Conflict between colonists and Aboriginal Tasmanians escalated from about 1824 as pastoral settlement spread across the island's midlands. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur declared martial law in 1828, which, as the National Museum of Australia records, designated Aboriginal Tasmanians open enemies of the state without legal protection. In October 1830 more than 2,200 settlers, soldiers, police and convicts - roughly a tenth of the colony's European population - formed the 'Black Line', a cordon dragged across the settled districts intended to drive the remaining Aboriginal people onto the Tasman Peninsula; it captured two people and killed two. Removal was then achieved by negotiation through George Augustus Robinson, and about 200 survivors were taken to Wybalenna on Flinders Island, where the National Museum records that most died within a few years: forty remained by 1847, when the settlement was closed and the remnant moved to Oyster Cove, and by 1876 all but one had died. Aboriginal Tasmanian descent communities survive today through the Bass Strait islands.
British colonists and the colonial government of Van Diemen's Land fought and then removed the Aboriginal population of Tasmania to an island settlement
Estimates of the pre-invasion Aboriginal Tasmanian population range from about 3,000 to 7,000, with Lyndall Ryan's figure of roughly 5,000-7,000 the most widely used; by the time the Black War began in 1824 perhaps 1,000 remained, and 220 or fewer were removed to Wybalenna on Flinders Island in the 1830s.
Estimates of Aboriginal Tasmanians killed in the Black War itself generally fall between six hundred and a thousand, against roughly two hundred colonists killed, and rest on colonial newspapers, government correspondence and depositions rather than on records of the dead. The Black Line operation of 1830, despite mobilising a tenth of the colony's settler population, killed only two people. The far larger element in the population collapse - from perhaps 15,000 before colonisation to fewer than 2,000 by 1818, as the National Museum of Australia records - was introduced disease, the loss of land and food resources, the abduction of women by sealers and the resulting failure of reproduction, and this is not captured in any killing figure. Mortality at Wybalenna itself, where most of the 200 removed died within a few years, was from respiratory disease and despair in confinement.
The National Museum of Australia documents the declaration of martial law removing legal protection from Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Black Line operation, and the confinement of survivors at Wybalenna where most died; the abduction of Aboriginal women and children by sealers and settlers is recorded in colonial depositions and in the Colonial Frontier Massacres project's sources.
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