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Genocide of Indigenous Australians

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Genocide of Indigenous Australians
1888 illustration of a massacre by Australian native police in Queensland, Australia
LocationAustralia
Date1788 - 1970
TargetAboriginal Australians
Torres Strait Islanders
Attack type
Genocide, massacre, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, starvation, cultural genocide
PerpetratorsBritish colonisers
Australian Government
MotiveSettler colonialism
White supremacy
Part of a series on
Genocide
of indigenous peoples
Issues
Sub-Saharan Africa
Americas (history)
East, South, Southeast Asia
Europe and North Asia
Oceania
West Asia / North Africa
Related topics

The genocide of Indigenous Australians is the series of ongoing systematic and deliberate actions taken primarily by British colonisers and their descendants, including the Australian federal government, aimed at eradicating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, languages, and people.[1] Motivations for the genocide varied, and included motivations aimed at preserving a "white Australia",[2] or assimilating Indigenous populations "for their own good".[3]

There is debate among scholars and Indigenous people about the exact definition and type of genocide that has occurred.[4][5][6] Actions of settlers against Indigenous Australians includes mass killings during the frontier wars, forced removals of children (now known as the Stolen Generations), and policies of forced assimilation by the Australian Government that sought to extinguish Indigenous Australian identity and cultural practices.[7][8] These actions have variously been described as terrorism, ethnocide, and genocide, against the Indigenous peoples.[9]

Historical context

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Further information: Terra nullius § Australia

The colonization of Australia by the British, starting in 1788, marked the beginning of a catastrophic impact on the Indigenous populations, who had lived continuously on the continent for over 80,000 years prior to European settlement.[10][11][12] Some of the catastrophic impacts upon the indigenous population came about somewhat inadvertently (e.g. those caused by disease introduction, or agricultural displacement[13]). However, other impacts upon the population were more deliberate, and would fairly be described by modern scholars as historical acts of genocide.[14]

Acts of genocide

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Some acts of genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Australians included:

  1. Massacres:[15][page needed] particularly in the frontier wars, there were numerous recorded and unrecorded deliberate massacres of Indigenous Australians by colonists, and by Australian State Police and militias.[16] These acts were often carried out pre-emptively, or in retaliation against, violent resistance by Indigenous Australians against the occupation of their lands.[17] In some instances massacres were carried out merely due to motivations involving hatred and racial prejudice of the perpetrator.
  2. Dispersal campaigns: some scholars have described extermination campaigns undertaken in the 1800s, aimed at dispersing and displacing indigenous Australians from their lands as a form of genocide.[18] An example of this was a collaboration between white settlers and the State of Western Australia to erase the presence of Indigenous Australians from the southwest of WA between 1900 and 1940.[19]
  3. Forced removals: policies enacted by Australian state governments involved the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families.[20][21] A well-known example of this practice has been acknowledged by the term "Stolen Generations",[22] whereby children were placed in institutions or forcibly adopted by non-Indigenous families with the intent of assimilating them into white society, and discouraging indigenous languages and culture.[23][24][25] These policies were sometimes undertaken by eugenicists, such as A. O. Neville, and argued for on the basis of ostensible "benefits" bestowed upon victims of the practice.[26] It was a common early 20th century view that Indigenous Australians were dying out.[27]
  4. Assimilation policies: other legislation and policies were designed to assimilate Indigenous Australians into European-Australian society.[28] In many schools, children were punished for speaking their native language. Additional restrictions were placed on movement, marriage, employment, and the practice of traditional ceremonies and legal systems.[29] Collectively, these policies have been argued by some scholars as an act of cultural genocide. Some scholars have argued against the characterization of these policies after 1945 as genocidal in intent, and have argued that they were aimed instead at ensuring survival of indigenous peoples.[30]
  5. Ongoing cultural genocidal policies: a minority of scholars consider genocidal structuring dynamics continue to operate in Australia, however the opinions of these scholars are a distinct minority opinion in genocide scholarship and popular discourse.[18]
  6. Ongoing economic genocidal policies: several authors have viewed coercive government economic programs targeted at Aboriginal people, such as the cashless debit card, as a form of "redemptive violence" contributing to the ongoing cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples via legitimising their continued cultural and economic assimilation.[31][32]

Legacy and recognition

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Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd on screen in Federation Square, Melbourne, apologising to the stolen generations in 2008.

The genocide of Indigenous Australians has left deep scars on communities in Australia, with ongoing impacts on cultural heritage, languages, and people groups. The recognition of historical injustices in Australia has been relatively slow.[33][34] Efforts to acknowledge and reconcile these actions started toward the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

One watershed moment was the Bringing Them Home report, which contained the findings of the federal government inquiry into the removal of thousands of Aboriginal children.[22] The report argued that the Commonwealth Government was guilty of the crime of genocide; under the UN Convention defining genocide as "intentional destruction of a racial, religious, national, or ethnic group".[35]

Since 1998 Australia has acknowledged the harms caused to Indigenous Australians in a National Sorry Day on May 26. In addition, a formal apology was delivered to the Stolen Generations by prime minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian Parliament in 2008. In recent decades the Australian Government has pursued a policy titled "Closing the Gap" partly in an effort to redress some of the harms caused by prior policy.

There remains ongoing debate about the characterization of the historical events that Indigenous Australians faced as a form of "genocide".[36][page needed] Some argue that the actions meet the legal definition outlined in the United Nations Genocide Convention, while others express a contrary view. Scholars such as Robert van Krieken have argued that the debate often involves a continuing dispute as to how broadly the concept of genocide ought to be understood. Narrow conceptions of genocide are restricted to killing, whereas the broader definition includes other ways a human group can be "eliminated", including the destruction of cultural identity.[37][page needed] Some scholars have said in relation to this "Australia's record on Indigenous Australians is at best ambiguous, and at worst an example of genocide by eugenics".[38]

Particular instances

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Black War

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Main article: Black War
Samuel Thomas Gill's depiction of a night-time punitive raid on an Aboriginal camp

The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population[39] has been described as an act of genocide by historians and genocide scholars including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan, Tom Lawson, Mohamed Adhikari, Benjamin Madley, Ashley Riley Sousa, Rebe Taylor, and Tony Barta.[40][41] The author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, considered Tasmania the site of one of the world's clear cases of genocide[42] and Hughes has described the loss of Aboriginal Tasmanians as "the only true genocide in English colonial history".[43]

Boyce has claimed that the April 1828 "Proclamation Separating the Aborigines from the White Inhabitants" sanctioned force against Aboriginal people "for no other reason than that they were Aboriginal". However, as Reynolds, Broome and Clements point out, there was open warfare at the time.[44][45] Boyce describes the decision to remove all Aboriginal Tasmanians after 1832—by which time they had given up their fight against white colonists—as an extreme policy position. He concludes: "The colonial government from 1832 to 1838 ethnically cleansed the western half of Van Diemen's Land and then callously left the exiled people to their fate."[46]

As early as 1852 John West's History of Tasmania portrayed the obliteration of Tasmania's Aboriginal people as an example of "systematic massacre"[47] and in the 1979 High Court case of Coe v Commonwealth of Australia, judge Lionel Murphy observed that Aboriginal people did not give up their land peacefully and that they were killed or forcibly removed from their land "in what amounted to attempted (and in Tasmania almost complete) genocide".[48]

Historian Henry Reynolds says there was a widespread call from settlers during the frontier wars for the "extirpation" or "extermination" of the Aboriginal people.[49] But he has contended that the British government acted as a source of restraint on settlers' actions. Reynolds says there is no evidence the British government deliberately planned the wholesale destruction of indigenous Tasmanians—a November 1830 letter to Arthur by Sir George Murray warned that the extinction of the race would leave "an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government"[50]—and therefore what eventuated does not meet the definition of genocide codified in the 1948 United Nations convention. He says Arthur was determined to defeat the Aboriginal people and take their land, but believes there is little evidence he had aims beyond that objective and wished to destroy the Tasmanian race.[51] In contrast to Reynolds' argument, historian Lyndall Ryan, based on a sample of massacres taking place in the Meander River region in June 1827, concludes that massacres of Aboriginal Tasmanians by white settlers were likely part of an organised process and were sanctioned by government authorities.[52]

