Genocide of Indigenous Australians | |
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Location | Australia |
Date | 1788 - 1970 |
Target | Aboriginal Australians Torres Strait Islanders |
Attack type | Genocidal massacre, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, starvation, cultural genocide |
Perpetrators | British colonisers Australian colonial, state and federal governments |
Motive | Settler colonialism White supremacy Assimilation Welfare |
Part of a series on |
Genocide of indigenous peoples |
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Issues |
Many scholars have argued that the British colonisation of Australia and subsequent actions of various Australian governments and individuals involved acts of genocide against Indigenous Australians. [1] They have used numerous definitions of genocide including the intentional destruction of Indigenous groups as defined in the 1948 United Nations genocide convention, or broader definitions involving cultural genocide, ethnocide and genocidal massacres. [2] [3] They have frequently cited the near extermination of Aboriginal Tasmanians, [4] mass killings during the frontier wars, [5] forced removals of Indigenous children from their families (now known as the Stolen Generations), [6] and policies of forced assimilation as genocidal. [7]
When Britain established its first Australian colony in 1788, the Aboriginal population is estimated to have been 300,000 to more than one million people [8] [9] [10] comprising about 600 tribes or nations and 250 languages with various dialects. [11] [12] By 1901 the Aboriginal population had fallen to just over 90,000 people, mainly due to disease, frontier violence and the disruption of traditional society. [8] In the 20th century many Aboriginal people were confined to reserves, missions and institutions, and government regulations controlled most aspects of their lives. Thousands of Indigenous children of mixed heritage were removed from their families. [13]
There is an ongoing debate over whether imperial, colonial and Australian governments intended to destroy Indigenous peoples in whole or in part, or whether their intention was to end resistance to settler colonisalism, protect Indigenous people from settler violence and promote the welfare of Indigenous people by assimilating them into British-Australian society. [1] There is also debate over whether the legal definition of genocide sufficiently captures the range of harm inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of Australia. [14] Since 1997 the state, territory and federal governments of Australia have formally apologised for the stolen generations and for other injustices against Indigenous Australians. [15]
When Britain established its first Australian colony in 1788, the Aboriginal population is estimated to have been 300,000 to more than one million people [16] [9] [10] whose ancestors had inhabited the land for 50,000 to 65,000 years. [17] [18] [19] [20] They were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies. There were about 600 tribes or nations and 250 languages with various dialects. [11] [12] In the 150 years that followed, the number of Aboriginal Australians fell sharply due to introduced diseases and violent conflict with the colonists that many scholars argue included acts of genocide. [5] When the Australian colonies federated in 1901 and the Commonwealth of Australia was established, the Aboriginal population had fallen to just over 90,000 people. [16]
The Torres Strait Islands were progressively annexed to the British colony of Queensland from 1872. The Torres Strait Islander people first settled their islands around 2,500 years ago. Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas. They developed agriculture on some islands and established villages by the 14th century. [21] [22]
Following federation, Aboriginal affairs was a state responsibility, although the Commonwealth became responsible for the Aboriginal population of the Northern Territory from 1911. By then the Commonwealth and all states except Tasmania had passed legislation establishing Protectors of Aborigines and Protection Boards with extensive powers to regulate the lives of Aboriginal Australians including their ownership of property, place of residence, employment, sexual relationships and custody of their children. Reserves were established and Church groups ran missions providing shelter, food, religious instruction and elementary schooling for Indigenous people. [23]
Some officials argued that the growing number of Aboriginal children of mixed heritage was inconsistent with the white Australia policy. Laws concerning Aboriginal Australians were progressively tightened to make it easier for officials to remove Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their parents and place them in reserves, missions, institutions and employment with white employers. [24] The policy of forced removal of Aboriginal children from their parents created the "stolen generations", and the Australian Human Rights Commission concluded in 1997 that this policy constituted genocide. [25]
Scholars have used various definitions of genocide to argue that acts of genocide against Indigenous Australians occurred after 1788. The most widely used definition of genocide is that of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. Under the convention, genocide requires the perpetrator to commit acts with the intention to destroy, wholly or partly, "a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". [2] Genocidal acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions on them calculated to destroy them, taking measures to prevent the group bearing children, and forcibly transferring their children to other groups. [2]
Some scholars have used different definitions of genocide [2] or have argued that colonist committed acts not captured by the UN convention which they variously describe as cultural genocide, [26] genocidal massacres, ethnocide or Indigenocide. [3]
Scholars have argued that acts of genocide against Indigenous Australians included:
"Are we going to have a population of 1,000,000 blacks in the Commonwealth, or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any aborigines in Australia?"
