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James Boyce | Canine Revolution: The Social and Environmental Impact of the Introduction of the Dog to Tasmania | Environmental History, 11.1 | The History Cooperative
11.1  
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January, 2006
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canine revolution: the social and ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF THE INTRODUCTION OF THE DOG TO TASMANIA

JAMES BOYCE

 

ABSTRACT

Until 1803, the island of Tasmania was one of the rare places of human habitation where the dog was unknown. First introduced when British colonists established a penal settlement there, the dog not only completely transformed Aboriginal society but also greatly affected the emerging convict culture. The dog proved more important than guns for kangaroo hunting, allowing the Aboriginals (who soon possessed their own domesticates) to compete successfully with the Europeans in the hunting market. The hunting culture, in turn, greatly slowed down the process of agriculture development, giving rise to a colonial experience that was far different from the typical European pattern.


IN 1803, THE island of Van Diemen's Land, known as Tasmania since 1856, was one of the few places of permanent human habitation where the dog was unknown. Rising sea levels permanently isolated the Tasmanian Aborigines from the Australian mainland around twelve thousand years ago so that Australia's native dog, the dingo, which arrived some time after this, never reached the southern island. Dogs only came to Van Diemen's Land when it was settled by the British as a penal outpost of New South Wales in 1803–1804. Of all the luggage brought by the invading Europeans, none was as significant as their canine companions. For two decades the dog was central to a rapid change in the way of life of both British and Aboriginal people. So productive were hunting dogs that the convict colonizers of Van Diemen's Land abandoned most of the outward "advantages" of the industrial and agricultural revolutions to become semi-nomadic hunter-pastoralists. While intermittent conflict with Aborigines continued, this way of life facilitated two decades of shared land use, mediated by cross-cultural dog exchange. It was not until a few hundred wealthy free settlers were given exclusive private title over the best pasture-lands of Van Diemen's Land during the 1820s that the British invasion became the brutal environmental and human conquest that is synonymous with Tasmanian history. 1
   

PERSPECTIVES ON TASMANIAN COLONIZATION

 
THE LONG ISOLATION of Tasmania before 1803 has been the subject of much interest to biologists, anthropologists, and historians. Jared Diamond has argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that Tasmania illustrates "in extreme form a conclusion of broad potential significance for world history.... A population of 4,000 was able to survive for 10,000 years, but with significant cultural losses and significant failures to invent, leaving it with a uniquely simplified material culture." The comparative advantages conferred by domestic animals and farming are central to Diamond's thesis, arguing (more recently) that "because domestication ultimately yields agents of conquest (for example, guns, germs, and steel).... The peoples who through biographic luck first acquired domesticates acquired enormous advantages over other peoples and expanded."1 The Tasmanian Aborigines, almost uniquely on earth, had no domestic animals. Nor did they farm in the European sense.2 To the extent that, as Alfred Crosby has argued, "the success of European imperialism has a biological, an ecological, component," the British invasion of Van Diemen's Land is, therefore, a template of European expansion in the New World.3 2
      This conclusion is shared by influential environmental histories of Australia. Most have argued that the ecological tools of conquest were applied with particular brutality and explicit intent in Australia, not least in Van Diemen's Land, because, to Europeans, the environment was incomprehensibly foreign. The standard assumption is that early settlers responded to environmental difference with vigorous attempts to tame and manage the land through the ruthless application of technology and the importation of the plants and animals of Britain.4 . . .
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