The last full-blood Aborigine a woman called Trucanini known as the Last Tasmanian died a

The last full-blood Aborigine, a woman called Trucanini, known as the Last Tasmanian, died a human wreck in Hobart in 1876. He ordered soldiers, settlers and convicts to form a chain across Tasmania and drive all Aborigines in a pincer movement toward a "Black Line" at Eaglehawk Neck, whence they were to be dumped on an offshore island. The exercise failed.The killings, in any case, had taken their toll. Hence flogging was a daily event..."For their part, the Aborigines had an even worse time. Last Sunday's massacre was not Tasmania's first, by a long shot.

That was recorded in 1804, when soldiers opened fire on a party of 300 Aboriginal men, women and children. Thereafter, random shootings and torture of Aborigines were commonplace. Some white settlers killed blacks for sport, hunting them down from horses like kangaroos or Tasmanian devils - a species which, like the Aborigines themselves, eventually became extinct on the island.George Arthur did not approve of such uncontrolled murders His solution to the "black problem" was more clinical. Even today, allowing for the prettiness of the site's restoration, it is hard to reconcile the idyllic scene with the violence that went on there. Convicts were flogged and clamped in irons for the most trivial transgressions. Those who tried to escape out over the narrow isthmus called Eaglehawk Neck, were set upon by slavering hounds kept for that purpose. Port Arthur acquired the name, Hell's Gates.Historian Robert Hughes offers a vivid account of the lot of Tasmania's convicts in his book The Fatal Shore: "Half-starved, chilled to the bone, forced to labour 12 hours a day in winter and 16 in summer, sleeping on a wet rock under the driving rain squalls of the Southern Ocean, aching with rheumatism and stinking from dysentery, afflicted by saltwater boils and scurvy, some convicts nevertheless remained defiant.

It took over the roles of two earlier prisons, at Macquarie Harbour and Maria Island.The 12,700 convicts who landed at Port Arthur over its 47 years must have wondered if they were really coming to a prison. It faces a sheltered inlet surrounded by attractive woodland. Both groups were to be tamed by authority.Port Arthur, the prison that bears his name, opened in 1830 as a place for second offenders - those convicted of crimes since landing in Australia - and for newly arrived convicts from England. Convicts were sent there long after transportation to New South Wales ceased, and by the 1850s, the island was bulging with miscreants. Its policy had been set by Sir George Arthur, who ruled Tasmania with cold ruthlessness as lieutenant-governor for 12 years from 1824. Arthur compared his prisoners to unbroken horses and described the Aborigines as "troublesome assailants".