In 1830, the Palawa people were in the midst of their guerilla war against the British colonists taking their land in what is now Tasmania. After flaring in the mid-1820s, intensifying violence had claimed hundreds of First Nations and settler lives. In response, the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir George Arthur, commissioned the preacher George Augustus Robinson to seek conciliation.

Guided by Nuenonne woman Truganini and her cleverman husband Woureddy, Robinson travelled southwest across Tasmania to persuade the largely isolated Toogee nation to be relocated to a Christian mission. They were assured they would eventually be allowed to return. The promise was broken. Almost 200 members of the Toogee and other Lutruwita nations were exiled to Flinders Island, where most died.

The consequences of Robinson’s empty promise have lingered ever since, from the erosion of Palawa culture to the abrupt end to millennia of cultural burning.

In our time, Tasmania’s west is thought of as wilderness – wild and lightly populated. Dry lightning storms triggered massive fires in 2013, 2016, 2019 and 2025, burning areas unused to fire.

To find out whether these fires were been made worse by the end of Indigenous cultural burning, we turned to Robinson’s detailed journals. In our new research, we show Robinson made very rapid progress across treeless areas. Many of these are now dense scrub. This is the first time this scrubby thickening........

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