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The Impacts of English Colonial Terrorism and Genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians:

The Impacts of English Colonial Terrorism and Genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians: This article critically explores the essence of colonial terrorism and its consequences on the indigenous people of Australia during their colonization and incorporation into the European-dominated racialized capitalist world system in the late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system or globalization. Raising complex moral, intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and political questions, this article explores the essence, roles, and impacts of colonial terrorism on the indigenous Australians. First, the article provides background historical and cultural information. Second, it conceptualizes and theorizes colonial terrorism as an integral part of the capitalist world system. Specifically, it links capitalist incorporation and colonialism and various forms of violence to terrorism. Third, the article examines the structural aspects of colonial terrorism by connecting it to some specific colonial policies and practices. Finally, it identifies and explains different kinds of ideological justifications that the English colonial settlers and their descendants used in committing crimes against humanity. Keywords capitalism, colonialism, terrorism, genocide, capitalist incorporation, and indigenous/Black Australians With the expansion of European-dominated capitalist world settlers in 1788. They were hunters and food-gatherers, and system to the Australia continent in the late 18th century, the survived on wild foods. While men hunted or fished, women English settlers started terror and genocide on indigenous collected vegetable foods, insects, shellfish, honey, and other Australians to expropriate their economic resources and to small creatures; they did not have permanent settlements, takeover their homeland. These crimes against humanity had and moved depending on the availability water and food continued in the 19th century until the indigenous peoples resources (Cranstone, 1973). They did not keep domestic were almost destroyed and the ownership of their land was animals, except the dog. Men used weapons such as the stone entirely transferred to the English colonial settlers and their axe, hunting spears, throwing sticks or clubs, shields, and descendants. These colonial settlers and their descendants boomerangs, and they were “expert at tracking and stalking have justified their theft and robbery of the resources of the game and knowledgeable about its habits, and even in open indigenous people in the discourses of race, backwardness, country” (Cranstone, 1973, p. 13). Indigenous women used a civilization, and modernity. This article first introduces the digging stick for digging up food resources such as grubs, indigenous Australians, their cultures and social organizations roots, edible ants, and burrowing animals. Men usually trav- that made them vulnerable to the British attack. Second, it eled over higher grounds to see and hunt animals, and women explains how the British colonial settlers expropriated the land walked on lowlands to collect vegetable foods (Tindale, of indigenous Australians through terrorism and genocide, and 1974). justified their criminal actions in the doctrine of terra nullius They changed their environment through burning, man- (empty land), (Lindqvist, 2007). Third, it identifies and aged their resources, and reached “a possible technological explores different mechanisms of terrorism and genocide and peak in the ‘eel farming’” in some areas (Bultin, 1993, p. 56). their impacts on different groups of indigenous Australians. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA Background Corresponding Author: Asafa Jalata, University of Tennessee, 901 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN The indigenous Australians occupied the continent for more 37922, USA. than 65,000 years before the arrival of English colonial Email: ajalata@utk.edu 2 SAGE Open Like other nonagricultural societies, indigenous Australians (1930) estimated between 250,000 and 300,000, and D. J. might have started some practices that might have led to the Mulvaney and J. P. White (1987) proposed about 700,000. initial domestication of animals and plants, irrigation, and N. G. Bultin (1993) estimated that they were between 1 and gardening (Tindale, 1974). According to Norman B. Tindale 1.5 million in 1788 and concluded that “precontact popula- (1974), tions of 700 000, 1 or 1.5 million imply massive depopula- tion and widespread destruction of indigenous societies and Australia has one of the largest areas of territory occupied by economies” (p. 99). In 1901, however, fewer than 100,000 peoples in an approximately uniform state of hunting culture of them remained (Kiernan, 2007). Bultin (1993) suggested differing from region to region chiefly because of the different three major reasons for the societal destruction: disease epi- animals and plants upon which the people depend for a living sodes, the withdrawal of resources, and killing. European and because of the acquisition of ideas by some which have not diseases that exposed the population lacking immunological yet spread to all. (p. 30) defenses to destruction included smallpox, venereal disease (e.g., gonorrhea), influenza, measles, pneumonia, and tuber- Indigenous Australians produced for their own consump- culosis. The English settlers and their descendants expropri- tion or satisfaction, not for exchange; they had small group ated native land and removed the indigenous people by property rights in land and other assets (Bultin, 1993). As G. cutting them from their food resources, and engaged in Bultin (1993) wrote, indigenous Australians genocidal massacres. The indigenous Australians were oral communities and recognized larger kinship relations, vital to many of their social kept “their cultural heritage alive by passing their knowl- and economic practices and these larger kin groups, in turn, edge, arts, rituals and performances from one generation to acknowledged property, ritual and other rights. From time to another, speaking and teaching languages, protecting cul- time, [they] came together physically in larger associations for tural materials, sacred and significant sites, and objects.” special purposes. To a limited degree, they traded within and beyond these kin groups; and there were episodes of conflict Customary laws that passed from generation to generation between them. (p. 53) through values and oral discourse governed them. As N. B. Tindale (1974) noted, indigenous Australians controlled their They not only spent their times in economic activities, but communities they also engaged in other activities such as education, learn- ing-by-doing, leisure, ritual and religion, order, reproduc- by the use of song and the powers of ridicule and rebuke in them, although in some songs the added power of the man tion, administration and management, warfare, and practicing ‘death magic’ [was] also seen as a controlling force. investment (Bultin, 1993). Based on customary laws and val- In this regard old dances and songs, describing the fate of ues, indigenous communities had coherence-based similar ancients who misbehaved and suffered for their actions were thought and communication because of their common lan- made topical, ‘pieces’ being put in to make them fit the new guage, common life experiences, like exchange of women circumstances. (p. 34) between extended families, and sharing of initiation rites. Euro-American scholars call indigenous people tribes to The British Captain James Cook who visited Australia in claim that they are primitive and less developed and call 1770 appreciated their egalitarian social system (Kiernan, Europeans or their descents nations or ethnic