Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
2011, Rene Lemerchand (ed) Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial and Memory
Californian Indian societies, land is life. The affirmation of the aforementioned statement is based on the premise that land is necessary for their livelihood. A commonality that can be identified out of the three societies mentioned above is that they all lived off the land by means of hunting and eventually gathering. Faith to a great degree for natives all over the world, is inextricably bound to the use of the land. The San believed that there was no life without the land due to the spiritual enactment of it; Aboriginal people of Australia had a spiritual, physical and cultural connection to their land and Californian natives had a perception of the land as being sacred and a living being (Brady, 1998). Therefore, a contest for land can also be regarded as a contest for life. The most evident commonalties that is shared by all of the societies mentioned above is that they were virtually whipped out. Dr Mohamed Adhikari suggests that the main agents for the destruction of the Cape San societies was owing to the Dutch-speaking pastoralists whose homicidal form of acquiring land and the ecological damage caused from their farming exploits, virtually certified the
2016
Did frontier conflict in Australia amount to genocide? Answers to this question have revolved around topics such as contemporary understandings of the conflict, intent, the applicability of the term to Australian history and considerations of Indigenous agency. In this historiographical article, we argue that ‘genocide’ is a useful framework with which to understand the frontier experience in the Australian colonies. From that perspective, we provide a critical review of the literature up to the present.
ohamed Adhikari’s book The Anatomy of a South African Genocide is a synthesis of the research on the extermination of the San peoples of South Africa and aims to establish that such extermination must be considered genocide. Unfortunately, the book is based exclusively on published sources, and especially with regard to the nineteenth century, fails to consider archival and other sources that throw much light on the fate of the San, most notably the corpus of documents on the mission that the resident magistrate and civil commissioner of Namaqualand, Louis Anthing, undertook in 1862 to investigate reports of massacres of San bands in Bushmanland. Adhikari’s book also suffers from the fact that he refers to “the San”, while it is methodologically more correct to distinguish clearly between the different San populations and to address the history of specific groups in specific areas of southern Africa. Another major weakness is his placement of almost exclusive blame for the extermination of the San on “Dutch-speaking pastoralists”, downplaying sources that point to the heavy involvement of Baster, Griqua and Khoi groups in the destruction of the hunter-gatherer bands. The case study of Louis Anthing’s mission to Bushmanland, which proves that there was indeed genocide in Bushmanland in the second half of the nineteenth century, is presented in detail to show that an engagement with archival sources is essential to grasp the tragedy of the San in all its complexity.
2001, Aboriginal History
Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. So they took it. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People. Volume 3, Lemkinian Genocide as a Process, establishes the conceptual and analytical framework for examining any genocide.
2008, Journal of Genocide Research
Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. So they took it. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People. Volume 1, Introduction examines the insidious effect of creeping revisionism and whitewash into the Tasmanian genocide debate, where the role of the British Government can be lost.
2014, Aboriginal History, Vol 38, 2014, pp.225-227.
Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. So they took it. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, the songlines and traditions, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People. Volume 2, Context focuses directly on the British Imperium as the agency for intentional Tasmanian genocide and develops the semantic landscape through which we address revisionist counter-arguments against genocide.
This is a summary document of a more detailed semantic typology of mass killing and its variant terms, as they applied to Australia. The investigative methodology makes extensive use of modelling. Massacre events are presented as a nested type instance of the relevant process. Intentionality is embedded in any process along an abstraction gradient of nested decompositions. A method is introduced that allows the simulation of Government policy rules as constraints on a genetic algorithm, revealing an evolutionary genocidal process as a complex dynamical system with a determinable behaviour. Aboriginal population statistics are set out retrospectively and prospectively, using time series functional analysis.
Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. So they took it. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People.
2008, Journal of British Studies
2004, Journal of Genocide Research
Most puzzles begin with a question. That was the origination of this paper. The Question? How did Australia get to where it is now? Was there a pattern? Was the outcome inevitable? Can we learn? This paper sets out the provenance of Australia’s dispossessory rule-based order - legislative, behavioural - that gave us Lemkinian repression (genocide) and displacive environmental destruction (ecocide), and why we need a Bill of Rights to shape our evolving social contract. If only to save us from ourselves.
2018, Uncommon Wealths in Postcolonial Fiction
This is a meditational journey through evil , through collective and measurable psychosocial disorder, and how we may yet choose to respond as a civil society. For in murderously dispossessing the Aboriginals in an earlier century, we now seek to dispossess the Earth in this. There are few Australian laws for not doing so, either then or now. And religion is relatively mute. To some degree, our destructive behaviours have been inherited, probably epigenetically; a form of culturally acquired adaptation, which now threatens not only our own existence, but that of the biosphere. We live in an age of moral ambiguity but desperately need a transformational myth. Bigger than ourselves. To save us from ourselves.
2017, law&history
This article analyses humanitarian narratives that emerged in response to violence in New South Wales in the 1830s and argues that they make a revealing contribution to the antecedent history of human rights. The missionary Lancelot Threlkeld used his linguistic skills and access to Indigenous communities to collect and circulate testimony about violence and conflict. Threlkeld passed on such information in a variety of ways, for a variety of purposes and through a diverse network of correspondence and print. This article analyses how such testimony was framed within the language of colonial violence into humanitarian narratives, how it was mobilised for specific local and international effects, and how print culture mobilised (or countered) evidence of colonial conflict as part of broader debates about the British Empire, Indigenous peoples and the law. It argues for a nuanced approach to legal sources which enables us to see the crucial role of the Australian settler colonies in nascent human rights discourses and legal practices. The Supreme Court in New South Wales (established 1823) was a vehicle through which evangelical humanitarianism was mediated and circulated in the 1820s to 1830s cases in which Rev. Lancelot Threlkeld became involved. This was neither uncontroversial nor uncontested at the time; yet, crucially, the tension between humanitarian sensibilities and settler interests was fully present in the court room and in the court records, published at the time in the newspapers. Colonial law had only recently moved away from the preceding military system and, as a consequence, was open to debate and influence by a range of sectional interests. So, too, the English common law that had been brought to the colonies was a dynamic and contested discourse. Natural law, common law and public law was already a complex mix, which then took on new meanings in the context of what Ian Hunter terms the 'volatile tripartite relations' between settlers, governmental officials and Indigenous peoples. 1 Settlers and their lawyers, colonial governors working both independently and as conduits for the British Colonial Office, humanitarian agitators and the diverse polyglot of a mobile multicultural colonial world (including Indigenous people) used the law courts as crucial social institutions within which they tested their rights and responsibilities. This is particularly evident in the early foundational criminal law cases, in many of which Threlkeld and his Aboriginal collaborator Biraban played a role. They appeared at ten cases between 1827 and 1838 and were present at eight of the twenty-one NSW Supreme Court cases between 1827 and 1836 in which Aboriginal people were tried, convicted and executed. Their presence was usually solicited because of recognised problems with Aboriginal witness testimony and trying Aboriginal defendants in a system of which they had little knowledge and to which it had not yet been established they were subject. Threlkeld and Biraban assisted by translating and explaining legal procedures. 2 Heather Douglas and Mark Finnane rightly emphasise the distinctiveness of Australian colonial debates about law and sovereignty. 3 Yet comparisons with other colonial
2000, Journal of Genocide Research
2014, Lives in Migration: Rupture and Continuity. Australian Studies Centre UB (2011): 30-49. Barcelona, Spain. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/welcome.html</a. Legal deposit B.44596-2010 (E-book).
The case of territorial dispossession affecting Indigenous Australia (Aborigines and Torres-Straight Islanders) over the last two centuries, an instance of forced migration to the margins of white settler society, may speak back to European fears of displacement by the ethnic Other. This chapter analyses the ways in which Australian settler society has dealt with the Aboriginal population in its colonising thrust, and what strategies it has employed to effect Aboriginal cultural and physical displacement from their tribal lands in its aim to control vital resources. White frontier violence, the dispossession of ancestral country, the relocation to missions and reserves, child removal and institutionalisation have all played their role in a process of displacement often considered genocidal. The Indigenous law expert Larissa Berendt observes that “the political posturing and semantic debates do nothing to dispel the feeling Indigenous people have that [genocide] is the word that adequately describes our experience as colonized people” (in Moses 2005: 17). This essay will take Berendt’s cue in focusing on the plight and testimony of the Stolen Generations, a large group of mixed-descent children forcibly removed at great distances from their Aboriginal families and raised to fit into white society. Their vicissitudes have lately become visible, worded and documented in human-right reports, academic study and artistic and literary work. It is these children that became the main focus of assimilative government action; it is in their defencelessness that the breach of basic human rights is salient; it is also in their current recovery as Indigenous rather than white Australians that the resilience and ongoing presence of the Aboriginal communities and cultures are manifest, as shown in the Bringing-Them-Home Report. After an overview of Australian assimilative policies and these children’s location in these, this chapter will address their testimony of diasporic displacement in some representative Indigenous literary output from the state of Western Australia.
