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ABSTRACT
Did frontier conflict in Australia amount to genocide? Answers to this question have revolved around topics such as contemporary understandings of the conflict, intent, the applicability of the term to Australian history and considerations of Indigenous agency. In this historiographical article, we argue that ‘genocide’ is a useful framework with which to understand the frontier experience in the Australian colonies. From that perspective, we provide a critical review of the literature up to the present.
Acknowledgement
We would like to thank Dirk Moses for inviting us to write this article, and for drawing our attention to the newest research while we were writing. We would also like to thank the three anonymous peer reviewers for their very thorough and constructive reports.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Thomas James Rogers completed his PhD in Australian history at the University of Melbourne in 2014. His thesis examined free settler rhetoric in the Port Phillip District, 1835–1850, and showed how it reinforced and justified physical violence on the frontier. His research interests include settler colonial history and the relationships between language and violence.
Stephen Bain is a PhD candidate in Australian history at the University of Melbourne. His thesis examines the Aboriginal Protectorate in the Port Phillip District, 1839–1849.
Notes
1. For a recent example, see Mohamed Adhikari, ‘“Killed for being in the way of the great land theft”: civilian-driven settler genocides in California and Queensland’, Settler Colonial Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2015, pp. 174–185. For an overview, see Tony Barta, ‘Decent disposal: Australian historians and the recovery of genocide’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The historiography of genocide (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 296–322.
2. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 8, No. 4, 2006, pp. 387–409; Lorenzo Veracini, Settler colonialism: a theoretical overview (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 75; Benjamin Madley, ‘Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2004, pp. 167–192; Ben Kiernan, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 249–309.
3. Ben Kiernan, ‘Cover-up and denial of genocide: Australia, the USA, East Timor, and the Aborigines', Critical Asian Studies, Vol. 34, No. 2, 2002, p. 182.
4. Henry Reynolds, Forgotten war (Sydney: NewSouth, 2013), pp. 49–50.
5. Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: a history since 1803 (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2012), p. 145; Henry Reynolds, Fate of a free people (Ringwood: Penguin, 1995), p. 72; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians: a history since 1788 (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), p. 109.
6. See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark vanishings: discourse on the extinction of primitive races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Russell McGregor, Imagined destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the doomed race theory, 1880–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1997); A. Dirk Moses, ‘An antipodean genocide? The origins of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2000, pp. 96–97; Tony Barta, ‘Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia’, in Isidor Walliman and Michael Dobkowski (eds.), Genocide and the modern age: etiology and case studies of mass death (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 242–244; Tony Barta, ‘Mr Darwin's shooters: on natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2005, pp. 116–137.
7. See Marie Hansen Fels, Good men and true: the Aboriginal police of the Port Phillip District, 1837–1853 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1988); Henry Reynolds, The other side of the frontier: Aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Australia (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 104.
8. On Queensland, see L. E. Skinner, Police of the pastoral frontier: native police, 1849–59 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1975); Jonathan Richards, The secret war: a true history of Queensland's Native Police (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008); Robert Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier history revisited: Queensland and the ‘history war’ (Brisbane: Lux Mundi, 2011). On the Northern Territory, see Darrell Lewis, A wild history: life and death on the Victoria River frontier (Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2012), pp. 100–122; Jack Cross, Great central state: the foundation of the Northern Territory (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2011).
9. Reynolds, Forgotten war.
10. Bill Gammage, The greatest estate on earth: how Aborigines made Australia (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2011), pp. 103–104.
11. E.g. Peter Corris, Aborigines and Europeans in western Victoria (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1968); C. D. Rowley, The destruction of Aboriginal society (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1972), pp. 157–186; Henry Reynolds, Aborigines and settlers: the Australian experience, 1788–1939 (North Melbourne: Cassell Australia, 1972); Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin, Exclusion, exploitation and extermination: race relations in colonial Queensland (Sydney: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1975); Bernard Smith, The spectre of Truganini (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980); Reynolds, The other side of the frontier. On frontier conflict, see Bain Attwood and S. G. Foster (eds.), Frontier conflict: the Australian experience (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), pp. 1–30. See also Ann Curthoys, ‘Aboriginal history’, in Graeme Davison, John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre (eds.), The Oxford companion to Australian history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 3–5.