groups. Tindale 2007). Indigenous Australians had a loose political organiza- (1974) defines tion based on the authorities of elders or holders of tradi- tions: There were situations in which the “tribe” as the normally endogamous unit most commonly recognized in Australia, generally known as occupying a given a good hunter, a man given either to sorcery or to magical territory, speaking mutually intelligible dialectics, having a practices, or even a particularly skilled fighter, could [or] common kinship system, and sharing the performance of sometimes has exerted some authority. There is in general no ceremonial rites of interest to them all. (p. 33) formal institution of ‘chief’ or true leader, although ever since white settlement began efforts have been made to establish some In this discussion, the term tribe is rejected as it is a mod- sort of leadership role, and some pretense of chiefly authority ernist or racist concept. The indigenous groups prefer to be has been made by natives who have adopted white ways. called by their ethno-national names. There were between (Tindale, 1974, p. 33) 600 and 700 cultural-linguistic groups when English settlers arrived in Australia, and there are about 250 languages in use Indigenous Australians were organized in families, clans, today. kinship networks, and ethno-national groups. According to Eleanor Bourke (1998) estimated that in 1788 there were John Mulvaney (1981), they were between 300,000 and 1 million indigenous people inhabited in Australia. There are different precontact population esti- organized around small social units, families and clans, which mates of indigenous Australians: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown coalesced on occasions when seasonal conditions permitted or Jalata 3 when kinship obligations required. Hundreds of individuals Although the English settlers and their descendants often congregated for ceremonial activities such as initiation rejected the artistic contribution of indigenous Australians rituals, and for reciprocal gifts or marriage exchange. These until recently, systematic archaeological investigation larger social groupings are termed tribes. (p. 18) reveals the significance of their artistic heritage in the world (Mulvaney, 1981). Indigenous arts include carving, painting The smaller social groups, such as the family, extended (i.e., the decoration of the body, the preparation of ritual families, the patrilineal or matrilineal descent group, and grounds, and totem ceremonies), and visual art. Because of clans were the effective economic, social, and political unites their capitalist technology, social organization, and the desire (Cranstone, 1973). Indigenous Australians were not warlike to acquire land and accumulate wealth at any cost, the people, and they did not engage in war to capture territory or English settlers overpowered, terrorized, and almost exter- to dominate others; there was small-scale fighting for rea- minated indigenous Australians. sons connected with magical killing, revenge expeditions, with disputes about women, and with trespassing on hunting Conceptualizing and Theorizing grounds or sacred places (Cranstone, 1973). Terrorism Indigenous communities made decisions based on the sim- ple family, extended families, clans and kinship systems: Considering the historical and global context in which terror- ism developed and intensified, we need a more comprehen- Kinship influences marriage decisions and governs much of sive, historical, and broader definition of terrorism. So, I everyday behaviour. By adulthood people know exactly how to define terrorism as a systematic governmental or organiza- behave, and in what manner, to all other people around them as tional policy or strategy through which lethal violence is well as in respect to specific land areas. Kinship is about meeting practiced openly or covertly to instill fear on a given popula- the obligations of one’s clan, and forms part of Aboriginal Law, tion group beyond the direct victims of terror to change their sometimes known as the Dreaming. behavior of political resistance to domination or the behavior of dominant group for political and economic gains or other The Dreaming is as an aspect of indigenous beliefs that reasons. State and nonstate actors use terrorism; the former recognizes mythical beings that in the beginnings arrived in has used it to maintain state power or to loot resources and Australia fighting, hunting, and forming the natural features; the latter mostly to resist the oppressive and exploitative these religious “myths usually conclude with the Dreamtime policies of states. There are also nonstate terrorist agencies heroes turning into rocks or animals or going to live in water that advance extremist religious and racist ideologies and holes, and losing individual physical existence, but their practices on a subnational or international level. non-material essence survives and they are still actively con- As the frequency, intensity, and the volume of terrorism cerned with human affairs” (Cranstone, 1973, p. 24). have increased with the development of global capitalism, a According to some stories of the Dreaming, the spirits of definition and theory of terrorism cannot be adequately ancestors had created the world and then changed into rocks, developed without considering terrorism as an aspect of the stars, trees, watering holes, and have remained in sacred racialized capitalist world system. Beginning in 1492, sites; “the Dreaming is never-ending, linking the past and the European colonialists engaged in terrorism, genocide, and present, the people and the land.” Furthermore, some of the enforced servitude in the Americas and extended their vio- Dreaming stories claim that lence into Africa through racial slavery. Then, in the the ancestors’ spirits came to the earth in human form and as 17th, 18th, 19 centuries, they incorporated other parts of the they moved through the land, they created the animals, plants, world into this system through colonial terrorism and geno- rocks and other forms of the land that we know today. They also cidal wars. Most scholars have avoided providing a compre- created the relationships between groups and individuals to the hensive and critical analysis and an objective definition and land, the animals and other people. theorization of this aspect of the modern world system. Even critical scholars and others who have studied the emergence, Before English colonial settlement, like preagricultural development, and expansion of the capitalist world system and industrial European or other societies, indigenous have primarily focused on trade, the international division of Australians were living simple and egalitarian lifestyles: labor, exploitation, capital accumulation, political structures, development and underdevelopment, and social inequality, Their approach to life was minimalist yet nurturing of members and did not adequately address the role of terrorism in creat- of the group. Clothing was either not worn or minimal, shelter ing and maintaining the system. was easily assembled or non-permanent structures, tools were History teaches us that different forms of political vio- made from materials readily available on the land, there was no lence including terrorism have increased as different societ- written language, [and] children were cared for by the extended ies engaged in improved techniques of production, produced family group and Elders were treated as respected purveyors of surplus wealth, developed their organizational capacities, important spiritual and cultural formation. 