Until his retirement Professor Colin Tatz was professor of politics at Sydney's Macquarie University, where he established one of only three academic centres in the world devoted to genocide studies. A South African political refugee, he found in Australia echoes of his own country. "People say to me," he said, "Surely, South Africa was an example of dreadful maniacal, premeditated racism where Australia was really a case of innocent ignorance.

The truth is there is a tremenduous similarity, both in ideology and notions of scientific racial theories: for example, the fuller the blood, the more primitive, the lighter the skin colour, the more salvageable. The reserves, the exploitative labour, the sexual exploitation of women, the separate health systems, the separate education, the ban on interracial marriage - all are the same."

In 1998, Professor Tatz published a monograph,"Genocide in Australia,"
in which he argued that, under international convention, Australia is guilty of at least two types of genocide:

"Firstly, the essentially private genocide, the physical killing, committed by settlers and rogue police officers in the nineteenth century, while the state, in the form of colonial authorities, stood silently by (for the most part); secondly, the twentieth century official state policy and practice of forcibly transferring children from one group to another with the express intention they cease being Aboriginal."

He quotes the Chief Protector in Western Australia, C.F. Gale: 'I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring.'

"Very few Australians," wrote Tatz, ..."use the word genocide. Almost all historians of the Aboriginal experience - black or white - avoid it. They write about pacifying, killing, cleansing, excluding, exterminating, starving, poisoning, shooting, beheading, sterilising, exiling, removing - but avoid genocide."

Are they ignorant of genocide theory and practice? Or simply reluctant to taint "the land of fair go," "the lucky country," with so heinous a label?

Professor Tatz reminds Australians that, in acts of genocide, "There are three parties: the perpetrators, the victims, and the bystanders."

John 100,000 Japanese were killed in a instant just over 50 years ago. Should they hold a grude? Millions have have been killed in wars in the last hundred years. How should we balance that, against the selfloathing that you seem to want us to feel. There is now doubt bad things were done to "first" Australians? I think though it is you and many like you that have not got the right tidea about this.

Whenever somone talks like this I reminded of the Monty Python movie life of Brian. I mean "What have the Romans ever done for us".

CONT'D

When Sir Ronald Wilson, the former High Court judge who chaired the
"Bringing Them Home" inquiry, used the word "genocide," he was accused of "intemperate slander" and roundly abused by goernment politicians and the far-right commentators who dominate the Australian press. Like Professor Tatz and a few other bravehearts, he had broken white Australia's most enduring taboo.

Central to this is the suppression of Aboriginal population figures; for if historians were to reveal that large numbers of people inhabited the "empty land" at the time of white settlement, the deduction would have to be made that the genocide was on an even more appalling scale than had been previously assessed.

On the eve of the bicentenary of white settlement in 1988, a sensational "discovery" was made by the anthropologist Dr Peter White and Australia's most celebrated pre-historian, Professor D.J.Mulvaney.
They reported that the Aboriginal population in 1788 was 750,000, or three times the previous estimate. They concluded that more that 600,000 people had died in the years following white settlement. News of this was published on page sixteen of the Sydney Morning Herald under the byline of the paper's "Environment Writer."

The Mulvaney/White disclosure was supported by the news historiography of Henry Reynolds, Ross Fitzgerald, Noel Butlin and others, who literally wrote the Aboriginal story on the blank pages of Australia's history, until then a faintly heroic tale of the white man struggling against nature, of "national achievement" devoid of blacks, women and other complicating factors. With the Aborigines included, the narrative was completely different.

It was a story of theft, dispossession and warfare, of massacre and resistance. It was a story every bit as rapacious as those of the United States, Spanish America and colonial Africa and Asia. It was above all, a political story.

In breaking the silence, these historians incurred the wrath of an influential group of white supremacists, including Prime Minster
John Howard. Who holds the unique position of being the only leader of a white settler nation to refuse to apologise for the decimation of the original inhabitants.

Q&A

“Leigh, you say "no genocide".

What is your *enlightened* interpretation of the mass killings of aboriginals in Tasmania to the point of extermination?
Posted by Q&A, Thursday, 24 January 2008 9:50:39 AM”

For your answer, look to Keith Windschuttle who properly researched the subject (unlike Henry Reynolds, who made it up as he went along) and proved that the so-called genocide in Tasmania never took place. It was all in Henry’s mind.

Never take any notice of writers who do not footnote their claims to references you can check for yourself.

Most historians are left wingers trying to make a name for themselves. There are so many of them vying for their own place in history that they cannot afford to let the truth get in the way of a good yarn.

Thanks Leigh, I have “looked" to Keith Windschuttle, but all I have ever seen (and continue to see) is a political ‘wag’ who is on the editorial board of Quadrant - he politicises aboriginal history issues.

Unfortunately, you do the same with your comment;

“Most historians are left wingers …”

You are intentionally (or unintentionally?) helping to turn Australian History into a pathetic game of ideology – this is wrong.

I can concur with the view that there are some people that are part of a group of populist conservatives waging a propaganda ‘war’ built around a cultural and political struggle – as you seem to be doing here, whether you realise it or not.

Everyone should do proper research before they blindly follow. To argue a point or adopt a stand, one should assess other points of view. In this regard, two other books are worth a read.

1. ‘The History Wars' by Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark

2. 'Whitewash' by Robert Manne

A review can be found here,

http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Oct03/Birch.htm

Leigh, we have to afford truth to get in the way of a good yarn.

Foxy, thanks for your input.

Australia Day? I for one am not at all sure about what we celebrate. A National holiday such as this is of course an opportunity for a long weekend, a barby or other social occasion. But what it actually celebrates is a bit up for grabs. We can look around and celebrate the emergence of a truly great nation, one of the best places to live in my opinion. We can put on black armbands and bewail the misery into which many black and white folk were plunged in early colonial times. What we really need is some leadership and imagination. If I had the ear of a politician I would be saying "come on Kevin" let's get any residue of guilt off our chest, let us pledge to extend all our great Australian values to all of our people, black and white. Let us work to preserve any precious vestiges of indigenous culture while at the same time extending all the benefits and privileges of our citizens to all black fellows as well. There needs to be challenge too as well as rhetoric. Ought remote communities, beyond the pale of law and economic opportunities, be supported when a lot of evidence says they have failed? Instead of the moralising by the author of this article we need some constructive thought. Advance Australia fair to all. But we have to translate grand statements into practical policy.