Sally Ghattas, University of Sydney
History in the Making, Vol 6 (December 2018)
Unwriting the Great Australian Silence is an historiographical paper on frontier conflict in early Van Diemen’s Land, which attempts to move beyond the polarising rhetoric of the ‘History Wars’ and probe the deeper historical and philosophical questions underpinning the debate. It focuses on the respective characterisations of the conflict as ‘warfare’ and ‘genocide,’ considering whether the two frameworks might be reconciled and the methodological and philosophical implications of this reconciliation. Without adhering to the homogenising logic of the ‘black armband’ label, it focuses on a group of historians traditionally grouped under this term and seeks to understand how they illuminate different facets of this complex, vexed history – but also how their approaches and underlying theories help us to further consider the problems in writing history itself.
The Australian War Memorial’s 2017 ‘Colonial Conflicts’ exhibition celebrates Australia’s “early military history from European settlement,” the caption proudly proclaims, to remember the support of the British Empire in the wars of others: in the Sudan, New Zealand, China, and South Africa.[1] The War Memorial, however, has repeatedly refused to recognise the ‘colonial’ conflicts on Australia’s own soil: most controversially, Tasmania’s ‘Black War’ (1828 – 1832), one of the most violent eruptions of conflict on the Australian frontier.
The Australian War Memorial’s refusal to commemorate frontier conflict is a remnant of what anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner so memorably termed the “great Australian silence” in 1969 – a structural cult of forgetfulness not only reflected in Australian histories, but created by them.[2] With the outbreak of Australia’s ‘History Wars’ in the late-1980s, Tasmania became the fraught, contested, and politicised fighting ground of the ‘white blindfold’ and ‘black armband’ historians in the heated aftermath of the Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, or the Bringing Them Home report. The History Wars, then, were as political as they were scholarly. This investigation seeks to understand how historians embroiled in this intellectual and representational, but also deeply political, war have understood and characterised the conflict in early Van Diemen’s Land. But comparative analyses of the two diametrically opposed schools have been exhausted, and the tensions are overwhelmingly self-evident.[3] And in the words of prolific Aboriginal poet Tony Birch, the History Wars were a “phoney war” – it was not a “legitimate discussion on the production of history” for many of the participants, but a “strategic plaything” to “assist particular ideological positions.”[4] Moving away from the “tabloid dualities”[5] of the History Wars, we can find a rich body of frontier histories that demand closer reflection – not insofar as they respond to and defend themselves against the critics and journalists in the ‘white blindfold’ camp, but as histories in and of themselves. We might then begin to ask more illuminating questions about our national history: if this violence warrants the label ‘war,’ what are the implications of understanding the Tasmanian Aboriginals as co-belligerents? Of writing Indigenous agency into Australia’s national history? This question of Indigenous agency has problematised the other polemical debate within the ‘school’ that has coloured Tasmanian history: can we refer to this conflict as ‘genocide’? Must genocide and war be mutually exclusive frameworks?
The black armband, a symbol of protest and grief originating in Ancient Egypt, only came to be associated with Australian history and politics when Professor Geoffrey Blainey used the phrase to refer a group of historians who, he said, “swung the pendulum” towards a “jaundiced,” “gloomy” history.[6] Blainey may have coined this phrase, but it gained its political purchase in Australian discourse because of his close affiliation with John Howard. When Howard came to power in early 1996, his government was intent on undoing what they perceived as the “politically correct” revision of history by Paul Keating and the left-wing elite.[7] “Never before,” Graeme Davison observed, had “historians occupied as prominent a place in Australian public life”; never before had historians informed inquiries into custody deaths, child removals, or been weaponised in the legal battles for land rights.[8] Now commonplace, Blainey’s term has obscured interesting developments within the so-called ‘black armband’ school in favour of polemics. This investigation will trace a series of historians with different focuses, conceptualisations of violence, terminologies, approaches, and backgrounds. All, however, contribute interesting perspectives on the conflict(s) in Tasmania – and, also, provoke greater conceptual and methodological questions on the act of writing history itself. As part of the ‘new imperial’ history, this scholarship grapples with the problems of writing Indigenous histories and agency in the face of historical silences, national myths, and, practically speaking, a lack of sources created by Indigenous peoples. The question of colonial genocide, moreover, foregrounds the competing philosophies underpinning this debate – the tensions between individual agency and structure, as historians ask: can genocide be inherent to the colonial project, or must it be located in individual intent? The wars within the ‘black armband’ school remain relevant to historians and contemporary Australia, representing a historical contest over Australian national identity, history, and commemoration.
Reviewing Australia’s historiographical literature in 1959, John La Nauze was struck by the absence of Aboriginal peoples – an absence, he argued, that testified to Australia’s unique history, which lacked a “formidable opposition by the native inhabitants.”[9] The “Aboriginal,” he continued, “is noticed in our history only in a melancholy anthropological footnote.”[10] It was not until the 1970s that this historical silence met a serious challenge from academic historians. The most notable works that challenged this myth and foregrounded “the Aboriginal” as subject were produced with the new imperial turn – triggered, in Australia, by intensifying Indigenous activism in the 1970s that coincided with the anti-Vietnam movement. Henry Reynolds, Australia’s preeminent Tasmanian historian and the famous face of the ‘black armband’ school, sought to undermine what he identified as Australia’s twin, foundational myths of the accommodating Aborigine and peaceful settlement.[11] Overturning the prevailing conception of the friendly but pitiful Aborigine, The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) rewrote Aboriginal people as resisters, foregrounding them as active historical agents: “Black resistance,” he writes, “was inescapable.”[12] Particularly striking was that Reynolds turned history ‘inside out,’ approaching the issue through Aboriginal people’s eyes and incorporating often fragmentary evidence from journals, newspapers, diaries, and official documents. But it was his use of oral histories in particular that distinguished his work. Oral histories, as Miranda Johnson articulated in 2014, remain vital to writing Indigenous “heterogeneity” into academic history[13] and rectifying the epistemic violence of subjugated forms of knowledge[14] – a shift Reynolds was important in instigating in Tasmanian and Australian history.
