Deconstructing Australian Genocide, Ecocide: the provenance and agency of Australia's dispossessory rule-based order (2024)

Beyond Savagery: The Limits of Australian 'Aboriginalism'

‘The intrusion therefore of cattle is by itself sufficient to produce the extirpation of the native race’: social ecological systems and ecocide in conflicts between Hunter–Gatherers and commercial stock farmers in Australia

Settler Colonial Studies, 2015

Deconstructing Australian Genocide: Britain's legislative and procedural agency in the destruction of Aboriginal society

Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?

Tasmanian Genocide Revisited reflections on mass violence in a time of ecocide V1 0

This paper presents what may be a unique approach to modelling and visualizing complex historical datasets involving mass violence in Tasmania and whether the evidentiary behaviours that drove colonial normative behavioural pathology may persist today in ecocide. Much has been written about the contested space of Tasmania, a small island off the southern coast of Australia that Britain first invaded in 1803. Surely we know the story comprehensively by now, what happened, why, and by whom? Perhaps not, as our thesis will show. The pure blood Aboriginal people of Tasmania were effectively destroyed within a generation, around thirty years or so, by the policies of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur and other British administrators; only mixed-race survivors remain, those whose ancestors cohabited – willingly or unwillingly - with sealers in Bass Strait, and a small number from elsewhere. Palawa repression was a Lemkinian process, exhibiting the type characteristics of the UN Convention as we will show. These descendants now struggle for their rights. We exist, they say, we weren’t exterminated, don’t make us invisible. They try to reclaim some of their ancestral land through tortuous litigation. They try to reclaim their history and culture by reading wordlists from George Augustus Robinson, Jorgen Jorgenson, and others, the mercenaries and agents of death, complex individuals who claimed to be humanitarian but drove ethnic cleansing - and more - for personal profit.

2010 Colonizing Processes, the Reach of the State and Ontological Violence: Historicizing Aboriginal Australian Experience

Anthropologica, 2010

Deconstructing Australian genocide How Britain shaped the destruction of Aboriginal society

Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Should it be accountable? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?

The partial Case for Australian Genocide: the massacre at Murdering Creek

Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. The massacre was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost.

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.

Aboriginal Life and Death in Australian Nationhood

The Concept of Mass Killing in Australia

We will set out a terminological ecosystem of mass killing, develop a typology with semantics, and propose a methodology to investigate any instance of a mass killing event as a contextual referent within the process of enforced displacive occupation in Australia between 1788 and 1930. We will assert that a mass killing event can apply to a series of single homicides bound together by common purpose over prescribed time, scaling to the destruction of Aboriginal society across the continent, a testable hypothesis. We conclude that mass killing as a normalised pathological behaviour is not limited to homicide, but also includes ecocide. Australia’s unarticulated values – we don’t have a Bill Of Rights – are determined by collective behaviour and their motivations, giving rise to what we call our spaghettified rule-based order, a fragile bulwark against existential uncertainty.