find in the literature comparing them with tools of all Paleolithic eras. Thus, Balfour, who studied 5 thousand samples of stone tools from forty sites in the northern and eastern districts of Tasmania, brings their technique closer to the Mousterian and Aurignacian and finds that the similarity with the Aurignacian culture is more pronounced. The most widespread in Tasmania, as Balfour points out, is the "barbed scraper", which is one of the characteristic tools of the Late Paleolithic. Sollas draws an analogy between the Tasmanian and Acheulean (!) Cultures. S. Johnston points out the similarity with the pre-Aurignacian forms and, in particular, with the well-known forms of the Mousterian industry. These purely formal comparisons are completely wrong, and just as wrong are the conclusions that were drawn from them, the conclusions about some unusually low level of development, at which the Tasmanians, exterminated by the colonialists, supposedly stood. Much more probable is the convergence of the Tasmanian tools with the rough forms of the early Neolithic "macroliths".

The vast majority of stone tools (terra-watt) found in Tasmania were obviously obtained by simply beating off fragments from one stone (nucleus) and have no traces of further processing. According to the description of the colonist Rainer, whose observations date back to 1813-1818, the aborigines broke a stone into pieces by hitting it against a rock or other stone, and from the fragments obtained, they chose those that had sharp cutting edges. The worker, throwing one stone on another, lying on the ground, bounced, spreading his legs wide apart so as not to be wounded by shrapnel. The favorite material for Tasmanian terror-watta servants is hornfel, rich deposits of which are located near Dismal Creek. As an exception, there are samples that indicate a more thorough skipping, by means of which they are deliberately given a certain shape.

Although, thus, there are indications of the existence of specialized forms among the Tasmanians, nevertheless most of the stone tools had universal application. With the help of the terror-watt, the Tasmanians skinned kangaroos and other marsupials, cut meat, made notches in trees to facilitate climbing on them, smoothed and sharpened spears and clubs; the same terra-wattas were used for shaving hair on the head of women, scarification, scraping red ocher, which, mixed with fat, was used to lubricate the hair.

Terror-watt's universality is indicated by the absence of words in Tasmanian dialects for different types tools: all types of stone tools were denoted by the same word ( tronutta , trowutta , terro - watta derived from trona , or teroona - a rock).

Balfour mentions one example of a tool with a polished working edge. He attributes the origin of this weapon to the "Australian infusion"; In his opinion, the Australians, a small number of whom were transported to Tasmania by the British in the middle of the 19th century, imported, in his opinion, stone axes with a handle found in Tasmania in single samples: the Tasmanians, it is believed, did not know the latter.

Bone processing was completely unknown to the Tasmanians. The so-called "spoons" are really just kangaroo brooches; they do not show any traces of processing.

The shells were used unprocessed as drinking vessels. Sometimes the Tasmanians used shellfish instead of stone for sharpening spears. Small shells, namely Elenchus, served as the material for the necklaces.

The Tasmanians' combat and hunting weapons were spears and clubs. The spears were pointed sticks 2-3, even up to 4 m long and as thick as a finger. They could be thrown no more than 40 m. The northern tribes used spears with a serrated end. There are indications that the Tasmanians sometimes poisoned spears, using cadaveric poison for this purpose. The Tasmanians, unlike the Australians, did not know spear throwers.

Tasmanian clubs are described as short sticks, pointed at both ends, about 2.5 cm thick, with frequent coarse notches at one end to prevent slipping in the hand. When throwing, the club was kept in a horizontal position; when thrown, it came into a spinning "motion, which one author compares to the flight of a boomerang. But the Tasmanians did not know the real boomerang.

The Tasmanian weaving technique is characterized as spiral roll. The samples of baskets available in the British Museum are very similar to those in Australia. Along with wicker baskets and bags, there are much more primitive ones: from bark, leaves, algae.

The dwellings of the Tasmanians were often the simplest barriers from the wind, but huts were also built in the form of a hemisphere or a cone, with a frame of poles covered with bark and branches.

The boats of the Tasmanians were peculiar. They were a cross between a raft and a boat and were made of large, rolled into a tube, nested one inside the other and wrapped in grass ropes, pieces of bark of different types of eucalyptus. These tubes were connected in three places, the middle one is longer (4.5 m), the outer ones are shorter. Such a vessel, reminiscent of the "balsa" (reed raft) of the Indian tribes of South America, carried up to six people; it was set in motion with sticks 2.5-3 m in length; in low water these sticks were used as boat hooks, in high water they were used as oars, rowing while standing or sitting on bundles of grass.

Kangaroo skins served as clothing for the Tasmanians: women wore them in the form of aprons, the sick and the elderly - as raincoats to protect them from the cold. But often, even in the cold season, Tasmanians went completely naked.

Of the three known methods of making fire on mainland Australia: drilling, plowing (the so-called "fire plow") and sawing, the Tasmanians knew the first two. Drilling was the predominant method. They tried to keep the fire, and during their movements the women always took smoldering torches from the bark with them. The Tasmanians had very low processing techniques for food supplies: they did not have grain graters, they did not have an earth oven, which existed among the Australians; they did not know the art of cooking; all they knew was roasting over a fire and baking in ash.