With the publication of Keith Windschuttle’s The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (2004), Tasmania was foregrounded as the site of contestation. This contestation over frontier history was situated firmly within the battles over the Stolen Generations; both frontier violence and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children were exaggerated, if not wholly fabricated, stories produced by the ‘guilt industry.’[15] By this time, publications such as Quadrant, under Padraic McGuinness, had helped to campaign against the Bringing Them Home report. While the problems with Windschuttle’s work have been exhaustively (and satisfyingly) noted, his history is worth consideration here only insofar as it helps us understand the emphasis on and significance of ‘warfare’ as a framework through which to understand Tasmanian history.[16] Rather than a “war” over country, Windschuttle asserted that the conflict was triggered by Aboriginal greed, motivated simply by a desire for revenge and British products.[17] Because the Indigenous Tasmanians (supposedly) possessed no word for, or concept of, property or trespass, Windschuttle suggested that the Tasmanians were not resisting territorial occupation, nor were they fighting a war.[18] The violence was instead, he argued, an expression of what we might now recognise as criminality[19]; their actions were “nothing more than what would be recognised as crimes in any human culture, robbery, assault and murder.”[20]
In A History of Tasmania (2011), Reynolds went on to dedicate a chapter to the ‘Black War.’ The Tasmanian Aboriginal people were here characterised as “effective warriors,”[21] who “[fell] in defence of their country…to retain their…independence.”[22] Stressing the extent to which Aboriginal resistance transformed British life, Reynolds challenged the prevailing myth of a peaceful Australian history, where the central struggle was “with the land,” rather than “a fight for possession of it.”[23] Reynolds also emphasised the effectiveness and innovation of Aboriginal resistance, noting, for instance, Aboriginal people’s adoption of dogs, which they “quickly incorporated” – a “remarkable example of rapid, creative acculturation.”[24] So effective and so persistent was Aboriginal resistance, he argued, that “almost everyone” in Tasmanian society “felt emotionally, if not physically, engaged in the conflict.”[25] For Reynolds, there was no doubt that contemporaries understood the violence in Tasmania as “warfare.”[26] If Windschuttle had argued that the British had never regarded the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as warriors or opponents because their violence was merely petty criminality,[27] Reynolds drew from sources like the Launceston Independent to examine the contemporary discourse among the colonists: “We are at war with them…they resist our invasion,” wrote one correspondent, ‘J.E.’[28] In drawing from such commentaries, Reynolds suggested that contemporaries did not contest that this violence constituted “war” – only whether this war was morally justified. Reynolds also examined the treatment of the captured Aboriginals, which he insisted differed from that of “captured bushrangers”; rather than being chained, the remnant band of the Mairremminer people in 1831 carried spears when meeting with the governor. They were thus “treated as prisoners of war rather than criminals or rebels,” as instructed by London officials, Reynolds concludes.[29] Reynolds’ background in Tasmanian history and his portrayal of the varied experiences of settlers, convicts, and bushrangers allowed him to rigorously examine the circulating moral debates, thereby deconstructing the simplistic perception that the colonists saw the Aboriginal peoples as savages, destined to a sad but inevitable extinction. If the turn of the twentieth century had brought with it the perception of the sea as the “only frontier Australians have ever contemplated,” as poetically articulated by Arthur Adams in 1920, Reynolds played a principal role in reminding us of the violence and resistance that characterised the Australian frontier.[30] The ‘forgetting’ of Indigenous resistance, Reynolds asserts, prevailed only in twentieth century histories with the growth of Australian nationalism – not historically among the contemporaries on the frontier.[31] For Reynolds, “the central question then becomes why conflict between colonists and Aborigines has never been accorded the same status as even minor overseas engagements.”[32] Reynolds’ history is thus deeply concerned with memorialisation and memory, especially amid the “militarisation” of Australian history that still neglects to tell the stories of conflicts on our own frontier.[33]
In 2014, Reynolds wrote the foreword to Nicholas Clements’s The Black War. Reynolds had examined white fear to buttress his argument on Indigenous resistance, but Clements then shifted the focus to fear as the dominant, and shared, emotion on the frontier. In the first social history on the Black War, Clements embraces a ‘bottom-up’ approach, examining the experiences in the war zone. Bringing Indigenous people and settlers into the same analytical ground,[34] Clements unsettles comfortable binaries of natives and colonists, heroes and villains.[35] How, then, does an historian write the experience of the colonists, while recovering the Indigenous voice? In both his doctoral thesis and The Black War, Clements divides each chapter under the headings ‘black’ and ‘white’. Acknowledging the “semantic and political problems” of this terminology, Clements specifies that the terms “are reflective of [the] divisiveness that characterised frontier relations.”[36] In the preface to The Black War, he further articulates his intention to “remind us that our forebears, black and white, were the same as you and me: imperfect mammals who generally did what they thought was right, or at least, what they felt was necessary.”[37] Empathy, he writes, is “indispensable to the historian’s craft.”[38] In seeking to write this ‘empathetic’ history, and using the second person to address us, Clements conveys the genuine fear of the colonists; “just as frontiersmen encountered few…obstacles to killing Aborigines, they had very little protection against being killed themselves [and so] many colonists killed Aborigines as much from a sense of self-preservation as from feelings of hatred and lust.”[39] For Clements, the effectiveness of the Tasmanian guerrilla fighters “places them in a similar league to the Māori,” in the fear they instilled in the colonists.[40] In dedicating a sub-heading to “comparisons” of the “black” and “white” perspectives, Clements seeks to establish common ground between the colonists and Indigenous Tasmanians, building on Reynolds’s problematisation of binary oppositions. If Reynolds established the frontier as a place of violent conflict, Clements further characterised the frontier as a messy place marked by characters with complicated motivations, as they merely fought for causes they “believed” to be right – or, at least, necessary.
