BRINGING AUSTRALIA IN: GENOCIDE IN AUSTRALIAN AND WORLD HISTORY

There is now a lively world of international scholarship which considers the question of genocide holistically, and investigates case studies – the Armenian genocide of 1915–16, the Holocaust of 1939–45, the events in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s.32 Australian participation in it is slowly growing, with contributions by scholars such as Tony Barta, Colin Tatz and Dirk Moses. In public debate, the genocide question has been considered since the Human Rights Commission’s Bringing Them Home report of 1997, which investigated the history and effects of Aboriginal child removal in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had argued that Australian child removal practices fell within the definition of genocide used in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. This aspect of the report horrified many Australians of quite varying political views. Many people, including historians, rejected the notion that child removal could be reasonably described as ‘genocide’. Subsequent arguments have focused on the assimilation and absorption policies of the twentieth century, attempting to determine whether such policies had genocidal intent, that is, the destruction of Aboriginal peoples as identifiable human groups. The debate also broadened into a reconsideration of the question of violence on the frontiers of settlement, and indeed the effects of colonisation and settlement itself on the indigenous populations of Australia. These are by no means new debates, but they took on a new edge with the application of the word ‘genocide’, with all its associations and connections with the Holocaust of World War II, to Australian history.

The first step towards illuminating the complex ‘genocide’ debate for Australian history is to consider genocide as an historical and not purely a legal concept.33 While it is a lively issue within international law, stemming from the UN Convention and subject to new developments quite recently in consideration of events in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, which necessarily influences historical debate, historians must work with an historical rather than a legal definition. The great twentieth-century Polish-Jewish jurist Raphaël Lemkin (1901–1959) is generally regarded as having defined the term in his 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. His definition became the basis of the 1948 UN Convention, though that convention significantly modified his original formulations. Lemkin proposed his new concept of ‘genocide’ – deriving the term from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (killing, as in tyrannicide, homicide, fratricide) – defining it as a twofold process. As he explains in Chapter IX, ‘Genocide’, of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor.34

Genocide meant that one national pattern was to be destroyed, to be replaced by the imposition of another.35 Genocide signified a ‘coordinated plan’ of different actions ‘aiming at’ the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the ‘aim’ of annihilating the groups themselves.36 Genocide was not to be confined to the notion of mass killing, though that was profoundly important, but was to be seen, rather, as a composite of actions (economic, social, religious, moral, political, military) by which the destruction of a nation or group’s foundation of life was to be secured. Since the destruction of any human group results in the loss of its future contributions to the world, in Lemkin’s view the future of humanity as a world community is affected.

For my purposes here, a key issue is the connection between genocide and colonialism. In Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Lemkin saw a clear relationship of between the two, especially in wartime western Poland, where German colonisation was conducted on a large scale as part of the project of extermination of the Polish Jewish population.37 One people was to be exterminated, and another put in its place; the two processes went together. The connection between colonisation and genocide has been developed further by a number of scholars, especially in two texts which both appeared in 1997, the same year as the Bringing Them Home report brought the genocide word so controversially into public Australian debate.

One of these texts was A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, by the Native American historian Ward Churchill. For Churchill, the greatest series of genocides ever perpetrated in history – in terms of magnitude and duration – occurred in the Americas, led by Columbus himself. By first dispossessing them of their abundant cultivated fields and then instituting policies of slavery and systematic extermination, Columbus reduced the formerly prosperous Taino people from as many as eight million at the outset of his regime to about three million in 1496. By the time of Columbus’ departure in 1500, only 100 000 Taino had survived; by 1514, there were 22 000; by 1542, only 200 were recorded. The pattern of destruction inaugurated by Columbus continued as the pattern of genocide for the Americas, so that, Churchill suggests, it is probable that more than one hundred million pre-Columbian peoples died in the course of Europe’s ongoing conquest of the continent. A hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90 per cent. Entire civilisations were eradicated. 38 Subsequent English colonisation of the American continent was just as destructive, reducing many American Indian tribal groups to tiny remnants of their former selves. He goes on to argue that settler- colonies around the world established during European expansion post-1492 in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina are not only potentially but inherently genocidal. A settler-colony to be a settler-colony requires ‘wholesale displacement, reduction in numbers, and forced assimilation of native peoples’.39

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The second text which emerged in 1997 was a remarkable book, Exterminate all the Brutes: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, by Sven Lindqvist.40 This book traces the genealogy of the idea, so harshly expressed by Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that extermination of entire peoples was inevitable and necessary. In it, Australian history, at first seemingly irrelevant, gradually acquires major importance. Lindqvist traces the growth of the extermination idea, later renamed genocide, as the inevitable byproduct of progress, reminding us of what every Australian historian knows, that so great was the death rate of indigenous peoples in all the British colonies of settlement that the House of Commons established a Select Committee to enquire into the matter; its eventual report in 1837 recognised the rights of indigenous peoples to land and recommended that steps be taken to stop the slaughter. Despite the attempts of British colonial authorities, and of non-government aborigines protection societies both in Britain and in the colonies, the slaughter continued.41 Europeans were especially mindful of the destruction in Tasmania, where frontier violence, disease and starvation had reduced a population of about 3-4 000 to a few individuals by the early 1860s, the last person of full descent dying in 1876.42 Lindqvist draws attention to the attractions of the new racial science which depicted these huge population losses as inevitable processes whereby the higher races displaced the lower, bringing civilisation and progress to the world; in these circles, as Lindqvist puts it, ‘the Tasmanian (case) became the paradigm, to which one part of the world after another yielded’.43 When the Anthropological Society debated the extinction of the so-called lower races on 19 January 1864, the opening speaker reminded his listeners of the fate of the Tasmanians, and predicted the next to depart the world stage would be the Maori.44 (Later in the book, Lindquist argues that the successful colonisation methods of the British empire were the exemplar for Hitler when planning colonisation and genocide of the Jews, Poles, Russians and others in the territories east of Germany.)45

