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emoval of the captured aboriginals from Flinders Island back to the Tasmanian mainland nor
of the conditions and experiences faced once moved to the “settlement” (Dunlop & Pike,
1963, p. 75).
The main argument to justify the creation of this closed ‘settlement’ for the Tasmanian
Indigenous population is attributed to their being “primitive” (Dunlop & Pike, 1963, p. 75).
Unlike the Indigenous population on the Australian mainland, it is not uncommon for the
Tasmanian Aboriginals to be described as “primitive”, and some textbooks, including
Australia: Colony to nation (Dunlop & Pike, 1963, p. 5) and Australia and the near north
(Connole, 1962, p. 1) discuss this quite explicitly, by stating that the Tasmanian aboriginals
were not as ‘developed’ as those on the mainland, as seen in Source 6.25 and 6.26, for
example.
Source 6.25. “Old Stone Age Tasmanians” extract from Australia: Colony to nation
(Dunlop & Pike, 1963, p. 5).
Source 6.26. Tasmanian aboriginals extract from Australia and the near north
(Connole, 1962, p. 1).
6.6.2 Discourses of tokenistic representations.
Australia and the near north (Connole, 1962) pays scant attention and detail to what the
textbook terms “the spectacular Black War” (Connole, 1962, p. 27), this textbook does not do
justice to this significant event in early Australian history, and could be seen as including
only a tokenistic representation of Indigenous Australians. The content of this genocide of
Tasmania’s aboriginals is disjointed and provides little context and even less information
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