A First Look At Where We Are

The older you are, the more likely it is that you would have grown up in an Australia where we were educated within the paradigm of the Empire being our heritage, of King/Queen & Country being an inviolable idea and that between them, Able Tasman & James Cook ‘discovered’ Australia or the Great South Land etc. 

Aboriginal ‘people’, well in Tasmania and Launceston they were seen as extinct, uncivilised, degenerating, of no real account and dying out anyway for those who saw themselves as First Tasmanians. They just were not real.

We, well a lot of us, now know better than to be trotting out this Middle Class subservient, racist and colonial  bull dust!

Colonisation is always an act of violence. The British colonisation of Tasmania or lutruwita was an extreme act of violence as so carefully recorded by the colonial oppressors and in today's terms it would be considered an act of genocide.

Many new Launcestonians do not know the history of their new place in the world. Many visitors having been here can see and will tell you about the vestiges of that colonisation everywhere....what's the name of that museum again? 

Oh and isn't the River Tamar in Cornwall? Is this not violence, to strip a place of its name and to impose the colonial overlords name on it.

No they weren't thinking of Terra nullius they were thinking of theft, murder, slavery, conquest and setting themselves up for a better life than they ever had before in this new paradise. 

Today they would be considered "economic migrants" though clearly many of the convicts, especially those who escaped, could be considered "refugees" and "asylum seekers". And they still keep coming!

A BETTER LAUNCESTON tells ALL its stories ALL the time. Air brushing the place's histories just doesn't work any more.