The First Nations of Tasmania had existed on-country for some 40,000 years. In 1836, just three decades after the British colony was established, a twenty-six year-old Charles Darwin visited. The native population had vanished with horrible speed, leaving behind the shadow of a monumental question: what were the implications of applying notions of natural selection to the human animal? In episode one of the Black Line, Christopher Bardsley examines an international crisis of conscience, as the same empire that banned and prosecuted slavery the world over was forced to come to terms with an appalling cultural genocide they could not deny responsibility for.