Little History of Tasmania

The Tasmanian natives' ancestors arrived from the north at least 20,000 years ago. At this time the island lacked its most important feature, it was not an island, but connected with mainland Australia. About 12,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age Tasmania was cut off completely.
At the time of European exploration the number of Aborigines was small, they numbered 6000 at the most. The island was divided between nine tribes who had well defined boundary, though there was much travel going on.
They were nomadic hunter-gatherers who wore no clothes apart from skins, which they sometimes used to drape around their shoulders. Almost certainly they could not make fire and therefore carried a fire stick, which they needed to set fire to the bush to clear the land for hunting the game. Only a few tools were known like pieces of wood and shaped stones, the only weapon was a sharpened spear. They ate plenty of shellfish but no one know why they never touched fish.
Because of the nomadic life that the Tasmanian Aborigines led they did not build houses except for temporary shelters made of bark and branches.

In November 1642 Abel Jans Tasman sighted from his ship the Heemskerk. He had been sent from Java by the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, to explore the ocean south of Australia, which was still called New Holland then. Tasman's superior's name was Anthony van Diemen and Van Diemen's Land is a name that survived to the present day in Irish folk songs. Van Diemen's Land was believed to be an extremity of New Holland itself.
The island was left alone for another 130 years. From 1772 to 1793 various French and British explorers visited Van Diemen's Land, recording most of the information now left about its natives. The permanent settlers who followed later did not draw a more detailed picture as one would expect. They were to busy getting rid of them to study them, let alone understand them.
The explorers described what they found, and the strangeness of the encounter, with a freshness that can never be recovered. Many of them were irritated, yet fascinated by what they saw.

Captain Charles Clerke recorded that

'these people in the most natural action are without the least restraint and have much less idea of decency than a dog, pouring forth their streams whether sitting, walking, or talking without any preparation or guidance or even appearing sensible of what they are doing, not in the least interested whether it trickles down their own thighs or sprinkles the person next to them.'

'Immediately the best understanding prevailed between us. They received with joy the handkerchiefs we offered them; one of the young men gave me a few small shell of the whelk kind, pierced near the middle and strung on a chord....
One of the savages informed us by unmistakable signs that he had seen us asleep the night before; we had slept indeed with the utmost tranquillity, although actually we had been at their mercy throughout the whole night...'

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