Faced with the absence of Aboriginal sources, Clements also effectively ‘reads against the grain,’ or employs what Inga Clendinnen termed the ‘silent-film’ strategy: reading colonial sources without the colonial commentary, looking, instead, to extract Indigenous perspectives.[41] In reading against the grain, Clements draws on Rhys Isaac’s dramaturgical method for examining social interactions “at a molecular level,”[42] a method which helps him understand the Aboriginal actors, but also the frontiersmen, from whom we are also separated by a “cultural gulf,” Clements reminds us.[43] Although he admits that Isaacs’s strategy is most effective when those described in the sources can understand and interpret each other’s linguistic and behavioural tropes, Clements insists that it has still been useful in understanding and analysing the “action statements” in the colonial sources.[44] In attempting to interpret the behaviours, emotions, and motivations of both the colonists and the Aboriginal people on the frontier, Clements writes that two strategies guided him: first, keeping in mind the basic human necessities driving the actors – food, water, safety, rest; and, second, a first-hand understanding of the Tasmanian landscape, climate, and resources.[45] Throughout his work, he also shifts his terminology to reflect the level of his speculation: from ‘unlikely,’ to ‘possible,’ to ‘undoubtedly.’ Using the journals of George Augustus Robinson, Clements draws on his descriptions of Aboriginal testimony and actions to better understand Aboriginal motivations.[46] He examines the context of arson and stock killing by the Aboriginal people, arguing that that it was a political tactic which intended to intimidate the frontiersmen. And in contesting Windschuttle’s argument that Aboriginal resistance was inspired by “criminality”[47] by arguing that the Aboriginal peoples “knew nothing of British law,”[48] Clements reads into an article from the 1830 Hobart Town Courier, which observed the “natural tactics of war available” to the Aboriginal peoples.[49] This methodological tactic and active reflection on sources is especially important in writing Indigenous histories, allowing Clements to reconstruct a “rich, albeit incomplete picture of Aboriginal…experiences,” despite the “poverty of the ethnographic record.”[50]
If this understanding of the Aboriginal Tasmanians as co-belligerents uncovered a hitherto unwritten history of resistance, it also complicated another persistent question in Tasmanian historiography: the genocide question. And it is here that the ‘black armband’ label seems especially insufficient and unproductive, concealing more interesting, more illuminating disagreements that speak to the subconscious philosophies underlying these histories. While the genocide framework is associated with this supposedly left-wing ‘school,’ this framework has been its most contested ground after ‘genocide’ moved to the forefront of national consciousness with the 1997 Bringing Them Home Report. Aboriginal child removals, the report concluded, constituted an act of genocide according to Article II(e) of the United Nation’s 1948 Genocide Convention, whereby the forcible removal of children from a group with the intention of destroying that group constitutes genocide, sparking a debate that questioned the very legitimacy of the nation. In An Indelible Stain? (2001), Reynolds had argued that child removals indeed constituted genocide; frontier dispersals in Tasmania, however, did not. ‘Genocide’ thus more accurately reflects Queensland’s child removal policies than the Tasmanian frontier. Reynolds’s discussion of genocide here differs from traditional approaches in genocide studies and research in that it is highly attuned to the importance of local histories and groups of Aboriginal peoples. And in Queensland, Reynolds argued, we can speak of genocide because “settlers and police systematically pursued particular groups of Aborigines with the intention of destroying them.”[51] It was this systematic pursuit and intention that, Reynolds maintained, was absent in Tasmania,[52] and it is on intention that his claim of genocide hinges. The emphasis on systematic pursuit and intent conveys Reynolds’ fixation on intent as located in the state body. For Reynolds, one must examine “the attitude of the Colonial Office,” because only then “can we come closer to the question of genocide.”[53] In his examination of the Colonial Office, Reynolds found no evidence of a government policy to destroy a people – it sought control over the island, not extermination.[54] Reynolds pays particular attention to the humanitarian Governor Arthur,[55] who professed that “natives” must be treated “with the utmost kindness”[56]; “we have made every effort in our power to save the aboriginal race from being exterminated,” he famously stated.[57] Even the Black Line of 1830, directed by Arthur, was not designed to exterminate, Reynolds suggests, but to protect. Reynolds, however, neglects to mention that it is simply “unlikely” that documents would express an intent to destroy, in John Docker’s words.[58] London’s imperial authorities, Docker continues, would not clearly express the ‘smoking gun’ of intent that Reynolds seems to be looking for, positioning themselves instead as “honourable colonisers.”[59]
Reynolds’ need to locate this ‘systematic’ intent in a state decision to destroy leaves the relationship between genocide and colonialism uninterrogated, as he focuses instead on individual actors. In stressing the “agency of the state,” Reynolds professes the classic liberal view on genocide identified by Dirk Moses, which neglects to consider the social forces preceding the war.[60] While acknowledging that the British had “no intention to arrive as guests,” or ask for permission “to acquire land,” Reynolds fails to examine the implications or genocidal potential of the settler colonial logic.[61] Perhaps this derives from his reliance on the UN definition of genocide, especially Article II, where genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy” – an intent that Reynolds cannot find in the British authorities, nor their Tasmanian representatives.[62] It seems that Reynolds interprets Article II to mean that ‘genocide occurs only when we find a clearly articulated intent to destroy.’ But Article II does not specify what constitutes ‘intent,’ nor from whom it must derive. So while Reynolds even concedes that there was mention of ‘extermination’ among officials, this does not satisfy his “self-imposed” definition of genocide as a formally authorised, systematic policy.[63] In his reliance on this legal definition, Reynolds adopts what Docker has described as a “juridical” persona, acting as a presiding judge, but also “counsel” for the British defence.[64] In adopting the role of juror, Reynolds neglects the contingent factors that radicalised British policy and the logic underpinning colonial presence.
If we move beyond the polarising rhetoric of the History Wars, we can see that Reynolds’ conception of intent as state-sponsored mass-murder and his characterisation of the ‘moral’ British state bears some resemblance to Windschuttle’s model of the British state. Both position their rejection of the ‘genocide’ framework in response to Helen Fein’s notation that Tasmania featured as one of Raphaël Lemkin’s case studies on genocide.[65] Both then contest this by positioning the British government as the moral force, as the source of restraint on the violent colonists. “Left to themselves,” Reynolds writes, “the settlers would have eventually wiped out the tribes of central Tasmania.”[66] Less plausibly, Windschuttle discusses the morality of the colonists, a claim substantiated by no sources other than their self-proclaimed Christianity, which he fails to interrogate.[67] Considering the ‘unconscious’ underpinning these albeit very different histories, however, reveals similar conceptions of individual agency as the key determinant in historical causation and thus the basis of genocide.[68] This characteristically liberal view, in Moses’s critique, perceives of the state in “Rankean terms, as an individual personality” where “genocide is held to issue from ideologies.”[69] This characterisation also fails to examine how these ideas of extermination exist prior to the outbreak of violence; to understand how they are rooted in civil society.[70] These explanations treat the state as if it exists separate to broader social forces – in this case, the settler colonial logic. In examining only state or individual ‘intention,’ these histories do not consider how the Tasmanian case existed within the context of modernising and colonising societies that sought to “sequester indigenous land and kill its owners if they resisted.”[71] It must be stressed, however, that Windschuttle seeks to exculpate the colonists and accuse historians of fabricating violence. Albeit working from a perhaps unsatisfactory definition of genocide, it seems that Reynolds may have implicitly associated genocide with two prevailing frameworks that he had worked to disprove: first, the “patronising view of the Aborigines as helpless but pathetic victims of the colonists’ murderous impulses”[72]; and, second, with the myth of Aboriginal extinction that pervaded Tasmanian history: “In a literal sense,” it was “clearly” not a genocide because the “Aborigines survived.”[73] Reynolds’s history thus testifies to the need to develop greater dialogue between local histories and the conceptual rigour of genocide scholarship – and, importantly, to the perceived incompatibility between war and genocide, which has no basis in any working definition of genocide.
