The colonial government in Tasmania offered a bounty of £5 for each Aboriginal adult and £2 for each Aboriginal child , initially for live capture and later extended to cover the dead as well.

Quick Scoop: What Was The Bounty?

During the violent frontier period known as the Black War in Tasmania (then Van Diemen’s Land), the British colonial administration used cash bounties to encourage settlers and soldiers to hunt down Aboriginal people.

  • Standard bounty: £5 for every Aboriginal adult captured.
  • Child bounty: £2 for every Aboriginal child captured.
  • These payments, which began as rewards for live captives , were later extended to also cover dead Aboriginal people.
  • The policy helped turn “black-catching” into a brutal, quasi-commercial activity during the 1820s–1830s.

A concrete illustration: in 1830, Governor Arthur’s administration publicly offered £5 per adult and £2 per child brought to Hobart, which directly incentivised organized hunting parties and forced removals to island settlements like Wybalenna on Flinders Island.

How And Why These Bounties Were Used

The bounties didn’t appear in a vacuum; they were part of a wider campaign to dispossess and control Aboriginal Tasmanians.

  • Martial law and “shoot on sight”: By the late 1820s, proclamations and martial law allowed settlers and troops to treat Aboriginal people as enemies, with killings often going unpunished.
  • From “capture” to removal: Government agents like George Augustus Robinson used the bounty system to round up people, who were then transported to islands such as Gun Carriage Island and later Wybalenna, where many died from disease, exposure, and trauma.
  • Economic incentive: The bounty effectively put a price on Aboriginal bodies, making violence not only tolerated but financially rewarded.

One contemporary report described how settlers in the late 1820s spoke of Aboriginal people being shot “with as little remorse as so many crows,” underlining how the bounty system fed into a wider culture of dehumanisation and frontier killing.

Forum-Style Take: Why This Is Still Discussed

“Putting a price on people’s heads – £5 for an adult, £2 for a child – wasn’t just a cold policy detail. It turned survival into a colonial marketplace.”

In recent years, historians, human rights reports, and public discussions have increasingly framed these bounties as part of a genocidal process in Tasmania.

  • Many scholars argue that the combination of dispossession, introduced disease, martial law, bounties, and forced removals amounted to genocide against Aboriginal Tasmanians.
  • Museums and research projects now link the bounty system on Aboriginal people to broader colonial practices, including bounties on animals like the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), as part of a mentality of eradication.
  • Contemporary Aboriginal communities and advocacy groups highlight these bounties as a core example of how law and economics were used to enable extreme violence.

This history continues to surface in trending discussions around colonial violence, reparations, and the recognition of genocide in Australia, especially when states debate formal apologies or compensation schemes.

Key Facts In A Nutshell

  • Official bounty for Aboriginal people in Tasmania: £5 per adult, £2 per child.
  • Origin: Introduced by the colonial government in the late 1820s and used through the 1830s, particularly during the Black War.
  • Purpose: To incentivise colonists and armed parties to capture (and later kill) Aboriginal people and clear them from “settled districts.”
  • Legacy: Widely cited today as evidence of state-sanctioned violence and a key element in arguments that Aboriginal Tasmanians were victims of genocide.

TL;DR: The bounty on Aboriginal people in Tasmania during the Black War era was £5 for each adult and £2 for each child , initially for live captives and later also for the dead, and it played a central role in enabling large-scale, state-backed violence against Aboriginal Tasmanians.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.