Whose Land is It Anyway?

The Commonwealth of Australia comprises six states and ten territories. It is also one of Earth’s continents, an immense hunk of land, home to many different people today. Tasmania is one of its states, an enormous island 150 miles south of the mainland across the Bass Strait. Fierce winds and currents typify the Bass Strait and complicate both water and air transportation. In the fall of 2023, my husband and I flew in a small turboprop plane across the Strait to Tasmania and landed skidding sideways on the short runway of the Davenport airport; and so began our exploration of Tasmania’s story: Who and why would anyone dare to traverse the Strait to settle in this strange land?

About 11,000-12,000 years ago rising sea levels formed the Bass Strait and separated Tasmania’s indigenous people, the Aboriginals from the mainland. Evidence suggests the presence of the Aboriginals for at least 30,000 years before that time. In 1803, Tasmania’s population diversified with the arrival of 49 people who set up along the Derwent River a British settlement, later called the city of Hobart, Tasmania’s current capital. In what was known as Van Dieman’s Land, the settlement gave rise to penal colonies and free persons’ holdings, which eventually led to massacres and deadly diseases that devastated most of Tasmania’s Aboriginals.

Stephen and I stayed for a few days in Hobart and took a day trip to a southeastern peninsula of Tasmania to visit the location of the Port Arthur penal colony. In the  1800’s, a punitive system termed transportation sent British convicts who committed non-capital crimes, real or perceived, to British colonies, in this case to Australia. Port Arthur was a penal colony established for intransigents or convicts who had committed additional offenses. Claiming to be a model prison, Port Arthur used strict surveillance and psychological punishment, including solitary confinement, hooding, and imposed silence to “guide” a convict toward a life of morality and good deeds.  

We walked around the colony’s extensive grounds, through the ruins of dormitories and a restored, cross-shaped prison cell building with its chapel, infamous for its partitioned pews. The harsh psychological conditions of this so-called model prison often resulted in prisoners’ severe mental illness. Although the Port Arthur penal colony vaunted itself as a new and enlightened sort of imprisonment, it was actually as cruel and severe as other penal colonies. And the use of psychological punishment in an inescapable location exacerbated its brutality.

We toured Port Arthur on a sunny spring day. Bathing in seasonal warmth, we walked among trees and through gardens on the prison administrators’ former grounds. Visions of prison life there, the scenes and participants conjured by the remains of buildings and explanatory panels at each site haunted us.

Prisoners at Port Arthur had no hope of ever leaving the colony, unlike many other people transported in the 19^th century to Tasmania and other settlements on the Mainland. The latter had the possibility to establish themselves and prosper after they had served their sentences; and many did. As their interests expanded, their encounters with the various Aboriginals became deadly conflicts, fatal more often for indigenous people than for whites. All these Englishmen (and women) were interlopers who were effectively driving indigenous people from the lands they had occupied for thousands of years.

Today, according to the 2021 census only 3.8% of Australia’s population is Aboriginal. A 2011 genetic-data-based study by Morten Rasmussen and others, “makes Aboriginal Australians one of the oldest living populations in the world and possibly the oldest outside Africa, confirming they may also have the oldest continuous culture on the planet.”[1]

Our Aboriginal hosts in Tasmania were of mixed heritage. Nevertheless, they were  committed to preserving their indigenous legacies, albeit against terrible odds. Our contacts were eager to show us how their people over millennia had learned to survive and flourish in a hostile land. Each tribe, or mob, has had its unique ways, now threatened by Australia’s dominant culture. Today, the various indigenous cultures are endangered. Aboriginals suffer many more economic, health, social, and emotional problems than the general population and have a much higher rate of suicide. The replacement of indigenous Australians with colonial settlers continues to result in cultural assimilation coupled with discriminatory practices based on prejudice and self-interest, a situation mirrored for centuries also in the annals of colonial and expansionist settlement in North America.

Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Sorry, Mr. Twain, but prejudice and self-interest persist today despite real and virtual travel. Our own trip to the south coast of Australia and Tasmania, however, helped us understand and have compassion for the fate of indigenous people wherever we travel. It helped us respect their efforts to survive and prosper. Unfortunately, many other people do not share Mark Twain’s views or even care. I understand. It’s complicated.

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1. [1]  “DNA confirms Aboriginal culture is one of the Earth’s oldest”. Australian Geographic. 23 September 2011.