The intoxicating drink was known to the Tasmanians. They made deep cuts in the trunks Eucalyptus resinifera , which bore the name of the "cider tree" among the colonists, and collected the sweet juice that flowed out in abundance into a hole dug at the foot of the tree. The juice quickly thickened, turning into a kind of molasses. The pits were covered with a flat stone for protection from animals and birds. After a while, the juice began to ferment, it was mixed with water and received an intoxicating drink like cider.

Farm

Hunting and gathering played a leading role in the economy of the Tasmanians. Hunted for a large

Game (kangaroos) and marine mammals (seals and stranded whales). The Tasmanians did not know any traps; the main hunting tool was throwing spears and clubs. The usual method of hunting was a round-up with the burning of grass and bushes. Women also took part in the hunt, mainly in raids as beaters.

The objects of the gathering economy were mushrooms, large bulbs, berries, bird eggs, edible algae, molluscs, larvae. Next to gathering, it is necessary to place crustacean fishing and hunting for small animals (possum, bandicoot).

The Tasmanians were not engaged in fishing at all, even on the sea * coast. They did not eat fish, disgusted with it - this fact is very difficult to explain. Therefore, they had no fishing tackle, no hooks, no nets. But they willingly caught and ate various mollusks and other marine animals. Catching them was the specialty of women, who very skillfully swam and dived after them. Women's business was also the hunting of seals, which they killed with blows of clubs on the head * as they do in our North.

Regarding the distribution of hunting and gathering products, the sources contain only an indication that the prey of the collective hunt was distributed among all participants, and each of the surplus individual prey was probably also shared with other members of his group, since the preservation and storage of food was not known to the Tasmanians.

Social system

The social structure of the Tasmanians remained almost “completely unknown”. It is known that they were divided into about twenty tribes, each of which had

it had its own dialect. The tribes, in turn, had divisions called in the sources "hordes" or "clans". Apparently, there were no more than fifty people in each division. Furneau (Cook's companion) says that he did not have to see the encampment, which consisted of more than four huts, each of them accommodating three or four people. O'Connor estimates the size of the group of Tasmanians who roamed together at ten to thirty people. La Billardière tells q of a meeting with a "horde" of 42 people. Elsewhere, the same author mentions a "horde" of 48 people (ten men, 14 women and 24 children).

Each group moved in a certain territory, the boundaries of which were strictly observed. In some places, a transition to subsidence was observed, mainly on the north-western coast of the island, where the "hordes" remained all year round in the same place, collecting mollusks. However, according to general rule, and there seasonal movements took place: winter was spent in valleys protected from sea winds, and summer - on the seashore.

The sources do not contain accurate data on the true nature of the tribal divisions among the Tasmanians. These divisions were probably primitive genera. According to Milligan, Tasmanians avoided * getting married within their unit and "wives were more often abducted or openly captured in neighboring clans." In other words, they had exogamy. The account of kinship was apparently matrilineal. At least Bonwick reports that "in Australia and Tasmania, men were considered relatives of their mothers' relatives." Comparison with Australian orders makes this message plausible, because in 1870, when these words were written, in Australia there were mainly those tribes who really considered female kinship.

The Tasmanian marriage apparently was a pair, but along with it, remnants of group marriage have survived. In West we read: “polygamy was tolerated; lately, women have lived in bigamia. " Milligan points to the extreme ease of divorce among Tasmanians. The widow was considered the property of the entire group: all men had the right to her. Comparing the data of the sources, we can come to the conclusion about the predominance of the traditions of group marriage among the Tasmanians.

All sources agree that the Tasmanians did not have any real people. But some observers saw their tribal leaders, however, with very limited power (Davis, Breton, Dixon, Jeffries, Robinson, Walker), while others believed that they were just heads of individual families (Backhouse, West). Any quarrels were resolved by self-reprimand or by unification of the warring parties.

Religion

Even less is known about the religious beliefs of the Tasmanians than about the social order. Observer reports about this are contradictory and not very reliable. Some - like Widowson, Breton, Jorgensen - generally denied any religion with them. Others - the majority - recognized the existence of religious beliefs, but described them in very contradictory ways. Almost everyone, however, agrees on one thing: the aborigines were afraid of the night spirit, or the spirits that roam in the dark. Some also indicate the name of this night spirit: Raego Wrapper (Robinson) or Namma (Davis). Others boil it down to mere superstitious fear of the dark (Line, Walker, West). There is a report of the cult of the moon (Lloyd, Bonwick), in any case, on moonlit nights, the Tasmanians arranged their "corrobores." There are reports of belief in the day spirit, but they are very vague. Pater W. Schmidt tried to find traces of “primitive monotheism” in these messages, but there are no grounds for this.

