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Australia’s genocide

“As early as 1804 the British began to slaughter, kidnap and enslave the Black people of Tasmania. The colonial government itself was not even inclined to consider the aboriginal Tasmanians as full human beings, and scholars began to discuss civilization as a unilinear process with White people at the top and Black people at the bottom. To the Europeans of Tasmania the Blacks were an entity fit only to be exploited in the most sadistic of manners—a sadism that staggers the imagination and violates all human morality. As UCLA professor, Jared Diamond, recorded:

“Tactics for hunting down Tasmanians included riding out on horseback to shoot them, setting out steel traps to catch them, and putting out poison flour where they might find and eat it. Sheperds cut off the penis and testicles of aboriginal men, to watch the men run a few yards before dying. At a hill christened Mount Victory, settlers slaughtered 30 Tasmanians and threw their bodies over a cliff. One party of police killed 70 Tasmanians and dashed out the children’s brains.”

Such vile and animalistic behavior on the part of the White settlers of Tasmania was the rule rather than the exception. In spite of their wanton cruelty, however, punishment in Tasmania was exceedingly rare for the Whites, although occasionally Whites were sentenced for crimes against Blacks. For example, there is an account of a man who was flogged for exhibiting the ears and other body parts of a Black boy that he had mutilated alive. We hear of another European punished for cutting off the little finger of an Aborigine and using it as a tobacco stopper. Twenty-five lashes were stipulated for Europeans convicted of tying aboriginal “Tasmanian women to logs and burning them with firebrands, or forcing a woman to wear the head of her freshly murdered husband on a string around her neck.”

Not a single European, however, was ever punished for the murder of Tasmanian Aborigines. Europeans thought nothing of tying Black men to trees and using them for target practice. Black women were kidnapped, chained and exploited as sexual slaves. White convicts regularly hunted Black people for sport, casually shooting, spearing or clubbing the men to death, torturing and raping the women, and roasting Black infants alive. As historian, James Morris, graphically noted:

“We hear of children kidnapped as pets or servants, of a woman chained up like an animal in a sheperd’s hut, of men castrated to keep them off their own women. In one foray seventy aborigines were killed, the men shot, the women and children dragged from crevices in the rocks to have their brains dashed out. A man called Carrotts, desiring a native woman, decapitated her husband, hung his head around her neck and drove her home to his shack.”

The darkest and most repugnant era of Australia’s history ought not to be swept to the wayside as it is, given it’s single page reference in most school text books if any at all. Yes, the Tasmanian State Government apologised in 1997 and the Federal Government apologised in 2009, but further acknowledgement and attention ought to be brought to those original Australians who white man treated worse than any animal. In my own high school history books that I’ve kept, I recall entire chapters on the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement in America, yet just two pages on our own genocide, which unlike the Holocaust and race hate crimes in the US, resulted in the extermination of an entire race of people.

It’s for this reason that I hardly believe in nationalism or patriotism. I’m proud to be Australian, sure, and I am appreciative of the quality of life and opportunities it has given my ancestors and I, but to be blind-sighted and completely ignore the wrongs that have happened in this nation’s history is another thing. In a way, I feel distanced from such atrocities being only a second generation Australian, part of me is proud of it, but as a white man, I still reap the benefits of damages done centuries ago in this country. I’m not going to become one of those people that vehemently and publicly detests the celebration of Australia Day (with dreadlocks a-waving), but I do understand that the name Invasion Day has just as much validity to it as Australia Day or Foundation Day. 

History is history, but time doesn’t necessarily heal anything at all. There’s no way of changed what happened, but hiding it brings no justice to anything or anyone at all.