Indeed, as Henry Reynolds points out in Genocide: An indelible stain?, the idea that Tasmania provides the paradigmatic case of extermination, or genocide, is now well established in the international literature. Especially important for modern equations of Tasmania with genocide was Clive Turnbull’s Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, written in the context of World War II and first published in 1948. This was a period when the world was reeling from the events now known as the Holocaust, when many were looking to history for antecedents and explanations. Turnbull wrote:

Not, perhaps, before, has a race of men been utterly destroyed within seventy-five years. This is the story of a race which was so destroyed, that of the aborigines of Tasmania – destroyed not only by a different manner of life but by the ill-will of the usurpers of the race’s land. With no defences but cunning and the most primitive weapons, the natives were no match for the sophisticated individualists of knife and gun. By 1876 the last of them was dead. So perished a whole people.

Indeed, so fixed had this idea of the complete extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people become that it was only with the rise of the Tasmanian Aboriginal movement in the second half of the 1970s, along with the publication of Lyndall Ryan’s book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, in 1983, that most people learned there were descendants, after all. Genocide had taken place, but its ultimate purpose, extinction, had not.

So, in some ways, with this history of public knowledge that the colonisation of the Australian colonies produced population losses on a massive scale, it is a little curious to find, in the late 1990s, such strong public reaction to the idea that the concept of genocide could be applied to the Australian colonial past. The historians of the nineteenth century recognised the extermination of their own times, and some of them expressed anguish and concern; it was only later that indifference and denial set in. There are two aspects to the recent debates – questions of historical interpretation, and questions of definition. There have been angry debates over the nature and extent of child removal, and over the extent of killing on the frontier.46 There has also been discussion as to whether ‘genocide’ is an appropriate or a misleading term for characterising some or all of these events, a debate confused by the fact that in popular discussions ‘genocide’ is equated with mass killings of an entire people, appropriate only or mainly to the Holocaust, whereas in scholarly debate, as indicated above, the term has a much wider meaning, taking in various attempts to annihilate a people, including the taking of children. In a very real sense, national honour is seen to be at stake, just as it is for the Turkish historians who argue that what happened to the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and 1916 was a human tragedy but not an example of genocide. For others, national honour is better served by confronting the question of genocide directly.47

As the debate over the meanings of genocide, their relation to colonialism, and Australia’s place in a world history of genocide proceeds, as it surely will, the contribution of cultural historians will be essential. At the heart of the genocide debate is the question of identity, a quintessentially cultural question. The UN Convention definition refers to the attempt to destroy a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such’, while Lemkin speaks of the attempt to destroy one ‘national pattern’ and replace it with another. In other words, what is at stake is not only the killing of people, but also the attempt to eliminate some people’s sense of being a people, a distinct human group. That is why the question of the removal of children is so important in these debates, for it is clearly not about killing, but about the attempt to eradicate any sense of ‘peoplehood’, of national or ethnic or group identity.

NOTES

32 Apart from many monographs, there is the specialist journal, the Journal of Genocide Research.
33 See also Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Introduction – Genocide: Definitions, Questions, Settler Colonies’, Aboriginal History, vol. 25, 2001, pp. 1–15.
34 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, Washington, D.C., 1944, p. 79.
35 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, pp. xi, 79–80.
36 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79.
37 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79.
38 Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1997, pp. 1, 85–87, 97, 129, 403. See also David E. Stannard, American Holocaust:The Conquest of the New World, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992.
39 Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide, p. 422. Since this essay was written, Dirk Moses has written on this issue at length in ‘Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the “racial century”: genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 36, no. 4, 2002, pp. 7–36.
40 It had appeared in Swedish in 1991, but appeared in English translation only in 1997. I am using Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, Granta Books, London, 1998.
41 Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, pp. 123–24.
42 See Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, Second Edition, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p. 14 for the population estimate of 3–4000 and passim for the history of the destruction of Aboriginal societies in Tasmania.
43 Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, p. 130.
44 Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, p. 131.
45 Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes, p. 156 ff.
46 Robert Manne, In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, Schwartz Publishing, Melbourne, 2001. Keith Windschuttle, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian history’, parts I, II and III, Quadrant, October–December 2000.
47 See Aboriginal History, no. 25, 2001.

By Ann Curthoys in "Cultural History In Australia" edited by Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White, University of New South Wales Press Ltd, Sydney, Australia, 2008, excerpts pp.32-36. Adapted and illusrated do be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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