After the Holocaust:

Consciousness of Genocide in
Australia
TONY BARTA

‘New conceptions’, wrote Raphael Lemkin in 1944, ‘require new terms’. The term
he coined was ‘genocide’, and inevitably the context of the time was to give it very
specific associations. Because I want to consider our understanding of this term in
a different context, and in relation to those associations, I shall quote his original
definition of it at length.
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of
a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended
rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential
foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.
The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions,
of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national
groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the
lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national
group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals belonging to
such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions
involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members
of the national group.
Genocide proceeded in two phases: ‘destruction of the national pattern of the
oppressed group’ and then ‘the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’.
This imposition could be made ‘upon the oppressed population which is allowed to
remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the
colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals’.’
If this indeed was what genocide was intended to mean - and these meanings have
been reiterated with some legal standing in a UN convention- why, it might be asked,
has the term been skirted so warily by historians of Australia? There is no dispute
that the basic fact of Australian history is the appropriation of the continent by an
invading people and the dispossession, with ruthless destructiveness, of another. There
can be no doubt about the disintegration of Aboriginal society, traditional culture
and religion, the destruction of the Aborigines’ economic existence, their languages,
their personal security, liberty, health, and dignity. About the loss of lives we have
the most appalling evidence. The fate of the Aborigines of Tasmania is better known
but the story was not very different in Victoria and New South Wales. Throughout
southern and eastern Australia the processes of colonization and economic expansion
involved the virtual wiping out of the Aboriginal population. If ever a people has
had to sustain an assault on its existence of the kind Lemkin described it would seem
to have been over the last two hundred years in Australia.
For all the recent outspokenness of Aborigines resisting continuing European
pressure, and the beginning of engagement with the issue by white historians,’ most
Australians have never seriously been confronted by the idea that the society in which
they live is founded on genocide. One reason for this is a genuine problem of
definition: genocide is not generally understood in terms of effects but of pIanning
and intention. Another reason has to do with the resonances the word has acquired
in popular use. ‘Genocide’ for most people means only one thing: the murder of six
After the Holocaust 155

million Jews by Germans during the Second World War. The Holocaust, another
new term, evolved to emphasize the specifically Jewish catastrophe, has become
virtually synonymous with genocide.’ The images which cluster round the name of
Auschwitz make the concept concrete. And these images, making pale all other deeds
of violence committed by one people against another, now play an active role not
only in German history and Jewish history but in our understanding of Australian
history as well. By associating genocide uniquely with the Holocaust, Australians
have been able to make a classical transference of an unacknowledged shadow in
their own past to a publicly acknowledged worse -indeed worst-case. Germans have
a terrible legacy to live down-how could they let something like that happen?
Whatever took place in our past, it was nothing like that. This very powerful importing
of atrocity, I would argue, and the consequent exporting of outrage, is a major factor
in the way Australians cope (or do not cope) with what happened here.
That the Holocaust was a unique, nowhere remotely paralleled atrocity, is not
questioned by this argument. In fact, if one accepts all the ways it was unique, beyond
anti-Semitism, beyond reasons of state, industrialized killing without military,
political, economic or social advantage, even the term genocide is inadequate to
describe it.4 The Holocaust was a policy of genocide pushed to its ultimate extreme.
When Lemkin defined his term in 1944 the full horror of the ‘final solution’ was still
not known, and much of his evidence had to do with measures against other subject
peoples - Poles, Russians, Slovenes - though Hitler’s statements and actions left
no doubt that the Jews in particular were to be ‘destroyed completely’.5 So when the
facts about the death camps were publicized in 1945 (detailed information was in
Allied hands well before this) the association of the new word ‘genocide’ with the
unimagined realities of the gas chambers and crematoria was inevitable.
This was only the beginning of the problems for German history, for Jewish history
and-so far from Central Europe-for Australian history. The first two aspects in
fact have some bearing on the third.
Anyone who has taught German history to Australian students knows how difficult
it is to penetrate through the complex of Auschwitz images to the complexities of
Nazism. There is some justice in that: Auschwitz was the ultimate development of
the concentration camp system which was from the outset the clear expression of
how National Socialism would deal with those considered a danger to its methods
and goals. But the original purpose of the concentration camps-set up to hold
Communists and ‘asfar as is necessary’ socialists-comes as a surprise to most people.6
The class tensions which Hitler exploited, the nature and purposes of German fascism,
the violence against Germans which established the climate for violence towards others
are facts which the words ‘Holocaust’ and ‘genocide’ have both tended to obscure.
They have also served to make us less aware of the millions upon millions of Hitler’s
victims who were not Jews, especially in Poland and the Soviet Union. Given the
terrible cost in lives of the Nazi attack in the east, and the relatively very much smaller
French, British and American casualties, the emphasis in Western countries on the
six million murdered Jews has tended to incorporate them into a Western view of
fascism (one with the anti-communism taken out) and a Western interpretation of
Hitler’s war. One feels a certain discomfort in remarking on this but that is an
indication of the problem.
Even more taboo in respectable historiography, because of the ‘revisionist’campaign
waged by Nazi apologists, is any reference to the role of the Holocaust, of Nazi
genocide, in Zionist and Israeli propaganda. It is extremely dangerous to talk of ‘the
myth of the Holocaust’ because no one must be allowed to evade the facts of what
took place. But even if we lack an adequate expression for the way historical facts
are mobilized to serve political interests - historical interests, perhaps -there is no
doubt that the tragedy of the Jews under Nazism has been so mobilized in the interests
156 Tony Barta

