Genocide of Indigenous Australians | |
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Location | Australia |
Date | 1788 - 1970 |
Target | Aboriginal Australians Torres Strait Islanders |
Attack type | Genocide, massacre, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, starvation |
Perpetrators | European colonisers Australian Government |
Motive | Settler colonialism White supremacy |
Part of a series on |
Genocide of Indigenous peoples |
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Issues |
Part of a series on |
Genocide |
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Issues |
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The genocide of Indigenous Australians refers to the systematic and deliberate actions taken primarily by European colonisers and their descendants, particularly during the 18th to the 20th centuries, aimed at eradicating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, languages, and people. Motivations for the genocide varied, and included motivations aimed at preserving a "white Australia", [1] or assimilating Indigenous populations "for their own good". [2]
The genocide of Indigenous Australians includes mass killings during the frontier wars, forced removals of children (now known as the Stolen Generations), and policies of forced assimilation by the Australian Government that sought to extinguish Indigenous Australian identity and cultural practices. [3] [ page needed ]
The colonization of Australia by the British, starting in 1788, marked the beginning of a catastrophic impact on the Indigenous populations, who had lived continuously on the continent for around 60,000 years prior to European settlement. [4] [5] [6] Some of the catastrophic impacts upon the indigenous population came about somewhat inadvertently (e.g. those caused by disease introduction, or agricultural displacement [7] ). However, other impacts upon the population were more deliberate, and would fairly be described by modern scholars as historical acts of genocide.
Some acts of genocide perpetrated against Indigenous Australians included:
The genocide of Indigenous Australians has left deep scars on communities in Australia, with ongoing impacts on cultural heritage, languages, and people groups. The recognition of historical injustices in Australia has been relatively slow. Efforts to acknowledge and reconcile these actions started toward the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
One watershed moment was the Bringing Them Home report, which contained the findings of the federal government inquiry into the removal of thousands of Aboriginal children. [15] The report argued that the Commonwealth Government was guilty of the crime of genocide; under the UN Convention defining genocide as "intentional destruction of a racial, religious, national, or ethnic group". [22]
Since 1998 Australia has acknowledged the harms caused to Indigenous Australians in a National Sorry Day on May 26. In addition, a formal apology was delivered to the Stolen Generations by prime minister Kevin Rudd on behalf of the Australian Parliament in 2008. In recent decades the Australian Government has pursued a policy titled "Closing the Gap" partly in an effort to redress some of the harms caused by prior policy.
There remains ongoing debate about the characterization of the historical events that Indigenous Australians faced as a form of "genocide". [23] [ page needed ] Some argue that the actions meet the legal definition outlined in the United Nations Genocide Convention, while others express a contrary view. Scholars such as Robert van Krieken have argued that the debate often involves a continuing dispute as to how broadly the concept of genocide ought to be understood. Narrow conceptions of genocide are restricted to killing, whereas the broader definition includes other ways a human group can be "eliminated", including the destruction of cultural identity. [24] [ page needed ] Some scholars have said in relation to this "Australia's record on Indigenous Australians is at best ambiguous, and at worst an example of genocide by eugenics". [25]
The near-destruction of Tasmania's Aboriginal population has been described as an act of genocide by historians including Robert Hughes, James Boyce, Lyndall Ryan, Tom Lawson, Mohamed Adhikari, Benjamin Madley, and Ashley Riley Sousa. [26] The author of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, considered Tasmania the site of one of the world's clear cases of genocide [27] and Hughes has described the loss of Aboriginal Tasmanians as "the only true genocide in English colonial history". [28]
Queensland represents the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia. [29] [30] Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of indigenous people and the most disreputable frontier police force. [31] Thus some sources have characterized these events as a "Queensland Aboriginal genocide". [32] [33] [34] [35] In 2009 professor Raymond Evans calculated the Indigenous fatalities caused by the Queensland Native Police Force alone as no less than 24,000. [36]
Some scholars have argued that the genocide against Indigenous Australians continues, especially through contemporary cultural destructive policies. [37] These scholars are part of a minority opinion in both formal academic scholarship on genocide and in popular discourse. [11]
The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian federal and state government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s.
Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assimilates the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially.
Keith Windschuttle is an Australian historian. He was appointed to the board of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2006. He was editor of Quadrant from 2007 to 2015 when he became chair of the board and editor-in-chief. He was the publisher of Macleay Press, which operated from 1994 to 2010.