Clements’s intervention in the genocide debate is often reduced to his “support” for Reynolds,[74] which neglects to consider the distinct implications of, and assumptions within, his own argument. In a short section addressing the genocide conundrum, Clements writes that Reynolds has “demonstrated convincingly that the government did not intend to destroy.”[75] While including the same reference to the UN Convention – again, without citing Lemkin – Clements proceeds to draw comparisons between ‘exemplar’ genocides and Tasmania, thus working from an ideal-type model that supersedes the UN definition that he himself has quoted. Clements invokes these comparisons without pursuing their conceptual or even historical relationship.[76] Absent from Tasmania was the “ideological” basis that “inspired, for example, [the] Ottomans,” as if (settler) colonialism does not constitute an ideology.[77] Tasmania was also missing the “vulnerable minorit[y]” of the other genocides; “like all indisputable genocides, [these other cases] were not wars, but centrally coordinated slaughters of helpless non-combatants. In Tasmania…colonists were engaged in a serious conflict against a capable and terrifying enemy.”[78] By foregrounding examples of “indisputable genocides” as the basis of his definition, he implicitly redefines genocide as ‘coordinated slaughters of helpless non-combatants,’ motivated by an explicitly destructive and violent ideology. Clements, here, seems to distinguish the Tasmanian case from what Moses has described as “ideological genocides of scapegoated or hostage groups” as opposed to “developmental or utilitarian genocides” – again, without definitional basis, or even conceptual justification.[79] Clements indeed adhered to the “prioritisation of the ‘great genocides’”[80] – not, however, to reinforce a hierarchy of suffering, but to stress the force of Indigenous resistance and the complexity of the Tasmanian war zone. Despite foregrounding the feelings of the colonists, he treated their individual motives as detached from the social relations and ideologies that produced them.[81] Clements admitted, however, that another book is required to “sufficiently unpack” the genocide question, but ended by reminding us that “whatever word we use, we must at least acknowledge that [the Tasmanian case was] very different from those typically associated with genocide.”[82] Here, he implicitly foregrounded a gap in the history – the relationship between war and genocide. Despite extensive scholarly attention, Tasmanian histories are yet to unpack this relationship, which would enrich both genocide and Tasmanian histories.
Perhaps most controversially, Holocaust historian Tony Barta published two articles in the mid-1980s which typify what Moses described as the ‘post-liberal’ view in its emphasis on the greater historical and social structures that Reynolds and Clements neglected.[83] Unlike Reynolds and Clements, Barta worked from a conceptual understanding of Lemkin’s writing. In After the Holocaust (1985), he drew attention to the relationship between colonisation and genocide that Lemkin outlined in chapter nine of Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Barta thus proposed a rigorous analysis and application of Lemkin’s definition of genocide to Australia, in a way unique, at this time, among Australian historians. To Lemkin, destroying “the national pattern of the oppressed group” and imposing “the national pattern of the oppressor” constituted genocide.[84] Working from Lemkin’s conceptual, not legal, definition, Barta holds that we can thus indeed speak of “genocide in Tasmania.”[85] A “stiff adherence” to the idea of genocide as explicit policy,[86] he continues, is not fit for history, and especially not for colonial history. Implicitly, he suggests that the then prevailing understanding of genocide as state-sponsored mass murder emerged from the Holocaust paradigm – it seems more suited to “Himmler’s bureaucracy of murder,” than to “the improvisations, often contradictory in intention and effect, of the colonial frontier.”[87]
Importantly, then, Barta questioned the prevailing, and still persisting, idea of genocide as systematic and state-directed, as embodied, here, by Reynolds and Clements. In Relations of Genocide (1984), Barta distinguished between genocidal policy and what he called genocidal relations, appropriating Marxist terminology.[88] In this way, Barta shifted the question from the state to the society, conveying the way in which colonial genocides are often “society-led,” not “state-led,” as it is defined by the intentionalists who emphasise the state and individual agency as the key to understanding genocidal intent.[89] In existing on stolen land, non-Indigenous Australians live in “relations of genocide” with Aboriginal people.[90] This “implicit relationship of genocide,” then, is fundamental to Australian society, rather than to the state necessarily.[91] In arguing that “we have to face the fact that historically we have a relationship of genocide,”[92] Barta employs the inclusive “we” to stress the importance of these questions to contemporary politics and national myth-making, sharing this preoccupation with Reynolds. Barta, however, interprets Lemkin’s writing through a Marxist lens – Lemkin’s process of destruction and imposition creates relations of genocide between coloniser and colonised. And these relations do not always align with stated intentions.[93] Quoting Karl Marx’s famous warning that “one is too easily tempted to overlook the objective nature of the relationships and to explain everything from the will of the persons acting,” and drawing inspiration from Sartre’s On Genocide,[94] Barta reconceptualises intention from a Marxist framework. We need not find the smoking gun of intent. Intent, for Barta, can be obscure; and it is from the consequences of actions, as well as in the “often muddled consciousness,” that we might deduce, outline, and understand the nature of these historical relationships.[95]
Can processes, then, be genocidal? Barta’s history clearly brought what the liberal school did not: an understanding of the Tasmanian ‘genocide’ as deeply embedded within the colonial logic.[96] While Barta helped move the scholarship away from the now dated questions of extinction and state intent to explicitly ‘destroy,’ his sole emphasis on structure reduces the role of agents and culpability, skirting around the question of the “exterminatory consciousness,” in Moses’s words.[97] And we cannot “denude” genocide of conscious actors.[98] Here, Moses makes a powerful critique. If genocide is not an inevitable consequence of colonisation, if it does not always resort to extermination and only sometimes becomes a policy option, we must examine how it became an option, or how policy became radicalised. Colonialism thus needs to be understood as a “dynamic process” with the potential for genocidal moments.[99] If we also consider genocide’s status as a crime under international law, intent and criminality cannot be located in structures – “only conscious agents.”[100] Barta, however, remains resonant. Barta paved the way for fruitful analyses in rejecting and criticising the Holocaust as the ideal-type model in genocide histories. This model risks restricting the analytical power and applicability of genocide, thereby allowing people, he argues, to comfortably distance the crimes in their histories – to say, “whatever took place…it was nothing like that.”[101] Barta, instead, flips the Holocaust paradigm by suggesting that the Holocaust was an “extreme” case of genocide,[102] not the definitive type. With his background in Holocaust history, Barta examined the “flow of racist science from and to Australia,” thus pursuing the historical and conceptual relationship between the ideal-type examples of genocide that Clements cited and the colonial genocides, such as the Tasmanian case.[103]
