IS
‘GENOCIDE’ A USEFUL CONCEPT
for understanding colonialism and, in
particular, the destruction of Aboriginal
communities during the settlement of
Australia? Dirk Moses, the editor of
this stimulating collection of essays
on Genocide and Settler Society,
thinks so, but with qualifications.
Many of his contributors agree, but
tend to be more comfortable using the
concept in its adjectival form: there
were genocidal ‘moments’,
‘plans’, ‘processes’,
‘relationships’, ‘tendencies’
and ‘thoughts’ in Australian
history, but ‘genocide’ —
the crime of deliberately exterminating
a people — is another matter. The
charge of ‘genocide’ tout
court gives historians pause, for
it is essential to prove intent and
state sanction on the part of the perpetrators.
In his useful introductory essay on
the concept of geno- cide, Dirk Moses
returns us to the originating work of
the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin,
who, indignant that the perpetrators
of the Armenian genocide had largely
escaped prosecution, began lobbying
in the 1930s for international law that
would criminalise the wilful destruction
of human groups, such as Armenians or
Jews. In his book about the Nazis, Axis
Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation,
Analysis of Government, Proposals for
Redress (1944), Lemkin coined the
new term ‘genocide’ to ‘denote
an old practice in its modern development’.
Genocide did not require mass killings.
There were many ways to destroy a people,
as Lemkin elaborated:
The
end may be accomplished by the forced
disintegration of political and social
institutions, of the culture of the
people, of their language, their national
feeling and their religion. It may
be accomplished by wiping out all
basis of personal security, liberty,
health and dignity. When these means
fail the machine gun can always be
utilized as a last resort.
Lemkin’s
emphasis on the different ‘techniques
of destruction’ that might be employed
to exterminate a group of people shaped
the formulation of the United Nations
Convention in 1948, except that it omitted
the concept of ‘cultural genocide’.
In recent years, many commentators have
invoked ‘cultural genocide’
when discussing the impact of Australian
assimilation policy on Aborigines, but,
as Moses suggests and as Russell McGregor
argues later in this volume, to equate
national assimilationism with genocide
is to ‘render the term conceptually
and morally incoherent’.
The Australian experience that is most
commonly cited in the international
literature as a case of genocide is
the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines,
yet, as Henry Reynolds shows, on the
basis of extensive research, Governor
George Arthur, together with officials
in London and Van Diemen’s Land,
said again and again that they must
do everything possible to prevent the
extermination of the natives. Their
regret seemed to enable them to distance
themselves from responsibility. But
the Tasmanian case shows clearly that
‘elimination’, as Patrick
Wolfe has written elsewhere, was the
‘primary logic’ of settler
colonialism. Colonial Office men might
deplore the deadly consequences of settlement,
but they knew from experience, and from
ongoing reports, that this was the likely
outcome of the imperative of settlement
and Aboriginal resistance.
British imperialism, in the form of
settler colonialism, had a genocidal
logic. ‘A logic of elimination
towards Indigenous peoples,’ writes
Moses endorsing Wolfe’s argument,
‘does indeed constitute its essence.’
This was the case regardless of the
subjective attitudes or sympathies of
policy-makers: ‘the British colonization
of Australia was objectively
and inherently [his italics]
“ethnocidal”,’ writes
Moses carefully, ‘fatal for many
Aborigines, and potentially genocidal.’
Was the potential realised? Not unless
the destruction of a group was intended
and sanctioned by state authorities,
insists Paul Bartrop, whose chapter
comparing settler outrages in Victoria
and Colorado concludes that whereas
the massacre of Aborigines at Warrigal
Creek in Gippsland in 1843 does not
qualify as genocide, that of Cheyenne
at Sand Creek, Colorado, was ‘clearly
a genocidal massacre undertaken as part
of a larger campaign of genocide against
the Cheyenne and Arapaho’.
Historical analysis must attend to specific
instances of dynamic interaction as
well as analysing deep structures. According
to Moses, certain situations generated
‘processes of radicalization’
that produced, in turn, ‘genocidal
moments’. The task for the historian
is to identify moments of crisis —
usually induced by indigenous resistance
— that produced ‘subjective
genocidal policy development’,
when policy-makers and settlers together
became agents with genocidal intent.
When the struggle over land became most
intense, settlers determined to subdue
Aborigines and, if necessary, to be
rid of them. State soldiers or police
sometimes helped them reach this goal.
Raymond Evans, in one of his two chapters,
documents the brutality and mass murder
that ensued in Queensland during what
Aborigines called ‘the Wild Time’:
‘arguably one of the most violent
places on earth during the global spread
of Western capitalism in the nineteenth
century.’
There is no doubt that the Queensland
frontier — or the ‘outback’,
as some preferred to term that undefined
space — was a place of terrible
violence. Hundreds of people of European
and Asian descent, and thousands of
Aborigines, died, large numbers of the
latter shot by the Queensland Native
Police. Settlers got away with murder,
for, as Evans tells us, despite all
the slaughter no Queenslander was successfully
prosecuted for any crime against an
Aboriginal person until 1883, when a
lone Townsville man was sentenced to
life for the rape of a child who was
under ten years of age.
