The UN has corrected false information that Tasmanian Aboriginal people are ‘extinct’ on its website.
A UN agency has removed a historically inaccurate document from its website stating that Tasmanian Aboriginal people are ‘extinct.’
The document also stated that thylacines, or Tasmanian tigers, may still exist.
This information was part of a key document in the nomination process for the declaration of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in 1982.
The document highlighted the significant environmental and cultural values of the region.
“The nominated site includes three national parks … which together comprise one of the world’s last remaining temperate pristine wildernesses,” it stated.
But it also included a myth that the First Nations people of Tasmania ‘no longer exist’ while also simultaneously saying the thylacine could still be alive.
The document stated: “with distinctive landforms, outstanding examples of cool temperate rainforests, important aboriginal sites (the Tasmanians are now an extinct race of humans), and many endangered species of plants and animals (including, perhaps, the thylacine or Tasmanian Wolf), the area is unique and special at a world scale.”
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has confirmed that it has removed this claim from the document.
“As soon as the World Heritage Centre was informed of this issue … the document was removed from the World Heritage website pending revision by IUCN, the UNESCO advisory body that produced the document in 1982,” a UNESCO spokesperson said.
The Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania (ALCT) said that the document was an example of ‘racist rhetoric’ that continues to be perpetuated.
ALCT manager Rebecca Digney said, “it’s dehumanising.”
“Denying somebody’s existence is probably the cruellest thing you can do to a class of people, particularly a class of people who are the survivors of genocide.”
Ms Digney also said that First Nations people of Tasmania have been trying to fight this myth of extinction since the death of Truganini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, in 1876.
Ms Digney welcomed the UN’s decision to correct this mistake.
“The quickest way to undermine Aboriginal people, particularly in Tasmania, is to tell them that they don’t exist,” Ms Digney said.
“It silences their voices on a political and social level. It denies them their claims on any sort of legal or economic level.”