First, I want to show how the notion of nomadism has influenced the theoretical discussion in the last twenty years. This goal is driven by a benevolent critique of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s opus magnum A Thousand Plateaus, in which the authors postulate a smooth, unstructured nomadic space as an alternative to post-industrial capitalism. Second, I want to show how the notion of nomadism has served the interest of European settlers by defining Indigenous people as roaming primitives without culture. Third, I want to demonstrate how this discourse has made its entrance into the scientific discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fourth, I strive to underline the fact that nomadic space, at least in the Australian case, was highly structured or “striated” as Deleuze/Guattari would put it.
2009
Indigenous health is one of the most pressing issues confronting contemporary Australian society. In recent years government officials, medical practitioners, and media commentators have repeatedly drawn attention to the vast discrepancies in health outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. However a comprehensive discussion of Aboriginal health is often hampered by a lack of historical analysis. Accordingly this thesis is a historical response to the current Aboriginal health crisis and examines the impact of colonisation on Aboriginal bodies in Queensland during the early to mid twentieth century. Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources, including government correspondence, medical records, personal diaries and letters, maps and photographs, I examine how the exclusion of Aboriginal people from white society contributed to the creation of racially segregated medical institutions. I examine four such government-run institutions, which catered for Aboriginal health and disease during the period 1900-1970. The four institutions I examine – Barambah Aboriginal Settlement, Peel Island Lazaret, Fantome Island lock hospital and Fantome Island leprosarium – constituted the essence of the Queensland Government’s Aboriginal health policies throughout this time period. The Queensland Government’s health policies and procedures signified more than a benevolent interest in Aboriginal health, and were linked with Aboriginal (racial) management strategies. Popular perceptions of Aborigines as immoral and diseased directly affected the nature and focus of government health services to Aboriginal people. In particular the Chief Protector of Aboriginals Office’s uneven allocation of resources to medical segregation facilities and disease controls, at the expense of other more pressing health issues, specifically nutrition, sanitation, and maternal and child health, materially contributed to Aboriginal ill health. This thesis explores the purpose and rationales, which informed the provision of health services to Aboriginal people. The Queensland Government officials responsible for Aboriginal health, unlike the medical authorities involved in the management of white health, did not labour under the task of ensuring the liberty of their subjects but rather were empowered to employ coercive technologies long since abandoned in the wider medical culture. This particularly evident in the Queensland Government’s unwillingness to relinquish or lessen its control over diseased Aboriginal bodies and the continuation of its Aboriginal-only medical isolation facilities in the second half of the twentieth century. At a time when medical professionals and government officials throughout Australia were almost universally renouncing institutional medical solutions in favour of more community-based approaches to ill health and diseases, the Queensland Government was pushing for the creation of new, and the continuation of existing, medical segregation facilities for Aboriginal patients. In Queensland the management of health involved inherently spatialised and racialised practices. However spaces of Aboriginal segregation did not arise out of an uncomplicated or consistent rationale of racial segregation. Rather the micro-histories of Fantome Island leprosarium, Peel Island Lazaret, Fantome Island lock hospital and Barambah Aboriginal Settlement demonstrate that competing logics of disease quarantine, reform, punishment and race management all influenced the ways in which the Government chose to categorise, situate and manage Aboriginal people (their bodies, health and diseases). Evidence that the enterprise of public health was, and still is, closely aligned with the governance of populations.
