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The history of Tasmania begins at the end of the Last Glacial Period (approximately 12,000 years ago) when it is believed that the island was joined to the Australian mainland. Little is known of the human history of the island until the British colonisation of Tasmania in the 19th century.
First arriving in Tasmania (then a peninsula of Australia) around 40,000 years ago, [citation needed] the ancestors of the Aboriginal Tasmanians were cut off from the Australian mainland by rising sea levels c. 6000 BC. They were entirely isolated from the outside world for 8,000 years until European contact.
Van Diemen's Land was the colonial name of the island of Tasmania used by the British during the European exploration and colonisation of Australia in the 19th century. The island, inhabited by Aborigines, was first encountered by the Dutch ship captained by Abel Tasman in 1642, working under the sponsorship of Anthony van Diemen, the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies.
The modern history of the Australian city of Hobart (formerly 'Hobart Town', or 'Hobarton') in Tasmania dates to its foundation as a British colony in 1804. Prior to British settlement, the area had been occupied definitively by the semi-nomadic Mouheneener tribe, a sub-group of the Nuenonne, or South-East tribe. [1]
It is unclear what happened to Robert Hobart May as documented records of him after 1806 appear to be absent. However, in 1829 a Tasmanian Aboriginal man simply named "Robert", who is described as being raised and baptised as a child by the colonists, became part of George Augustus Robinson's "friendly mission" to acquiesce, round-up and exile the surviving Indigenous Tasmanians.
Mathinna (c.1835 – 1 September 1852) was an Aboriginal Tasmanian girl, who was kidnapped, adopted and later abandoned by the Governor of Van Diemen's Land, Sir John Franklin and his wife Lady Jane Franklin.
Norfolk Island was first settled by Polynesians in the 13th or 14th century. In 1788 the British colonised the island, by that time the Polynesians had been gone for hundreds of years. Jervis Bay Territory is located on the Australian mainland and has two small villages. Prior to British settlement, the area was inhabited by Yuin aboriginal people.
"There were a great many of the Natives slaughtered and wounded", according to the Edward White [8] (later to be discredited, as he was not even in Tasmania at the time of the incident), an Irish convict who later spoke before a committee of inquiry nearly 30 years later in 1830, but could not give exact figures. [1]