4 SAGE Open and improved their technological innovations. The emer- violence or terrorism and confuse abstract theories of the gence of the nation-state with the development of capitalism state with reality. Based on the assumption of the ideal rela- in the 16th century in Europe increased the organizational tionship between the state and society, philosophers and and technological capacity to engage in more lethal violence political thinkers identified three functions of the state that including terrorism. In European countries such as England, would earn it legitimacy. According to these theorists, the France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, the 16th state protects and maintains internal peace and order in soci- century was the period of the formation of the nation-state ety; it organizes and protects national economic activities; (Frank, 1978). With the formation of the nation-states, state- and it defends national sovereignty and national interests centered colonial terrorism expanded all over the world. For (Campanella, 1981). In reality, most states violate most of instance, Bartolome’ De Las Casas, who traveled to the New these theoretical principles by engaging in political repres- World in 1502 with the Spaniards in their quest to colonize sion and state terrorism to defend the interest of powerful and rob the treasures and lands of the indigenous peoples of elites, particularly when they engage in colonial expansion. the Indies, provides an eyewitness account of the anatomy of Various forms of violence including political terrorism are colonial terrorism and genocide: closely related to the art of statecraft (Tilly, 1985). As capitalism developed in Western Europe, the need for raw materials like gold and silver, markets, and free or cheap They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there. . .Some they chose to keep alive and labor expanded due to the desire to minimize the cost of pro- simply cut their wrists, leaving their hands dangling, saying to duction and to increase the rate of profit and accumulation of them: ‘Take this letter’—meaning that their sorry condition capital or wealth. This need was fulfilled through colonial- would act as a warning to those hiding in the hills. (De Las ism, racial slavery, terrorism and genocide. “The treasures Casas, 1992, p. 15) captured outside of Europe by undisguised looting, enslave- ment, and murder,” Marx (1967) wrote, “floated back to the Such terrorist acts were sponsored by European states or mother-country and were there turned to capital” (pp. 753- state agencies. A. P. Schmid (1991) asserts that 754). Capitalism had “witnessed the first long, sustained, and widespread quantitative and qualitative development. . .in its state terrorism can be seen as a method of rule whereby some mercantile stage and the first period of concentrated capital groups of people are victimized with great brutality, and more or accumulation in Europe” (Frank, 1978, p. 52). Western pow- less arbitrarily by the state or state supported actors, so that ers and some states in the Global South still engage in terror- others who have reason to identify with those murdered, will ism and hidden genocide to implement their draconian despair, obey or comply. (p. 31) economic and political policies. “The war on terrorism is being used as a continuation of the war on social justice, as Furthermore, terrorism and war can be seen as a contin- waged with the economic weapons of the international finan- uum process, and it is often impossible to draw a clear and cial institutions” (Eisenstein, 2001, p. 136). Western powers, neat boundary between political repression, state terrorism, multinational corporations, and state elites in the Global war, and genocide. The policy of state terror can sometimes South have collaborated and engaged in massive human lead to genocide (Schmid, 1991). The Spaniards imposed rights violations and terrorism (Blakeley, 2009) even as fear through mass terror and genocide so that they could Western-based human right organizations have systemati- achieve their economic and political goals without any cally exposed such crimes. obstacle. These acts of terrorism and genocide were guided In theorizing nonstate terrorism, scholars like Senechal and financed by the government of Spain (see Cohen, 1969). de la Roche (1996) noted that the accumulation of griev- Later, several European governments engaged in committing ances causes terrorism and “social polarization” between similar crimes. Today mainstream Euro-American scholars socially and culturally distant groups. Long-standing col- gloss over such crimes and refer to them as actions of “dis- lective grievances and the right social geometry, such as a covery” and “civilization.” higher degree of cultural and religious differences, rela- Although some government elites and their apologists tional distance, and social inequality between the aggrieved claim that the state provides protection from domestic and and the dominant population groups can sometimes con- external violence, “governments organize and, wherever tribute to the development of nonstate terrorism (see Black, possible, monopolize the concentrated means of violence” 2004). Jeff Goodwin (2006) advanced a theory of categori- such as political terror (Tilly, 1985, p. 171). Political terror cal terrorism: and other forms of violence have always been involved in producing and maintaining structures, institutions, and orga- The main strategic objective—the primary incentive—of nizations of privileged hierarchy and domination in society. categorical terrorism is to induce complicitous civilians to State terrorism is a massive and extreme aspect of political support or to proactively demand changes in, certain government violence. Those who have state power, which includes the policies or the government itself. Categorical terrorism, in other power to define terrorism, deny their involvement in political words, mainly aims to apply such intense pressure to Jalata 5 complicitous civilians that they will demand that ‘their’ the continent belonged to the Dutch East Indies Company. government change or abandon policies that the revolutionaries In 1606, Willem Janszoon, a Dutchman, with a ship called oppose. (p. 2038) the Duyfken and his crew explored the Australian coast and met indigenous people. In November 1642, Abel Tasman Using this theory, Godwin concludes that Al Qaeda reached the west coast of Tasmania with two ships known attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, because it as Heemskerck and Zeehaen and named it Van Diemen’s considered Americans to be “complicitous citizens” who Land. Anthony Van Diemen, Governor-General of the support the foreign policy of the United States in the Middle Dutch East Indies commissioned Abel Tasman, a sea cap- East. tain employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1642 to Recently a few critical scholars have started to explore the explore the unknown South Seas. Two years later, Tasman essence and characteristics of state terrorism or colonial ter- and his crew sailed along the northern coast of Australia rorism. These scholars include Caroline Elkins, Mark Curtis, (which later named New Holland) from Cape York to North Ruth Blakeley, Richard Jackson, Doug Stokes, Sam Raphael, West Cape. and Marie Breen Smyth. Elkins (2005) explains that the Following the Dutch mariners, Lieutenant James Cook, British colonial government used political terror to destroy a an English mariner, in 1770 explored the Australian east Kenyan liberation movement known as the Land and coast in his ship HM Barque Endeavour. King George III of Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) in the early 1950s through England instructed Cook on August 22, 1770, to claim the forced removals and deportations of millions of Kenyans, possession of the east coast of Australia that was later tortures (“a kind of public spectacle, often conducted in the named New South Wales. Queensland was separated from open barbed-wire areas for all to see”) and public rape at New South Wales in 1859. Although French expeditions led gunpoint for introducing public terror to the whole popula- by D’Entrecasteaus, Baudin, and Furneaux visited a few tion. Scholars