Genocide in Tasmania and Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to elucidate how the process of the colonisation of Tasmania in the nineteenth century led to a gradual disintegration of its native inhabitants, the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and ended up with an alleged extinction of an entire race. The paper describes conditions on the Tasmanian frontier, and moments of fierce violence that eventually led to such an outcome, and places it in the context of the violence committed by the settlers in the whole of Australia, showing that there existed a pattern. What is elaborated further is how the violence in Tasmania came to be represented in historiography, from the discourses that saw Tasmania as the site of the extinction of a weaker race to the notion of Tasmania as a site of genocide committed by the British Empire. Fierce debates, especially in the last 40 years, point to the issues in defining Tasmania as a site of genocide, and whether such a definition can be applied in this case. It explains why Tasmania can be seen as a site of genocide, even though it does not conform entirely to the definition of genocide provided by the UN Convention on Genocide. The paper further provides an analysis of Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party, novel that deals with a particularly violent moment from Tasmania’s history. The analysis of the novel shows how the events described in the novel can be seen as a part of a bigger process – of the ongoing process of genocide