The Myall Creek Massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people on 10 June 1838 (Figure 1), was one of the key events in the ongoing frontier war between settlers or intruders and the various Aboriginal peoples of Australia. The massacre was an act of brutal murder, for which eleven non-Aboriginal perpetrators were tried and seven were hanged. As Lyndall Ryan points out in another chapter in this book, there had been a number of mass killings of Gomeroi and Wirrayaraay people in the region over the previous year with the loss of many hundreds of lives. The Myall Creek Massacre of 28 Wirrayaraay people and subsequent trial had a direct impact on policing in the colony, and affected the lives of people from different Aboriginal nations across eastern Australia. In this chapter we explore the aftermath of the Myall Creek Massacre in Queensland, where a Native Police force was formed a decade later. We also examine evidence for Aboriginal responses to the event in the past and the present, considering how people from different Aboriginal groups at the time may have heard about Myall Creek and other violent clashes with white settlers, and how their families remember frontier conflict today.
2000, Journal of Postcolonial Writing
This is an essay on values. Australian post-contact history has a shape defined by its evolving juridical constraints, by its Constitutional purpose, by its legislative provisions, by its professed values, by its changing rule-based order, that deliver the nation’s momentum and trajectory through time. This shape, the shape of our history, delimits our society, our structure, and our body politic; it confers our sense of who we are as, buoyed by settler triumphalism, we march into multi-cultural pluralism and an uncertain future, clouded by climate change and a history of Aboriginal repression. Australia Felix. Our nation’s mateship character has inherited a debilitating morbidity. Unequal. Racist. Exploitative. Fearful. Historical amnesia. The great Australian silence. The rise of right-wing extremism and Trump-style identity politics. We are now in denial. Lies become truths. Truth is relative. Opinion is fact. Myths are reality. Democracy is for sale, along with the environment and our basic rights. Can we change? Do we want to? Perhaps it is already too late. From the destruction of Aboriginal society, we now seem intent on destroying the biosphere in whole or part, a persisting Lemkinian pattern for as long as economic considerations overrule environmental and humanitarian concerns. We should have expected it. The persecution and impoverishment of Aboriginal society came with a subrogated human cost. We now expect to delay the cost of climate change and transfer it to other generations. Both outcomes arise from exploitative normative behaviour, from our values. To avert an imperiling national emergency, an existential threat to our home and way of life, an impending tragedy that is self-imposed through our inability to act strategically against the worst effects of human-induced climate change, this document argues for a transformational myth, one that re-engages us with respect for the Earth, a respect that allowed Aboriginal people to live sustainably in a way to which we should all aspire, where the rights of the biosphere are protected, where Nature is not owned as property, where Aboriginal people have a treaty-recognized voice, where fundamental rights – of humans, of Nature - are set out in Australia’s Constitution as a Bill of Rights, a positive and more substantial foundation for our rule-based order. Aboriginal people were right: The Earth is our Mother and we are her children, for now and all the generations to come. Unless we dishonor her. We can become scavengers or builders. It is up to us.
Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek in south-east Queensland. Myth is the handmaiden of reality, a more onerous citizenship. It can be ignored. Or cast aside as quaint folklore from another time. Or it can be explored and possibly verified or refuted. What cannot be discounted: myth forms a large part of the Australian historical landscape. For over a century, Australia was a war zone. It was a war for land and Aboriginals were in the way. A firestorm of massacres defined the pastoral frontier as it advanced across the continent. Many of these massacres have achieved the element of myth, untested, insufficiently examined. One of them is the reported massacre at Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. This paper proposes investigative tools that can help decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide. We remind ourselves that racism is the belief that one race considers itself superior to another. Perhaps history is not so far removed after all.
2006, Transforming Cultures Ejournal
The arrival of European agriculturalists emphatically disrupted the foraging economies of Australia Aboriginal peoples. Introduced farming based on non-native species was practiced over southern and eastern Australia, while much of arid and tropical Australia supported ranch pastoralism. Thus the primary setting for culture contact between Aboriginal societies and outsiders involved agrarian colo-nialism. In this configuration, some hunter-foragers became herders, domestic animal handlers, and gardeners. The transformation occurred quickly, within a single generation, although was essentially 'uneven' across families, kin groups, and regions. Much of the unevenness resulted from the social and political realities of colonial Australia, alongside environmental parameters. While Australia provides insight into how foraging societies transformed when faced with farmers, these changes occurred in specific historical contexts wherein the contingencies of agrarian colonialism greatly restricted the range of possibilities for Aboriginal people while destabilizing prevailing indigenous anthropogenic environments. This paper argues for an archaeology of agrarian Australia that aims to understand the emergence of Australian historical landscapes from combined Holocene Australian and Early Modern European roots. Crown
2014, Partages d’Espaces : Regards Croisés sur l’Art et la Géopolitique
The “History Wars” have paralysed the scholarly discussion on genocide in Australian history, because genocide is regarded as a politicized concept that distorts historical understanding. Both the public sphere and much historiography continue to regard genocide as a synonym for the Holocaust, framing public discussion of genocide in Australia as well as discouraging historians from engaging with the international comparative literature on colonial genocides. This article aims to stimulate reflection on these issues by explaining the origin and meaning of the term in intellectual and legal history. It suggests that thinking of genocide as a form of extreme counter-insurgency helps us comprehend how colonial violence unfolds. Finally, it highlights some potential limitations of the concept in understanding the Indigenous experience of colonial genocide, before suggesting how historians can deploy it in the service of scholarship rather than “History War"
Queensland Aboriginals suffered a rolling genocide across multiple phases from invasion to deportation and repression, group by group, area by area. We deconstruct this fractal-like process in a companion volume. For now, we will briefly focus on one particular language group (the Kabi of the Sunshine Coast) for one particular phase of Lemkinian repression (deportation and detention to Barambah). We find that there are disturbing similarities between genocidal aetiology and morbidity for Barambah (Kabi) and Wybalenna (Palawa). We are led to the conclusion that the Queensland Government might have learned from the humanitarian disaster of Wybalenna, but instead chose to replicate the Tasmanian process and its genocidal mechanics.
Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process, while the war for land raged across the continent for a century or more. Aboriginals were an impediment to a blitzkrieg of settler occupation. Aboriginal dispersal was abetted by a Government process that included military (at first) and then police enforcement. Heavily armed pastoralists were encouraged to take the law into their own hands, if they did it circumspectly, under the guise of self-protection. Aboriginals resisted, but the war was too one-sided. The reward for resistance was to be shot or hanged. British law did not allow Aboriginals to own land, not until well into the 20th century. Until then, Aboriginal dispossession was legal, leaving the First People as trespassers. With no where else to go they became refugees. Detention centres became the Government answer to the Aboriginal problem. And a ruthless boot on the neck. Over 90% of the Aboriginal population ‘disappeared’ by 1911. We see the pattern of invasive occupation repeat for all states, including Queensland. From the early 1860s, almost all the available pastoral areas in south east Queensland had been taken over by British settlers seeking their fortune. Many leases remained a battleground. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse.
Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. The massacre was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost.
This is an essay on Australian values, what we hold important; how these values affect our changing multi-dimensional social contract, the prescriptive relationship between people (involved parties) and the State; and why we need a superordinate Bill of Rights. Australian post-contact history has a shape defined by its evolving value-embedded juridical constraints - by its Constitutional purpose, by its legislative provisions, by its beliefs about what is right or wrong and what is important, by its changing rule-based order, by its social contracts - that deliver the nation’s momentum and trajectory through time. We are now in denial. Lies become truths. Truth is relative. Opinion is fact. Myths are reality. Democracy is for sale, along with the environment and our basic rights. We trade freedom for security. Slogans and ‘fake news’ replace critical thought. Dangers are irrationally dismissed. Indigenous disadvantage is ignored. ‘Jobs over the environment’, we chant. Can we change? Do we want to? To avert any imperilling national emergency, any existential threat to our body politic and way of life, any impending tragedy that is self-imposed through our inability to act critically or strategically against the worst effects of human-induced climate change or other future shocks, this document argues for a transformational myth, one that re-engages us with respect for the Earth, a respect that allowed Aboriginal people to live sustainably in a way to which we should all aspire, where the rights of the biosphere are protected, where Nature does not have to be owned as property, where Aboriginal people have a treaty-recognized voice, where fundamental rights – of humans, of the First people, of Nature - are set out in Australia’s Constitution as a Bill of Rights, a positive and more substantial foundation for our rule-based order as we look towards an increasingly perilous and unpredictable future. Denial must become formalized acceptance, accountability and optimism. Aboriginal people were right: The Earth is our Mother and we are her children, for now and all the generations to come. Unless we dishonor her. We can become scavengers or builders. It is up to us.
