The smallest state in Hughes’s Australia, the island of Tasmania, is the only place on Earth where the entire native population was dead soon after the first white people arrived, and whose genes are no longer to be found even in crossbreeds, since the settlers found Tasmanians so loathsome that they would not have sex with them. It is not certain that the Tasmanians had even domesticated fire. At the University of Chicago so long ago, one professor suggested to me that the Tasmanians found life so intolerable after the white people came that they stopped having sex with each other.