The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population [45] has been described as an act of genocide by scholars including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan, Tom Lawson, Mohamed Adhikari, Benjamin Madley, Ashley Riley Sousa, Rebe Taylor, and Tony Barta. [46] [47] The author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, considered Tasmania the site of one of the world's clear cases of genocide [48] and Hughes has described the loss of Aboriginal Tasmanians as "the only true genocide in English colonial history". [49] However, other historians –including Henry Reynolds, Richard Broome, and Nicholas Clements –do not agree that the colonial authorities pursued a policy of destroying the Indigenous population, although they do acknowledge that some settlers supported extermination. [50] [51]
As early as 1852 John West's History of Tasmania portrayed the obliteration of Tasmania's Aboriginal people as an example of "systematic massacre" [52] 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". [53]
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. [50] [51] 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." [54]
Historian Henry Reynolds says there was a widespread call from settlers during the frontier wars for the "extirpation" or "extermination" of the Aboriginal people. [55] 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" [56] —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. [57] 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. [58]
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. [59]
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. [60] 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." [61]
Queensland represents the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia. [62] [63] Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of indigenous people and the most disreputable frontier police force. [64] Thus some sources have characterised these events as a "Queensland Aboriginal genocide". [65] [66] In 2009 professor Raymond Evans calculated the Indigenous fatalities caused by the Queensland Native Police Force alone as no less than 24,000. [67]
There is an ongoing scholarly debate about whether there were acts of genocide in Australia and, if so, the form they took. [68] Robert van Krieken argues that the debate often involves how broadly the concept of genocide ought to be understood. Narrow conceptions of genocide, such as that in the UN convention, are restricted to killing and other forms of physical elimination, whereas the broader definition includes other ways a human group can be destroyed, including the destruction of cultural identity. [69]
Scholars are also divided over whether colonists and Australian governments acted with an intention to destroy Indigenous peoples in whole or in part and therefore committed genocide as defined by the UN convention. Reynolds argues that while some settlers and colonial officials talked of extermination of Aboriginal people in the context of the frontier wars, this was not official policy and killing of Aboriginal groups ended once their violent resistance to colonisation ended. [70] Barta, however, argues that conflict between an expanding settlement and traditional owners of the land established "relations of genocide" and that a genocidal intent can be inferred from the actions of government agents which were contrary to declared policy. [71]
Many scholars argue that the actions taken against Indigenous Australians were not systematic or intentional like other genocidal events. [72] Others also argue that the high death toll among Indigenous Australians following colonisation was mainly a result of the introduction of diseases, and that deliberate acts of violence and the effects of dispossession did not meet the legal definition of genocide. [73] [74] Lawyer Michael Legge, however, concludes: "Australia's record on Indigenous Australians is at best ambiguous, and at worst an example of genocide by eugenics". [75]
The publication of the Bringing Them Home report in 1997 and Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002) led to a heated public debate on genocide and frontier violence. [76] [77] Historians and commentators such as Windschuttle accused those who argued that Indigenous Australians had survived genocide of fabricating evidence and writing "black armband" history that claimed that "much of Australian history was a disgrace". [78] [76] Others argue that since the violence and dispossession happened in the past, it has no relevance to the current state of affairs. [79] [80] Proponents of the genocide thesis, in turn, often accused their critics of denialism and ignoring the evidence of frontier massacres, the violent dispossession of Indigenous Australians of their land, and the systematic removal of Aboriginal children from their families. [76] [81] [82]
The recognition of historical injustices in Australia has been relatively slow. [83] [84] A 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. [85] 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". [86]
Since 1998 Australia has acknowledged the harms caused to Indigenous Australians in a National Sorry Day on May 26. [87] In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, on behalf of the Australian Parliament, deliver an apology to the stolen generations and to all Indigenous Australians who had suffered because of the unjust government policies of the past. However, the apology did not specifically acknowledge genocide. [88]
Genocide is violence that targets individuals because of their membership of a group and aims at the destruction of a people.