such as Blakeley (2009) and Curtis (1995, areas of Australia between 1790 and the 1830s, as the Dutch 1998) explored how the Global North or the West particu- mariners did in the 17th century, the continent of Australia larly the United States and the United Kingdom have been was totally colonized by England. The first British colonial contributing to gross human rights violations and state ter- fleet led by Captain Arthur Philip reached at Botany Bay rorism in the Global South. Particularly Blakeley (2009) between 18 and 20 January 1788. This fleet consisted of 11 provides ships and around 1,350 crew and convicts. These English colonialists found that Botany Bay was unsuitable for set- a detailed history of Northern state terrorism, within the context tlement, and hence they moved to north to Port Jackson on of the foreign policy objectives of those states and the strategies January 26, 1788, and camped at Cove called Cadi by the they use to achieve them, dating back to the European colonial Cadigal people. They traded food with indigenous people. era, through to the practices of the US and its allies in the “War Richard Broome (2002) asserted that the English colonized on Terror.” (p. 4) Australia beginning January 26, 1788, when “ships con- taining 290 seamen, soldiers and officials and 717 convicts Western powerful states directly or indirectly engage in sailed into Port Jackson, to confront the Gamaraigal people terrorism to dominate economic resources and markets in the of the Sydney area” (p. 26). Global South and to promote the politics of order at the cost Because of the following three reasons the Gamaraigal of democracy and social justice. Generally speaking, as some people avoided to deal with these settlers for 2 years: The states and their agencies engage in terrorist activities to pro- first reason was that they did not like how the British ordered mote their economic and political domination, nonstate ter- convicts around and flogged or hanged them. The second rorist forces use similar tactics to oppose and challenge such reason was that they did not like the British unearthing of policies, behavior, and practices, and to advance their agen- graves to steal the bones of indigenous people. The third rea- das. In this piece, I demonstrate that colonial terrorism was a son was that the Gamaraigal people “objected to the form of state terrorism as it was planned and executed by Europeans clearing the ground around a waterhole (possibly colonial states and their agencies. sacred) and casting nets in the area without permission” (Broome, 2002, p. 26). The second fleet arrived in 1790 with needed food and other supplies. George Vancouver started Terror and Genocide the process of British colonialism in Western Australia in The European mariners started to explore the waters of the 1791 by claiming the Albany region in the name of King Australian continent in the 17th century; between 1606 and George III. Tasmania was occupied in1803 and 1825, 1770, about 54 European ships arrived on the coast of Western Australia in 1827, South Australia between 1836 Australia and made contact with the inhabitants of the con- and 1842, Victoria in 1851, and Northern Territory in 1825. tinent. These European explorers called the Australian con- England sent to Australia over 162,000 convicts in 806 ships tinent Terra Austalis Incognita (unknown southern land). In between 1788 and 1850 to colonize the continent. Mathew the 17th century, many of the merchant ships that visited Flinders suggested the name Australia and later it was 6 SAGE Open adopted as the name of this country. Australia emerged in Depriving . . . victim of their rights to life or property is the very act by which the injured party is constructed as Other . . . Naming 1901 as a federation of the six English colonies. and killing often are indeed two sides of the same coin. Naming How did the English colonialists create this new country? the Other is often a way of obliterating their identity. . .This What happened to indigenous Australians in the process of metaphorical murder of people who are marginalised by creating this country? The English settlers and indigenous mainstream society boils down to an exclusion that can be felt people initially exchanged items such as food, cloth, arti- by the victim as complete annihilation. (p. 1) facts, and other supplies in amicable and understanding ways. How did these relationships change? Indigenous Once indigenous Australians were objectified and dehu- Australians did not resist when the British invaders were manized it became easier to terrorize and kill them: arriving in Australia. Richard Broome (2002) argued, Massacres of Aborigines were usually the work of groups of Had they known the implications the arrival of these strangers settlers or colonial police, and less often military units, would have for their future, they may have met the intruders sometimes in a part-time or volunteer capacity. But . . . killings more frequently with violence and less with curiosity. The could occur with impunity in an ideological atmosphere that irony was that the Aborigines had often helped the European mixed expansionism, racism, and classical models with a fetish explorers and the first settlers as they bumbled through the for cultivation and contempt for indigenous land use. (Kiernan, bush loaded down with equipment and plagued by inexperience. 2007, p. 252) (p. 40) The Australian colonial government used eugenics and Despite the fact that indigenous people never tried to social-Darwinist ideology to legitimize a series of racist harm these invaders at the beginning, the invaders turned policies and colonial terrorism on indigenous Australians; to their cooperation and friendly relationship into conflict, war, dispossess the rights of indigenous Australians to life and and terrorism to expropriate the homeland of the indigenous property, it developed “classification schemes allegedly people. Gradually indigenous people realized that the English proving the inferiority of the native populations living on settlers were expropriating their land and other resources on the territory they conquered” (Deschamps & Prum, 2007, which they depended and disturbed their ways of living. p. 2). Only a few of the settlers recognized the humanity of Consequently, between 1790 and 1810, the Eora group in the indigenous people. For instance, Tom Browne, one of the Sydney region initiated the campaign of resistance against settlers, wrote that many indigenous warriors were “grandly- the English invaders in a series of attacks under the leader- formed specimens of humanity, dignified in manner, and ship of Pemulwuy. Did other indigenous Australians engage possessing. . .intelligence by no means to be despised. Why in such resistance? How did such conflicts end? According to should these proud men give ground peacefully to white set- Michael Cannon (1993), tlers and their abominable convict servant” (quoted in Cannon, 1993, pp. 3-4). The English settlers considered the The white newcomers were determined that the whole continent of Australia should belong to them—the soil, the beasts and Australian continent birds, the rivers and fish, the minerals and trees. A dream of total possession had taken hold of normally stolid men. Such lust for a paradise on earth, for here laid one of the fairest domains ever new lands ran through the whole British race that monarch and created by nature. Permanent life-giving rivers meandered lowliest labourers alike glowed with the glory of creating a new through its extensive plains; lush grasslands and forests empire. (pp. 1-2) flourished on its rich soil. The white men could scarcely believe their luck, as they penetrated further into undulating pastures and negotiable bushlands. (Cannon, 1993, p. 10) The more the settlers expropriated the native land and destroyed their means of survival, the more the indigenous The British settlers used the