Another case study of the ‘radicalization
process’ is provided by Anna Haebich,
who describes the collaboration of white
settlers and the state in ‘Clearing
the Wheat Belt’ of an indigenous
presence in the south-west of Western
Australia. Haebich takes a cue from
her editor in emphasising the dynamic
nature of the situation: ‘government
intentions evolve over time as policy-makers,
faced with changing circumstances, head
in directions they had not foreseen.’
Many of the Aboriginal families were
forcibly relocated to make way for the
subdivision of country into wheat farms
for agriculturalists, including soldier
settlers. The great democratic project
of small-scale land settlement —
intended to free settlers from wage
slavery — rested on the dispossession
of indigenous Australians.
Dirk Moses is an historian of Germany,
which explains, in part, what might
otherwise look like an anomaly: two
chapters of Genocide and Settler
Society focus on German history.
But there is a larger transnational
argument here. Increasingly, the field
of ‘genocide studies’ seeks
to illuminate relationships between
European and colonial histories, suggesting
that race thinking in the European heartland
was shaped by European experience in
the colonies. In his chapter, ‘Colonialism
and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology
of Genocide’, Jurgen Zimmerer argues
that Nazi policies towards Eastern Europe
are best understood as colonial in nature,
shaped by the politics of race and space.
Territory in Poland and Russia would
be occupied, resources mobilised and
large numbers of people killed in the
course of securing ‘Lebensraum’
in a vastly expanded German empire.
Hitler himself saw his precedent for
his policies in British imperialism:
‘The Russian territory is our India
and, just as the English rule India
with a handful of people, so will we
govern this our colonial territory.
We will supply the Ukrainians with headscarves,
glass chains as jewelry, and whatever
else colonial peoples like …’.
Zimmerer’s essay provides an exploration
of the ‘structural similarities
and connections’ between colonialism
and National Socialism, especially with
regard to the ‘formulation and
function of the concepts of race and
space’ — clearing space for
the occupation of a superior race. He
looks particularly at the German war
against the Herero and Nama in south-west
Africa, justified by General Lieutenant
von Trotha as clearing the way for the
settlement of Europeans. Colonialism,
Zimmerer suggests, established an important
precedent: the murder of the Jews ‘would
probably not have been thinkable and
possible if the idea that ethnicities
can simply be wiped out had not already
existed and had not already been put
into action’.
The other chapter on German history
examines the Nazi policy of removing
children of ‘valuable racial stock’
from parents in occupied Eastern European
countries, such as Czechoslovakia, and
‘Germanising’ them through
adoption. The programme, administered
by the SS under Heinrich Himmler, aimed
at strengthening the Volk through the
infusion of ‘good blood’.
Those responsible were successfully
prosecuted by Nuremberg judges, who
referred to Lemkin’s definition
of genocide. A few months later, the
UN Genocide Convention explicitly defined
the process of ‘forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group’
as a genocidal act. It was this article
that was invoked by the Human Rights
and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC)
in its report on Aboriginal child removal,
Bringing Them Home (1997).
Russell McGregor, in his chapter ‘Governance
not Genocide’, takes issue with
HREOC’s approach, insisting that
the meaning of Aboriginal child removal
depends on the policy framework in which
it was administered, and that this changed
from biological absorption between the
wars to social assimilation after World
War II. Assimilation policies, far from
seeking the elimination of Aborigines,
sought to ensure their survival as a
part of the national community. Robert
Manne examines earlier goals of biological
absorption promoted by state and territory
governments during the first decades
of the twentieth century, and notes
a shift from a concern to ameliorate
the conditions of children’s lives
to a growing anxiety about Australia’s
‘half-caste problem’.
When administrators such as Cecil Cook
and A.O. Neville determined that the
half-caste population could be merged
with the general population and thus
be made to disappear, then the ‘genocidal
dimension’ of their thinking became
evident. Paradoxically, one of the bases
for this idea was the scientific belief
that Aborigines were not in fact racially
different (like Negroes) but shared
with white Australians a common Caucasian
ancestry. Ironically, many opponents
of the plan to ‘breed out the colour’
were animated by racist outrage at the
prospect of widespread miscegenation.
While Cook and Neville were animated
by fantasies of radical social engineering,
neither had the power or the resources
to realise their goals. Their attempts
to control Aborigines’ lives and
the consequent separation of families
undoubtedly caused untold pain and misery,
but Manne concludes that because of
the ‘fantastical nature of the
absorption policy’, ‘genocidal
thoughts’ and ‘genocidal plans’
are more adequate ways of describing
their projects than ‘genocidal
crimes’.
The value of this collection of historical
essays is that it points to both the
usefulness of a transnational framework
for analysing race thinking and the
necessity for close attention to the
historical specificity of particular
moments and places.
