Toogee

The Toogee were the Aboriginal nation of Tasmania's rugged west coast, their country running from Macquarie Harbour, which they called Parralaongatek, south to Port Davey. They were skilled knappers who traded tools of Darwin Glass, natural glass from a meteorite crater; Kutikina Cave on the Franklin River holds evidence of ice-age occupation going back some twenty thousand years.

Their rainforest coast long shielded them from the colonial settlements in the east, until the sealer and mariner James Kelly rowed a whaleboat from Hobart into Macquarie Harbour in 1815.

A penal station was opened on Sarah Island inside the harbour in 1822, its convict gangs cutting the Huon pine and its gaol later holding Aboriginal prisoners taken during the Black War, bringing the Toogee bands directly under the colony's power before the general removals of the 1830s emptied their country.