doctrine of terra nullius to population groups engaged in resistance. The settlers inter- expropriate native lands through violence; according to this preted the resistance “as barbarous opposition to the enlight- doctrine, Australia belonged to no one and as indigenous peo- ened forces of White civilization” (Cannon, 1993, p. 169). ple did not have concept of law of ownership, they did not have The English colonizers and their descendants called rights to land. “The continuing pressure of agrarian ideology indigenous Australian Aborigines by giving them a new even when actual settlement patterns were pastoral took on name that had no meaning for peoples who had their own new virulence with spread of scientific racism,” Ben Kiernan ethno-national group names. For the English settlers, the (2007) wrote, “which justified mass murder of indigenous name Aborigines characterized the backwardness, inferior- communities to safeguard investments in animal stock” (p. 309). ity, and otherness of indigenous Australians. This name was As hunters and food-gatherers, the land use of indigenous peo- invented to create a racial boundary between White ple was different from a European way of land use. The British Europeans and Black Australians for dehumanizing them colonizers used this as pretext in confiscating the land of indig- later. According to Bénédicte Deschamps and Michel Prum enous people calling it terra nullius, free wasteland for taking. (2007), Jalata 7 As mighty was right in colonialism, the British settlers used edible fruit that grows in the ground are common property. . .For every black man you fellows shoot, I will kill a white man. this ideological discourse and terrorism to extinguish all indig- (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 289) enous rights to land and other resources. These activities involved “multiple deliberate killings and a series of genocidal Colonial governors granted land and ordered their troops massacres” (Kiernan, 2007, p. 250). “As killing escalated, to kill indigenous people and to kidnap their children as racial justification did, too”; colonial officers said, “disgrace unpaid laborers; they ordered their troops to strike the Blacks would it be the human race to call them Men” (Rowley, 1972, with terror or teach them by terror (Kiernan, 2007). On a p. 275). Colonial terrorism in Australia involved the destruc- public meeting a colonial officer declared, tion of essential foundation of the lifestyles indigenous people in economic, political, social cultural, biological, physical exis- the best thing that could be done would be to shoot all the blacks tence, religious, and moral arenas. and manure the ground with their carcasses. Cox or others The English settlers confiscated land and other eco- recommended likewise that the women and children should nomic resources and destroyed or obliterated indigenous specially be shot as the most certain method of getting rid of the institutions of self-government by replacing them with the race. (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 262) structures of colonial governments and by repressing cul- tural and knowledge systems, by reducing quality of food One English juror called indigenous Australians “a set of and depriving basic nutrients and causing physical debilita- [monkeys] and the earlier they are exterminated from the tion and death, by engaging in mass killings, intellectual face of the earth better” (Kiernan, 2007, p. 286). Nobody and resistance leaders, by destroying indigenous religions, exactly knows how many indigenous people were extermi- and by undermining moral and ethical values. Depending nated. Indigenous people were on their capitalist technological and organizational capac- ity, the English setters expropriated more and more land to shot down like dogs while sleeping round their fires, their make more money by engaging in agricultural capitalism. women taken from them to gratify the lusts of white men, hunted As Cannon (1993) asserts, “Australia was suitable for rapid and persecuted in all directions, and in fact looked upon as expansion of wool-growing. Flocks spread over all avail- savage beasts of the forest, whom it was necessary to get rid of, able grasslands. By the end of the 1840s, the then-amazing no matter how. (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 278) figure of 40,000,000 pounds of wool was being exported to Europe each year” (p. 2). To justify their crimes against For instance, in colonial Victoria, in 1834, Blacks were humanity, the English settlers promoted the idea of a White estimated between 5,000 and 10,000, but by 1886, only 806 Australia and the extinction of indigenous Australians; the of them survived (Kiernan, 2007). Tasmania’s Blacks were native “land was declared desert and uninhabited later reduced from an estimated 4,000 or more to under 2,000 by represented as terra nullius and the various nations declared 1818; “settlers would shoot on sight. . .killing the men and uncivilized.” The English setters gradually decimated taking the children from the women”; the settlers would indigenous population groups, obliterated their cultures, often “chase the mother through the bush until she had to and challenged their survival and identity (Bourke, 1998, leave her children, then make a selection” of child labor p. 40). (Rowley, 1972, pp. 44, 120). The British settlers expropriated the land of indigenous The Tasmania indigenous people were also terrorized and hunters and food-gatherers for farming and pastoral interests destroyed. The genocide of indigenous Tasmanians was con- and destroyed their livelihood. A. P. Elkin (1951) noted, sidered “the only true genocide in English colonial history” (Hughes, 1987, p. 120). The genocide of the early 19th cen- tury in Tasmania “directed and organized by the government When cultivation is associated with grazing cattle and sheep. . .ever increasing in numbers, the settlers required all the grass and substantially eliminated the indigenous population” (Bultin, must not be disturbed by hunts-men’s activities. So the native 1993, p. 134). Similarly, in the colony of Queensland, the fauna must go, including the Aborigines, unless they change settlers’ inroads were “marked with blood, the forests were their ways of living. (p. 166) ruthlessly seized, and the [Blacks] hunted down like their native dogs” (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 303). Between 1824 Indigenous people did not understand why the English and 1908, the settlers killed approximately between 8,000 settlers expropriated their land and claimed private owner- and 10,000 Blacks in Queensland (Kiernan, 2007). According ship on it. For instance in 1843, Yagan, an indigenous man, to Kiernan (2007), the told the advocate general of Victoria the following: roaring expansion [between 1850 and 1900] produced a Why do you white people come in ships to our country and crescendo of genocidal killings that exceeded all previous shoot down poor blackfellows who do not understand you—you Australian catastrophe. What the governor termed a ‘steady, listen to me! The wild blackfellows do not understand your silent flow’ of pastoral settlement included a series of large-scale laws, every living animal that roams the country, and every massacres of Aboriginal communities. (pp. 303-305) 8 SAGE Open more overtly murderous acts such as shooting and poisoning. In Mechanisms and Discourses of Terror particular, the 1789 epidemic laid the foundation for the notion and Genocide that Aboriginal people were not killed outright, but owing to their own personal weaknesses and cultural flaws, sadly just “faded The English settlers used several mechanisms of terrorism and away.” It was as if smallpox was nothing more than the first stage genocide against indigenous Australians, and justified them in the tragic but necessary workings of evolutionary law, with a racist discourse. These mechanisms included