Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide
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I want this book to be an example of novelist Tim Winton’s precept that ‘the past is in us, not behind us ... things are never over’. The short text exposes long-standing myths about democracy. It tells us something about the real and the surreal, rather than the imagined character and narrative of good colonists, our desire to have noble and pristine origins, and about our states of denial and wilful amnesia. It looks at our divergent notions of reconciliation and what the Germans call Wiedergutmachung (‘making good again’) — at our particularly twisted path towards reparations of any kind. It discusses the legacies of the genocidal eras, and the way that history is both in the past but rehearsed in the present; and it explains the ways in which this history impacts on contemporary Aboriginal communities. It challenges our attitudes to modern genocide generally, and our resistance to having a genocidal history of our own. It tells us why we can’t always look on the bright side as a way of disarming or diminishing the dark demons. (There are some brightish sides, and they are noted.) I try to evoke and discuss an index of outrage, to fathom what has to take place before we are prodded, let alone moved, to a response. It reviews Australia’s long-standing ‘problem’ with genocide in general. It reflects on our maturity as a nation, on our willingness to grow into our actual (instead of our fabricated) history as the basis of our national consciousness. Finally, it looks briefly at why so many attempts at change have come to nothing, and what kind of ‘revolution’ would help towards better outcomes for all.
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About the Book
“We are a moral people” and the very notion that Australians could have anything to do with genocide is unthinkable—so claimed parliamentarians when Australia was asked to ratify the UN’s Genocide Convention in 1949. The reality is that even decent democrats and people who consider themselves good colonists are capable of doing just that—killing people because of who they were, forcibly removing their children in order to assimilate them and erase them from the landscape, and then, in the name of their protection, incarcerated them on reserves in a manner that caused them serious physical and mental harm. This confronting book addresses the whole issue of what happens to an indigenous minority who were considered other than human, an unworthy order of beings destined to die out.
About the Author
Colin Tatz was born and educated in South Africa and completed his PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia. He founded and directed the Monash Indigenous Centre at Monash University, Melbourne from 1964 to 1971. He was foundation professor of Politics at the University of New England, NSW, from 1971 to 1982 and professor of Politics at Macquarie University, Sydney from 1982 to 1999. He has been visiting professor of Politics and International Relations at ANU since 2004. He is the founding director of the Australian Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Sydney. The author of 22 books, he researches, teaches and writes in the fields of Aboriginal studies, Jewish studies, race politics, migration, youth suicide, and sport history. His book, Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport won the Australian Human Rights Award for Non-Fiction in 1995 and in 1997 he was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO).