Genocide and Settler Society

Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History

A. Dirk Moses, A. Dirk Moses

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781782381693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Genocide & War Crimes
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

– Section I –

CONCEPTUAL AND
HISTORICAL DETERMINANTS

– Chapter 1 –

GENOCIDE AND SETTLER SOCIETY
IN AUSTRALIAN HISTORY

A. Dirk Moses

The “Gorgon Effect” and Colonial Genocide

The Gorgon were three mythical sisters, originally beautiful priestesses serving the goddess of wisdom and war, Athena. After the only mortal among them, Medusa, was raped by Poseidon, they vented their anger by torturing men passing Athena’s temple. Outraged by such transgressions, Athena turned the sisters into hideous creatures whose image of “Hate, Violence, and Onslaught . . . chills the blood.”¹ Ever since, the sight of the Gorgon has turned men to stone. Similarly, some have observed, the imagination and will of scholars freezes when they regard the Holocaust. Such is its enormity that conventional categories of analysis fail to apply, and conceptual activity is paralyzed.²

Judging by the comparative paucity of publications on colonial genocide, the metaphor of the “Gorgon effect” is equally relevant to this field of inquiry, although it is perhaps less a matter of awed passivity than willful blindness.³ Consider this observation by a European historian of the Holocaust:

I think there may have also been a widely-held unspoken assumption that the mass of killing of African or American peoples was a distant and in some senses an “inevitable” part of progress while what was genuinely shocking was the attempt to exterminate an entire people in Europe. This assumption may rest upon an implicit racism, or simply upon a failure of historical imagination; it leads, in either case, to the view that it was specifically with the Holocaust that European civilization—the values of the Enlightenment, a confidence in progress and modernity—finally betrayed itself. This view claims both too much and too little. If there had indeed been such a betrayal, had it not occurred rather earlier, outside Europe?⁴

At least some non-Europeans concur with this suggestion. “From the standpoint of numerous Asian and Third World scholars,” wrote one, “the Holocaust, alongside the killings of homosexuals, gypsies, and the purportedly deranged, visited upon the peoples of Europe the violence that colonial powers had routinely inflicted on the ‘natives’ all over the world for nearly five hundred years.”⁵

It is not necessary to join the polemic over the status of the Holocaust in relation to colonial genocides to recognize that vastly more scholarly and popular attention has been devoted to the former, and state-sponsored killing in the twentieth century in general, than to the latter.⁶ The “Gorgon effect” here is a product of the paradox that the largest of the modern empires, Great Britain, was at once an implacable opponent of totalitarianism and the source of those settlers who swept aside millions of Indigenous peoples to establish progressive democracies in North America, New Zealand, and Australia. Bulwarks of liberty, Britain and its former colonies also have blood on their hands.

This paradox has issued in two incommensurable responses. In its extreme incarnation, the first of these condemns European imperialism as a murderous conspiracy against non-Europeans. Typical is the Native American activist and scholar Ward Churchill, who regards the English as “global leaders in genocidal activities, both in terms of overall efficiency—as they consummated the total extinction of the Tasmanians in 1876—and a flair for innovation embodied in their deliberate use of alcohol to effect the dissolution of many of North America’s indigenous peoples.”⁷ A rival view lauds Britain as the mildest of Europe’s imperial powers: the “natives” were lucky that the British colonized their country and not, say, the French or Belgians. Hannah Arendt, for example, was fascinated by the Anglophone colonies as exceptions to the continental pattern of conquest because they were not “seriously concerned with discrimination against other peoples as lower races, if only for the reason that the countries they were talking about, Canada and Australia, were almost empty and had no serious population problem.” To be sure, Arendt qualified this extraordinary statement in a footnote that acknowledged “comparatively short periods of cruel liquidation” of the few original inhabitants. Nonetheless, her basic conviction was that British civilization blessed the continents of America and Australia, which, until its arrival, were “without a culture and history of their own.”⁸ Likely she would have rejected the proposition of Churchill and David E. Stannard that the Native Americans suffered an “American Holocaust,” but her naïve paean to British expansion simply repeated contemporary European prejudices about their civilization and non-European barbarism despite the fact that the Holocaust occurred in the heart of Europe.⁹

A closer look at British commentary on Britain’s encounter with Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century reveals that both views are one-sided. Rarely can exterminatory intent be discerned in British authorities, but there was a greater degree of consciousness about the fatal impact of their presence than Arendt was willing to consider. Writing in 1839, for instance, Charles Darwin noted, “Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. . . . The varieties of man seem to act on each other; in the same way as different species of animals the stronger always extirpating the weaker.”¹⁰ In the same year, the ethnologist James Prichard sounded the tocsin about “the extinction of human races” in The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal: “Wherever Europeans have settled, their arrival has been the harbinger of extermination to the native tribes.” Fearful that a further century of colonization would mean “the aboriginal nations of most parts of the world will have ceased to exist,” he asked “whether any thing [sic] can be done effectually to prevent the extermination of the aboriginal tribes.”¹¹

