> I agree more with Robert Manne in
> the Quarterly Essay piece, that for a specific period in the 1930s until
> 1950 or so, there was a conjunction of policies that amounted to an
official
> effort at genocide.
I do think that deliberate and systematic murder by government forces, such as the Coniston Massacres of 1928, have to be a part of "genocide". And in every State and Territory, the numbers of Aborigines reached their lowest ever point by the mid-1930s and then started to increase. The statistical methodology was probably flawed, in that they did not include a lot of people who now count themselves as indigenous, but my point is clear.
> But I don't see that a genocide needs to be a matter of government policy,
> that if it is not policy, then it is not genocide. What matters is that
the
> conditions necessary for the survival of a people as a people are
destroyed.
If that is your definition, then the introduction of capitalist livestock industries, in the last 18th Century, was the most significant genocidal act of all. By that I mean that the size/numbers of hunter gatherer populations, pre-contact, simply could not co-exist with sheep/cattle grazing, because of its severe impact on traditional food and water sources (cf Noel Butlin 1993).
> I think that the net outcome of colonial practices was that several
cultures
> vanished; we don't even have linguistic data on Tasmania, which is a
serious
> pain the arse for linguists, not to mention the people whose ancestors
used
> to speak those languages.
Yes, the disappearance of languages is a clear example of an element of cultural extinction. Don't you think, however, that it is a kind of immanent part of modernity everywhere? I mean how many minority languages in Europe were still dying in the late 20th Century, before the change in thinking and government policies from the late 1960s?
> At most you can argue that the colonialists were
> somehow stupid, that they didn't realise that immunological shock followed
> Europeans wherever they went (in fact they knew perfectly well about
this),
Some did, but let's face it, most 19th Century settlers were not rocket scientist material. They were mostly farm labourers, pauperised yeomen/petty bourgeois and lumpen types.
> that the dispossession and let's be frank, open hunting season on
> Aboriginals wasn't going to bring about the termination of these cultures.
> That would be to ascribe to them a mind-boggling stupidity.
I don't think there was an "open season", at least after the the 1830s, for two reasons: first, the British anti-slavery movement and its influence on official response to the massacres at Waterloo Creek and Myall Creek (for which seven white men were hanged), signified a dramatic shift in policy and second, during the gold rushes of the 1850s in Victoria and NSW, there was a serious shortage of labour and the large scale employment of Aborigines began. Pastoral capitalists used a "carrot and stick" approach to recruit Aborigines in and around their properties and to expand west and north. In the 1860s, the pearling industry boomed across northern Australia, with a huge demand for Aboriginal and Melanesian labour (eventually to be displaced by Japanese divers in suits). And by 1870, for example, Anthony Trollope, in his vivid and underrated travelogue, _Australia & New Zealand_, reported meeting skilled Aboriginal mine workers in the --- at that time extensive --- South Australian copper mines. What I'm getting at here is that Aboriginal labour history is a largely untapped vein of Australian history and one which is only just beginning to be explored properly. And it shows that the ruling class had more reasons to take measures to preserve populations, rather than destroy them.
> There was in fact a whole scientific theory of how Aborigines were going
to disappear and
> all we had to do was to ensure that no vestiges of their culture remained
to
> contamine the half-breeds.
>
> In fact, if you read the Hansard from 1904 you can't help coming across
the
> reality that people knew perfectly well what was going on. 1904 was the
year
> Papua was to be annexed and the entire debate is couched in terms of
> shielding the Papuans from what was openly recognised to be a catastrophe,
> the fate of Aborigines. It makes for remarkable reading. "A black page in
> history" was the summary by one MP back then.
True. The likes of Deakin were supreme ideologists of racial Darwinism. But let's take the guilty self-lacerations of the Colonial liberal bourgeoisie/s with a grain of salt; by 1904, the greatest damage to both Aboriginal, Torres Strait and Papuan _populations_ had already been done.
regards,
Grant.