Genocide of Indigenous Australians

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Genocide of Indigenous Australians
Massacre at Skull Hole, Mistake Creek, Australia.png
1888 illustration of a massacre by Australian native police in Queensland, Australia
LocationAustralia
Date1788 - 1970
Target Aboriginal Australians
Torres Strait Islanders
Attack type
 Genocide, massacre, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, starvation
Perpetrators European colonisers
Australian Government
Motive Settler colonialism
White supremacy

The genocide of Indigenous Australians refers to the systematic and deliberate actions taken primarily by European colonisers and their descendants, particularly during the 18th to the 20th centuries, aimed at eradicating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, languages, and people. Motivations for the genocide varied, and included motivations aimed at preserving a "white Australia", [1] or assimilating Indigenous populations "for their own good". [2]

Contents

The genocide of 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. [3] [ page needed ]

Historical context

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 around 60,000 years prior to European settlement. [4] [5] [6] Some of the catastrophic impacts upon the indigenous population came about somewhat inadvertently (e.g. those caused by disease introduction, or agricultural displacement [7] ). However, other impacts upon the population were more deliberate, and would fairly be described by modern scholars as historical acts of genocide.

Acts of genocide

Some acts of genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Australians included:

  1. Massacres: [8] [ 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. [9] These acts were often carried out pre-emptively, or in retaliation against, violent resistance by Indigenous Australians against the occupation of their lands. [10] 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. [11] 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. [12]
  3. Forced removals: policies enacted by Australian state governments involved the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families. [13] [14] A well-known example of this practice has been acknowledged by the term "Stolen Generations", [15] 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. [16] [17] 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. It was a common early 20th century view that Indigenous Australians were dying out. [18]
  4. Assimilation policies: other legislation and policies were designed to assimilate Indigenous Australians into European-Australian society. [19] 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. [20] 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. [21]
  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. [11]

Legacy and recognition

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. 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. [15] 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". [22]

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". [23] [ 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. [24] [ 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". [25]

Particular instances

Black War

The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population has been described as an act of genocide by historians including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan, Tom Lawson, Mohamed Adhikari, Benjamin Madley, and Ashley Riley Sousa. [26] The author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, considered Tasmania the site of one of the world's clear cases of genocide [27] and Hughes has described the loss of Aboriginal Tasmanians as "the only true genocide in English colonial history". [28]

Queensland Aboriginal genocide

Queensland represents the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia. [29] [30] Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of indigenous people and the most disreputable frontier police force. [31] Thus some sources have characterized these events as a "Queensland Aboriginal genocide". [32] [33] [34] [35] In 2009 professor Raymond Evans calculated the Indigenous fatalities caused by the Queensland Native Police Force alone as no less than 24,000. [36]

Current status

Some scholars have argued that the genocide against Indigenous Australians continues, especially through contemporary cultural destructive policies. [37] These scholars are part of a minority opinion in both formal academic scholarship on genocide and in popular discourse. [11]

See also

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References

  1. ↑ 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."
  2. ↑ Haebich 1992, p. 138.
  3. ↑ Moses, A. Dirk (2012b). Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. Berghahn Books. ISBN   9781782381693.
  4. ↑ Morse, Dana (30 April 2021). "Researchers demystify the secrets of ancient Aboriginal migration across Australia". ABC News . Australian Broadcasting Corporation . Retrieved 7 May 2021.
  5. ↑ 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.
  6. ↑ 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.
  7. ↑ Haebich 2012, p. 271.
  8. ↑ Elder, Bruce (2003). Blood on the wattle : massacres and maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788. New Holland. ISBN   1741100089.
  9. ↑ Kociumbas 2012, p. 90.
  10. ↑ Moses 2012, pp. 13–14.
  11. 1 2 3 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.
  12. ↑ Haebich 2012, p. 267.
  13. ↑ Barta, Tony (2008). "Sorry, and not sorry, in Australia: how the apology to the stolen generations buried a history of genocide". Journal of Genocide Research . 10 (2): 201–214. doi:10.1080/14623520802065438. S2CID   73078524.
  14. ↑ Cassidy, Julie (2009). "Unhelpful and inappropriate?: The question of genocide and the stolen generations" (PDF). Australian Indigenous Law Review . 13 (1): 114. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  15. 1 2 Perry, Michael (20 May 1997). "A Stolen Generation Cries Out". Hartford Web Publishing. Reuters . Retrieved 24 November 2016.
  16. ↑ Manne 2012, p. 218.
  17. ↑ Haebich 2012, p. 274.
  18. ↑ Manne 2012, pp. 219–220.
  19. ↑ Moses 2012, p. 8.
  20. ↑ Haebich 2012, pp. 271–272.
  21. ↑ 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."
  22. ↑ 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."
  23. ↑ Reynolds 2001.
  24. ↑ 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)
  25. ↑ Legg, Michael (2002). "Indigenous Australians and International Law: Racial Discrimination, Genocide and Reparations". Berkeley Journal of International Law . doi:10.15779/Z38KM0Q. S2CID   152433767.
  26. ↑ 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
  27. ↑ Reynolds 2001, p. 50.
  28. ↑ Hughes 1987, p. 120.
  29. ↑ Loos, Noel (1970). Frontier conflict in the Bowen district 1861–1874 (other). James Cook University of North Queensland. doi:10.25903/mmrc-5e46 . Retrieved 11 September 2019.
  30. ↑ Loos, Noel (1976). Aboriginal-European relations in North Queensland, 1861–1897 (PhD). James Cook University . Retrieved 11 September 2019.
  31. ↑ Ørsted-Jensen 2011.
  32. ↑ Gibbons, Ray. "The Partial Case for Queensland Genocide". Academia. Archived from the original on 27 December 2023.
  33. ↑ Baldry, Hannah; McKeon, Alisa; McDougal, Scott. "Queensland's Frontier Killing Times – Facing Up to Genocide". QUT Law Review . 15 (1): 92–113. ISSN   2201-7275.
  34. ↑ Palmer, Alison (1998). "Colonial and modern genocide: explanations and categories". Ethnic and Racial Studies . 21: 89–115. doi:10.1080/014198798330115.
  35. ↑ Tatz, Colin (2006). Maaka, Roger; Andersen, Chris (eds.). "Confronting Australian Genocide". The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives. 25. Canadian Scholars Press: 16–36. ISBN   978-1551303000. PMID   19514155.
  36. ↑ 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.
  37. ↑ Short, Damien (27 Sep 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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