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
The Aboriginal Tasmanians are the Aboriginal people of the Australian island of Tasmania, located south of the mainland. At the time of European contact, Aboriginal Tasmanians were divided into a number of distinct ethnic groups. For much of the 20th century, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were widely, and erroneously, thought of as extinct and intentionally exterminated by white settlers. Contemporary figures (2016) for the number of people of Tasmanian Aboriginal descent vary according to the criteria used to determine this identity, ranging from 6,000 to over 23,000.
The Black War was a period of violent conflict between British colonists and Aboriginal Tasmanians in Tasmania from the mid-1820s to 1832 that precipitated the near-extermination of the indigenous population. The conflict was fought largely as a guerrilla war by both sides; some 600 to 900 Aboriginal people and more than 200 British colonists died.
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2006. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press, which operated from 1994 to 2010.
John Batman was an Australian grazier, entrepreneur and explorer, who had a prominent role in the founding of Melbourne.
Henry Reynolds is an Australian historian whose primary work has focused on the frontier conflict between European settlers in Australia and Indigenous Australians. He was the first academic historian to advocate for Indigenous land rights, becoming known with his first major work, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981).
The history wars is a term used in Australia to describe the public debate about the interpretation of the history of the European colonisation of Australia and the development of contemporary Australian society, particularly with regard to their impact on Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The term "history wars" emerged in the late 1990s during the term of the Howard government, and despite efforts by some of Howard's successors, the debate is ongoing, notably reignited in 2016 and 2020.
The history of Indigenous Australians began 50,000 to 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses. This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other sub-groups defined by language and culture. Human habitation of the Australian continent began with the migration of the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia. The Aboriginal people spread throughout the continent, adapting to diverse environments and climate change to develop one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.
Indigenous Australians are people with familial heritage from, or recognised membership of, the various ethnic groups living within the territory of present day Australia prior to British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups, which include many ethnic groups: the Aboriginal Australians of the mainland and many islands, including Tasmania, and the Torres Strait Islanders of the seas between Queensland and Papua New Guinea, located in Melanesia.
The Other Side of the Frontier is a history book published in 1981 by Australian historian Henry Reynolds. It is a study of Aboriginal Australian resistance to the British settlement, or invasion, of Australia from 1788 onwards.
The Australian frontier wars were the violent conflicts between Indigenous Australians and mostly British settlers during the colonial period of Australia.
The genocide of indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the elimination of indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.
The California genocide was a series of genocidal massacres of the indigenous peoples of California by United States soldiers and settlers during the 19th century. It began following the American conquest of California in the Mexican–American War and the subsequent influx of American settlers to the region as a result of the California gold rush. Between 1846 and 1873, it is estimated that settlers killed between 9,492 and 16,094 indigenous Californians; up to several thousand were also starved or worked to death. Forced labor, kidnapping, rape, child separation and forced displacement were widespread during the genocide, and were encouraged, tolerated, and even carried out by American officials and military commanders.
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.
The Karuwali are an Aboriginal Australian people of the state of Queensland.
Genocidal intent is the specific mental element, or mens rea, required to classify an act as genocide under international law, particularly the 1948 Genocide Convention. To establish genocide, perpetrators must be shown to have had the dolus specialis, or specific intent, to destroy a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part. Unlike broader war crimes or crimes against humanity, genocidal intent necessitates a deliberate aim to eliminate the targeted group rather than merely displace or harm its members.
Denial of genocides of Indigenous peoples consists of a claim that has denied any of the multiple genocides and atrocity crimes, which have been committed against Indigenous peoples. The denialism claim contradicts the academic consensus, which acknowledges that genocide was committed. The claim is a form of denialism, genocide denial, historical negationism and historical revisionism. The atrocity crimes include genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.
The historiography of Indigenous genocide is the study of how these type of genocides have been documented and interpreted by historians throughout the colonial age up to today.
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.
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.
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