BOOK REVIEW: Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples
By Henry De Young

On March 3rd, 1869, William Lanney died at 34 in a public house in Hobart, capital city of the British Colony of Tasmania. His death was noteworthy for one reason only: Lanney had been the last surviving pure bred male representative of the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. His passing signified the certain extinction of a people.

In 1660 the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman landed on the island and named it Van Diemen's Land. In the same year that the unfortunate Lanney died, its name was officially changed to Tasmania. For the original inhabitants, things started going downhill fast, when in 1803 Philip King, Lieutenant Governor of New South Wales, decided he needed a penal colony, to remove his worst miscreants from the wider convict society in Sydney Cove.

The indigenous people of Tasmania, estimated at 4,000 persons at the beginning of European settlement, had lived free of outside contact for millennia, cut off even from the rest of Australia by the 200-mile-wide Bass Strait. Within 3 generations they no longer existed.

Mark Cocker tells in Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe's Conquest of Indigenous Peoples the story of this extinction of a people. Disease, disruption of traditional food sources, casual atrocities and the "Black War" of 1825 reduced the population to 700. This bereft remnant was hustled off to one of the Bass Strait islands, Flinders Island, which proved to be a death trap. The British authorities insisted that the people, who previously were accustomed to going naked, wear European style clothing. The Aborigines got soaking wet in the course of their outdoor lifestyle and, neglecting to remove the clothing, got pulmonary infections, colds and influenza. Truganni, "The Last Tasmanian," as she came to be known, died in 1876.

The book recounts in unsparing detail the fraught relationship between European and tribal societies, including the conquest of Mexico, the dispossession of the Apache, and the Germans in South West Africa.

In recounting the indigenous resistance to European encroachment, Cocker avoid the one dimensional image of aboriginals as innocent victims. The exploits of Nana (chief of the Chirichua Apache) and Tecumseh (leader of the Shawnee), who died at the Battle of the Thames near Chatham, Ontario in the battle of 1812, illustrated the tribal warriors' willingness to use European weapons. Tribal peoples were capable of methods just as brutal as Europeans.

In the final chapter Cocker sets out what he describes as a defence of Europe's relationship with tribal societies and a caution against overemphasizing exclusive European culpability.

The experiences of indigenous people of Canada are mentioned only peripherally in the book. In Canada, the story is less about outright conquests than it is about treaties made, broken, and remade. Canada too has a legacy of a broken relationship with its original inhabitants that justice demands be resolved.

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