If Barta treated Tasmania as but one part of the broader Australian genocide, Tom Lawson published a Tasmania-specific study in 2014 in which he also maintained the importance of analysing the colonial structure to answer the genocide question. Neither an historian of genocide nor of Australian history, Lawson is unique in his background in British history, but is yet to receive a rigorous treatment in historiographical accounts.[104] The “tragedy unleashed” in Tasmania, Lawson asserted, “was a British genocide.”[105] Contesting Reynolds’s depiction of the British as “the (albeit hapless) protectors of the indigenous”[106] and a force of restraint on frontier violence, Lawson argues that Reynolds’s history gives the British an “alibi for genocide.”[107] Lawson thus repositions the Tasmanian case as a “consequence of British actions”[108] – taking place “almost exclusively under direct British rule, and… committed by British colonists and settlers who were working either for the British Crown or for British companies.”[109] He then draws parallels between Reynolds and conservative historian Niall Ferguson, who, Lawson suggests, attempts to revive the memory of imperialism by suggesting that the colonists “betrayed their British heritage” in Tasmania.[110] Despite critiquing Reynolds’s “narrow” conception of intent,[111] Lawson concurs with Reynolds, Clements, and even Barta: there was no “deliberate campaign of mass murder.”[112] But if genocide is taken to mean a state crime, then of course we do not find it in Tasmania, he maintains.[113] Instead, what renders Tasmania a site of genocide is that the British colonial vision saw “no future whatsoever for the original peoples of the island.”[114] The British were committed to this vision “at all costs,” and “continually sanctioned” destructive policies in its pursuit.[115] Here, Lawson marries the colonial vision and British policy, and this is his strength – his examination of colonialism (the structure) without disposing of intent (or painting intent as inherent in the structure). Instead, he articulates the relationship between the state, actors, and the settler colonial project.[116] However benign the actors, these policies were approved by the London government and serviced the settler colonial project, he asserts.[117] “Lines between state and private action are unclear,” but it was always in service of a “state-led cause.”[118] Interrogating Reynolds’ distinction between settler and government, Lawson confronts and combats a persistent problem in colonial genocide scholarship: the tension between indirect rule and administration.[119]
Drawing on Lemkin’s formulation of cultural genocide, Lawson illuminates Britain’s twin goals of settler colonialism and cultural genocide as constituting a ‘genocidal plan’ to destroy Aboriginal economies and culture in pursuit of a land “free of indigenous people and their culture” in Tasmania.[120] This, he suggests, was the aim that bound the humanitarian protectionists and London’s Colonial Office together. The humanitarians, like Robinson, would pursue this fantasy in an “apparently non-violent” way, notably through Robinson’s ‘friendly mission’ to relocate Aboriginals to Flinders Island.[121] Describing this as a “cultural-genocide fantasy island,” Lawson’s background in British and Holocaust history underpins his comparison of Britain at Flinders with the Nazi project: both intended “to remake mankind in their own image.”[122] Working from Lemkin’s definition of genocide as a multi-pronged process, Lawson examines the way that the Tasmanians at Flinders were to be “Christianised…lead sedentary lives, and accept the idea of private property.”[123] Lawson also reads, for instance, the separation of children and parents to educate Aboriginal children as European as genocidal, in light of Lemkin’s understanding of the removal and education of children “within the framework of another human group.”[124] But it is also Lawson’s background in British colonial history that adds rigor to his examination of Britain’s perception of themselves as benevolent colonisers. Lawson holds that while they might have been disturbed by the deaths at Flinders, the rapid deaths of the Tasmanians after the 1840s testified to British superiority, bolstering British national identity.[125] Asking Britain to confront their “genocidal past,” Lawson, like Reynolds, then, sees the forgetting of Tasmania as integral to the process of national myth-making – only here, to British, not Australian, myth-making. Evil, for Lawson, is banal. Racial extermination does not exist only in “maniacal ideologies,” but lingers in ideas “familiar to us today,” even in the concept of progress.[126]
“Invasion is a structure,” Patrick Wolfe famously wrote, “not an event.”[127] In analysing the settler colonial vision and project as at least potentially genocidal, the arguments put forth by Barta and Lawson are reminiscent of Wolfe’s now ubiquitous term the “logic of elimination,” which he coined to articulate the “specificity” of the settler colonial project as opposed to the colonial.[128] Uniquely, the logic of elimination has both positive and negative dimensions – “negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies”; “positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base.”[129] Wolfe’s logic of elimination, of course, is not limited to frontier violence, even inhering within the “deceptively emancipatory provisions of native title legislation”[130]; nor did he seek to provide a specific analysis of Tasmania, only to theorise, delineate, and historicise settler colonialism. Wolfe is also relevant to our understanding of the relationship between state and frontiersmen, which is the source of much of the confusion and disagreement over the question of intent. The logic of elimination, he suggested, “unites the diplomatic niceties of the law of nations and the maverick rapine of the squatters’ posse within a cohesive project that implicates individual and nation-state, official and un-official alike.”[131] In this way, the logic inhering within the structure can then become “consciously incarnated in its agents,” as Moses described, at the moment when genocide becomes a realistic policy option.[132] To understand the genocidal potential of the settler colonial logic does not necessitate that we do away with questions of intent and agency.