The destructive effect of the Stolen Generations upon Indigenous Australians across the continent has been total. White colonial society, indisposed to interact with Aborigines on human terms, possessed by political fanaticism and ideation of universal dominance, compelled by religious ideology, could never have reached an understanding with Australia's Aborigines. Colonialists' heedless, arrogant violations of traditional Australian law, eventually culminating in the extreme assimilationist policies to which the Stolen Generations have been subjected, must be viewed through the victim's lens in order to appreciate to any degree the totality of destruction inflicted upon their culture.
Things are not always as they seem. What may appear different – say genocide and ecocide - can have a common provenance in predatory displacement that follows a shared set of type constraint rules; what seems homeomorphic can have different originations, for example, the similar-looking accusatory remains of disparate life forms: the bones of destroyed trees and the bones of murdered Aboriginal people. Reality – or how we interpret it - depends on where we are in the ontological process, how far into the past that we can explore. And whether we can deconstruct our myths and beliefs, to form verifiable patterns for our agency. When we examine Australian history since the British invasion of 1788, we find there is a recurring theme: enforced (de facto de jure) economic exploitation using asymmetric power. Within such exploitation, there is a pattern: invasive pastoralism. Pastoralism drove violent Aboriginal dispossession, the theft of their land; it now drives environmental destruction and species extinction. Of course, there are co-factors such as mining and agriculture and the grotesque expansion of urban centres, but the pattern is clear. The rise of pastoral triumphalism was built on the bodies of Aboriginal people; it destroyed ecosystems for economic motivations; the after-effects are still with us, the behavioural morbidity embedded in our collective agency: Lemkinian repression, environmental degradation. This paper deconstructs the deep relationship between genocide and ecocide. It asks the question, Can we change? And, if so, how?
2014, Thinking and Practicing Reconciliation: Literary and Pedagogical Responses to Atrocity
Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Should it be accountable? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?
In my original introduction to 'Conspiracy of Silence, Queensland’s frontier killing times' (Allen & Unwin 2013) my publisher was adamant that the argument that I proffered of genocide should be removed as it would ‘turn off’ some who might otherwise buy the book, and that by the time they had read it, they would come to that conclusion anyway. It was more important to me that the truth about frontier violence should be readily available for the general public than that the argument about genocide be made. The topic is an extremely emotive one in Australia and so I acquiesced to my publisher's wishes, but for those interested I wanted the paper to be available. Having looked at the generally accepted parameters of what constitutes genocide, I have found that the Queensland frontier does indeed satisfy those parameters.
This is a short book which tries to accomplish two things at once: on the one hand it is intended as an overview of the principle predominant concerns and ideas about the relationship between the white/black relations and constitutive prevalent structures of symbolic universe of Aboriginal Literature; and, on the other , it is an attempt to develop a critical stance towards these ideas, with the hope of providing a new and more satisfactory account of this relationship in the form of creating a new critical discursive space within the dominant discursive space. These two aims are not unrelated to one another. As will become apparent in the text, one of the major themes that emerges from the description I give of the main positions which have been taken on this matter is the intimate connection that exists between the ideas that we have and the sort of life that Aborigines were forced to live. This book examines the issues of identity, aboriginality and a sense of belongingness from the viewpoints of three autobiographies, proposing a new model of creating a new discursive space within the dominant discursive space. It critically discusses the Australian Aboriginal model―a new epistemological terrain―which would become an emancipatory dialogue of discourse, having potentiality to bring transformation in Australian Aboriginal Community. It will be of interest to students and researchers of the post-colonial studies, to those engaged in ‗Australian Aboriginal Studies‘, and indeed to all those who are concerned to know what are some of the major concerns of Aboriginal Writings.
