you wrote:
> Thiago,
>
>> 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.
If you think a genocide requires killing, that's fair enough, though it is at odds with the Geneva Convention:
http://www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html#Article%202.5
What would you say the Australian policies were, when in the 1930s there children were being removed with the explicit intention of eliminating Aboriginal culture and identity? There is no question, I think, that this was the case. So was that a crime? What sort? The only place people have problems seeing this is genocide is Australia and in backwards places like the Northern Hemisphere.
You also wrote,
> 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?
Quite a few, that is true. But we are talking about something worse than the elimination of, say, Irish speakers, though that would be a serious crime indeed if attempted again. We're talking about something even more drastic, comparable to the elimination of Indo-European so that not even records of it remained. So that no one could know how marriages took place in France, what nursery rhymes kids slept to in Catalonia, what dreams miners had in Poland, what philosophies were spun out in English pubs. That's what happened in Tasmania, though some people survived knowing next to nothing about their former way of life. As I said, from a linguistic and anthropological point of view, that's a catastrophic loss of data; from the perspective of the people whose lifeworld was encoded in those languages, it's an even greater loss.
Thiago