If intent is the preoccupation of the genocide debate, Lawson locates it in the British decision to pursue colonial policy despite rapidly increasing Aboriginal death rates, in line with Moses’s call to understand how genocide became a policy option. This differs from Barta’s conception of intent in that Lawson maintains the importance of the British decision to pursue colonial policy. Robinson and other imperial authorities, Lawson writes, never ceased to pursue their “utopian” fantasy, as Wybalenna (where the remaining Tasmanian Aboriginal population were exiled) became a “pan-imperial model for the Empire in dealing with indigenous peoples.”[133] Ann Curthoys similarly suggests that intent lies in the government’s refusal to even consider withdrawing – like Lawson, marrying structure and agency[134] in favour of what Moses describes as a ‘dynamic analysis’ of colonial genocide.[135] It is a genocide, but “not of state planning, mass killing, or extinction,” she writes.[136] Versed in the experience in North America and the Caribbean, the colonists and government continued to pursue land, “whatever the consequences.”[137] This, for Curthoys, “is surely a genocidal project.”[138] With a background in both Tasmanian and genocide history, Curthoys is the only historian other than Reynolds and Clements in this account to consciously address the problem of Indigenous agency. The settler colonial paradigm has been criticised, notably by Tim Rowse for obscuring the stories of “Indigenous heterogeneity” and closing down “plural and more complex accounts of life under settler colonialism.”[139] But as Miranda Johnson pointed out, the settler colonial paradigm attempted to “theorise a particular kind of colonial predicament,” and did not “necessarily intend to nuance an account of Indigenous agency.”[140] This, in part, might help explain Reynolds’s and Clements’s aversion to the genocide label. But, Curthoys proposes, we can recognise these colonising decisions without undermining Indigenous resistance and survival and to, instead, understand the radicalisation of colonial policy in response to this resistance.[141] Curthoys’s history moves the scholarship towards a fruitful dialogue between genocide and Tasmanian scholarship, conceptualising the encounter in Tasmania in a way that does not let the broad, legalistic framework of ‘genocide’ drown out the stories of fear, exchange, resistance, and, importantly, survival.[142] In this way, it seems possible – and, indeed, essential – for histories that focus on the logic of (settler) colonialism and genocide to point towards the messiness of the frontier, the ‘heterogeneity’ of Indigenous experience, and Indigenous survival.[143]
In a brief passage on Tasmania, Moses argues that colonial genocides demand a differentiated concept of intent.[144] It is because the colonial states were “supervised by distant, metropolitan governments in Europe” that the genocidal perpetrator cannot be so easily located.[145] The authorities in London may indeed have lamented violence (as Reynolds pointed out), but they were nonetheless unwilling “to cease the…project despite the manifest consequences.”[146] Moses cites a 1837 Select Committee report which urged the British to accept “moral responsibility” for the “indigenous peoples of south Africa, the Australian colonies…lest they ceased to exist.” Moses uses this entreaty to understand how the “rhetoric of inevitability” around the ‘dying’ native – which, they insisted, “could not be averted” – masked conscious choices available to policymakers. They refused to entertain these choices as serious options, however, because these choices would undermine the colonial project; they were only humanitarian insofar as it did not disrupt their colonial vision and pursuit of land.[147] Intent, for Moses, then, has to be present – but need not be explicit in state-authorised policy. It can exist “implicitly,” in the form of “silent condoning, sometimes agonised acceptance, of events held to be ‘inevitable.’”[148] Of course, as Moses continues, the Colonial Office was not solely responsible. But a conceptualisation of intent that would absolve the office because they lamented the rising death tolls of Tasmanian Aboriginals is surely an inadequate and misplaced definition that demands revision.
It might seem counterintuitive to now end with Lemkin – but considering his analysis last allows us to see how revisiting his work can further illuminate our understanding of genocide in Tasmania. Long confined to the New York libraries, Lemkin’s unfinished writings included a chapter on Tasmania, a chapter that has received little scholarly attention. Of course, it is unfinished and relies entirely on secondary material, overwhelmingly on James Bonwick’s The Last of the Tasmanians (1870). But Lemkin’s analysis nonetheless warrants further attention for its nuanced understanding of intent. While Reynolds and Windschuttle each refer to the fact that “Lemkin considered Tasmania…one of the world’s clear cases of genocide,”[149] neither of them cited Lemkin. Addressing the vexed problem of intent, Lemkin argues that both settlers and convicts attacked the Indigenous Tasmanians; blame, however, also fell on the governing authorities. While these authorities acted with “benevolence,”[150] they failed their “duty of protection,”[151] an argument that informed Moses’s later conclusion that intent lay in failed attempts to enforce laws. The Government, however, was “unable to cope with the situation created by the very character of the white people overrunning the land.”[152] Here, Lemkin suggests that the problem is the very character of white people overrunning the land – that is, their very presence, the process of settler colonialism. While he shares Barta’s later emphasis on unintended consequences, describing the “avowed intention…to civilise,”[153] Lemkin also stresses the importance of individual actions. In his section on the “cruelties of soldiers and settlers,” he describes incidents of bushrangers using “natives” as rifle targets.[154] Far from abandoning individual intent, Lemkin recognises how choices are informed by greater processes with the genocidal potential Moses would later articulate. While Clements suggests that it was not a genocide because the Aborigines were a terrifying enemy, Lemkin does not deny the force of Aboriginal resistance, citing colonial sources such as the Derwent Star, telling of the “distress” among the colonists at Aboriginal methods of attack, especially cattle attacks.[155]
Conceiving of genocide as a synchronised attack,[156] Lemkin addressed multiple techniques of genocide – an element largely absent from the other historical accounts, which prioritised the understanding of genocide as mass murder. While Reynolds and Clements address the experiences of Aboriginal women, it is removed from their discussion of genocide. Lemkin, however, understands the “brutal treatment, kidnapping, [and] prostitution” of women as manifestations of the same genocide, destroying the ability to reproduce.[157] Two other prongs of this genocide, Lemkin wrote, were the stealing and killing of children by settlers, and the introduction of liquor as a form of demoralisation.[158] Lemkin’s conceptualisation of genocide was too complex and too multifaceted to be interpreted as mass murder, and the finer points of the genocidal tactics that he outlined are too often neglected. To Lemkin, genocide was clearly a “coordinated plan of different actions” that aimed to destroy the group’s “essential foundations of life,” with the intention of eventual physical destruction.[159] Lemkin thus implores us to historicise – not to impose legalistic definitions of genocide onto history, not to isolate individual action from processes, nor to see history in terms of blind processes. Instead, he implores us to establish an understanding of genocide as a recurring phenomenon throughout human history that might still illuminate the specificities of each context.
