‘Isle Of Damned’ Label Rekindled Recent Mass Killing A Reminder Of Tasmania’s Dark History

The massacre of 35 people near the ruins of Australia’s most notorious colonial prison has revived Tasmania’s long-standing reputation as “the Isle of the Damned.”

Martin Bryant, a 28-year-old local man, is accused in Sunday’s mass killing at the Port Arthur historic site. The bloodshed has been called the worst in Australia this century.

But the history of Tasmania, a lush green state off the mainland’s southeastern tip, long has been darkened with disaster.

Named after Abel Tasman, a Dutch navigator who explored the island in 1642, Tasmania became a British penal colony in 1803.

Since then, thousands have perished in disasters both natural and manmade - in forest fires, shipwrecks, mining tragedies and bridge collapses.

These catastrophes do not include the genocide of the original Tasmanians, some 7,000 aborigines.

By 1817, aborigines were being killed in such great numbers that a proclamation was issued to protect them. But the slaughter continued.

Governor George Arthur’s declaration of martial law in 1828 meant that aborigines could be “shot on sight without the murderers risking any legal punishment,” according to Lloyd Robson’s “A History of Tasmania.”

Aborigines were “shot like kangaroos and poisoned like dogs, ravaged by European diseases and addictions, hunted by laymen and pestered by missionaries,” Robert Huges wrote in his epic, “The Fatal Shore.”

In the “Black War” of 1830, the aborigines struck back at the white settlers in some 222 attacks.

“These were not troublesome savages, making a nuisance of themselves as the Europeans tried to peacefully settle the island,” writes historian Henry Reynolds in “Fate of a Free People.”

“They were the first Australian patriots, defending their land against invasion - and giving as good as they got.”

The last Tasmanian, a woman known as Truganini, died in 1876.

The diseases that ravaged the native people also took a toll on white settlers. A flu epidemic in 1919 killed 171 in a seven-week period; a 1937 outbreak of polio killed 81.

Hundreds of Tasmanians have lost their lives in mining disasters. The worst was in 1912 when fire raced through the Mount Lyell pump house in the state’s west, killing 42 men.

Shipwrecks alone have killed countless hundreds: Some 762 wrecks lie in Tasmanian waters, including 57 that went down with more than 800 people near King Island, off Tasmania’s north coast.

In the worst single incident, 414 people drowned when an English passenger ship sank in 1845.