Henry Melville
After the first peoples of Tasmania met their end variously at the hands of the prospectors and their ‘government’, the only remaining native animal that was seen as a threat to white land prospectors was the thylacine. Bold, shameless charlatanry convinced an intimidated and compliant colonial government in the 1880s to sign its death warrant too. And they also tried through bounties to exterminate the wedge-tailed eagle. But where government bounty and trickery didn’t work, local poisoning, trapping and shooting took its toll. The forests were always the refuges of the beleaguered natives. What a sad legacy of prospecting and exploitation. Now look at Taz- mania in 2007. What has changed? What land needs to be acquired? Which inhabitants need to be persecuted into leaving – depopulated? Which native animals are next to fall by the prospectors’ wayside?
Prospecting this island began in 1642 by the Dutch explorer, Abel Tasman.
“This land being the first land we have met with in the South Sea, and not known to any European nation, we have conferred on it the name of Anthony van Diemen, our illustrious master who sent us on this discovery.” – Abel Janzoon Tasman
Patronage and appeasement was part of the game in the 17th century, as it is today. Whereas Tasman saw nothing to recommend the place, colonisation was begun in earnest by the British after 1803 when the French seemed to be taking an unusual liking to Van Diemen’s Land!
Since then the place has been a prospector’s plaything.
The current prospectors are no more greedy or opportunistic than their predecessors; it’s just that the base value in Tasmania is starting to run on empty!
Nowadays the prospecting ‘game’ – in all its forms – is getting difficult.
The place used to thrive on fertile soils, clean abundant water, rich sea bounties and the forest, THE FORESTS! Those were the days when exploitation was not in the lexicon and unsustainable did not exist.
What has changed?
The cold temperate predictable seasons with their bountiful winter-spring rains; the assured autumn breaks; the promise of lush fresh pastures and plentiful harvests. The days when Tasmania first became the granary for the whole British settlement of New South Wales. The days when the freehold leases became the preserve of the landed gentry with their thousands, then millions of sheep. And of course sealers and the whalers – the fur seals and the whales only lasted until the mid-1800s, driven to the brink of extinction in less than 30 years.
Of course the land did need to be depopulated of its indigenes – the Blacks – they had to go, administratively of course! The British colonial administrations of Davey, Sorrel and Arthur turned the necessary blind eye to the settlers’ skirmishings with Trowunna folk. The process of aboriginal genocide was set in train. And of course the food animals the aborigine relied on for food, clothing and shelter were also now declared ‘pests’ that needed to be hunted to the last rough-ground refuges – the Forester kangaroos had to be depopulated. The emus lasted a few decades before being exterminated. Into the prospectors’ pots, Tasmania’s dodos!
After the first peoples of Tasmania met their end variously at the hands of the prospectors and their ‘government’, the only remaining native animal that was seen as a threat to white land prospectors was the thylacine. Bold, shameless charlatanry convinced an intimidated and compliant colonial government in the 1880s to sign its death warrant too. And they also tried through bounties to exterminate the wedge-tailed eagle. But where government bounty and trickery didn’t work, local poisoning, trapping and shooting took its toll. The forests were always the refuges of the beleaguered natives.
What a sad legacy of prospecting and exploitation.
Now look at Taz- mania in 2007. What has changed? What land needs to be acquired? Which inhabitants need to be persecuted into leaving – depopulated? Which native animals are next to fall by the prospectors’ wayside?
Who are the present prospectors? Who is the ‘government’?
And is Taz-mania to become a 21st century version of Easter Island – depleted of all the value that made it so rich for the prospectors? Where will Taz-mania’s hungry prospectors move to next? Go south as the world heats up? Macquarie Island perhaps? No, after we removed the cats, the rabbits took possession of that place and they’re currently eating it to bare soil.
But it’s part of Taz-mania! Only if someone else pays to get rid of the rabbits!
Welcome to crazy Taz-mania!