of an embattled Israel. The experience of genocide was the immediate impulse which
brought the state of Israel into being and inevitably there has been a linkage in
defending and justifying even some of the more questionable elements of Israeli
Realpolitik in all the years since. Jews would not have allowed this most terrible
episode of their history to be forgotten had events in the Middle East taken a different
course, but that it has been remembered and kept before the world very much in
the context of subsequent Jewish history has been an aspect of the consciousness of
genocide which remains difficult to evaluate clearly. Certainly, in Australia, supporters
of Israel have made clear that their emotional commitment cannot be separated from
their consciousness of the Holocaust.
It is this consciousness of a uniquely terrible event, this distance from anything
we might recognize as genocide in our own past, which is so hard to break through
for Australians. Thousands of Aborigines died violently at the hands of white settlers,
whole peoples were wiped out by disease, degradation, alcohol and despair. But who
planned it? Who carried it through? It seemed simply to happen. By 1850 the original
inhabitants of Sydney and Newcastle were all gone. By 1886, after only fifty years
of settlement in Victoria, a population of more than 10,000 Aborigines was reduced
to 806. Round Adelaide, the decline was from 650 to 180 in fifteen years.
Perhaps a fifth of those killed died ‘by the rifle’ as the settlers advanced; however,
the greatest killer was undoubtedly small-pox.’ Venereal disease, also brought by the
Europeans, and malnutrition caused by the adopting of an inadequate diet of
European commodities, contributed to a drastic fall in the birth-rate. With their
hunting and gathering economy disrupted, their social structure destroyed, their
traditional culture challenged at every turn, Aborigines appeared to the invaders -
and often to themselves-unlikely to survive the encounter with European civilization.
Long before Darwin’s ideas of natural selection became fashionable there was a
conventional wisdom in Australia that the Aborigines would suffer the inevitable fate
of an inferior race.
To keep repeating the observation that a people is dying out does not, of course,
amount to genocide. All the definitions agree that it is the intention of one group
of people to destroy another which counts, and the efficiency of carrying the intention
through: ‘the deliberate destruction of a race or nation’; ‘the systematic extermination
of racial or national groups’. Curiously, an Australian dictionary is the most insistent
in emphasizing policy: only ‘the extermination of national or racial groups as a planned
move’ can be defined as genocide.* Obviously these definitions are much more
appropriate to Himmler’s bureaucracy of murder than to the improvizations, often
contradictory in intention and effect, of the colonial frontier. Official statements of
intention towards native peoples are apt to be concerned and protective; in Australia
this was consistently the case. The intentions of most settlers, as individuals, were
more often than not-at least until they felt threatened -sincerely benign. That their
presence and everyday activities had an effect which was genocidal leaves us, however,
with a considerable problem. 1 think we have to face the fact that historically we
have a relationship of genocide with the Aborigines which cannot be understood only
in terms of a clear intention to wipe them out.
The key relation, I have argued elsewhere, was instituted by the determination of
Europeans to take over the land. Officially declaring Australia to be not effectively
inhabited, they set about establishing a new economy, based on pastoralism, which
converted every yard of grassland into private property as fast as the flocks and herds
could travel. Neither the stockholders who had invested their capital in the expectation
of taking up grants of land, nor the colonial administrators who allowed the grants,
proceeded with the clear intention of displacing the Aborigines. But when the
Aborigines resisted the invasion of strange animals into their hunting grounds - and
this they could initially do very effectively - the response of the white men was
After the Holocaust 157

