Archaeology and Aboriginal protest: the influence of Rhys Jones's Tasmanian work on Australian historiography

In 1977 archaeologist Rhys Jones asked a question that sparked a controversy: if Europeans had never reached Tasmania, had the Aborigines been nonetheless ‘doomed to a slow strangulation of the mind’? Some contemporaries accused Jones of reiterating nineteenth-century ‘Social Darwinism’, a charge Lyndall Ryan has recently renewed as ‘scientific racism’. In contrast, this article argues that Jones, a left-wing Welshman, intended to make a poetic comparison between the possible effects of isolation and a history of genocide. The assumption that genocide had ended in Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction potentially undermined Australia's earliest and most radical emergent indigenous movement. The controversy that followed was pivotal to Australian Aboriginal and academic relations, and has shaped fundamentally how Tasmanian, and Australian, history is written.