> Thiago, I guess you don't agree with Henry Reynolds then, who rejects the
> word "genocide" in relation to the Aborigines? And I have to admit, as well,
> that although Keith Windschuttle is essentially a reactionary propagandist,
> he has managed to score significant hits on the idea of "Australian
> genocide", _including_ what happened in Tasmania. He has exposed serious
> flaws in the work of historians like Lyndall Ryan on this exact matter. Put
> simply, this is because it is impossible to establish that "genocide" was
> official policy in relation to the _whole_ of Tasmania, let alone Australia
> in general. In any event, as with native Americans, it is quite clear that
> European and other imported diseases did much more of the killing than did
> actual violence.
>
> My main area of research is state-labour interaction in Colonial Western
> Australia and my feeling from my reading is that the rationale for massacre,
> removal of children, etc, in Australia was generally _not_ similar to the
> Nazi "Final Solution", although racist ideology certainly played a
> supporting role. From my research its seems to me that most of what is
> called genocide in Australia took place not as overt/official policy, but
> much more usually as part of a general idea among capitalist settlers, that
> Aboriginal populations which had survived the (almost certainly
> non-intentional) introduction of devastating diseases like smallpox, could
> be coerced into becoming capitalist-productive labour, especially in the
> sheep and cattle industries. And while there was a huge component of forced
> labour in the policy of the Third Reich, I don't have the feeling it was the
> main purpose of the concentration camps etc. (although I also recognise that
> some have argued that it was.)
No, I don't agree with Reynolds. I suspect he is not even being honest - that he is watering down what he thinks for the sake of the disgusting debate now taking place in this country. 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.
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.
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. 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), 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. 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. Both Deakin spent about four days explaining how the catastrophe was not going to be repeated. But it was hardly news then. "No other people have suffered as the Aborigines have at the hands of the Queensland Government, the half that has been told of it! Are the Papuans to be handed to these tender mercies?" said James Chalmers in 1874.
Of course what happened in colonial Australia was nothing like what happened in Germany, but not all genocides are the same. The suppression of culture is one of them, the extermination of people another.
Thiago