ruthlessly determined. From Governor Arthur’s clearance of all the Aborigines from
the main island of Tasmania, to the notorious ‘dispersal’tactics of the mounted police
in Queensland, official violence backed up the officially deplored reprisals of
individual settler^.^ In this campaign it was not uncommon to hear the language of
genocide, and the deeds were a match for the words.
One of the largest holders of Sheep in the Colony, maintained at a public meeting at
Bathurst, that the best thing that could be done, would be to shoot all the Blacks and manure
the ground with their carcases, which was all the good they were fit for! It was recommended
likewise that the Women and Children should especially be shot as the most certain method
of getting rid of the race. Shortly after this declaration, martial law was proclaimed, and
sad was the havoc made upon the tribes at Bathurst. A large number were driven into a
swamp, and mounted police rode round and round and shot them off indiscriminately until
they were all destroyed! When one of the police enquired of the officer if a return should
be made of the killed, wounded there were none, all were destroyed, Men, Women and
Children! the reply was; - that there was no necessity for a return. But forty-five heads
were collected and boiled down for the sake of the skulls! My informant, a Magistrate,
saw the skulls packed for exportation in a case at Bathurst ready for shipment to accompany
the commanding Officer on his voyage shortly afterwards taken to England.’”
There may be nothing particularly remarkable about such a massacre in a colonial
context and in the arithmetic of twentieth-century mass murder it might not bulk large.
My point in citing it is to emphasize that the prospect of genocide-‘the most certain
method of getting rid of the race’- was openly canvassed in the initial confrontations
with the Aborigines, and the willingness to proceed down the path of genocide was
fundamental to the establishment of the social order whose bicentenary we are about
to celebrate. The men who established our economy, our society, our political system
knew they would have to kill for it, and they were prepared in that killing to envisage
the disappearance of the prior inhabitants altogether. That the Aborigines disappeared
largely in ways which spared white consciences the most acute moral confrontations
has had a good deal to do with the playing down of this fact, but we should be in
no doubt that the killing designed ‘to teach the Blacks a lesson’ succeeded: the other
disasters which befell the Aborigines all had to be borne in the knowledge that their
lives and their continued existence as a people now counted for nothing. The
Europeans, seeing only the degradation of drink, dependency, sexual exploitation
and disease, could comfortably conclude that the Aborigines’ inability to survive was
proof of their unfitness to live.
That they are an inferior race of human beings it is in vain to deny; (the probable extinction
of the race from natural causes is a proof of this); and it is no more desirable that any
inferior race should be perpetuated, than that the transmission of an hereditary disease,
such as scrofula or insanity should be encouraged.
It is impossible (or should be impossible) to read this now without the consciousness
of where such race thinking ultimately led. For the readers of the Geelong Advertiser,
mostly pastoralists, to whom it was addressed in 1846, the message implied no active
policy of extermination. ‘In the case of the Aborigines’, they were once again assured,
‘the process of their extinction is the result, in a great degree, of natural causes’, and
therefore not the responsibility of the settlers. There was no point now in being other
than realistic about ‘the inevitable destiny of the Aborigines -the incontrovertible
fact that the propagation of the race has ceased -and the consequence, that the present
generation of Aborigines is the last that will have existence . . .’I1
For later Australians, suddenly aware of an increasingly assertive number of
Aborigines still existing, this prophecy may be hard to take seriously. But it was
seriously meant, and very nearly right. The paper, no doubt with a keen sense of
its audience, was prepared to go further: ‘We unhesitatingly repeat, [emphasis in the
original] that the perpetuation of the race of Aborigines is not to be desired.’ Again,
I58 Tony Barta

