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The Black War was the period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Australians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832. The conflict, fought largely as a guerrilla war by both sides, claimed the lives of more than 200 European colonists and between 600 and 900 Aboriginal people, all but annihilating the island's indigenous population. The near-destruction of the Aboriginal Tasmanians, and the frequent incidence of mass killings, has sparked debate among historians over whether the Black War should be defined as an act of genocide. The escalation of violence in the late 1820s prompted Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur to declare martial law—effectively providing legal immunity for killing Aboriginal people—and in late 1830 to order a massive six-week military offensive known as the Black Line, in which 2200 civilians and soldiers formed a series of moving cordons stretching hundreds of kilometres across the island in order to drive Aboriginal people from the colony's settled districts to the Tasman Peninsula in the southeast, where it was intended they would remain permanently confined. The Black War was prompted by the rapid spread of British settlers and agricultural livestock throughout areas of Tasmania that had been traditional Aboriginal hunting grounds. Historian Nicholas Clements has described the Aboriginal violence as a resistance movement—the use of force against an invading or occupying enemy. He said the Aboriginal attacks were motivated by revenge for European atrocities and the widespread kidnapping, rape and murder of Aboriginal women and girls by convicts, settlers and soldiers, but particularly from the late 1820s the Aboriginal people were also driven by hunger to plunder settlers' homes for food as their hunting grounds shrank, native game disappeared and the dangers of hunting on open ground grew. European violence, meanwhile, was motivated by mounting terror of Aboriginal attacks and a conviction that extermination of the Aboriginal population was the only means by which peace could be secured. Clements noted: "As black violence grew in intensity, so too did the frequency of revenge attacks and pre-emptive strikes by frontiersmen." Attacks were launched by groups of Aboriginal people almost always in daylight with a variety of weapons including spears, rocks and waddies used to kill and maim settlers and shepherds, as well as their livestock, while homes, haystacks and crops were often set alight. European attacks, in contrast, were mainly launched at night or in the early hours of dawn by pursuit parties or roving parties of civilians or soldiers who aimed to strike as their quarry slept in bush camps. Women and children were commonly casualties on both sides. From 1830 Arthur offered rewards for the capture of Aboriginal people, but bounties were also paid when Aboriginal people were killed. From 1829 efforts were made with the aid of preacher George Augustus Robinson to launch a "friendly mission" to persuade Aboriginal people to surrender and be removed to an island sanctuary; from November 1830 to December 1831 several groups accepted his offer and 46 were initially placed on Flinders Island, from which escape was deemed to be impossible. Although conflict between Aboriginal people and settlers almost completely ceased from January 1832, another 148 Aboriginal people were captured in the island's northwest over the next four years as a "clean up" and forcibly removed to Hunter Island and then Flinders Island. The terms "Black War" and "Black Line" were coined by journalist Henry Melville in 1835,〔Henry Melville, ''The History of Van Diemen's Land From the Year 1824 to 1835'', p. 89, 90〕 but historian Lyndall Ryan has argued that it should be known as the Tasmanian War. She has also called for the erection of a public memorial to the fallen from both sides of the war. ==Early conflict== Although sealers had begun commercial operations on Van Diemen's Land in late 1798, the first significant European presence on the island came five years later, with the establishment in September 1803 of a small military outpost at Risdon on the Derwent River near present-day Hobart. Several bloody encounters with local Aboriginal clans took place over the next five months, with shots fired and an Aboriginal boy seized. David Collins arrived as the colony's first lieutenant governor in February 1804 with instructions from London that any acts of violence against the Aboriginal people by Europeans were to be punished, but failed to publish those instructions, leaving no legal framework on how to deal with any violent conflict. On 3 May 1804, alarmed soldiers from Risdon fired grapeshot from a carronade on a group of about 100 Aboriginal people after an encounter at a farm, while settlers and convicts fired rifles, pistols and muskets in support. Magistrate Robert Knopwood told a subsequent inquiry into the so-called Risdon massacre that five or six Aboriginal people had been killed, but other witnesses claimed as many as 50 men, women and children had died, with 30 bodies later burned or buried to extinguish the odour as they decomposed. A wave of violence erupted during a drought in 1806–7 as tribes in both the north and south of the island killed or wounded several Europeans in conflicts sparked by the competition for game, while explorer and naval officer John Oxley referred in an 1810 report to the "many atrocious cruelties" inflicted on Aboriginal people by convict bushrangers in the north, which in turn led to black attacks on solitary white hunters. The arrival of 600 colonists from Norfolk Island between 1807 and 1813 increased tensions as they established farms along the River Derwent and east and west of Launceston, occupying 10 percent of Van Diemen's Land. By 1814 12,700ha of land was under cultivation, with 5000 cattle and 38,000 sheep. The Norfolk Islanders used violence to stake their claim on the land, attacking Aboriginal camps at night, slaughtering parents and abducting the orphaned children as their servants. The attacks prompted retaliatory raids on settlers' cattle herds in the southeast. Between 1817 and 1824 the colonial population rose from 2000 to 12,600 and in 1823 alone more than 1000 land grants totalling 175,704ha were made to new settlers; by that year Van Diemen's Land's sheep population had reached 200,000 and the so-called Settled Districts accounted for 30 per cent of the island's total land area. The rapid colonisation transformed traditional kangaroo hunting grounds into farms with grazing livestock as well as fences, hedges and stone walls, while police and military patrols were increased to control the convict farm labourers. Over the first two decades of settlement Aboriginal people launched at least 57 attacks on white settlers, punctuating a general calm, but by 1820 the violence was becoming markedly more frequent, with one Russian explorer reporting that year that "the natives of Tasmania live in a state of perpetual hostility against the Europeans". The number of black attacks rose sharply from the mid-1820s, but there was also a corresponding rise in violence initiated by colonists. Clements says the main reasons for settler attacks on Aboriginal people were revenge, killing for sport, sexual desire for women and children and suppression of the native threat. Van Diemen's Land had an enormous gender imbalance, with male colonists outnumbering females six to one in 1822 and the ratio as high as 16 to one among the convict population. Clements has suggested the "voracious appetite" for native women was the most important trigger for the Black War. He wrote: "Sex continued to be a central motivation for attacking natives until around 1828, by which time killing the enemy had taken priority over raping them." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Black War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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