Deaconess Winifred Hilliard arrived at the Presbyterian Ernabella mission craftroom in far north-west South Australia in 1954 to work as a qualified missionary. She was 33.Her job: to work among Pitjantjatjara women as the ‘handcraft supervisor’ at the mission. The art history of Ernabella (Pukatja) is arguably the last neglected narrative of first-generation, postcontact Indigenous art-making among Australian Western Desert peoples. The history of Papunya Tula artists, a painting movement begun in 1971 by men in association with a white male cultural-broker, has become ubiquitous shorthand for Western Desert art.2 The beginnings and practices of the Hermannsburg watercolour artists, begun by men, has enjoyed a revival of interest. The influence of Ernabella art made by women remains obscure, a mere footnote to this art history. This paper discusses how the role of its long-serving female art-broker and the influential intercultural brokerage role she carried out is germane to this.
It is the usual prerogative of the victor or dominant cohort in some asymmetric struggle-economic, environmental, ideological-to dictate the terms of engagement over some contested space and set out the preferred facts of history in a belligerent form of historical revisionism. It is both the strength and failure of social systems that they are tribal, whether a political party, or landed class, or history's gatekeepers, or any other defined group. We form clubs of common interest, self-interest, with staked territories and borders, a Kuhnian landscape, enclaves of us and them, domains of inclusion and exclusion that reinforce our territorial interests, our ownership of things, a proprietorial behaviour that gave us slavery and other forms of unsustainable exploitation including the misuse of fellow species and entire ecologies. We are told what to think and coerced in what to believe, blind to ecocide, ignorant of genocide. While economic determinism may have been the British motive in Tasmania, what we now call Lemkinian genocide was the means. In colonial times, it was called extirpation, but different names do not expunge common agency. We will set out the patterned agency-the aetiology and logistics-of violent Palawa dispossession by the British Government that replicated to all other parts of Australia, leaving Aboriginal society to become refugees in their own land, group by group. It was a pattern that was to repeat across the continent in a practised modality, the procedural mechanics of slaughter. Across the continent, by the time of the 1911 census, more than 90% of Aboriginal people had 'disappeared'. There was little comment on their passing, and an amount of measured relief. Pastoralists and the political class could finally claim juridical and economic sovereignty over the land. Legitimacy was another question. Has anything changed today? We now have those with capital and those without, the 99%, the working poor. Within this disadvantaged group, Aboriginal society is now less than 3%, their voice lost in rising multiculturalism and the empty doctrine of prosperity theology. Criminogenic intent remains with us still,
2012
The implications of the European colonization of Australia, beginning in 1788, have affected nearly all socio-cultural patterns of Indigenous peoples’ lives. The colonial governments’ efforts at the westernization of Aboriginal groups yielded devastating consequences, including, inter alia, legal discrimination against and physical mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Although several Australian historians and anthropologists had sought to equate these practices to the acts of genocide in the past (Evans, 1988; Reynolds, 1981) it was not until the mid-1990s when the discourse of Aboriginal genocide started to gain momentum and elicit public interest.
2018, Genocide Studies International
Human rights are not (if even considered) prominent within typical nationalist discourses. Nation alism has preoccupations with wars, empire, heroism, common struggles, or self-righteousness. The national past is typically praised within patriotic narratives because this illustrates the idealized characteristics of identity. For the worst twentieth century examples of nationalism (and related political ideologies), it is accepted that their violence emanated from implementing and justifying their philosophies. The language of "human rights" is routinely utilized in relation to these exam ples, particularly in the field of history. Nations associated with liberalism, democracy, and "moral progress" (such as Britain, America, or Australia) are also attached to heroic nationalist narratives, but these narratives are widely held (by themselves) to be self-evidently true. Such nations have long associations with the principles of post-1945 international law and human rights declarations, but have been selective in their support for human rights. This is mirrored by a willingness to ignore (downplay or even justify) human rights controversies within their own pasts. Genocide Studies International 12, 2 (Fall 2018): 208–226. © 2018 Genocide Studies International. doi: 10.3138/gsi.12.2.05
2013, Before the Anzac Dawn: A military history of Australia before 1915 edited by Craig Stockings, John Connor