The Best Australian Essays 2014 (26 page)

The same thing struck me about rock star and former Labor politician Peter Garrett as the former senator Reynolds. No greater friends when it came to indigenous rights and paying the rent and decrying the burning beds of history, but completely silent about the unravelling social crisis of the present – and, to the extent they thought about what needed to be done, mostly wrongheaded. It is strange that people who would insist strongly on Aboriginal agency in the past would turn a blind eye to such passivity in the present.

Second, I find persuasive Bain Attwood's critique of Reynolds's oeuvre as consisting overmuch of ‘juridical history': the telling of history as if presenting evidence in a legal case before a court. I share Attwood's view that Reynolds's core trilogy –
The Other Side of the Frontier
(1981),
Frontier
(1987) and
With the White People
(1990) – is unimpeachable. But much of the rest has the features of juridical history, and too many contentions seem to be submissions to a court case rather than based on a proper grappling with the political economy of the time and circumstances of which he writes. Therefore some appear thin.

In a 2007 essay for
Griffith Review,
I analysed the dynamic of the political discourse between progressives and conservatives. I observed that the conservative camp comprised a broad spectrum, ranging from true denialists such as Windschuttle to those who, in their cups, would admit the truths of Aboriginal history, but who were defensive of their own heritage and of the accomplishments of their forebears. John Howard was not a denialist; he was defensive about his settler heritage. Of course, an inability to deal with the psychological meaning of this historical legacy often means the default position becomes a version of denialism – or is strongly coloured by denial. After all, the long, 150-year reign of the Great Australian Silence was about denial.

On the other hand, I observed that progressives were prone to use racial discrimination and historical denial as political bludgeons against their conservative opponents, and their advocacy for an honest confrontation with the colonial past degenerated into moral vanity. The result was that progressives reinforced victimhood of the indigenes while their opponents denied their victimisation.

Having said this, I now turn to the volatile question of the extirpation of the original Tasmanians.

I hoped to avoid the past, but it is not possible. I hoped to dis-remember the past, but it is not possible.

The question of genocide in Australia

The use of the term ‘genocide' and the rhetoric of the Jewish Holocaust is incendiary. The destruction of the Tasmanians was an event of world history long before the Nazi genocide of the Jews. It was well established in the discourse of British and Australian history long before the 1948 Genocide Convention. It was referred to around the world during the course of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth.

Whether you use the word most common in colonial times – ‘extirpation' – or other words also used – ‘extermination' or ‘extinction' – or the word ‘genocide', they speak to the same meaning. And that meaning is the loss to the world by the passing of a people from history by killing and mass death. The fact that a descendant community survived this history does not negate or reduce the profundity of the loss. When as a primary schooler I was told the significance of Truganini was that she was the last ‘full blood' of Tasmania, I understood clearly what was meant. The language of racial composition was commonplace in that time, and still is, among black and white Australians, despite its contemporary disreputability. It is not to deny the fact of the survival of the descendant community, and neither is it to impugn their identity, to remember the enormity of the fact that Truganini's death marked the passing from the world of one of the last Tasmanians without mixed lineage. A lineage that had occupied that land for more than 35,000 years.

Those last sentences were hard to write. I was not sure I could get it right, and still don't know whether I have. I mean not to offend contemporary Aborigines of Tasmania. I mean not to return to the mind-frame of racialist eugenics that has so tangled the history that I wish untangled. I just do not want to deny or diminish the tragedy of Truganini and the old people of Tasmania.

Of course, as a reader of history and not a historian, I can hardly untangle this history. I can only say how I respond to and deal with it, as an Aboriginal and an Australian.

History is never resolved, and we should not make a shared future contingent on a shared past. For this reason I cannot abandon the examination of genocide as readily as some eminent historians in the wake of the History Wars prescribe.

I will not deal with the debate on whether the removal of children, identified by Michael Dodson and Sir Ronald Wilson in the
Bringing Them Home
report of 1997, constituted genocide. I will also not deal with the debate on whether the colonial history of mainland Australia – particularly my home state of Queensland – involved genocidal episodes. Instead I will confine my discussion to what happened in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Among historians who have been at the forefront of Aboriginal history, there is some respectable consensus against the use of the term ‘genocide' in this context.

