Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (review)

As citizens of a white settler democracy, many Australians find it hard to acknowledge that genocide could have happened in their own history. The word genocide erupted into Australian public life in 1997, when a major government report found that particular aspects of the policy of forced Aboriginal child removal in the twentieth century conformed to the UN definition of genocide. The report recommended that Aboriginal survivors of the policy should receive compensation and an apology from the federal government.¹ The government, however, refused to acknowledge the dark underside of the country's past.² Since then, conservative media commentators and their adherents have tried to shut down discussion of genocide in Australian history.³

The word, however, is not entirely unfamiliar to Australian historians. A decade earlier, in an article that made many take notice, Tony Barta pointed out: "If genocide is still a word which seems 'to stick in the typewriters of some [Australian] historians' it is for others a fact which finally has to be faced."⁴ Like the Australian government, however, most Australian historians cannot face this fact. While a few, such as Ann Curthoys and John Docker, have attempted to grapple with the issue, others such as Bain Attwood argue that "genocide" is a simplistic term that obscures the complexity of the colonial encounter and its aftermath.⁵

Enter Dirk Moses, an Australian historian of modern Germany. After an extended period of research in Europe, he returned to Australia in 2000 to find that many Australian historians were so mesmerized by the virtues of modernity—which they believed promoted the ideals of equality, humanity, and progress—that they could not believe that Australia's colonists might have deliberately ill-treated indigenous peoples, let alone practiced genocide. While they acknowledged that there were moments of excess on the colonial frontier, such as the Myall Creek massacre in 1838 and the shocking treatment of some Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents in the twentieth century, they were quick to point out that the colonists never practiced the excesses of their Spanish counterparts in the ruthless destruction of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America. By making this comparison, they concluded that the dispossession and virtual disappearance of Australia's indigenous peoples could not have been the outcome of systematic colonial violence, but rather was due to inherent weaknesses in the indigenous societies.⁶

Moses challenges that approach in this book. In a long chapter in the first section, he argues that white settler colonialism did not arise from random decisions made by individuals, but was part of the structural process of modernity that had potentially deadly implications for indigenous peoples. This point is further developed by Jan Kociumbas and Raymond Evans, who demonstrate in frightening detail how the ideas and beliefs of modernity were used to justify the virtual destruction and dispossession of Australia's indigenous peoples.

In the second and third sections, seven of Australia's leading historians of race relations, Henry Reynolds, Anna Haebich, Russell McGregor, Pamela Lukin Watson, Paul R. Bartrop, Robert Manne, and Raymond Evans (who has two chapters in the book), consider the question of genocide in case studies of the Australian colonial frontier and of Aboriginal child removal. They find that in four cases genocide did take place, but in three others, including Tasmania, it did not. Moses interweaves this research with case studies by German historians Jürgen Zimmerer and Isabel Heinemann on the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe and the forced removal of Eastern European children to German homes, which he presents as twentieth-century examples of settler colonialism.

By including these chapters, Moses has produced a bold and provocative book for Australian readers. The case studies are meticulously researched and argued, reflecting the wide diversity of opinion about genocide. However the book's real strength lies not in the way historians address...