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Australian Genocide

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  Quote hoffdaddy Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Australian Genocide
    Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 09:30
Hi,
 
Thought I would start a topic by asking what do people know of an Australian Genocide? This refers to the treatment of European colonisers of Australia's indigenous population. I think it is a concept that is rarely used in Australian society. Obviously there are many reasons for this. But I thought, as an Australian myself, it would interesting to see what people outside of the nation know of this incident and any thoughts on how such a historically significant event should be treated in the 21st century.
 
Cheers
 
Hoffdaddy
 
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  Quote Constantine XI Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 10:07
Firstly I think it is worth pointing out that the topic has been framed from a specific point of view: that an actual policy of genocide was in place. In mainland Australia this was simply not the case. There were clashes between natives and Europeans on occasion, but overall the occupation was one of the least bloody in history. In Tasmania, the numbers of natives killed by European violence was only recorded as being in the couple of hundreds.

The reason for the lack of natives in Tasmania (and there are still some) is the small native population to begin with (tiny due to poor hunting and foraging grounds) and the disease which subsequently wiped out most of the population.
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  Quote aslanlar Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 10:29

I don't see how if a government labels the people as animals, that there is any way that the killings don't respresent genocide.

"The league is alright when sparrows dispute but it can do little when eagles argue" -Mussolini
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  Quote Constantine XI Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 10:51
Originally posted by aslanlar

I don't see how if a government labels the people as animals, that there is any way that the killings don't respresent genocide.


How about providing some evidence of things like armed expeditions to kill aborigines, or concentration camps. The government for a time did consider that people living in the stone age were part of the native fauna of the country. It doesn't prove there was an organised campaign of genocide like we are used to hearing about from Europe etc.

The colonisation of Australia was simply another invasion, and one of the least bloody in all of history.
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  Quote hoffdaddy Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 11:42
Maybe we could begin by considering the definition of Genocide as stated by the UN. It is as follows.
 
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. From the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
 
Now we can begin to ask ourselves do any acts committed in the history of Australian colonisers fit into these categories?
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  Quote Constantine XI Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 12:13
With that definition, every single war and invasion in history is a genocide. And this includes lots of acts of piracy, border skirmishes and the like.

The problem is that this word often brings to mind things like Nazi Death camps, when the reality in Australia was very different. Of all the wars and invasions in history, Australia's colonisation ranks as one of the least brutal qualitatively and saw some of the lowest destruction of the native people through violence in quantitative terms.
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  Quote Leonidas Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 12:45
What happened in Tasmania was shameful, I mean some of the stories a quite sadistic. But Constantine is making some valid points, especially on the size of the population. We are talking about a rather small,stone age population with no resistance to disease. Contact alone would of decimated them and it did, much more so than the violence.

 What can we accuse the authorities of, im not sure. Did the government actaully set out to kill every Tasmanian Aboriginal? if not, does their actions or better still inactions still constitute genocide? The end result looks like genocide, in parts of that chapter of our history it also look like it, however it also  lacks that co-ordinated or planned dimension.

  They certainly can be accused of ethnic cleansing, because after they rounded up the last of the locals and relocated them. The government at the time can also be accused of allowing the white population and it own forces in using unpunished violence. lastly they are guilty of complete neglect of their captives when they relocated them. This last part to me comes closest to that term, not the so much the conflict.


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  Quote Guests Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Oct-2007 at 20:02

I think we should distinguish something important in here. The policies of the states doesn't necessarily matches the attitudes of the settlers.

 
Since the second part of the 19th century, up to the beginning of the 20th (or 1970 in Brazil) it was common that governments claimmed to protect natives, and even given food and shelter, while at the same time the European settlers engage in personal campains of genocide. So, one shouldn't automatically blame the Australian government for what the European immigrants did to the natives.
 
These kind of genocides of small ethnic group was common when European settlers of the second part of the 20th century established in new lands and "cleaned" it for them. We have a painful experience in Chile with the Onas of the Land of Fire, exterminated by European settlers (yugoslavia, germany, austrians, etc.) that settled there to exploit the whool of sheeps. Now, the main genocide it was a Romanian adventurer called captain Popper. And then I could ask you how to blame the central governments when they hardly had control over the lands were those Europeans settled?
 
The same happened in the Amazonas of Brazil well into the 20th century, when any rascal pick a rifle and when to the jungle, and did what he chosed with the Indigenous people. Today, in some places, those rascals from the east are shoted on spot by Brazilian soldiers that are mainly indigenous in the Amazon. Times change.
 
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  Quote aslanlar Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Oct-2007 at 09:44
Originally posted by Leonidas


  They certainly can be accused of ethnic cleansing


Forgive me if i'm wrong, but isn't ethnic cleansing and genocide directly linked? The purpose of genocide is not to kill a bunch of people, but to 'ethnically cleanse' an area.
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  Quote Leonidas Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 12-Oct-2007 at 15:45
Originally posted by aslanlar

Originally posted by Leonidas


  They certainly can be accused of ethnic cleansing


Forgive me if i'm wrong, but isn't ethnic cleansing and genocide directly linked? The purpose of genocide is not to kill a bunch of people, but to 'ethnically cleanse' an area.
no they are not linked. One is to remove a population but not necessarily exterminate them because that not the aim or intention. While genocide basically speaking, is the extermination of a group as a whole or in parts.




Edited by Leonidas - 12-Oct-2007 at 15:47
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  Quote toyomotor Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 03-Jan-2014 at 13:35
Originally posted by hoffdaddy

Hi,
 

Thought I would start a topic by asking what do people know of an Australian Genocide? This refers to the treatment of European colonisers of Australia's indigenous population. I think it is a concept that is rarely used in Australian society. Obviously there are many reasons for this. But I thought, as an Australian myself, it would interesting to see what people outside of the nation know of this incident and any thoughts on how such a historically significant event should be treated in the 21st century.

 

Cheers

 

Hoffdaddy

 

No, the last Tasmanian Aborigine died over 125 years ago. What remains today are people of mixed race, including Polynesian, European and Melanesian. The Aboriginal language and culture is lost. True, the English committed genocide against the Tasmanian Aborigines, aided by disease to which they were not immune.
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  Quote opuslola Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 03-Jan-2014 at 22:06
Some things never change!

Ron
http://www.quotationspage.com/subjects/history/
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  Quote toyomotor Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Jan-2014 at 20:01
Originally posted by opuslola

Some things never change!

Ron

The Tasmanian Aborigines were either killed or captured as the result of the notorious "Black Line". Troops and settlers actively hunted the Aborigines, killing indiscriminately or capturing some of them. Those captured were moved to small islands off Tasmanian north coast where they were further raided by the crew of seal and whale hunting ships. Many of the women were taken for "on board" entertainment. This is one of the reasons for the admixture in the modern day descendants.
To further address the original question, the Australian mainland Aborigines saw strange woolly animals appear on the scene after the whites arrived. These animals were easy to spear for food, and so they did. The white settlers objected to the unfettered killing of their sheep, so in some cases, they shot the Aborigines. While there was no doubt mass killing of mainland Aborigines, I don't think it's accurate to call it genocide.
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