Clements accepts Reynolds' argument but also exonerates the colonists themselves of the charge of genocide. He says that unlike genocidal determinations by Nazis against Jews in World War II, Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda and Ottomans against Armenians in present-day Turkey, which were carried out for ideological reasons, Tasmanian settlers participated in violence largely out of revenge and self-preservation. He adds: "Even those who were motivated by sex or morbid thrillseeking lacked any ideological impetus to exterminate the natives." He also argues that while genocides are inflicted on defeated, captive or otherwise vulnerable minorities, Tasmanian natives appeared as a "capable and terrifying enemy" to colonists and were killed in the context of a war in which both sides killed noncombatants.[53]

Lawson, in a critique of Reynolds' stand, argues that genocide was the inevitable outcome of a set of British policies to colonise Van Diemen's Land.[54] He says the British government endorsed the use of partitioning and "absolute force" against Tasmanians, approved Robinson's "Friendly Mission" and colluded in transforming that mission into a campaign of ethnic cleansing from 1832. He says that once on Flinders Island, indigenous peoples were taught to farmland like Europeans and worship God like Europeans and concludes: "The campaign of transformation enacted on Flinders Island amounted to cultural genocide."[55]

Queensland Aboriginal genocide

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Main article: Australian frontier wars § Queensland

Queensland represents the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia.[56][57] Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of indigenous people and the most disreputable frontier police force.[58] Thus some sources have characterized these events as a "Queensland Aboriginal genocide".[59][60] In 2009 professor Raymond Evans calculated the Indigenous fatalities caused by the Queensland Native Police Force alone as no less than 24,000.[61]