this was not a direct incitement to genocide of the kind heard at Bathurst and in the
‘kill the breeders’ slogans of Queensland and the far West, rather it was an
uncommonly forthright expression of the view that was to underlie official policy
in all states into the twentieth century. In Victoria especially, with the 1886 Act forcing
half-castes to ‘merge’ with the dominant white population, the assumption was that
the Aborigines, one of the world’s oldest and most distinctive peoples, would simply
die out.”
Even the Aborigines’ crucial allies, the missionaries, played an ambivalent role.
While they did battle with the squatters to save the minute pockets of reserve land
on which the last Aboriginal communities could regroup for the struggle, they believed
Aborigines could only survive in white society with white ideas. So even as they saved
the black people from extinction they pressed on with their business of replacing
traditional values and culture with the individualist religion and work ethic of the
transplanted civilization. When Aborigines perversely insisted on adopting the
consolations of the white man’s drugs (alcohol and tobacco) rather than his religion,
and his vices (dependency on handouts) rather than his official virtues, it was
undoubtedly self-destructive but also an act of resistance. A deviant culture was now
their last refuge of autonomy, of defiance in the face of invasion, conquest, theft
of their land and the relentless - even if sometimes benevolent - campaign to destroy
their existence as a people.
These realities were plain to observers in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Many who wrote reminiscences of frontier life commented on them. Some frankly
recognized the responsibility of the Europeans for what was taking place. When the
Aboriginal remnant retreated to the reserves, consciousness of the tragedy also went
into retreat: Australians could busy themselves with building a prosperous and humane
society in what they perceived as an empty continent. With the influx of first the
free settlers and then the gold-diggers came the development of democratic politics -
that ‘Herrenvolk democracy’ of settler societies predicated almost unthinkingly on
racism. If there was disagreement about the scale of privileges in white society there
was at least agreement that all white men had a manifest superiority over blacks.”
Wherever Aborigines were encountered these assumptions set the rules. However,
very few Australians, in the already highly urbanized and suburbanized society of
the early twentieth century, had any contact with or knowledge of Aborigines; whether
struggling to make ends meet or basking in the pompous rhetoric of nation-building,
they rarely if ever suffered a pang for those who once lived where their streets now
ran. Fringe-dwellers in country towns, the Aborigines also became, in Henry
Reynolds’s phrase, the fringe-dwellers of Australian historiography. Now came the
years of ‘the great Australian silence’, lasting into the 1960s, when major histories
could be written with only the most passing reference to the Aborigines and with
no reference at all, in most cases, to the actions which caused them to di~appear.’~
The new historiography of the last fifteen years has accepted the obligation to explain
what happened. Very importantly, it has also begun to tell the story of the Aboriginal
resistance, how the invasion was perceived and countered from ‘the other side of the
frontier’. Emphasis on survival and continuity is vital for Aborigines renewing the
struggle, and is part of what all Australians need to know.Is They also need to know
why survival was so difficult, and the lot of only a few. If genocide is still a word
which seems ‘to stick in the typewriters of some historians’ it is for others a fact which
finally has to be faced.I6
Historical consciousness, if not always articulate enough to be self-justifying, is
apt to be self-shielding. I have suggested that our more vivid sense of involvement
with the Holocaust than with what took place in our own history has a defensive
aspect to it, and I suspect there is more than a hint of racism in it as well. Black
people we cannot help seeing as different, as ‘other’, and part of their otherness is
After the Holocaust 159

