The Tasmanian aborigines. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Peter Coleman's judicious review of the Windschuttle thesis (December 2002) clears the ring for a fair fight, and we can look forward to watching the historians slug it out point by point. There is nothing like a close of old-fashioned polemics to start the blood running.

Reading it as an anthropologist, the part of the thesis that troubled me most was Windschuttle's assertion that, while the Tasmanians clearly believed they held sole rights over naturally-occurring food resources, they lacked any concept of property in land. How collectivities such as bands or tribes could have the first without the second is not explained. As kangaroos were not branded, the only feasible way to assert hunting rights over them would be in terms of the possession of a territory over which they roamed.

If the indigenous Tasmanian polity placed no restrictions whatever on movement in pursuit of game or plant food, it was unlike any stable hunter-gatherer regime we know about. Absence of conflict caused by trespass, upon which Windschuttle bases his case, does not necessarily imply absence of territory--that is, traditional associations between corporate descent groups and delimited areas of land of the kind that Australian courts now acknowledge as native title. If modern research on the mainland can be taken as a guide, what it implies is the existence in Tasmania of an ethic of reciprocal hospitality facilitating a sharing of resources while simultaneously affirming the right of hosts to give or withhold. The fact that Aborigines admired generosity and deplored stinginess should not mislead us into thinking they lacked a concept of ownership.

The reason Windschuttle denies a concept of property in land to the Tasmanians is that he wishes to assert that they had no sense of their own territorial dispossession and displacement by the colonists. The early attacks on the newcomers, he claims, were provoked merely by their shooting of game, while the later episodes of robbery and murder were outcomes of a growing taste for European commodities. There was never a patriotic war in Tasmania, either set-piece or guerrilla, because the natives lacked not only a military organisation but the concept of a fatherland. Admittedly in the 1820s there was a serious crime wave. This was put down when the governor ultimately took decisive military action, after which the defeated natives were shipped off to Bass Strait where they could do no further harm.

The first major attack on the colonists took place at Risdon Cove in 1804, shortly after the move to present-day Hobart. Upwards of 500 natives attacked a settler's hut, appropriated game from a servant on his way back to the garrison, then surrounded the garrison itself. When attack seemed imminent, a carronade was fired and the natives fled. They were chased up the valley by soldiers and convicts.

After lengthy examination of the sources, Windschuttle rejects the native death toll of "up to fifty" recorded by the 1830 committee of inquiry and instead puts the count at three. The figures that interest me, however, are the 500 or more natives involved in the attack, which Windschuttle does not dispute, and his calculation towards the end of the book that the total pre-colonial population of Tasmania was less than 2000. If these numbers are valid, they mean that one-quarter of the island's inhabitants had gathered at a spot adjacent to the first ...