ABSTRACT
The Aboriginal or Flinders Island Chronicle, produced between September 1836 and December 1837, must be seen as the first Aboriginal newspaper in the Australian colony, even though it was overseen and controlled by G. A. Robinson, the controversial figure who served as Commandant of the Aboriginal settlement on Flinders Island in the Bass Strait. A small group of Aboriginal people had been transported from Tasmania to this island in 1833 (as others had been sent to various islands near Tasmania earlier under the same official program of the era) after White settlers complained they could not remain there unless the military took steps to bring the Aboriginal inhabitants together and isolate them.