Henry Reynolds's
An Indelible Stain?
centres on official correspondence from secretary of state for the colonies Sir George Murray to Tasmania's lieutenant governor, Sir George Arthur, on 5 November 1830. Murray referred to the ‘great decrease which has of late years taken place in the amount of the aboriginal population' and his apprehension ‘that the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become extinct'. He wrote:

Reynolds's discussion focuses on the coining of the term ‘genocide' by the Polish Jewish jurist and American émigré Raphael Lemkin, in the 1940s, and its adoption in the Genocide Convention of 1948, following the Holocaust. Lemkin was clear that while the term and its establishment as a crime in international law was new, its occurrence in history was not. Lemkin specifically assumed that the events in Tasmania which I am discussing here constituted such an occurrence.

Applying the definition of the crime of genocide to events before the enactment of the Convention involves retrospectivity, and indeed its application to the Holocaust was necessarily retrospective. It was applied by Lemkin and is generally not considered anachronistic when applied to the history of the Armenians at the hands of Turkey in 1915. How far back does retrospectivity turn into anachronism?

But anachronism is not the only objection to taking terminology invented in the 1940s and applying it to events in colonial Tasmania. In his discussion in
An Indelible Stain?
and
Forgotten War
(2013), Reynolds comes down against the application of genocide to Australia because the 1948 Convention requires
intention
on the part of the offending state. The absence of an explicit intention on the part of the colonial authorities, who frequently expressed concern at the treatment of indigenous peoples at the frontier, ultimately underpins Reynolds's conclusion. It is a lawyer's conclusion. The lawyer in me protests that the circumstances and the evidence clearly speak of a constructive intention on the part of the colonial authorities, but this debate is not merely a legal argument. John Docker's point is apposite:

Inga Clendinnen, an authority on the Jewish Holocaust and respected Australian historian, also baulked at the application of the genocide definition to the Australian context:

Bain Attwood's
Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History
(2005) was a fine circuit-breaker to the History Wars. He showed clearly that Keith Windschuttle's role in these debates was not as a historian. Windschuttle is a reader of history and public intellectual, not a historian, and
Fabrication
is a work of historiography, not history. I consider Attwood's book a good starting place for Australian readers of history to think about how we might come to terms with our past. I therefore take his view seriously:

But I remain unpersuaded that these views should be the final word. Let me enumerate my reasons.

First, the fact of Truganini.

Second, Michael Mansell's point that ‘the British had more impact on Aborigines than the Holocaust had on the Jews' is particularly apt in respect of the history of his people. The old people of Tasmania are no more. Only their descendants remain. (Lawson: ‘… if the destruction of their ancestors was not total, it was comprehensive. All original communities had been destroyed since the British invasion, and the population reduction was greater than 99 per cent.')

Third, I bridle at assessments that derogate from the gravity of what happened to the Tasmanians. In this respect I am resistant to Attwood's approach:

Without in any way diminishing the Holocaust (as if it could be diminished), I cannot accept any moral comparison that diminishes the fate suffered by the Tasmanians.

Fourth, the accounts – both from the oral histories of Aborigines and from the documented sources of colonial times – referring to the death of Aborigines on the frontier speak to me of the profoundest moral problem of this history: the heavy discounting of the humanity of the Aborigines. It is not the horrific scenes of mass murder that are most appalling here; it is the mundanity and casual parsimony of it all. No people on earth were considered lower. No people rated lower on the ruling scales of human worth, and their deaths elicited the least level of moral reproval. My point is that while the reproof of the time reflected the morality of the age, the racism that underpinned that calculus cannot hold sway today. The Tasmanians were human beings. They were gone within half a century. And only their descendants remained.

Fifth, there is Tom Lawson's thesis in
The Last Man,
to which I now turn.

The Scylla and Charybdis of colonialism

Tom Lawson is professor of history at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom. His book
The Last Man,
published this year, is subtitled
A British Genocide in Tasmania.
If his thesis has any power, it is to make plain that the consensus view outlined above is a long way from having resolved these questions. He puts forward a compelling counter-interpretation.

I will avoid a summation of Lawson's book, for it is better read in its own right. It is worth reading in its own right. Even if you come to these questions with scepticism or indeed indignation, you have a duty to hear out his scholarship.

If you read Lawson after Reynolds's
An Indelible Stain?,
you will be struck by a subtle but critical point made by the Briton about who would wear the indelible stain. For Reynolds:

But in response, Lawson notes that:

It is a crucial reorientation of Reynolds's framing. The discussion of what happened to the Tasmanians in the first half of the nineteenth century is about a British colony run by the British government. The principal players in this history, Governor George Arthur, his predecessors and successors, his superiors back in Downing Street and their agents, such as George Augustus Robinson, on the colonial frontiers were members and agents of the British government, acting under the ultimate authority of the Colonial Office. They administered British policy, and this would remain the case until responsible government was vested in Tasmania in 1856.