shooting, annihilating all species slow to “adapt.” (p. 82) burning, disease, rape, ethnocide, or cultural destruction. According to A. Dirk Moses (2004), terrorism and genocide or In their political discourses, the colonialists and their “indigenocide” involved five elements: apologists blamed the conflicts among indigenous people, lack of healthy conditions, and the behavior of indigenous the intentional invasion/colonization of land; the conquest of the people for the destruction of indigenous communities. indigenous peoples; the killing of them to the extent that they While openly advocating and engaging in exterminating can barely reproduce themselves and thereby come close to extinction; their classification as vermin by invaders; and the indigenous people, the settlers and their descendants were attempted destruction of their religious systems. (p. 27) also arguing that “indigenous society was not destroyed by the Europeans, but collapsed under the weight of its own Raymond Evans and Bill Thrope created a new term called pathologies” (Moses, 2004, p. 15). In other words, they sug- indigenocide to explain the extermination of the indigenous gested that it was not the English settlers and their violence population in Australia: Indigenocide that destroyed indigenous communities, but the indigenous communities themselves that caused their own destruction: is a means of analyzing those circumstances where one, or more “Coupled with emphasis on intertribal killings, alcoholism, peoples, usually immigrants, deliberately set out to supplant a unhygienic living conditions and, more recently, deaths in group or groups of other people whom as far as we know, police custody, the result has been to blame the victims of represent the Indigenous, or Aboriginal peoples of the country their own demise” (Kociumbas, 2004, p. 82). In reality, the that the immigrants usurp. (Moses, 2004, p. 27) British settlers and their descendants declared their inten- tions to exterminate indigenous communities and translated The English settlers shot indigenous people and divided them into actions through different mechanisms although them to turn them on one another. The colonial government they tried their best not to take responsibility for their crimes created the “Native Police Force” by providing food, money, against humanity. uniforms, horses, and guns to motivate some opportunistic The settlers and indigenous communities have exactly elements to fight against and kill their own people (Broome, known who were responsible for the crimes that were com- 2002, pp. 48-49). Furthermore, diseases like smallpox, mea- mitted in Australia. For example, Dalaipi, a Queensland sles, and tuberculosis killed several thousands of indigenous Black, in the late 19th century said: people. The settlers used food poisoning to kill Blacks; they distributed poisoned flour to commit premeditated murder We were hunted from our ground, shot, poisoned, and had our (Broome, 2002). Biological warfare was also used in colo- daughters, sisters and wives taken from us. . .What a number nies such as New South Wales, particularly at Port Jackson in were poisoned at Kilcoy . . . They stole our ground where we 1789, in the form of affecting the White settlers. According used to get food, and when we got hungry and took a bit of flour to Jan Kociumbas (2004), or killed a bullock to eat, they shot us or poisoned us. All they give us now for our land is blanket once a year. (quoted in The British had at their disposal “variolus matter in bottles,” but Broome, 2002, p. 55) though written accounts from the period describe with wonder and sometimes horror the number of corpses strewn around the The settlers raped women or slaughtered and massacred harbor, none mention the use of the variola, even for the purposes women, children, and the aged (Broome, 2002). They also of inoculating the newly-born white children who, though kidnapped young children to satisfy their demand of labor particularly susceptible to the disease, nevertheless appeared to for housework and harvesting (Kociumbas, 2004). As there have survived. (pp. 80-81) were no rich mines and manufacturing industries in Australia, “the settlers had never wanted much from Aboriginal people The colonialists and English scholars tried to minimize except their women and their land; for labor the settlers the effects of colonial shooting and poisoning on indigenous mainly depended on convict labor and imported coolies” Australians; they argued that indigenous Australians died out (Kociumbas, 2004, p. 92). because of their inability to adapt to a changing socioeco- Rape was also used as a mechanism of terror to destroy nomic environment. Jan Kociumbas (2004) asserts, indigenous families and communities. Some settlers held indigenous women and small girls and used them for sexual By dwelling on smallpox and other infectious diseases as faceless gratification. According to Richard Broome (2002), killers, colonialists and historians directed attention away from Jalata 9 The violence took sexual forms as well . . . Reverend Threlkeld colonialists and scholars started to theorize, “indigenous . . . in 1825 wrote that he was tormented “at night [by] the survivors were not really people at all” (Kociumbas, 2004, shrieks of girls, about 8 or 9 years of age, taken by force by the p. 96). Colonial officials justified the total extermination of vile men of Newcastle. One man came to see me with his head indigenous people by calling them nonhuman beings. They broken by the butt-end of a musket because he would not give proclaimed that “let us at once exterminate these useless and up his wife.” Some of the worst abuses occurred in Tasmania, obnoxious wretches” (Moses, 2004, pp. 15-16). where Aborigines were allegedly flogged, branded, castrated The English settlers engaged in trade in body parts of and mutilated by convicts. (p. 45) indigenous people for scientific purposes. Medical schools and scientific societies in Europe were interested in living The use of sexual violence is a tactic of terrorism and and dead specimens; they purchased skeletons and skulls too genocide that a dominant society practices in destroying the (Kociumbas, 2004). According to Jan Kociumbas (2004), dominated communities. Terrorism and genocide studies ignore The fact that Australia’s indigenous people were so extensively dismembered and exhibited as scientific freaks made for a the full extent of the humiliation of the ethnic group through the particularly virulent form of racism, which rendered it rape of its women, the symbols of honor and vessels of culture. increasingly impossible for even model, educated Aboriginal When a woman’s and [or a girl’s] honor is tarnished through people to find acceptable in settler society. Men became illicit intercourse, even if against her will, the ethnic group is extremely vulnerable to capital conviction of rape against white also dishonored. The after affects of rape—forced impregnation, women, though white men continued to rape Aboriginal women psychological trauma, degradation, and demoralization—go virtually as a right. (p. 98) beyond the rape victims themselves. (Sharlack, 2002, p. 107) It is disturbing to realize that one human group used mod- Some English settlers and their descendants captured ern education, technology, and legal means to hide crimes indigenous women and small girls from their husbands and against humanity: families without any fear and repercussion because colonial governments sanctioned these actions. Such inhumane activ- What is unique about genocide in Australia is not its violence, but ities were sanctioned to demoralize, destroy, and to show that its apparent legality and above all its modernity. It was modern the English settlers and their descendants had power to do technology that made possible the pace and effectiveness of the any thing on indigenous families and communities. killing, and modern law that provided the judicial