| Review of: | Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History edited by A. Dirk Moses |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Tony Barta |
| Reviewed in: | Australian Journal of Politics and History |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 53, Issue 03, Pages 465-504 |
Book Reviews
In a decade marked more by campaigning attempts at controversy than by genuine challenge and reassessment, here is a book of fundamental importance for Australian history. It is now over twenty years since the idea was raised - in this journal, among other places - that genocide in Australia's past should be very seriously investigated. Some of the authors Dirk Moses has asked to write for this volume are among the pioneers. Without the work of Raymond Evans and Henry Reynolds the relatively muted interest in frontier violence and its ongoing effects in our society would be more muted still. Noise from the right about a left orthodoxy having made genocide a conventional part of our history is wide of the mark. Only a minority of scholars have determinedly engaged with the arguments. Some appear here; others - notably Lyndall Ryan, Colin Tatz, Ann Curthoys and John Docker - have made important contributions elsewhere.
Focus on the issues is more important than agreement. Reynolds, for instance, continues to argue that genocidal outcomes cannot be properly called genocide unless the state has authorised a policy of killing. Evans partly agrees. In "'Plenty Shoot 'Em': The Destruction of Aboriginal Societies along the Queensland Frontier", he produces figures that show the death toll from settler violence was far higher than previously estimated, and leaves no doubt that the state was party to it. Anyone who remains sceptical about genocide should take an unflinching look at this evidence and the justifications settlers made. And those who think the use of the word "genocide" in connection with child removal is emotive and misleading should read the chapters by Robert Manne, Pamela Lukin Watson and Anna Haebich. If, as Manne says, the policies of "breeding out the colour" were never systematically put into effect, they at least involved "genocidal thoughts" and "genocidal plans". In practice, as Watson shows, the profits made by some individuals meant not only suffering but catastrophe for whole peoples.
Haebich, working from her meticulous Western Australian research, demonstrates why "erasing the indigenous presence" in a specific locality needs to be understood within the large-scale relations of genocide instituted by the settlement project. Her essay is one of several that make the connection between the earlier frontier atrocities and the later child-stealing, with a further link to the more military determination by the Nazis. Jan Kociumbas outlines genocidal dynamics in the very founding of Australia; Jürgen Zimmerer follows the process from European colonization of the Americas through to the more evolved state project of the Holocaust. "Colonial genocides", he insists, "did not constitute a fundamentally different category from the Nazi genocides. They were merely less organized, centralized, and bureaucratized forms of genocide." The inclusion of an essay by Isabel Heinemann about Nazi kidnapping of "racially valuable" children makes the comparison in an unexpected and confronting way.
We do not like to be confronted. Australian historians and Australians in general have found it difficult to associate our past with a concept of genocide so closely identified with Hitler's crimes. Whether the masterful introductory essay by Dirk Moses, together with the range of argument and evidence he has brought together, succeeds in the stated aim remains to be seen. He knows that a supplanting society will not want to recognize itself as inherently genocidal. That is not our foundation myth. But his project of interpreting Australian history within the "exterminatory and eugenic policies" of the past two centuries will continue: a second volume,