‘Victims of the past? White‐Aboriginal relations in Australian historiography in the nineteenth century,’ Zeitschrift für Australienstudien,No. 22/23 (2009), 24–41. (original) (raw)

Myth and reality in Australian colonial history and beyond

Much of Australian history is in the form of ‘myth’. The absence of case law makes the investigation of massacres more difficult. Many university history faculties discourage such conflict studies as unnecessarily negative, preferring to focus on ‘race relations’. The debate gave rise to the ‘history wars’ and a repudiation of the ‘black armband view’ of history. This paper contends that a culture of denialism has perpetuated some of the dysfunctional behaviours that drove violent Aboriginal depopulation.There is evidence that Australia is in a late stage Lemkinian genocidal process.

The Question of Colonial Genocide in Australia The Question of Colonial Genocide in Australia

We reexamine the fraught question of colonial genocide in Australia and conclude that the worst of Australia's values were formed in the crucible of racism, a sense of superiority deriving from Britain's class obsessed hierarchy, a sense that has now transferred to the environment, for which specism is the enabler and ecocide is the consequence. The impact of British power on Aboriginals was calibrated and ruthless, but we are now asked to question British 'intent', that there was no documented intention by Britain to commit genocide. This is a further example of 'reframing'. Mass killing almost never has a written order. It is unlikely, and highly self-incriminating, that a Government would issue instructions for carrying out deliberate murder. Nevertheless, ethnically targeted mass killing-racial destruction-is usually the expected result of some official policy or reactive social behaviour within a policy context. We are asked by some politicians and historians to absolve or reject Britain's role in colonial genocide because there is no evidence of written orders from the British Government that authorises mass killing. Others argue, if mistakes were made, that the past should remain in the past. We are further asked by some (such as Windschuttle and other denialists) to dismiss any allegations of mass killing because there is no body of legal evidence (that is, case histories) to support such a charge. Instead, we are exhorted to consider violence against Aboriginals, if we accept it at all, as the aberrational excesses of a few settlers at the lawless frontier; or if we reluctantly accept that targeted racial violence and Aboriginal antipathy did occur, we are encouraged to play it down as 'a black armband' view of history that is unhelpful in the myths we prefer to create for ourselves.

Re-presenting the Australian aborigine: Challenging colonialist discourse through Autoethnography

Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2000

Since the late 1980s, a steady output of life-writing has emerged from Australia's Aboriginal community. This paper --intended as an introduction to subsequent studies of particular texts --examines the socio-historic background to this literary phenomenon. It argues that the so-called 'autobiographical' writing produced by Aboriginal authors is, in fact, a form of autoethnography -an important counterdiscourse to the systematic misrepresentations of Aborigines that whites have used to justify their su/o-ppression of Australia's indigenous peoples.

History Australia Reflections on genocide and settler-colonial violence

The debate about whether genocide took place on the Australian colonial frontier began more than thirty years ago and appears to have reached an intellectual impasse. How then did the debate begin in Australia, how did it gain traction and why does it appear more vigorous in Australia than in other settler societies? To explore these questions, this paper places the debate within a larger context, firstly by comparing the Australian debate with those taking place in other similar British settler societies and then considering the ways European historians have invoked genocide discourse to explore nationalist histories. In taking this approach the paper reveals the different ways genocide discourse has been used to make sense of traumatic pasts in different regions of the world and how it has become part of the discussions about national identity. Finally in an attempt to overcome the intellectual impasse about the genocide debate in Australia, the paper offers a few suggestions that may give historians of the colonial frontier a way forward. This article has been peer reviewed.

Aboriginals, Colonists and Multiculturalism: The Dialectic of Recognition and Social Exclusion in Australian History

Social Exclusion: An Approach to the The Australian Case, Edited by Doris Weiss, 2003

Developing Hegel’s ideas on the dialectic of recognition and its role in the evolution of civilization, Charles Taylor in a seminal work, Multiculturalism and the “Politics of Recognition” (since translated into Italian, French and German), defended multiculturalism, in which different cultures within a country are recognized and respected, as a new phase in ethical and political development (Taylor and Gutmann, 1992; Taylor, 1994). Australia is unique in modern history in the extent to which it has embraced multiculturalism and abandoned nationalism - the commitment to a territorial community the membership of which is defined first and foremost in terms of place of birth. It appears to be a post-nationalist, multicultural society that celebrates its cultural diversity. Far from being social outcastes, immigrants, who are selected for their level of education, have a higher average income than native-born Australians. Australia, therefore, might seem to provide a vision of the future for those countries striving to overcome the exclusionary tendencies of their nationalist heritage. Here I will that the Australian experience brings into question the whole idea of multiculturalism.