Subsequent instances of Indigenous massacres of settlers and the rise of scientific racism meant that the novelist Anthony Trollope and imperial ideologue Charles Dilke expressed no such anxieties when they wrote about their respective antipodean tours several decades later.¹² The Aborigines were “ineradicably savage,” declared the former in 1872; the male possessed the deportment “of a sapient monkey imitating the gait and manners of a do-nothing white dandy,” as well as suffering from a “low physiognomy” that rendered him lazy and useless. “It is their fate to be abolished; and they are already vanishing,” he concluded without regret or moral scruple. The harshness of Trollope’s judgment that the Aborigine “had to go” was hardly mitigated by the wish that they “should perish without unnecessary suffering.”¹³ Dilke commented in similar terms in relation to Indigenous population collapse. The “aboriginal Australian blacks . . . were so extraordinarily backward a race as to make it difficult to help them to hold their own.” They were “rapidly dying out, and it is hard to see any other fate could be expected for them.”¹⁴ Many such statements from the period could be adduced.¹⁵

Australian Settler Society and its Conscience

Clearly, the British understood the effects of their presence in Australia and other colonies. But this did not mean they took responsibility for the anticipated disappearance of the Indigenous peoples, despite the obvious connection between colonization and depopulation. Since the nineteenth century, they, and later, Australians, have engaged in often-acrimonious debate about the causes of the Aboriginal demographic catastrophe and the apportionment of blame. As one visitor to New South Wales observed in the early 1840s, colonial society was split between those for whom the Aborigines were “not entitled to be looked upon as fellow creatures,” and those who viewed “with horror the inroad made into the possessions of the natives.”¹⁶ An English settler made the same observation in 1844 when he reported that two friends “argued that it is morally right for a Christian Nation to extirpate savages from their native soil in order that it may be peopled with a more intelligent and civilized race of human beings . . . [while] . . . (Frederick) McConnell and myself were of the opposite opinion and argued that a nation had no moral right to take forcible possession of any place.”¹⁷ The stakes were, and remain, high. Was white Australia born with the mark of Cain? Or had the settlers built a society about which they could feel justly proud and that ultimately benefited the Aborigines, at least those prepared to relinquish their “stone-age” culture for the modern European one? The arguments fall roughly into the same two camps sketched above: “humanitarian” and “triumphalist.”

“That Thin Strand of Humanitarianism”¹⁸

Australian colonization was triumphant, but its human cost troubled a small minority of Britons. From the 1820s, they believed the settlers were unjustly treating the original inhabitants and exterminating them when they resisted. Where Aboriginal warriors had committed “depredations” or “outrages,” these critics pointed out, were they not reacting to white violation of their food supplies and women? Even if disease carried off the majority of the Aborigines, they continued, had not Indigenous society and its reproductive capacities been fatally smashed by rapacious settlers? Furthermore, it was iniquitous that Aborigines were forbidden from testifying in legal proceedings when they were otherwise regarded formally as British subjects, equal before the law.¹⁹ Expressing the Enlightenment and Christian belief in a universal human nature, they insisted that Aborigines were fully human and children of God, and therefore “civilizable.” Such were the assumptions of the colony’s first governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, whose orders were to treat the Aborigines well.²⁰

In this vein, liberal officials in the Colonial Office in London worried greatly about the frontier struggle transpiring on the other side of the world. In 1837, a Select Committee Inquiry urged the British government to assume moral responsibility for the Indigenous peoples of South Africa, the Australian colonies, and North America lest they become extinct. A year later, Sir George Gipps, Governor of New South Wales, embodied this spirit when he expedited the prosecution and execution of whites who had massacred Aborigines at Myall Creek—one of the very few occasions in the nineteenth century that the law making the murder of Aborigines a capital offence was enforced.²¹

Toward the end of the nineteenth century and early in the next, the humanitarian impulse issued in “protection” legislation for “pacified” Aborigines in the self-governing British colonies (which became the constitutive states of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901). Such measures, which confined many Aborigines in isolated reserves under oppressive regimes of discriminatory regulation, were designed to afford them security from the exploitation and violence of frontier existence. But these laws also suited the majority of colonists, who were happy to have Aborigines removed from fertile farmland and country towns.²²

The public, having also applauded the prohibition of non-white immigration into the country (...