The term genocidal massacre was introduced by Leo Kuper (1908–1994) to describe incidents which have a genocidal component but are committed on a smaller scale when they are compared to genocides such as the Rwandan genocide. Others such as Robert Melson, who also makes a similar differentiation, class genocidal massacres as "partial genocide".
The history wars is a term used in Australia to describe the public debate about the interpretation of the history of the European colonisation of Australia and the development of contemporary Australian society, particularly with regard to their impact on Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The term "history wars" emerged in the late 1990s during the term of the Howard government, and despite efforts by some of Howard's successors, the debate is ongoing, notably reignited in 2016 and 2020.
The history of Indigenous Australians began at least 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses. This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other sub-groups defined by language and culture.
Indigenous Australians are people with familial heritage from, and/or recognised membership of, the various ethnic groups living within the territory of present day Australia prior to British colonisation. They consist of two distinct groups, which includes many ethnic groups: the Aboriginal Australians of the mainland and many islands, including Tasmania, and the Torres Strait Islanders of the seas between Queensland and Papua New Guinea, located in Melanesia. The term Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples or the person's specific cultural group, is often preferred, though the terms First Nations of Australia, First Peoples of Australia and First Australians are also increasingly common; 812,728 people self-identified as being of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin in the 2021 Australian Census, representing 3.2% of the total population of Australia. Of these Indigenous Australians, 91.4% identified as Aboriginal; 4.2% identified as Torres Strait Islander; while 4.4% identified with both groups. Since 1995, the Australian Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag have been official flags of Australia.
The Other Side of the Frontier is a history book published in 1981 by Australian historian Henry Reynolds. It is a study of Aboriginal Australian resistance to the British settlement, or invasion, of Australia from 1788 onwards.
The Australian frontier wars were the violent conflicts between Indigenous Australians and primarily British settlers during the colonial period of Australia.
Settler society is a theoretical term in the early modern period and modern history that describes a common link between modern, predominantly European, attempts to permanently settle in other areas of the world. It is used to distinguish settler colonies from resource extraction colonies. The term came to wide use in the 1970s as part of the discourse on decolonization, particularly to describe older colonial units.
The Darumbal people, also spelt Darambal and Dharumbal, are the Aboriginal Australian people who have traditionally occupied Central Queensland, speaking dialects of the Darumbal language. Darumbal people of the Keppel Islands and surrounding regions are sometimes also known as Woppaburra or Ganumi, and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.
The genocide of Indigenous peoples, colonial genocide, or settler genocide is the intentional elimination of Indigenous peoples as a part of the process of colonialism.
Anna Elizabeth Haebich, is an Australian writer, historian and academic.
Settler colonialism occurs when colonizers and settlers invade and occupy territory to permanently replace the existing society with the society of the colonizers.
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.
The Karuwali are an Aboriginal Australian people of the state of Queensland.
Yued is a region inhabited by the Yued people, one of the fourteen groups of Noongar Aboriginal Australians who have lived in the South West corner of Western Australia for approximately 40,000 years.
Denial of genocides of Indigenous peoples consists of a claim that has denied any of the multiple genocides and atrocity crimes, which have been committed against Indigenous peoples. The denialism claim contradicts the academic consensus, which acknowledges that genocide was committed. The claim is a form of denialism, genocide denial, historical negationism and historical revisionism. The atrocity crimes include genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing.
Peter John Read is an Australian historian specialising in the history of Indigenous Australians. Read worked as a teacher and civil servant before co-founding Link-Up. Link-Up was an organisation that reunited aboriginal families who had undergone forcible separation of children from their families through government intervention. Read coined the term "Stolen Generations" to refer to the children subject to these interventions in a 1981 study. After graduating with a doctorate, Read worked as an academic for the rest of his career primarily working on Australian Indigenous history. He has also published work on the relationship between non-indigenous Australians and the land. In 2019, Read was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his work on Indigenous history.
This chapter examines the full range of literature on aboriginal participation in the Australian economy. Most of the scholarly works that consider the question of genocide in Australia focus on the "dispersal" extermination campaigns of the 1800s and/or the issue of the "Stolen Generations." While writers like Tony Barta and Patrick Wolfe imply that genocidal structuring dynamics are at work in Australia, theirs is a distinct minority opinion in genocide scholarship and popular discourse.
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