to belong to that portion of humanity we expect discrimination to happen to. We

might not condone it, we might actively campaign against it, but historically at least
we very easily accept it. Sometimes not even recognized as human, black people have
most readily been treated by Europeans as subhuman: turned into chattels when they
had labour use, exterminated as pests when they did not.
That the Nazis should turn on people in their own community, in the main
indistinguishable from the other members -people, we are often reminded, who were
just like us- and by a process of discrimination, exclusion, degradation turn them
into the kind of ‘other’ stripped of every attribute of humanity, is itself, we think,
barely human. To make of a respected fellow citizen, very possibly a social superior,
a spectral ‘Muselmann’ in a concentration camp is rightly for us an outrage t o
everything we associate with our civilization. That this should be done on grounds
of ‘race’ we regard as particularly evil: that Hitler learned racism in the context of
European imperialism we sometimes forget. His fascination with the ruthless struggle
of the superior race on the frontiers of the nineteenth-century British empire is an
eerie counterpoint to our horror at his ruthless application of race thinking in
twentieth-century Europe. And Europe, for many of us, remains closer. We have
personal connections with what happened to people in Europe, no personal
connections with the people displaced, dehumanized and destroyed by our civilization
here.
After the Second World War, confronted with the horrifying evidence of what their
government had done, Germans had to face the question: are we collectively, our
whole society, responsible for this? The question was answered differently in the two
halves of Germany but in broad terms there has been agreement: specific social
formations made fascism possible, and resumption of imperialist conquest probable,
but even that did not make the worst of the crimes, genocide, inevitable. That was
the will and secret program of a few men with the power to convert their ideological
mania into actuality. Nothing in German history or German society made it necessary.
There is no strong evidence that anti-Semitism was a major factor in the electoral
success of Hitler, nor was there any precedent then for thinking that an anti-humanism
as radical as his would actually be put into effect. It is right that after the unthinkable
happened we should forever associate National Socialism with the organized murder
of millions of people, wrong that all prior German history and the evolution of
German society be seen as culminating in this crime. Hitler must not be permitted
that success.
Irving Louis Horowitz, attempting historical explanation in sociological terms, has
subtitled an essay on genocide ‘State Power and Mass Murder’. That hits the nail
on the head in the case of National Socialist Germany. But to refer to Germany even
under the Third Reich, as ‘a genocidal society’l’ is misleading both as history and
as sociology. The society failed to resist National Socialism: it did not commit
genocide, or even imply genocide in any of its structures.
This is what makes the comparison with Australia most striking. In this country
genocide was never government policy: successive colonial administrations and
Australian governments kept talking about ways to save the Aborigines. To save them
from what? In this case it was precisely to save them from a genocidal society, a
form of imported social order which could not be established here without
dispossession of the original inhabitants, without killing, without bringing to a violent
end other forms of human existence developed over 50,000 years. Certainly state power
played a part; without British imperialism there would be no Australia. But the
appropriation of the whole continent was only nominally in favour of the crown;
effectively land was alienated from the communal ownership of Aborigines into the
private property of invading settlers. That fact is inseparable from the destruction
of the Aboriginal people, and is basic to our everyday lives today. We would recognize
160 Tony Barfa