The Tasmanians practiced initiation, but we only know about its rituals that one of them was scarring the body. Bonwick mentions the rotating tablets, but only as an instrument of magic, and not as belonging to initiation rites; women were forbidden to look at them. Regarding witchcraft, it is known that everyone knew and used magic techniques, but in each group there were also persons who were considered to be particularly adept at magic; the British called them doctors. Magic techniques were simple and very similar to those practiced by the Australians. According to Bonwick, the usual method of treatment was rubbing the sore spot, accompanied by the casting of spells, and the imaginary extraction of the diseased bone or stone from the body. Backhouse says that the sorcerers kept pieces of glass with them, with which they inflicted deep wounds in the diseased part of the patient's body. Obviously, glass replaced magic crystals, which the Australians had a necessary accessory for the sorcerer. One of better means for the treatment of diseases, it was considered the attachment of the bone of a dead man to a sore spot, as well as particles taken inside, scraped off the bone of the deceased, and water in which the bone was soaked. Milligan says that Tasmanians often wore the bone of an arm or leg or a lower jaw, and sometimes even the skull of a deceased relative, around their necks as an amulet to protect them from all troubles.

Sometimes the sick were placed near the deceased for healing. Backhouse says that after the death of one woman, her relatives built a platform of poles and laid a corpse on it at sunset; then they placed the sick around the platform. According to the natives, the deceased had to get up at night and drive out the sick evil spirits that caused the disease.

The sources are silent about the techniques of harmful magic. Only Brow-Smith mentions that the Tasmanians believed that a person could be harmed by taking possession of his hair. The Tasmanians believed in the spirits of the dead, which during the day hide in caves and crevices of rocks, hollows of trees, secluded valleys, and wander the earth at night. It was believed that spirits are generally benevolent creatures, although they can harm the living when angry.

The afterlife was considered a continuation of the earthly. There was an idea of the land of the dead, rich in game and berries. The Tasmanians knew three methods of burial: burial in the ground, cremation, sometimes with the preliminary display of the corpse on a platform, and burial in caves or tree hollows. Interesting are the "sacred stones" of the Tasmanians mentioned by Brow-Smith and Backhouse. They provide a remarkable analogy to the Australian churings and at the same time recall the famous painted pebbles from the Mas d'Azil cave in France (Mesolithic era). Apparently, they served as amulets and talismans. According to Beckhouse, the black and red stripes painted on these stones represented "absent friends." More likely, however, Bonwick's assumption that this is not a question of absent living people, but of the dead, who were spoken of as "going on a long journey."

There are some indications of totemic beliefs. More than once observers noted various food prohibitions: some Tasmanians refused to eat the meat of a male walabi, others - the meat of a female. An interesting story is about a woman who treated one of the trees in the forest with superstitious affection. When this tree was damaged by a group of men, she rushed at her offenders in anger with a burning brand 1. There was a ban on the consumption of fish, but the reasons for this ban remained unknown.

Art

Ling-Roth in his work "The Aborigines of Tasmania" questions the existence of the Tasmanians visual arts before the arrival of the Europeans, as "information about this is insufficient." However, already among early travelers we find references to works of visual art, the origin of which cannot be attributed to European influence. For example, Peron (1802) discovered pieces of bark in a grave he excavated, on which marks were applied, similar to those with which the natives tattoo their forearms. Henry Gellier (a source not mentioned by Ling-Roth) found a charcoal image of the moon on the wall of a hut in Surry Hills in 1827. Ross (1836) mentions images of human figures, quadrangles, circles scrawled on the bark. Calder reports that he found "several extraordinary charcoal drawings" on the walls of the huts. Some of them were conditional, and he could not understand their meaning, others depicted a dog, an emu, people throwing spears at some kind of animal, apparently a kangaroo. "Masterpiece" Calder calls "battle painting", which depicts people fighting, running and dying.

The arrival of Europeans gave new themes to Tasmanian artists. Thus, in 1828, shortly after the inhabitants of Surry Hills first saw the bull-drawn carts of a caravan of colonists passing through the county, a scene that struck them was reproduced on the wall of one of the huts. There are mentions of drawings on the bark, as well as images on trees and on rocks. In one of his 2 books, Bonwick reproduces images of the sun, moon, people in a boat, painted by Tasmanians on tree trunks. Of the rock carvings, he mentions only one, namely, a human hand painted with red ocher. Until recently, no other rock carvings have been found in Tasmania. Therefore, the relief images found by AL Meston on the rocky promontory of Mercy Cliff, on the northwestern coast of the island, not far from the "kitchen heap" at the site of the encampment, are of great interest. Some images are conditional (concentric circles, large ovals with smaller ovals inscribed in them), others are realistic, what are the images of a snake coiled into a ring, a bird's head, a shell Haliotis (the main food of the inhabitants of this district). Most of the bas-reliefs are characterized by their great depth, which was not easy to achieve due to the hardness of the rock (diabase). According to Meston, the images were carved with a pointed piece of quartzite, which was struck with another stone, like a hammer.

The Tasmanians are also familiar with the primitive forms of musical creativity. The melody was noted in parallel thirds. The content of the words of the songs concerned hunting, military clashes, etc. The skins rolled into a tube were used as a percussion instrument; they were beaten, beating time. The beat was beaten during the performance of dances 3. The dances were apparently similar to the Australian Corroborei 4.

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