Indigenous Australians
British colonisation of Australia began with the arrival of the First Fleet in Botany Bay, New South Wales, in 1788. Settlements were subsequently established in Tasmania (1803), Victoria (1803), Queensland (1824), the Northern Territory (1824), Western Australia (1826), and South Australia (1836). Australia was the exception to British imperial colonization practices, in that no treaty was drawn up setting out terms of agreement between the settlers and native proprietors, as was the case in North America, and New Zealand. Many of the men on the First Fleet had had military experience among Indian tribes in North America, and tended to attribute to the aborigines alien and misleading systems or concepts like chieftainship and tribe with which they had become acquainted in the northern hemisphere.
British colonisation of Tasmania
It has been claimed by authors such as Jeremy Paxman and Niall Ferguson, that the British colonisation of Tasmania led to the genocide of the native aborigines of Tasmania. Although distantly related, they had been separate from the Australian Aborigines for around 8,000 years. It is unknown how many Aborigines were living on the island when the Dutch arrived in 1642 nor when James Cook landed in 1777 but when the British began their colonisation in 1803, there were perhaps seven to eight thousand left, many of whom were already dying from diseases thought to have been contracted from European sailors, explorers and seal hunters. In addition many had been left infertile by venereal disease but the introduction of technologically advanced, brutal convicts and less than sympathetic settlers contributed to their misery. Almost all of the 7000 native people were killed during a period of colonisation lasting around 27 years. By the end of Britain's colonisation in 1830, at least two families of Aborigines were living on the Island. By 1835 only one aboriginal family remained on the island. They were living in a white sealing village near the Bass Strait, hiding from British authorities.