(Footnote.  Mr. Threlkeld has detected in it a similarity of idiom to the languages of the South Sea islanders and the peculiarity of a dual number common to all.  See his Australian Grammar, Sydney 1834.)

HABITS OF THOSE OF VAN DIEMEN’S LAND THE SAME.

The natives of Van Diemen’s Land, the only inhabited region south of Australia, are said to have been as dark as the negro race and to have had woolly hair like them.  Little is known of the language and character of the unfortunate Tasmanian aborigines, and this is the more to be regretted considering how useful a better knowledge of either might have been in tracing the progressive extension of the Australasian people.  The prevailing opinion at present is that the natives of Van Diemen’s Land were also much more ferocious than the natives of Australia.  But, brief as the existence of these islanders has been on the page of history, these characteristics are very much at variance with the descriptions we have of the savages seen by the earliest European visitors, and especially by Captain Cook who thus describes those he saw at Adventure Bay in 1777:  “Their colour is a dull black, and not quite so deep as that of the African negroes.  It should seem also that they sometimes heighten their black colour by smoking their bodies, as a mark was left behind on any clean substance, such as white paper, when they handled it.”  Captain Cook then proceeds to describe the hair as being woolly, but all the other particulars of that description are identical with the peculiarities of Australian natives; and Captain King stated, according to the editor of the Northern Voyage of Cook, that “Captain Cook was very unwilling to allow that the hair of the natives seen in Adventure Bay WAS woolly.”  The hair of the natives we saw in the interior and especially of the females had a very frizzled appearance and never grew long; and I should rather consider the hair of the natives of Tasmania as differing in degree only from the frizzled hair of those of Australia.

HABITS AND CUSTOMS OF THE ABORIGINES.

Instead of the ferocious character latterly attributed to the natives of Van Diemen’s Land we find on the contrary that Captain Cook describes them as having “little of that fierce or wild appearance common to people in their situation;” and a historian* draws a comparison, also in their favour, between them and the natives of Botany Bay, of whom THREE stood forward to oppose Captain Cook at his first landing.  The ferocity subsequently displayed by natives of Van Diemen’s Land cannot fairly be attributed to them therefore as characteristic of their race, at least until extirpation stared them in the face and excited them to acts of desperate vengeance against all white intruders.

(Footnote.  The History of New Holland by the Right Honourable William Eden, 1787 page 99.)