potato wrote:I'm sceptical of anything early settlers wrote as they were often writing home about the glorious opportunity of the new country. They tended to talk it up a bit.
There is one instance (Evans published pamphlet - ironically before he came to Tasmania) where colonial speculators 'talked up' the bountiful opportunities in Tasmania - but talked down the Indigenous (and bushranger) presence. The quotes I have mentioned are from diarists - not sources that were contemporaneously published. What would diarists and surveyors have to gain about describing how Aborigines burnt the land?
then i can only conclude, with all due respect, that you have a confirmation bias. You are thinking of reasons why the area could not have been burnt deliberately when the evidence leans towards the systematic and deliberate use of fire in many areas of Tasmania. Evidence which accords with that on Mainland Australia where fire was (and is) used for similar reasons by Indigenous people - an idea that seems less controversial.