A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney and senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism," wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the famous opening to their Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Little could they have imagined that their observation would hold almost 170 years later in Australia where conservative pundits and politicians, including the prime minister himself, are flinging the epithet of "Stalinism" at local government councils, Aboriginal people and the political opposition.
This time, however, it's not revolution that is spooking the establishment but the colonial past.
Two local councils propose to cancel Australia Day celebrations, while Indigenous people like journalist Stan Grant are suggesting that the plaques on monuments of colonial "founding fathers" be amended to reflect historical accuracy.
The Labor opposition agrees that it is absurd to claim that Captain James Cook "discovered" Australia in 1770 when Aboriginal people had been living there for 60,000 years. (Few take seriously Keith Windschuttle and George Brandis's quaint belief that the discovery claim refers solely to eastern Australia.) Yet, for conservatives, these "revisionists" are "airbrushing history," and engaging in "moral vandalism" and "political correctness on steroids."
If anything, however, Indigenous claims are being ignored, thereby repeating the silences that led to the erection of these monuments in the first place, and concealing a truth that dare not speak its name.
The Australian scene is part of a global drama from which it draws sustenance and inspiration. Beginning in South Africa with the toppling of Cecil Rhodes's statue at the University of Capetown in 2015, followed by the unsuccessful campaign to do the same at Oxford University, the colonial past is haunting the present. Germany is locked in tense negotiation with the Namibian government about the genocide that Imperial German forces committed against the Herero and Nama people at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the United States, the legacy of white racism and slavery is the apple of discord in the bitter and at times violent conflict about the many confederate monuments that dot the South.
Both genocide and slavery are at issue in Australia. "No pride in genocide" graffiti was recently sprayed on a colonial statue in Sydney, and Indigenous figures routinely employ the genocide concept to refer to frontier massacres and the stealing of Aboriginal children by missionaries and Australian states. Sometimes, they refer to British settlement as a whole as an "ongoing genocide" that continues to this day. In far north Queensland, descendants of South Sea Islanders kidnapped to work as indentured laborers on Queensland sugar plantations - virtual slavery called "blackbirding" - now challenge the monuments honouring the men who organised the infernal trade.
Although these claims have been made before, they have been given oxygen by the international resonance of the current U.S. debate over confederate monuments.
The facts on which these claims of genocide and slavery are made are well established. Historians have written dozens of academic books and articles about them, but politicians and journalists don't seem to know - or refuse to believe - what they contain. In an embarrassing display of ignorant understatement, former government minister Graham Richardson declared that he would "not be made to feel guilty about either indigenous people or convicts," for the "at times" very poor treatment of Aboriginal people, who "were whipped and flogged and fed gruel while being forced to work long hours" - that is, enslaved. When the famous Indigenous singer Dan Sultan mentioned genocide many times recently on Q&A, he was simply ignored. Either white Australians repress what he and other Indigenous people are saying, or they deliberately choose not to listen.
Most Australian historians do as well. Genocide is not a concept with any currency in colonial historiography. At most, historians talk about dispossession and displacement, perhaps destruction. The term "genocide" is inappropriate for Australian history, many think, because the British and Australian treatment of Aboriginal people does not resemble the Holocaust of European Jewry, and because it flattens out varied and complex patterns of interaction.
Certainly, there are obvious and dramatic differences between the cases, but the objection really reflects a particular settler mentality and the historian's instinct to draw distinctions. Where many Aboriginal people experience the multiple attacks on their individual and collective lives as interlocking and reinforcing, most settler Australians see unrelated and uncoordinated policies and practices. They disaggregate processes and disperse settler agency, while the genocide concept highlights their underlying intention and outcome: destructive assaults on Indigenous persons and group existence.
But to use the genocide concept is not necessarily to adopt an Indigenous perspective. It is to recognize that British settlement and vital industries like sugar could have not succeeded without the smashing of Indigenous resistance and the large-scale enslavement of people. Nationalists claim Australian history is too complex to allow for the updating of colonial monuments, but the simple yet difficult truth is that genocide and slavery were not avoidable blemishes; they were the necessary conditions for the development of modern, democratic society in Australia. Even so, settler Australians continue to offer their civilization as a gift to people they still regard as backward natives who are expected to show gratitude. How quickly people forget that white Australians envisaged a black-free population only a few generations ago, after "extinction," taking children and assimilation had performed its cleansing work.
Australians may be surprised to learn that that foreigner scholars - even conservatives like Niall Ferguson - take it as given that Aboriginal people were victims of genocide. To be sure, this scholarship relies on locally produced knowledge, combining research strands into a picture of colonial and Australian society that perceives its deep, enabling structures of violence, and that is unbeholden to theodicies of progress or self-congratulatory tales of national greatness. This sanguine view of settler colonial societies is not confined to Australia; there is a developing conversation about an "American Genocide," for instance.
Historical understanding deepens as the research continues. Lyndall Ryan and her colleagues have recently produced the first "massacre map" of the Australian continent, while Nick Brodie has just published a groundbreaking book about the war on Indigenous Tasmanians that details far more intensive state direction of the eradication campaigns than previously supposed. Politicians and conservative journalists must ignore these findings to preserve their fantasy about the redemptive foundation of the country.
By disregarding Aboriginal commentators who seek to correct the public record with hard facts vouchsafed by historians, conservatives are repressing the ugly colonial past that is celebrated by the many monuments to founding heroes - men who massacred and enslaved. Indigenous people have been making these points for a long time, and they won't go away. If other Australians wish no longer to be haunted by the past, they need to understand these points - above all, that founding fathers were authors of founding violence - and negotiate national symbols that don't symbolically repeat the violence, that unite rather than divide.
What is more, declares Indigenous leader Sam Watson, the reconciliation and treaty negotiation processes must be preceded by the natural consequence of such historical knowledge: "Australia owes Aboriginal people an apology for the deaths and the suffering of thousands of Aboriginal people since 1788." This debate - and the much-delayed constitutional recognition of Indigenous people - won't be shut down by emotional accusations of Stalinism and by the panic about a supposed "break-up of Australia."
In attacking the "revisionists" who seek to update colonial monuments, the former editor of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, hails the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and Cambodian killing fields as authentic testaments "to the idea of historical witness." So they are; but why then slap down contemporary witness to the Australian killing fields? Why not support an Australian memorial to genocide here? Who is "airbrushing the past" and "wiping out our history"?
A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, the senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research, and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies.