I assume you are misremembering Charles Darwin’s account. Darwin described the human chain, used in an attempt to take Aborigines as live prisoners, as similar to the chain of beaters used in a hunt. He never even hinted that it was used to *kill *Aborigines, simply that it was similar in construction to a hunting chain used to flush game.
Nobody ever recorded any event even remotely like you describe. The locals reported all sorts of other dealing with the natives, including reprisal attacks where people were killed. And they described them with all sorts of perspectives ranging from shock and outrage to calls for more native blood, so it’s not like there was any sort of censorship on events or social pressure to remain quiet. But not a single account of Aborigines being “systematically hunted down by the British, in a fashion pretty much identical to how they’d hunt animals”.
Rumours of such have been made, by unreliable witnesses. Just as they have been made about US troops in Afghanistan and about police officers throughout the US in the past 10 years. No evidence of such an event exists. It was the Nazi lampshade of its day. If such an event ever had occurred, it would have been pursued by the courts and resulted in hanging of found to be true.
The killing of human beings was simply never tolerated in Australia. In cases where an attempt had been made to bring natives to trial for multiple murders, and they had eluded the police, then very rarely a magistrate or governor would issue a permit for a reprisal attack. But even those specified how any men could be killed, and people were tried and hanged for killing women and children in such raids.
Even in Tasmania, where there were constant attacks by Aborigines upon Europeans (and vice versa), the death penalty for killing Aborigines was strictly enforced for decades. Eventually, under public pressure and pressure from England, the the governor authorised the use of violence against Aborigines, but even then reluctantly and stressed that it could be used only when the Aborigines were encountered within settled areas, only as an absolute last resort, only after a bona fide attempt at imprisonment had been made and only after violence had been offered by the natives. The natives could not be pursued into the bush. Even under a state of Marshall law, anyone killing an Aborigine outside a settled area was tried an hanged if found guilty.
Considering the situation in Tasmania was basically one of guerrilla warfare, the lengths the authorities went to to prevent Aboriginal deaths and punish murderers was surprising, and contrast sharply with the US situation where both soldiers and civilians repeatedly massacred towns full of peaceful women and children with no repercussions and often under orders from the authorities.
The idea that any court or government official in Australia would have tolerated killing people and using the skins for trophies is totally incongruous with the evidence of the times. Plenty of Europeans were tried by their peers an executed for killing Aborigines. The idea that the same government was sanctioning hunting them or making souvenirs from their skins is as bizarre as making the same claim about the Obama administration.