12. W. E. H. Stanner, ‘The Boyer lectures: after the Dreaming’ (1968), in Stanner, The Dreaming and other essays (Collingwood: Black Inc. Agenda, 2010), p. 191; pp. 188–189.
13. See, for example, Rowley, The destruction of Aboriginal society, pp. 157–186.
14. Geoffrey Blainey, ‘Drawing up a balance sheet of our history’, Quadrant, Vol. 37, Nos. 7–8, 1993, p. 11.
15. Keith Windschuttle, ‘The myths of frontier massacres in Australian history’, Quadrant, Vol. 44, No. 10, October (part 1: pp. 8–21), No. 11, November (part 2: pp. 17–24), No. 12, December (part 3: pp. 6–20), 2000; Windschuttle, The fabrication of Aboriginal history, Vol. 1: Van Diemen's Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002); Michael Connor, The invention of terra nullius (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2005). In response, see Robert Manne (ed.), Whitewash: on Keith Windschuttle's fabrication of Aboriginal history (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2003); Ian Clark, ‘The convincing ground massacre at Portland Bay, Victoria: fact or fiction?’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 35, 2011, pp. 79–109; Lyndall Ryan, ‘The right book for the right time?’, Labour History, Vol. 85, 2003, pp. 202–206; Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, The history wars (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003).
16. Patrick Brantlinger, ‘“Black armband” versus “white blindfold” history in Australia’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 46, No. 4, 2004, pp. 655–656.
17. Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Of a “contested ground” and an “indelible stain”: a difficult reconciliation between Australia and its Aboriginal history during the 1990s and 2000s’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 27, 2003, pp. 225–226.
18. Colin Tatz, ‘Genocide in Australia: by accident or design?’, Indigenous Human Rights and History Series, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011, p. 81.
19. See for example Windschuttle, ‘The myths of frontier massacres’ (part 2). See also A. Dirk Moses, ‘Revisionism and denial’, in Manne, Whitewash, p. 357.
20. Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’. Windschuttle later noted this essay but did not engage with its implications in detail; see Windschuttle, ‘Postmodernism in Aboriginal history – Part 1’, Quadrant, Vol. 50, No. 4, April 2006, p. 13.
21. James Boyce, Van Diemen's Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009), p. 205.
22. See for example Lt Gov. Arthur to Sec. State Rice, 27 January 1835, in Historical records of Victoria (Melbourne: Victorian Government Printing Office, 1982), Vol. 2a, p. 6; and Lt Gov. Arthur to Col. Sec. Murray, 15 April 1830, in Historical records of Australia (Sydney: Commonwealth Parliament, 1914), Series III, Vol. 9, p. 106.
23. John West, The history of Tasmania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [facsimile of 1852 edition]), Vol. 2, pp. 31–33.
24. John Reynolds, ‘West, John (1809–1873)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. Available at: http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/west-john-2784/text3965. Retrieved 24 August 2015.
25. Lemkin's incomplete chapter on Tasmania was published in 2005: Ann Curthoys, ‘Raphaël Lemkin's “Tasmania”: an introduction’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2005, pp. 162–169; and Raphaël Lemkin, ‘Tasmania’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2005, pp. 170–196.
26. Lemkin, ‘Tasmania’, pp. 177–178.
27. Tom Lawson, The last man: a British genocide in Tasmania (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), p. 97.
28. Lawson, The last man, p. 205.
29. Elizabeth Elbourne, ‘The sin of the settler: the 1835–36 Select Committee on Aborigines and debates over virtue and conquest in the early nineteenth-century British white settler empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2003, n.p., para. 48.
