Palawan

The Palawan are the Palawa, the Aboriginal clans of the island Europeans called Van Diemen's Land and later Tasmania. Rising seas flooded the Bass Strait around 6000 BCE, isolating the island; its peoples lived in territorial family clans and hunted kangaroos, gathered shellfish, traded ochre and stone tools, and built bark shelters.

Abel Tasman sighted the island in 1642, but sustained contact began with sealers in 1798 and a British penal outpost at Risdon Cove in 1803, where soldiers fired on a hunting party the following year. As sheep runs swallowed hunting grounds, resistance flared from 1824 into the Black War; martial law was declared in 1828 and the Black Line sweep of 1830 failed.

George Augustus Robinson's missions, aided by the negotiator Truganini, secured their surrender, and between 1832 and 1835 roughly 220 survivors were removed to Wybalenna on Flinders Island.