Aboriginal Tasmanians

Rare card · No. 73071

Aboriginal Tasmanians (palawa kani: Palawa, Pakana) are the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, a 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...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Benjamin Duterrau (1768–1851), Public domain