30. Michael Sturma, ‘Myall Creek and the psychology of mass murder’, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 16, 1985, p. 63.
31. Reynolds, Forgotten war, pp. 91–92. See also Nick Clements, The Black War: fear, sex and resistance in Tasmania (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014), esp. pp. 126–156; and Margaret Kiddle, Men of yesterday: a social history of the Western District 1834–1890 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1967), p. 122.
32. Judith Bassett, ‘The Faithfull Massacre at the Broken River, 1838’, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 24, 1989, p. 23; p. 34.
33. Alan Lester, ‘Colonial settlers and the metropole: racial discourse in the early 19th-century Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand’, Landscape Research, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2002, p. 43. On Myall Creek: Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: the Australia Day massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British conquest of New South Wales (Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, 1992), pp. 274–371; the dedicated issue of The Push from the Bush, Vol. 20, 1985; Rebecca Wood, ‘Frontier violence and the bush legend: the Sydney Herald's response to the Myall Creek Massacre trials and the creation of colonial identity’, History Australia, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2009, pp. 67.1–67.19; Sturma, ‘Myall Creek and the psychology of mass murder’; Rowley, The destruction of Aboriginal society, p. 36.
34. Wood, ‘Frontier violence and the bush legend’, p. 67.1.
35. Norma Townsend, ‘Masters and men and the Myall Creek Massacre', The Push from the Bush, Vol. 20, 1985, pp. 4–32.
36. Wood, ‘Frontier violence and the bush legend’, pp. 67.14–67.15.
37. Rowley, The destruction of Aboriginal society, pp. 74–75.
38. For example, see Southern Australian, 19 March 1840.
39. See, for example, Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the silence: the history and memory of South Australia's frontier wars (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2012). See also Stephen Gray, The protectors: a journey through whitefella past (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2011).
40. On central Australia, see Richard Kimber, ‘Genocide or not? The situation in central Australia, 1860–1895’, in Colin Tatz (ed.), Genocide perspectives I: essays in comparative genocide (Sydney: Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, 1997), pp. 33–65.
41. Reynolds, Forgotten war, p. 124. See also Tony Roberts, Frontier justice: a history of the Gulf Country to 1900 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005).
42. Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted-Jensen, ‘“I cannot say the numbers that were killed”: assessing violent mortality on the Queensland frontier’, unpublished paper delivered at ‘Conflict in History’, The Australian Historical Association 33rd Annual Conference, The University of Queensland, 7–11 July 2014.
43. Raymond Evans, ‘The country has another past: Queensland and the history wars’, in Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker (eds.), Passionate histories: myth, memory and Indigenous Australia (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010), p. 57.
44. Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 109–110. See also Timothy Bottoms, Conspiracy of silence: Queensland's frontier killing times (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013).
45. John Mackenzie-Smith, ‘The Kilcoy poisonings revisited’, Queensland History Journal, Vol. 20, No. 11, 2009, pp. 597–598.
46. See Mackenzie-Smith, ‘The Kilcoy poisonings revisited’; and Gordon Reid, ‘From Hornet Bank to Cullin-la-Ringo’, Historical Papers (Brisbane), Vol. 11, No. 2, 1980–81, pp. 62–82.
47. On northern Australia, see Lewis, A wild history; Roberts, Frontier justice.
48. Evans et al., Exclusion, exploitation and extermination; Noel Loos, Invasion and resistance: Aboriginal–European relations on the north Queensland frontier 1861–1897 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982); Gordon Reid, A nest of hornets: the massacre of the Fraser family at Hornet Bank station, central Queensland 1857 and related events (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982); Reynolds, The other side of the frontier.
49. Richards, The secret war; Evans, ‘The country has another past’, pp. 32–66; Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier history revisited; Bottoms, Conspiracy of silence.
50. Bottoms, Conspiracy of silence, p. 181, following Evans, ‘The country has another past’, p. 57; see also Evans and Ørsted-Jensen, ‘“I cannot say the numbers that were killed”’.