genocide as fundamental if the Nazi conquest and planned colonization of Poland

had been successful. We have enormous difficulty recognizing it in Australia.
A major problem, I think, is the reluctance to admit anything which questions so
threateningly the legitimacy of our society. In Germany genocide was the work of
a conspiratorial minority; comparatively few people benefited from taking the jobs
or property of Jews. Yet Germans have had to wrestle with the question: was our
whole society criminal? In Australia, where all of us are the beneficiaries of crimes
against the Aborigines, the question can’t seriously penetrate our ideological defences.
Anyone interested in the continued hegemony of our social values - property
acquisition at the very centre of them - has a kind of functional incredulousness: how
could our kind of society be criminal?
A century ago the question could be put quite insistently. The Bulletin, in particular,
liked to shake the defences of the triumphant bourgeoisie of Sydney and Melbourne
with reports from the open frontier in the North.
The Whites in Northern Queensland are an average lot, they shoot the male blacks and
carry off the gins, just as they did in Victoria and New South Wales. There is no occasion
for any holy howling over the business. It is the inevitable consequence of our possession
of the country, and the English government having taken possession of Australia and let
her children seize the lands, the aboriginalsmust go somehow-lead, or rum, or otherwise.”
(‘Otherwise’ was frankly explained on a later occasion: ‘Why, if you give the blacks
phosphorous in their flour it only makes their eyes water, but if you mix arsenic with
the flour, that’ll stretch them out.’)l9
What right [asked The Bulletin in 18921 have Victoria and New South Wales, which have
finished off their own aboriginal trouble, to bark at a new province for repeating the practice
they first initiated? The very shop wherein the smug citizen who holds up his hands in pious
horror at the reputed atrocities of the Queensland people, makes a living, is probably erected
over the bones of a murdered aboriginal.*O
That truth has not altered but it is now quite securely out of mind. In 1984 it was
possible for a leading politician to say of land rights: ‘We do not believe in New South
Wales that there is a legitimate case for Aboriginal land rights. There are no tribal
Aborigines in New South Wales and clearly no link to tribal land.’*‘Neither Mr Greiner
nor his audience noticed this for what it was: a blandly straightforward recognition
of genocide.
Historical consciousness is only one of our connections with the past but it is the
crucial one. It tells us which part of the past is our history and what that means.
A different view of the events and processes which account for present realities may
imply a different moral engagement with the past and a different political engagement
in the present. Of Germans, we expect that a knowledge of the terrible events of the
Nazi era must affect attitudes and commitments forty or more years after Hitler’s
defeat. This ‘coping with the past’ we have come to consider a moral obligation even
for Germans born long after the events.
Our moral position is weaker. Germans gained nothing from genocide. We did.
This self-knowledge we would rather suppress, and powerful interests will reinforce
our self-interest. Xndifference to genocide in Australia has always had political
implications; it will remain basic to the gathering campaign against Aboriginal land
rights. Consciousness of genocide will have political implications, too. Anyone who
knows what took place in this country must surely know what has to happen now.
In this paper I have tried to attend to two pasts and the way they have been separated
and brought together by history. Jews have been among the most historically conscious
of peoples; in Australia, too, they have kept their cultural identity largely by attending
to their history. I wonder, finally, whether their experience of genocide, and of
rebuilding afterwards, could not be more actively engaged in the Australian present.
After the Holocaust 161

In 1850, the last full-blood New South Wales coastal Aborigine said while dying,
‘All finished boss. All black feller dead. All finished.’ But the story of the Jewish
people did not end with the Holocaust and the story of the black people of Australia
is not finished either.