Current status

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Some scholars have argued that the genocide against Indigenous Australians continues, especially through contemporary cultural destructive policies.[62] These scholars are part of a minority opinion in both formal academic scholarship on genocide and in popular discourse.[18]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Barta 2023, pp. 46–47.
  2. ^ Evans 2012, p. 103: ""White Australia" as both an ideal and a colonial project long preceded its implementation as national policy in 1901.¹ Its origins are obscure, yet arguably begin with the enfolding process of Aboriginal dispossession from 1788. Its first articulation, inter alia, was probably by James Stephen, permanent British Under Secretary for the Colonies, when he floated the intention in 1841 of preserving the Australian continent "as a place where the English race shall be spread from sea to sea unmixed by any lower caste." The sense of ethnic exclusivity embodied in this hope seems unambiguous, as does its explicit Anglo thrust."
  3. ^ Haebich 1992, p. 138.
  4. ^ "Genocide and Colonialism – AHR". AHR – Australian Humanities Review. 2002-09-01. Retrieved 2024-11-08.
  5. ^ Markus, Andrew; Marcus, Andrew (2001). "Genocide in Australia". Aboriginal History. 25. ANU Press: 57–69. ISSN 0314-8769. JSTOR 45135471. Retrieved 2024-11-08.
  6. ^ Veracini, L. 2002, Genocide and Colonialism, Austalian Humanities Review, no. 27.
  7. ^ Moses, A. Dirk (2012b). Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781782381693.[page needed]
  8. ^ Barta 2023, p. 47.
  9. ^ Jalata, Asafa (2013-07-01). "The Impacts of English Colonial Terrorism and Genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians". Sage Open. 3 (3). SAGE Publications. doi:10.1177/2158244013499143. ISSN 2158-2440. The English settlers used several mechanisms of terrorism and genocide against indigenous Australians, and justified them with a racist discourse. These mechanisms included shooting, burning, disease, rape, ethnocide, or cultural destruction. According to A. Dirk Moses (2004), terrorism and genocide or "indigenocide" involved five elements:
  10. ^ Morse, Dana (30 April 2021). "Researchers demystify the secrets of ancient Aboriginal migration across Australia". ABC News. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Archived from the original on 30 October 2023. Retrieved 7 May 2021.
  11. ^ Crabtree, S. A.; White, D. A.; Bradshaw, C. J. A. (29 April 2021). "Landscape rules predict optimal superhighways for the first peopling of Sahul". Nature Human Behaviour. 5 (10): 1303–1313. doi:10.1038/s41562-021-01106-8. PMID 33927367. S2CID 233458467. Retrieved 7 May 2021.
  12. ^ Gomes, Sibylle M.; Bodner, Martin; Souto, Luis; et al. (14 February 2015). "Human settlement history between Sunda and Sahul: a focus on East Timor (Timor-Leste) and the Pleistocenic mtDNA diversity". BMC Genomics. 16 (1): 70. doi:10.1186/s12864-014-1201-x. ISSN 1471-2164. PMC 4342813. PMID 25757516.
  13. ^ Haebich 2012, p. 271.
  14. ^ Barta 2008; Cassidy 2009, p. 114; Moses 2012, pp. 8, 13–14; Ryan 2012, p. xix, 215; Baldry, McKeon & McDougal 2015; Adhikari 2022, p. xxix; Taylor 2023, p. 484; Barta 2023, p. 51
  15. ^ Elder, Bruce (2003). Blood on the wattle : massacres and maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788. New Holland. ISBN 1741100089.
  16. ^ Kociumbas 2012, p. 90.
  17. ^ Moses 2012, pp. 13–14.
  18. ^ a b c Crook, Martin; Short, Damien (2019). "A political economy of genocide in Australia: The architecture of dispossession then and now". Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics, and Global Manifestations. Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781351214100-7. ISBN 978-1-351-21410-0. This chapter examines the full range of literature on aboriginal participation in the Australian economy. Most of the scholarly works that consider the question of genocide in Australia focus on the "dispersal" extermination campaigns of the 1800s and/or the issue of the "Stolen Generations." While writers like Tony Barta and Patrick Wolfe imply that genocidal structuring dynamics are at work in Australia, theirs is a distinct minority opinion in genocide scholarship and popular discourse.
  19. ^ Haebich 2012, p. 267.
  20. ^ Barta 2008.
  21. ^ Cassidy 2009, p. 114.
  22. ^ a b Perry, Michael (20 May 1997). "A Stolen Generation Cries Out". Hartford Web Publishing. Reuters. Archived from the original on 10 December 2023. Retrieved 24 November 2016.
  23. ^ Manne 2012, p. 218.
  24. ^ Haebich 2012, p. 274.
  25. ^ Cruickshank & McKinnon 2023, pp. 93–94.
  26. ^ Haebich 2023, p. 558.
  27. ^ Manne 2012, pp. 219–220.
  28. ^ Moses 2012, p. 8.
  29. ^ Haebich 2012, pp. 271–272.
  30. ^ McGregor 2012, p. 290: "This chapter contests recent characterizations of post–1945 Aboriginal assimilation policies as genocidal.¹ Far from seeking elimination of the Aborigines, these policies of sociocultural assimilation were the first in more than a century to seriously envisage Aboriginal survival, to seek to ensure survival, and to prescribe strategies predicated upon their survival. Precisely because it envisaged Aboriginal survival, the postwar state turned more resolutely to their governance."
  31. ^ Klein, Elise (2019). "Settler colonialism in Australia and the cashless debit card". Social Policy & Administration. 54 (2): 265–277. doi:10.1111/spol.12576.
  32. ^ Bielefeld, Shelley (2021). "Cashless welfare transfers and Australia's First Nations: redemptive or repressive violence?". Griffith Law Review. 30 (4): 597–620. doi:10.1080/10383441.2021.1996891.
  33. ^ Vines, Prue (2023-01-31). "Australia's (Slow) Experiment with Indigenous Customary Law in Intestacy". The Journal of Commonwealth Law. 4. Matthew P Harrington: 43–71. Retrieved 2024-11-08.
  34. ^ Falls, Thomas; Anderson, Joel (2022-03-06). "Attitudes towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia: a systematic review". Australian Journal of Psychology. 74 (1). Informa UK Limited. doi:10.1080/00049530.2022.2039043. ISSN 0004-9530.
  35. ^ Manne 2012, p. 217: "Bringing Them Home, the findings of the federal government inquiry into the removal of thousands of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families, and communities in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, was published in 1997. It argued that the Commonwealth government and the governments of several Australian states were guilty of the crime of genocide."
  36. ^ Reynolds 2001.
  37. ^ van Krieken, Robert (13 February 2008). "Cultural Genocide in Australia". The Historiography of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan London. ISBN 9781403992192.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
  38. ^ Legg, Michael (2002). "Indigenous Australians and International Law: Racial Discrimination, Genocide and Reparations". Berkeley Journal of International Law. doi:10.15779/Z38KM0Q. S2CID 152433767.
  39. ^ Taylor 2023, pp. 481–484.
  40. ^ Hughes 1987, p. 120; Boyce 2010, p. 296; Ryan 2012, p. xix, 215; Lawson 2014, pp. xvii, 2, 20; Adhikari 2022, p. xxix; Madley 2004; Sousa 2004; Taylor 2023, p. 484; Barta 2023, p. 51
  41. ^ Shipway 2017, pp. 4–6.
  42. ^ Reynolds 2001, p. 50.
  43. ^ Hughes 1987, p. 120.
  44. ^ Broome 2019, p. 44.
  45. ^ Clements 2013, pp. 110–112.
  46. ^ Boyce 2010, pp. 264, 296.
  47. ^ Lawson 2014, p. 8.
  48. ^ Reynolds 2001, p. 29.
  49. ^ Reynolds 2001, pp. 52–54.
  50. ^ Reynolds 2001, p. 59.
  51. ^ Lawson 2014, pp. 15, 78, 85.
  52. ^ Ryan, Lyndall (6 November 2008). "Massacre in the Black War in Tasmania 1823–34: a case study of the Meander River Region, June 1827". Journal of Genocide Research. 10 (4): 479–499. doi:10.1080/14623520802447834. S2CID 145287373. Retrieved 8 March 2022.
  53. ^ Clements 2014, pp. 56–58.
  54. ^ Lawson 2014, p. 14.
  55. ^ Lawson 2014, pp. 51, 205.
  56. ^ Loos, Noel (1970). Frontier conflict in the Bowen district 1861–1874 (other). James Cook University of North Queensland. doi:10.25903/mmrc-5e46. Archived from the original on 9 July 2024. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
  57. ^ Loos, Noel (1976). Aboriginal-European relations in North Queensland, 1861–1897 (PhD). James Cook University. Archived from the original on 6 June 2024. Retrieved 11 September 2019.
  58. ^ Ørsted-Jensen 2011.
  59. ^
  60. ^ Tatz, Colin (2006). "Confronting Australian Genocide". In Maaka, Roger; Andersen, Chris (eds.). The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives. Vol. 25. Canadian Scholars Press. pp. 16–36. ISBN 978-1551303000. PMID 19514155. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  61. ^ Evans, Raymond (3 October 2011). "The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars". In Peters-Little, Frances; Curthoys, Ann; Docker, John (eds.). Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia. Aboriginal History Monograph. Vol. 21. ANU Press. doi:10.22459/PH.09.2010. ISBN 978-1-921666-64-3.
  62. ^ Short, Damien (27 September 2010). "Australia: a continuing genocide?". Journal of Genocide Research. 12 (1–2): 45–68. doi:10.1080/14623528.2010.508647. PMID 20941881.

Works cited

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Further reading

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