51. Reynolds, The other side of the frontier, p. 122; Evans, ‘The country has another past’, p. 57.
52. Richards, The secret war, p. 206.
53. Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier history revisited, pp. 111–112.
54. Bottoms, Conspiracy of silence, p. 201.
55. Evans et al., Exclusion, exploitation and extermination; Moses, ‘An antipodean genocide?’; Alison Palmer, Colonial genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House, 2000), esp. ch. 3; Henry Reynolds, An indelible stain? The question of genocide in Australia's history (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2001), pp. 125–134.
56. Palmer, Colonial genocide, p. 3; Moses, ‘An antipodean genocide?’, pp. 99–103; see also Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier history revisited, pp. 39–49, p. 107.
57. See, for example, Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier history revisited, pp. 39–49.
58. Governor Stirling to Aberdeen, 10 July 1835, quoted in Henry Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, settlers and land (Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 1987), p. 54.
59. Rockhampton Bulletin, 6 August 1867, quoted in Reynolds, Frontier, p. 55.
60. James Boyce, 1835: the founding of Melbourne & the conquest of Australia (Collingwood: Black Inc., 2011); A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and settler society in Australian history’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and settler society: frontier violence and stolen Indigenous children in Australian history (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), pp. 5–7.
61. See Lemkin, ‘Tasmania’; Lawson, The last man.
62. James Bonwick, The last of the Tasmanians; or, the Black War of Van Diemen's Land (London: Sampson, Low, Son, & Marston, 1870).
63. Boyce, Van Diemen's Land, p. 198.
64. John Batman to Thomas Anstey, 7 September 1829, quoted in Alastair Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines (Malmsbury, Vic.: Kibble Books, 1987), p. 27, pp. 31–32.
65. Batman to Thomas Anstey, 7 September 1829, quoted in Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines, p. 27, pp. 31–32.
66. Colonial Times, 24 September 1830.
67. John Connor, The Australian frontier wars, 1788–1838 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), pp. 95–101. See also Lyndall Ryan, ‘The Black Line in Van Diemen's Land: success or failure?’, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2013, pp. 3–18.
68. Colonial Times (Hobart), 21 September 1831.
69. George Augustus Robinson to his wife, 10 October 1830, quoted in Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines, p. 47.
70. See Boyce, 1835; Lester, ‘Colonial settlers and the metropole', pp. 39–49. See also James Belich, Replenishing the earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 275–278.
71. The Australian, 8 December 1838.
72. Sydney Herald, 7 November 1838.
73. Quoted in Townsend, ‘Masters and men’, p. 5.
74. John Helder Wedge to John Montagu, VDL Colonial Secretary, 15 March 1836, in Historical records of Victoria, Vol. 1, p. 35.
75. George Mercer to Sec. State Lord Glenelg, 16 March 1836, in Historical records of Australia, Series I, Vol. 18, p. 385.
76. Bain Attwood, ‘Aboriginal history', in John A. Moses (ed.), Historical disciplines in Australasia: themes, problems and debates, special issue of the Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 41, 1995, pp. 33–47.
77. Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe, ‘Indigenocide and the massacre of Aboriginal history’, Overland, No. 163, Winter 2001, pp. 21–39.
78. A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, colony, genocide: conquest, occupation and subaltern resistance in world history (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008).
79. Raymond Evans, ‘“Crime without a name”: colonialism and the case for “indigenocide”’, in Moses, Empire, colony, genocide, p. 141.
80. Evans, ‘“Crime without a name”', p. 142.
81. See, for example, Moses, Genocide and settler society; Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), Genocide on settler frontiers: when hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015); Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism’.
82. Barta, ‘Decent disposal’, pp. 313–314.
83. Barta, ‘Decent disposal’, p. 312. See Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust’, in Moses, Genocide and settler society, pp. 49–77; Norbert Finzsch, ‘“The Aborigines … were never annihilated, and still they are becoming extinct”: settler imperialism and genocide in nineteenth-century America and Australia’, in Moses, Empire, colony, genocide, pp. 253–270.
