>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.
Which is just the point that the likes of Windshuttle gloss over, or are too stupid to see. Massacres of aborigines are not necessarily genocide, which is the deliberate attempt to eliminate a people. (I disagree with you to the extent that you imply that purpose is not a necessary element in the crime of genocide.)
In any event, it is clear that it was deliberate policy in the early 20th century to eliminate aboriginals in Australia as peoples. Not by physically killing them all, but by systematically destroying their culture, language, customs etc. Removing children from their parents may have even been perceived as a 'liberal' and 'enlightened' method. More humane than the ghastly methods of finishing off the Tasmanian aborigines, by rounding them all up and deporting them to concentration camps on remote Bass Strait islands. (Which was actually portrayed as a humane solution at the time.)
The same thing went on in north America at the time too of course, with the same intended outcome.
It was genocide.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas