Aboriginal Tasmanians
Updated: Wikipedia source
Aboriginal Tasmanians (palawa kani: Palawa, Pakana) are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, the large island south of mainland Australia. Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania for tens of thousands of years before European settlement. Around 6000 BCE, rising sea levels flooded the Bass Strait and separated Tasmania from mainland Australia. This left the island's Aboriginal communities geographically isolated from other Aboriginal Australian groups for about 8,000 years. Before British colonisation in 1803, Tasmanian Aboriginal communities maintained distinct languages, cultural traditions, and regional identities across Tasmania, with communities organised through family and clan groups connected to particular territories and seasonal movement patterns. Estimates of the population before colonisation generally range from 3,000 to 15,000 people. During the first decades of British settlement in the 19th century, Aboriginal communities in Tasmania were devastated by introduced diseases, frontier violence, dispossession, and forced removal during the Black War. Between 1830 and 1835, most surviving Aboriginal people were removed to the Wybalenna Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. Historians continue to debate whether these events constituted genocide under the United Nations Genocide Convention. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, colonial writers and popular media incorrectly described Aboriginal people in Tasmania as an extinct people following the deaths of Truganini in 1876 and Fanny Cochrane Smith in 1905, two women wrongly presented by colonial writers as the "last" Aboriginal Tasmanians. Tasmanian Aboriginal communities survived, particularly through descendants of Aboriginal women in Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands, and continued to maintain and revive cultural traditions and community identity. In the 21st century, thousands of people in Tasmania identify as Aboriginal Tasmanian. Contemporary Palawa communities continue cultural revival projects, including the reconstruction and use of palawa kani, a composite Tasmanian Aboriginal language.