84. Curthoys, ‘Raphael Lemkin's “Tasmania”’, pp. 162–164.
85. Ann Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: the history of an idea’, in Moses, Empire, colony, genocide, p. 241.
86. Benjamin Madley, ‘From terror to genocide: Britain's Tasmanian penal colony and Australia's history wars’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 47, No. 1, 2008, pp. 104–106.
87. Madley, ‘From terror to genocide’, p. 106.
88. Lawson, The last man, p. 205.
89. Lawson, The last man, p. 205.
90. Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania’, p. 229. An exception is Clive Turnbull, Black war: the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne: Cheshire-Lansdowne, 1948).
91. Dan Stone, ‘Introduction’, in Stone, The historiography of genocide, p. 3.
92. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Moving the genocide debate beyond the history wars’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 54, No. 2, 2008, p. 253.
93. Broome, ‘The statistics of frontier conflict’, in Attwood and Foster, Frontier conflict, p. 94.
94. Damien Short, ‘Australia: a continuing genocide?’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 1–2, 2010, p. 45.
95. Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’, p. 238.
96. Richard Broome, Aboriginal Victorians: a history since 1800 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), p. 84. See also Paul Bartrop, ‘Punitive expeditions and massacres: Gippsland, Colorado, and the question of genocide’, in Moses, Genocide and settler society, pp. 195–214; and Reynolds, An indelible stain?, pp. 71–78.
97. Moses, ‘Moving the genocide debate beyond the history wars’, pp. 264–265.
98. Rebe Taylor, ‘Genocide, extinction and Aboriginal self-determination in Tasmanian historiography’, History Compass, Vol. 11, No. 6, 2013, pp. 410–412. See also Lorenzo Veracini, ‘A prehistory of Australia's history wars: the evolution of Aboriginal history during the 1970s and 1980s’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2006, p. 447.
99. Larissa Behrendt, ‘Genocide: the distance between law and life’, Aboriginal History, Vol. 25, 2001, p. 146.
100. Stone, ‘Introduction’, p. 2.
101. Taylor, ‘Genocide, extinction and Aboriginal self-determination’, p. 406. See Reynolds, Forgotten war; and Reynolds, An indelible stain?.
102. Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania’, p. 230.
103. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘Massacre in the old and new worlds, c. 1780–1820’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2013, p. 111.
104. Barta, ‘Relations of genocide’, p. 239. Emphasis original.
105. Tony Barta, ‘With intent to deny: on colonial intentions and genocide denial’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2008, pp. 111–112.
106. Tony Barta, ‘“They appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth”: Aborigines and the European project in Australia Felix’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 10, No. 4, 2008, p. 520.
107. Barta, ‘“They appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth”’, p. 536.
108. Lorenzo Veracini, ‘“Settler colonialism”: career of a concept’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 41, No. 2, 2013, p. 325.
109. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Nation and miscegenation: discursive continuity in the post-Mabo era’, Social Analysis, Vol. 36, 1994, p. 93.
110. Wolfe, ‘Nation and miscegenation’, p. 94.
111. Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism’, pp. 401–402.
112. Tim Rowse, ‘Indigenous heterogeneity’, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2014, p. 300.
113. Rowse, ‘Indigenous heterogeneity’, p. 301.
114. Boyce, 1835, p. 151; pp. 167–171.
115. Boyce, 1835, p. 180.
116. Boyce, 1835, p. 70; p. 177.
117. John Docker, ‘A plethora of intentions: genocide, settler colonialism and historical consciousness in Australia and Britain’, International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2015, pp. 74–89.
118. Veracini, ‘“Settler colonialism”: career of a concept’, p. 313.
119. A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, colony, genocide: keywords and the philosophy of history’, in Moses, Empire, colony, genocide, p. 7.
120. Tatz, ‘Genocide in Australia’, p. 76.
121. Docker, ‘A plethora of intentions’, p. 84.