On Flinders Island Robinson was determined to civilize and christianize the survivors. His settlement was run like a jail, at a windy site with little fresh water. Children were separated from parents to facilitate the work of civilizing them. The regimented daily schedule included Bible reading, hymn singing, and inspection of beds and dishes for cleanliness and neatness. However, the jail diet caused malnutrition, which combined with illness to make the natives die. Few infants survived more than a few weeks. The government reduced expenditures in the hope that the natives would die out. By 1869 only Truganini, one other woman, and one man remained alive. These last three Tasmanians attracted the interest of scientists, who believed them to be a missing link between humans and apes. Hence when the last man, one William Lanner, died in 1869, competing teams of physicians, led by Dr George Stokell from the Royal Society of Tasmania and Dr W.L. Crowther from the Royal College of Surgeons, alternately dug up and reburied Lanner's body, cutting off parts of it and stealing them back and forth from each other. Dr Crowther cut off the head, Dr Stokell the hands and feet, and someone else the ears and nose, as souvenirs. Dr Stokell made a tobacco pouch out of Lanner's skin.

Before Truganini, the last woman, died in 1876, she was terrified of similar post-mortem mutilation and asked in vain to be buried at sea. As she had feared, the Royal Society dug up her skeleton and put it on public display in the Tasmanian Museum, where it remained until 1947. In that year the Museum finally yielded to complaints of poor taste and transferred Truganini's skeleton to a room where only scientists could view it. That too stimulated complaints of poor taste. Finally, in 1976—the centenary year of Truganini's death—her skeleton was cremated despite the Museum's objections, and her ashes were scattered at sea as she had requested.

While the Tasmanians were few in number, their extermination was disproportionately influential in Australian history, because Tasmania was the first Australian colony to solve its native problem and achieved the most nearly final solution. It had done so by apparently succeeding in getting rid of all its natives. (Actually, some children of Tasmanian women by white sealers survived, and their descendants today constitute an embarrassment to the Tasmanian government, which has not figured out what to do about them.) Many whites on the Australian mainland envied the thoroughness of the Tasmanian solution and wanted to imitate it, but they also learned a lesson from it. The extermination of the Tasmanians had been carried out in settled areas in full view of the urban press, and had attracted some negative comment. The extermination of the much more numerous mainland Aborigines was instead effected at or beyond the frontier, far from urban centres.

The mainland governments' instrument of this policy, modelled on the Tasmanian government's roving parties, was a branch of mounted police termed Native Police, who used search-and-destroy tactics to kill or drive out Aborigines. A typical strategy was to surround a camp at night, and to shoot the inhabitants in an attack at dawn. White settlers also made widespread use of poisoned food to kill Aborigines. Another common practice was round-ups in which captured Aborigines were kept chained together at the neck while being marched to jail and held there. The British novelist Anthony Trollope expressed the prevailing nineteenth-century British attitude towards Aborigines when he wrote, 'Of the Australian black man we may certainly say that he has to go. That he should perish without unnecessary suffering should be the aim of all who are concerned in the matter.

These tactics continued in Australia long into the Twentieth Century. In an incident at Alice Springs in 1928, police massacred thirty-one Aborigines. The Australian Parliament refused to accept a report on the massacre, and two Aboriginal survivors (rather than the police) were put on trial for murder. Neck chains were still in use and defended as humane in 1958, when the Commissioner of Police for the state of Western Australia explained to the Melbourne Herald that Aboriginal prisoners preferred being chained.

The mainland Aborigines were too numerous to exterminate completely in the manner of the Tasmanians. However, from the arrival of British colonists in 1788 until the 1921 census, the Aboriginal population declined from about 300,000 to 60,000.

Today, the attitudes of white Australians towards their murderous history vary widely. While government policy and many whites' private views have become increasingly sympathetic to the Aborigines, other whites deny responsibility for genocide. For instance, in 1982 one of Australia's leading news magazines, The Bulletin, published a letter by a lady named Patricia Cobern, who denied indignantly that white settlers had exterminated the Tasmanians. In fact, wrote Ms Cobern, the settlers were peace-loving and of high moral character, while Tasmanians were treacherous, murderous, war-like, filthy, gluttonous, vermin-infested, and disfigured by syphilis. Moreover, they took poor care of their infants, never bathed, and had repulsive marriage customs. They died out because of all those poor health practices, plus a death wish and lack of religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence that, after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, not vice versa. Besides, the settlers only armed themselves in self-defence, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time. To place these cases of the Tasmanians and the Australian Aborigines in perspective, consider the three maps on pages 256-8, depicting for three different time periods some mass killings that have been labelled as genocide. These maps beg a question for which there is no simple answer: how to define genocide. Etymologically, it means 'group killing': the Greek rootgenos, meaning race, and the Latin root -cide, meaning killing (as in suicide, infanticide). The victims must be selected because they belong to a group, whether or not each victim as an individual has done something to provoke killing. As for the defining group characteristic, it may be racial (white Australians killing black Tasmanians), national (Russians killing fellow white Slavs, the Polish officers at Katyn in 1940), ethnic (the Hutu and Tutsi, two black African groups, killing each other in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1960s and 1970s), religious (Moslems and Christians killing each other in Lebanon in recent decades), or political (the Khmer Rouge killing their fellow Cambodians from 1975 to 1979).

While collective killing is the essence of genocide, one can argue over how narrow a definition to adopt. The word 'genocide' is often used so broadly that it loses meaning and we become tired of hearing it. Even if it is to be restricted to large-scale cases of collective killing, ambiguities remain. A sample of the ambiguities could run as follows.

How many deaths are needed for a killing to count as genocide rather than were murder? This is a totally arbitrary question. Australians killed all 5,000 iasmanians, and American settlers killed the last twenty Susquehanna Indians in 1763. Does the small number of available victims disqualify these killings as genocidal, despite the completeness of extermination?