What conclusions, then, can we draw on the scholarship around conflict in early Tasmania? We seem far away from Blainey’s label, which artificially constructed groups and thus conflated and simplified a body of rich, complicated histories in the name of crude politics. In Clements’s simple but effective words, what binds these historians together seems to be only their “sympathy for Aborigines.”[160] These histories, however, have grappled with more complicated questions about Tasmania’s history, and foregrounded questions about how we write history itself. Circumventing the absence of Aboriginal sources, Reynolds and Clements wrote histories of frontier violence with Indigenous peoples as active agents without reinforcing the colonised/coloniser dichotomy. The ‘black armband’ label, however, obscures what Moses identified as the deeper division between the liberals and the post-liberals in understanding the vexed problem of intent, a division that transcends the simplistic understanding encouraged by the ‘History Wars’ phenomenon. As the brief comparisons with Windschuttle (and even Ferguson) have demonstrated, the ‘liberal’ understanding of genocide transcends the rigid binaries of the ‘History Wars’ that perpetuate a false unity and opposition between ‘left’ and ‘right.’ Perhaps Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” and theorisation of settler colonialism risks obscuring the Indigenous heterogeneity that Rowse described, a heterogeneity best embodied by Clements’s emphasis on exchange, experience, and emotion. But it does not need to. Lawson, Curthoys, and Moses point the scholarship in fruitful directions, seeking to understand how genocide can illuminate the relationship between individual actions and colonialism. Future writings must balance close, local analyses with conceptual and comparative studies.[161] The effect of this would be twofold: one, it would broaden our conceptualisation of Indigenous experience; and, two, it would enrich our understanding of the complexity of genocide.[162] This, then, would lend itself to comparative regional histories that would help us retain a rigorous understanding of the local, without sacrificing historical specificity to larger genocide histories, which risk falling into anachronism and obscuring the specific experiences in different times and places. For instance, how does the process of child removals in Queensland, which Reynolds and Moses agree constitutes the clearest case of Australian genocide, compare to Tasmania? How do they form part of a greater imperial project? What is striking is the distance between the historians who emphasise a close examination of localised conflict and Indigenous resistance, on the one hand, and those that emphasise genocidal relations on the other. Curthoys makes us ask: need they be distinct? An interesting, and related, point of consideration would be the relationship between warfare and genocide: can they co-exist? In framing colonial policy as dynamic, Moses’s analysis lends itself to this consideration, both in genocide studies and Tasmanian history – a consideration that would allow us to understand how colonial policy radicalised in the face of resistance, thereby writing Indigenous agency into genocide history.
A final point on what Aboriginal jurist Larissa Behrendt has described as the “distance between law and life” on the genocide question.[163] Equally, there remains a distance between history and lived experience. This paper’s most obvious limitation is its focus on academic historiography, and a small group of academic historians in a debate dominated by non-Indigenous voices.[164] Behrendt herself has described the ‘genocide’ question as largely been confined to “political posturing and semantic debates,” which, she continues, “do nothing to dispel the feeling Indigenous people have that this is the word that adequately describes our experience.”[165] These understandings and experiences are “hard to fit into academic and legal discourse,”[166] no doubt because they are often characterised as “emotive” and thus “subjective,” or lacking in “epistemological integrity,” in Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s words.[167] Meanwhile, the observations of those like the scholars discussed in this paper have historically been elevated and held to be neutral. An interesting point of investigation that seems almost absent from historical scholarship would be how genocide moves outside the scholarly field and is used and understood by Aboriginal agents themselves. The discourse around Aboriginal genocide emerged outside the academic field, and it was most certainly felt, experienced, and lived outside the academic field, too.
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[1] Australian War Memorial, “Colonial Conflicts,” https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/visitor-information/galleries/colonial-conflicts, accessed 20 November, 2017.
[2] W.E.H. Stanner, “The Great Australian Silence” in The Boyer Lectures 1968 – After the Dreaming, (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1969).
[3] See Mark McKenna, “Different Perspectives on Black Armband History,” Research Paper 5, 1997-1998, Politics and Public Administration Group, 10 November 1997, http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/RP9798/98RP05, accessed 15 September 2017; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘“Black Armband” versus “White Blindfold” History in Australia’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Summer, 2004), 655-674.
[4] Tony Birch, ‘“I could feel it in my body”: War on a history war,’ Transforming Cultures eJournal, Vol. 1 No 1, March (2006), 21.
[5] Mark McKenna, “A preference for forgetting: some reflections on publishing Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: an Australian history of place,” Aboriginal History, Vol. 27, 2003, 134.
[6] McKenna, “Different Perspectives on Black Armband History.”
[7] Robert Manne, “In Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right,” Quarterly Essay, 23 (2001), 74.
[8] Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History, (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2000), 1.
[9] Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2013), 20.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid, 18.
[12] Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European invasion of Australia, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1981), 95.
[13] Miranda Johnson, ‘Writing Indigenous Histories Now’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 45, 2014, 318.
[14] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, (London: Macmillan, 1988), 25.
[15] Manne, In Denial, 93.
[16] For critiques of his argument, see Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003).
[17] Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002), 99, 101, 128.
[18] Ibid., chapter 4.
[19] Robert Manne, ‘Introduction’ in Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003), 13.
[20] Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, 99.
[21] Henry Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, (CUP, 2012), 49.
[22] Ibid., 66.
[23] Reynolds, Forgotten War, (UNSW Press, 2013), 16.
[24] Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, 56.
[25] Ibid., 53.
[26] Reynolds, Forgotten War, 15.
[27] Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, 130. Henry Reynolds, “Terra Nullius Reborn,” in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. Robert Manne, 121.
[28] Reynolds, Forgotten War, 11.
[29] Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, 63.
[30] Arthur H. Adams, The Australians: A Social Sketch, (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1920), 104–105, cited in Henry Reynolds, Forgotten War, (UNSW Press, 2013), 17.
[31] Reynolds, Forgotten War, 5.
[32] Reynolds, A History of Tasmania, 66.
[33] Henry Reynolds, “Are nations really made in war?”, in Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds, Mark McKenna, Joy Damousi (eds.), What’s Wrong With Anzac?, (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2012).
[34] Robert Aldrich and Kirsten Mckenzie, “Why Colonialism?” in Robert Aldrich and Kirsten Mckenzie (eds.), The Routledge History of Western Empires, (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 53.
[35] Ibid., 52.
[36] Nicholas Clements, Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land (Ph.D. thesis), University of Tasmania, 2013, ix.
[37] Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex, and Resistance in Tasmania, (UQP, 2014), xv.
[38] Ibid., 6.
[39] Clements, Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land (Ph.D. thesis), 253.
[40] Clements, The Black War, 3.
[41] Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with strangers, (Melbourne: Text Pub., 2003), 111.
[42] Clements, Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land (Ph.D. thesis), 6.
[43] Ibid., 5.
[44] Ibid., 6.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Ibid., 26, 27, 49.
[47] Windschuttle, Fabrication, 399.
[48] Clements, Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land (Ph.D. thesis), 118.
[49] Ibid.
[50] Ibid., 4.
