The main commandant of Wybalenna was George Augustus Robinson who played a principal role in the system of capturing and sending Palawa to the facility.

Arthur already had a similar policy in place with armed "roving parties" commanded by people such as Gilbert Robertson and John Batman, who would search for and capture or kill Palawa with the aid of Aboriginal guides.

However, after a cash bounty of £5 for every Aboriginal adult and £2 for every child captured and brought to Hobart was announced by Arthur, Robinson became more efficient at apprehending Palawa.

[1][4] Robinson arrived at Swan Island in November 1830 where he learnt that the Black Line operation was a failure, and that the Tasman Peninsula was no longer being considered as a site for incarceration.

Robinson, therefore, explored the other Bass Strait islands in the area for a more permanent site, requisitioning female Palawa who had been abducted by sealers along the way.

[1][4] Despite the small number of captured Palawa, Arthur was very pleased with Robinson's efforts and rewarded him with a pay rise, a £100 bonus and a personal land grant.

In June, Robinson left these problems to Sergeant Alexander Wight and started on his new expedition to capture the remaining Aboriginal people in the settled areas of mainland Tasmania.

After some violence which saw a Palawa man being shot dead by a sealer, Wight panicked and again relocated the settlement to nearby Green Island for security reasons.

He moved the establishment back to The Lagoons and installed Ensign William James Darling with a contingent of eight soldiers of the 63rd Regiment to take charge and maintain order.

A month later, Robinson again left after receiving a £1,000 offer from the colonial government to track down and remove all the remaining Palawa from Van Diemen's Land, most of whom were located in the rugged western region.

[1][5] While at The Lagoons, Darling allowed the Aboriginal people stationed there to conduct traditional practices, such as corroborrees, hunting and building their own type of shelters which had good ventilation and access to a central campfire.

However, after the move to Wybalenna, they were strongly encouraged to take on European practices such as wearing clothing, smoking tobacco, attending church services and not going into the bush to hunt.

Allen and Nickolls warned the colonial authorities that the housing was neither warm nor dry, the soil was sterile, the water supply was unwholesome and the provisions provided were very inadequate.

[1] Additionally, Nickolls made an official complaint in 1835 about the enforcement of Christianity upon the exiled Palawa, but received only a rebuke from the Lieutenant-Governor who stated that the teaching of the Bible was a priority to relieve "the unaccustomed mind of the savage...from the terrors" of life at Wybalenna.

[1] In 1835, Robinson had completed his mission of apprehending nearly all of the remaining Palawa on the Tasmanian mainland, with only one family group and perhaps a couple of individuals believed to have escaped being seized.

Robinson replaced their Indigenous names with British ones, forced the men to labour, and encouraged the women to take on conventional European female roles of washing and sewing clothes.

The editors were two Indigenous adolescents named Walter George Arthur and Thomas Brune who had learnt English at the orphan school in Hobart.

[2][7] The supply of adequate food and water, and the conditions of the housing failed to improve, with a visiting official from Launceston concluding in 1836 that the Aboriginal occupants of Wybalenna were being deliberately exterminated.

[9] Robinson, frustrated that the Wybalenna project was failing, attempted to obtain government permission to move the surviving Palawa to the Australian mainland.

[9] Mathinna gave evidence in a subsequent inquiry, saying: "I have been under the care of Mr and Mrs Clark when I was flogged I was placed across a table and my hands and feet were tied.

[10] It was the first petition written by Indigenous Australian people to a reigning monarch, in which they wrote: "Your Majesty's petitioners pray that you will not allow Dr Jeanneret to come again among us...he used to carry pistols in his pockets and threatened to shoot us...our houses were let fall down and they were never cleaned but covered with vermin...eleven of us died when he was here...he put many of us into jail for talking to him because we would not be his slaves.

[2] In 1847, Jeanneret's replacement as superintendent, Dr Joseph Milligan, oversaw the shutdown of Wybalenna and the transfer of its Aboriginal occupants to Oyster Cove in south-east Tasmania.

[12][9] Further desecration of the Aboriginal graves took place in the early 1870s when the professional collector Morton Allport commissioned the landowner at Wybalenna, Robert Gardner, to procure Palawa skeletons from the cemetery.

This association recognised the Wybalenna site, which contains Tasmania's largest known Aboriginal burial-ground, as holding great cultural and historical significance.

[13][14] In the early 1990s a group of local Indigenous residents unofficially reclaimed the area to bring pressure on governments to return the site to Aboriginal people.

The L-shaped terrace block remains obliterated and a plaque for the Palawa leader, Mannalargenna, who died at Wybalenna, was smashed and torn out by vandals.