History of Tasmania
Tasmania was inhabited by an indigenous population, the Tasmanian Aborigines, and evidence indicates their presence in the territory, later to become an island, at least 35,000 years ago. At the time of the British occupation and colonisation in 1803 the indigenous population was estimated at between 3000 and 10,000. Historian Lyndall Ryan's analysis of population studies led her to conclude that there were about 7000 spread throughout the island's nine nations; Nicholas Clements, citing research by N.J.B. Plomley and Rhys Jones, settled on a figure of 3000 to 4000. The combination of the so-called Black War, internecine conflict and, from the late 1820s, the spread of infectious diseases to which they had no immunity, reduced the population to about 300 by 1833. Almost all of the indigenous population was relocated to Flinders Island by George Augustus Robinson. Until the 1970s, most people thought that the last surviving Tasmanian Aborigine was Trugernanner, who died in 1876. However this "extinction" was a myth, as documented by Lyndall Ryan in 1991.
Colony of Tasmania
The Anglican See of Tasmania was created in 1843, and shortly after Francis Russell Nixon, the first Bishop of Tasmania arrived. Nixon was highly successful in promoting a form of High Anglicanism, and linking his denomination with a patriotic sense of national identity under the banner of 'God, King, and Country'. Not to be outdone, the first Catholic Bishop of Tasmania, Robert Wilson arrived the following year, preaching a form of pious asceticism. An unintended consequence of the Irish potato famine was a huge influx of Irish Catholic settlers in the 1850s, reestablishing Catholicism in the colony. In 1866 St Mary's Catholic Cathedral was opened, but without the originally designed tower.The magnificent St David's Anglican Cathedral, seat of the Bishop of Tasmania, and administrative centre of the Anglican Diocese of Tasmania, was designed by George Frederick Bodley, in high Gothic style and completed in 1868.