[51] Henry Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Australia, 2001), 130.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Henry Reynolds, ‘Genocide in Tasmania?’ in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (Berghanh Books, 2012), 139.
[54] Ibid., 129.
[55] Ibid., 130.
[56] Ibid., 131.
[57] Ibid., 138.
[58] John Docker, ‘A plethora of intentions: genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain’, The International Journal of Human Rights, 2015, Vol. 19, No. 1, 80.
[59] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 77.
[60] A. Dirk Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century: Genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice 36: 4 (2002), 19.
[61] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 77. Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, 73.
[62] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 75.
[63] Tony Barta, “Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide”, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 300.
[64] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 75.
[65] Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, 50. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-/1847, 14. Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage Publications 1993), 11.
[66] Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?,” 144.
[67] Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803-/1847, 360.
[68] Tom Lawson, The Last Man: a British genocide in Tasmania, (London: I.B. Taurus, 2014), 45, 48.
[69] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century”, 21.
[70] Ibid.
[71] Ibid., 22.
[72] Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?”, 146.
[73] Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers, and Land, (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 53.
[74] As seen in Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 84.
[75] Clements, The Black War, 57.
[76] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century,” 18.
[77] Ibid.
[78] Clements, The Black War, 57-58.
[79] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century,” 20.
[80] Ibid., 21.
[81] Ibid.
[82] Clements, The Black War, 58.
[83] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century,” 7.
[84] Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Foundation, 1944), xi, 79–80. Ann Curthoys, with John Docker, “Defining Genocide” in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide, (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 11.
[85] Tony Barta, “Sorry, and not sorry, in Australia: how the apology to the stolen generations buried a history of genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research (2008), 10(2), June, 211.
[86] Barta, “Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide,” 305.
[87] Tony Barta, “After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 31, Issue 1, April 1985, 154-161. Barta, “Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide,” 303.
[88] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 76.
[89] Alison Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide, 2000), 209.
[90] Tony Barta, “Relations of genocide. Land and lives in the colonization of Australia,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski, eds, Genocide and the Modern Age (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 237–251.
[91] Curthoys and Docker, “Defining Genocide,” 11.
[92] Barta, “After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 31, Issue 1, April 1985, 154-161. Barta, “Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide,” 303.
[93] Curthoys and Docker, “Defining Genocide,” 29.
[94] Ibid.
[95] Barta, “Relations of Genocide,” 239.
[96] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century,” 25.
[97] Ibid., 26.
[98] Ibid., 27.
[99] Ibid.
[100] Ibid., 28.
[101] Tony Barta, “After the Holocaust: Consciousness of Genocide in Australia,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 31, no. 1 (1984), 154.
[102] Ibid., 155.
[103] Tony Barta, “Discourses of genocide in Germany and Australia: a linked history,” Aboriginal History, 2001, Vol. 25, 46.
[104] Except in Docker’s “A plethora of intentions,” 74–89.
[105] Lawson, The Last Man: a British genocide in Tasmania, 337.
[106] Ibid., 43.
[107] Ibid., 72.
[108] Ibid., 45.
[109] Ibid., 19.
[110] Ibid., 44.
[111] Ibid., 51.
[112] Ibid., 72.
[113] Ibid., 52.
[114] Ibid., 47.
[115] Ibid., 72.
[116] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century,” 33.
[117] Lawson, The Last Man, 47.
[118] Lawson, The Last Man, 54.
[119] A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in A. Dirk Moses (ed.) Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and subaltern Resistance in World History, (Berghahn Books, 2008), 6.
[120] Lawson, The Last Man, 61.
[121] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 81.
[122] Lawson, The Last Man, 26, 104.
[123] Docker., 82.
[124] Ibid.
[125] Ibid., 83.
[126] Lawson, The Last Man, 346.
[127] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, (Cassell: London, 1999), 2.
[128] Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8(4), (2006): 387–409.
[129] Patrick Wolfe, “Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. by A. Dirk Moses, (Berghahn Books, 2008), 103.
[130] Ibid. Wolfe, Patrick. “Nation and MisegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era.” Social Analysis, No. 36, October (1994): 93-153.
[131] Ibid., 104.
[132] A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Settler Society in Australian History,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York, 2004), 34.
[133] Docker, “A plethora of intentions,” 82.
[134] Curthoys with Docker, “Defining Genocide,” 30.
[135] A. Dirk Moses, “An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia,” Journal of Genocide Research (2000), 2(1), 91.
[136] Curthoys, “Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea,” 230.
[137] Ibid., 246.
[138] Ibid.
[139] Johnson, “Writing Indigenous Histories Now,” 317. Tim Rowse, “Indigenous Heterogeneity,” Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 45, 2014, 301.
[140] Johnson, “Writing Indigenous Histories Now,” 317.
[141] Curthoys, “Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea,” 252.
[142] Ibid.
[143] Johnson, “Writing Indigenous Histories Now,” 317.
[144] Moses, “Conceptual Blockages and Definitional Dilemmas in the Racial Century,” 29.
[145] Ibid.
[146] Ibid., 29-30.
[147] Ibid, 30.
[148] Ibid., 31.
[149] Ann Curthoys, “Raphaël Lemkin’s ‘Tasmania’: an introduction,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2005, 163.
[150] Raphaël Lemkin, “Tasmania” in Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2005, 177.
[151] Curthoys, ‘Raphaël Lemkin’s ‘Tasmania’: an introduction,” 168.
[152] Lemkin, “Tasmania,” 177.
[153] Ibid., 189.
[154] Ibid., 180.
[155] Lemkin, “Tasmania,” 178.
[156] Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, DC: Carnegie Foundation, 1944), xi, 79.
[157] Curthoys, “Raphaël Lemkin’s ‘Tasmania’: an introduction,” 168.
[158] Ibid., 169.
[159] Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, xi, 79.
[160] Clements, Frontier Conflict in Van Diemen’s Land (Ph.D. thesis), 3.
[161] Curthoys, “Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea,” 252.
[162] Ibid., 252.
[163] Larissa Behrendt, “Genocide: the distance between law and life,” Aboriginal History, Vol. 25, (2001).
[164] Birch, ‘“I could feel it in my body”: War on a history war,’ 22-23.
[165] Behrendt, “Genocide: the distance between law and life,” 132.
[166] Ibid.
[167] Aileen Moreton-Robinson, “Whiteness, Epistemology and Indigenous Representation,” in Whitening Race: Essays in social and cultural criticism, ed. by Aileen Moreton-Robinson, (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2004), 84.
HISTORY IN THE MAKING 