NOTES

1 . Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington, 1944), 79. The 1946 UN Genocide
Convention is reprinted as Appendix 1 in Leo Kuper, Genocide (New York, 1981). 210-14.
2. cf. R. H. W. Reece, ‘The Aborigines in Australian Historiography’ in John A. Moses (ed.), Historical
Disciplines and Culture in Australasia: an Assessment (St Lucia, 1979), 261.
3. ‘Holocaust’ was a much less familiar term before the television series of that name. When a film on
the same subject was released recently there was really only one title possible: ‘Genocide’.
4. See the foreword by Emil L. Fackenheim to Yehuda Bauer, The Jewish Emergence from Powerlessness
(London, 1980). The thesis that the Holocaust was unique, going beyond anything normally understood
as ‘the human condition’, is taken further by Rainer C. Baum, The Holocaust and the German Elite,
Genocide and National Suicide in Germany 1871-1945 (Totowa and London, 1981).
5. Lemkin, Axis Rule, 81. The extent to which the Allies were informed about what was going on in
the death camps is documented by Martin Gilbert, Auschwifz and the Allies (London, 1981).
6. The best outline of the development of the concentration camp system is by Martin Broszat, ‘The
Concentration Camps 1933-45’, in Helmut Krausnick, Hans Buchheim, Martin Broszat, Hans-Adolf
Jacobsen, Anatomy ofthe SS State (New York, 1968). The other essays, on the persecution of the
Jews and on the SS, are also authoritative.
7. For some important implications, and some unjustified imputations, see Noel Butlin, Our Original
Aggression. Aboriginal Populations of Southeastern Australia 1788-18SO (Sydney, 1983).
8. Entries under ‘genocide’ in the Concise Oxford, Webster’s, and Macquarie dictionaries.
9. For the course of events in Tasmania see Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia, 1981),
and Lloyd Robson, A Hisforyof Tasmania, Vol. 1 (Melbourne, 1983); for New South Wales (including
Port Phillip) in the 1830s and 1840s, R. H. W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists (Sydney, 1984); for
Queensland, Raymond Evans, ‘The Nigger Shall Disappear’ in Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders, Kathryn
Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation, Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Sydney,
1975).
10. L. E. Thelkeld, Australian Reminiscences and Papers, ed. Niel Gunson (Canberra, Institute of
Aboriginal Affairs, 1974, Vol. 1, 49).
11. The Geelong Advertiser, 22 April 1846.
12. cf. M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835-86 (Sydney, 1979), 205. ‘Viewed in the harshest
light, the 1886 Act could be construed as an attempt at legal genocide. Certainly it was aimed at removing
the Aborigines as a distinct and observable group, with its own culture and way of life.’
13. M. C. Hartwig, ‘Aborigines and Racism: An Historical Perspective’, in F. S. Stevens (ed.), Racism:
the Australian Experience (Sydney, 1972).
14. Henry Reynolds, Aborigines and Settlers (Melbourne, 1972). Introduction. See also Reece, ‘The
Aborigines in Australian Historiography’, previously cited, and Rob Pascoe, The Manufacture of
Australian History (Melbourne, 1979).
15. For this perspective on the first and continuing encounter see Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of
the Frontier (Ringwood, 1982), and Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians (Sydney, 1982).
16. Peter Read, “‘A rape of a soul so profound”: some reflections on the dispersal policy in New South
Wales’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 7, Pt 1 , 1983, 32. See also Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini
(Sydney, 1980).
17. Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder (New Brunswick, 1967), 18.
18. The Northern Miner, quoted by The Bulletin, 9 June 1883. Reprinted in Andrew Markus, From the
Barrel of a Gun. The Oppression of the Aborigines, 186lXI900 (Melbourne, 1974), 69-70.
19. This remark was made in 1908. Quoted in Evans, ‘The Nigger Shall Disappear’ 50. The tradition of
frank utterance lives on. ‘People selling buttons in Melbourne streets for an Aborigine cause not long
ago were astounded by the savagery of the answers given by some of those asked to buy-“I’d rub
the lot out,” “Give ’em a bait” and so on, and these from people who had probably never seen an
Aborigine and who certainly had no reason to fear one.’ Clive Turnbull in Stevens, Racism, 233.
20. The Bulletin, 11 June 1892. Markus, From the Barrel of a Gun, 71.
21. The Age, 10 July 1984. The West Australian Opposition leader, also speaking in Sydney, indicated
two popular lines of attack in the campaign against land rights: ‘My party does not accept the proposition
that Aborigines have a right to land that is different from the rights that others have’. Not only do
land rights constitute ‘a racist policy’ but ‘a serious threat to the security and future welfare of Australia’.