niceties that Explaining such abuses Catharine MacKinnon (1994) says, condoned it. [I] T was modern education, not colonial ignorance that helped create the conditions where official silence and legally- It is . . . rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to sanctioned cover-ups could prevail. (Kociumbas, 2004, pp. 98-99) make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and Conclusion told to others: rape as spectacle. It is rape to drive a wedge The English colonialists and their descendants had used cap- through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It italist technology and social organization and engaged in is rape as genocide. (pp. 11-12) violent crimes against humanity in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. They perfected their acts of terrorism and In addition to raping small indigenous girls and women, genocide in the Australian continent to benefit the English the English settlers and descendants killed them whenever settler community at the cost of indigenous Australians. they wanted. Ward Churchill (1997), the indigenous American activist- Genocide can occur in many ways: scholar, considers the English as The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of global leaders in genocidal activities, both in terms of overall political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of efficiency—as they consummated the total extinction of the their languages, their national feeling and their religion. It may Tasmanians in 1876—and a flair for innovation embodied in be accomplished by wiping out all [bases] of personal security, their deliberate use of alcohol to effect the dissolution of many liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine of North America’s indigenous peoples. (p. 405) gun can always be utilized as a last resort. (quoted in Moses, 2004, p. 21) But most of the English descendants still refuse to accept the moral, economic, and political responsibility for the The English colonial settlers and their descendants in crimes committed against humanity in Australia despite the Australia used all these mechanisms of terrorism and geno- fact that they enjoy the economic and political benefits of cide. They used the discourse of racism to hide their crimes these crimes that resulted in destruction of indigenous com- against humanity. As the brutal dispossession of land munities. According to Michael Cannon (1993), increased in the early 19th century in the continent, 10 SAGE Open The whole white community [has] benefited economically from The indigenous communities deserve apologies and repa- the development of productive enterprises on the European rations. By taking such actions, governments and dominant model. However, it may now be accepted that these enterprises societies recognize that there are always prices to be paid for were established on land seized by force from an almost the crimes committed against humanity and learn how to defenseless race of people, and that most of the population is avoid such in humane acts in present time. According to still benefiting from that original seizure. If the Australian ideal Bénédicte and Michel Prum (2007), of ‘fair play’ has any meaning at all, it is surely time to redouble efforts to give descendants of the Aboriginal race a better chance Portraying colonisers’ atrocities or the systematic victimisation in life. (p. 265) and extermination of specific groups by a dictatorship provides a mirror which is essential not only to the understanding of the While boasting about dominating the world and spreading dark pages of a country’s history, but also to addressing past English civilization, modernity, Christianity, and commerce, governments’ errors, abuses and misconduct. Only in this way the descendants of English colonialists, like others who have can the malfunctions of the present be acknowledged and a just committed similar crimes against humanity, do not want to future constructed. (p. 3) deal with the crimes of the past and they prefer to be silent in Austria and other continents. As Jürgen Zimmerer (2004) Successive Australian White governments not only exter- notes, minated indigenous Australians and refused to recognize the crimes they committed against them, but they also attempted The question of colonial genocide is disturbing, in part to commit ethnocide on the survivors. They kidnapped those because it increases the number of mass murders regarded as mixed children of the settlers and indigenous mothers to genocide, and in part, too, because it calls into question the Anglicize them and distance them from their Black mothers: Europeanization of the globe as a modernizing project. Where the descendants of perpetrators still comprise the majority or Assimilating communities by trying to wipe out differences a large proportion of the population, and control political life through what could be called an ethnocide has been the common and public discourse, recognition of colonial genocides is policy of the various Australian governments. While authorities even more difficult, as it undermines the image of the past on have sought to achieve aboriginal conformity to a national which national identity is built. Australian conservatives, for culture modeled on white values, thus forcing the indigenous example, have difficulties recognizing the genocide of the population into an uncalled-for sameness, this has meant trying Aborigines. (p. 51) to negate their historical specificity as a colonial group, and play the card of “sameness” to reduce them to the status of It is impossible to bring national reconciliation between “disadvantaged minority.” Paradoxically, then, the inclusion of White and Black Australians without recognizing and deal- Aborigines into the wide spectrum of a “diverse Australia” is a ing with the crimes of the pas and present adequately on the way of excluding them once more, by depriving them of a past latter by the former. According to Bruce Elder (1988), that not only constitutes a part of their identity but also entitles to reparation in today’s society. Indigenous people are currently involved in a judicial battle, and demand compensation for the The blood of tens of thousands of Aborigines killed since 1788, abuse of human rights they have endured. (Deschamps & Prum, and the sense of despair and hopelessness which informs so 2007, p. 2) much modern-today Aborigine society, is a moral responsibility all white Australians share. Our wealth and lifestyle is a direct consequence of Aboriginal dispossession. We should bow our The settlers and their descendants attempted to totally heads in shame. (p. 200) eradicate the culture of the surviving of indigenous people. “Obsessed by the need to impose on [the survivors] their own There are White politicians in Australia who would like to kind of organization,” Michael Cannon (1993) writes, use the discourse of the ignorance of past generations with- “Anglo-Australian settlers could visualize no other end but out explaining their inhumane behavior and the conse- that the black people should behave like white people or die quences of their criminal acts: Some contemporary politicians out” (p. 253). Once governments and dominant societies in Australia claim that their European ancestors acted to the commit crimes against humanity, unless they realize and “standards of the time,” and the present generation does not change their criminal policies, they continue to engage in need to acknowledge, apologize, and compensate for the gross human rights violations in an attempt to hide the injus- crimes committed on the indigenous Australians. In 1999, tices committed in the past and present by attacking cultural Prime Minister John Howard announced that diversity in the name of “national culture” and the politics of the sameness. present generations of Australians cannot be held accountable . . . for the errors and misdeeds of earlier generations . . . To apply Declaration of Conflicting Interests retrospectively the standards of today in relation to their The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect behaviour does some of those people who were sincere an to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. immense injustice. (quoted in Deschamps & Prum, 2007, p. 3) Jalata 11 Funding Cohen, J. M. (Ed.). (1969). Christopher Columbus: The four voyages (J. M. Cohen, Trans.) London, England: Penguin The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or Books. authorship of this article. Cranstone, B. A. L. (1973). The Australian aborigines. London, England: The Trustees of the British Museum. Notes Curtis, M. (1995). The ambiguities of power: British foreign policy 1. These names include Airiman, Ajabakan, Ajabatha, Alawa, since 1945. London, England: Zed Books. Alura, Alyawarre, Amangu, Amarak, Amijangal, Anaiwan, Curtis, M. (1998). The great deception: Anglo-American power and Andakerebina, Andinyin, Andyamathanha, Anguthimri, world order. London, England: Pluto Press. Ankamuti, Anmatyerre, Antakirinja, Araba, Arabana, Arakwal, De Las Casas, B. (1992). A short account of the destruction of the Arrernte, Arnga, Atjinuri, Awabakal, Awarai, Awinmul, Indies (N. Griffin, Ed. & Trans.). London, England: Penguin Awngthim, Baada, Badjalang, Badjiri, Baiali, Baijungu, Books. Bailgu, Bakanambia, Balardong, Banbai, Bandjigali, Bandjin, Deschamps, B., & Prum, M. (2007). “Introduction,” Racial, ethnic, Barada, Baranbinja, Baraparapa, Barbaram, Barimaia, and homophobic violence: Killing in the name of otherness. Barindji, Barkindji, Barna, Barunggam, Barungguan, Batjala, New York, NY: Taylor & Francis Group. Beriguruk, Daii, Dainggati, Darambal, Darkinjang, Darug, Eisenstein, H. (2001). After 9/11: Globalization and the events of Dharawal, Diakui, Dieri, Duwala, Eora, Erawirung, Ewamin, September 11. Journal of the Research Group on Socialism Gaari, Gadjalivia, Gambalang, Gandangara, Gia, Goeng, Ilba, and Democracy, 16, 131-136. Idindji, Iwaidja, Ingura, Iningai, Irukandji, Ithu, Iwaidja, Elder, B. (1988). Blood on the wattle: Massacres and maltreat- Jaadwa, Jaako, Jaara, Juburara, Jadira, Jadliaura, Jagara, ment of Australian aborigines since 1788. Sydney, Australia: Janda, Jeidji, Jiegara, Kaantiju, Kalali, Kamilaroi, Kamor, National Book Distributors. Kandju, Koa, Kula, Laia, Larrakia, Madoitja, Nakako, Nana, Elkin, A. P. (1951). Reaction and interaction: A food gather- Ngalea, Oitbi, Ola, Pini, Rakkaia, Tagalag, Taior, Ualarai, ing people and European settlement in Australia. American Wadere, Wik, Yolngu, and Yuin. Anthropologist, 53, 164-186. 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indigenous_Australian_ Elkins, C. (2005). Imperial reckoning: The untold story of Britain’s group_names; http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_differ- Gulag in Kenya. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company. ent_aboriginal_tribes_in_Australia; http://australia.gov.au/ Frank, A. G. (1978). World accumulation, 1492-1789. New York, about-australia/australian-story/dreaming NY: Monthly Review Press. 3. Ibid. Goodwin, J. (2006). A theory of categorical terrorism. Social 4. Ibid., p. 2. Forces, 84, 2027-2046. 5. Ibid. Hughes, R. (1987). The fatal shore. London, England: Collins 6. Ibid. Harvill. 7. http://pals.dia.wa.gov.au/beforeEuropean.aspx Kiernan, B. (2007). Blood and soil: A world history of genocide 8. Tasmania was named after Abel Tasman. and extermination in from Sparta to Darfur. New Haven, CT: 9. See http://www.ulladulla.info/historian/ffstory.hotml Yale University. 10. See http://www.cultureandrecreation.gov.au/articles/australia Kociumbas, J. (2004). Genocide and modernity in colonial history/ Australia, 1788-1850. In A. Drik Moses (Ed.), Genocide 11. R. Lemkin (1944/1973) raises similar issues in explaining the and settler society: Frontier violence and stolen indigenous consequences of terrorism and genocide. children in Australian history (pp. 77-102). New York, NY: Berghahn Books. References Lemkin, R. (1973). Axis rule in occupied Europe: Laws of occupa- tion analysis of government proposals for redress. Washington, Black, D. (2004). The geometry of terrorism. Sociological Theory, DC: Carnegie endowment for International Peace. (Original 22, 14-25. work published 1944) Blakeley, R. (2009). State terrorism and neoliberalism: The north Lindqvist, S. (2007). Terra nullius: A journey through no one’ land. in the south. New York, NY: Routledge. New York, NY: New Press. Bourke, E. (1998). Images and realities (2nd ed.). In C. Bourke, E. Mackinnon, C. (1994). Rape, genocide, and women’s human rights. Bourke, & B. Edwards (Eds.), Aboriginal Australia (pp. 1-15). Harvard Women’s Law Journal, 17, 5-17. St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press. Marx, K. (1967). Capital (F. Engels, Ed.). New York, NY: Broome, R. (2002). Aboriginal Australians: Black responses to International Publishers. White dominance (3rd ed.). Sydney, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Moses, A. D. (2004). Genocide and settler society in Australian Bultin, N. G. (1993). Economics and the dreamtime: A hypothetical history. In M. A. Dirk (Ed.), Genocide and settler society: history. Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press. Frontier violence and stolen indigenous children in Australian Campanella, T. (1981). The city of the sun: A poetical dialogue history (pp. 3-48). New York, NY: Berghahn Books. (D. J. Donno, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Mulvaney, D. J. (1981). Origins. In Carol Cooper (Ed.) Aboriginal Cannon, M. (1993). Black land, White land. Melbourne, Australia: Australia. Sydney, Australia: Australian Gallery Directors. Minerva. Mulvaney, D. J., & White, J. P. (Eds.). (1987). Australians to 1788. Churchill, W. (1997). A little matter of genocide. San Francisco, Sydney, Australia: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon. CA: City Lights Books. 12 SAGE Open Prum, M. B., & Narie-Claude, B. (Eds.). (2007). Racial, ethnic, and the state back (pp. 170-185). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge homophobic violence: Killing in the name of otherness. New University Press. York, NY: Taylor & Francis. Tindale, N. B. (1974). Aboriginal tribes of Australia: Their terrain, Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1930). Former numbers and distribu- environmental controls, distribution, limits and proper names. tion of the Australian aborigines. Official Yearbook of the Berkeley: University of California Press. Commonwealth of Australia. Canberra, Australia: Australian Zimmerer, J. (2004). Colonialism and the holocaust: Towards Government Publishing Service. a archeology of genocide. In A. H. Beattie (Ed. & Trans.), Rowley, C. D. (1972). The destruction of aboriginal society. Genocide and settler society: Frontier violence and stolen Ringwood, Australia: Penguin. indigenous children in Australian history (pp. 49-76). New Schmid, A. P. (1991). Repression, state terrorism and geno- York, NY: Berghahn Books. cide: Conceptual clarifications. In P. Timothy Bushnell, V. Shlapentokh, C. K. Vanderpool, & J. Sundram (Eds.), State Author Biography organized terror (pp. 23-37). Boulder, CO: Westview. Asafa Jalata is Professor of Sociology and Global and Africana Senechal de la Roche, R. (1996). Collective violence as social con- Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has widely trol. Sociological Forum, 11, 97-128. published on indigenous and terrorism studies, globalization and Sharlack, L. (2002). State rape: Sexual violence as genocide. In K. uneven development, and Oromo and Africana Studies in regional Worcester, S. A. Bermanzohn, & M. Ungar (Eds.), Violence and international scholarly journals as well as several books. and politics: Globalization’s paradox (pp. 107-123). New York, NY: Routledge. Tilly, C. (1985). War making and state making as organized. In P. Evans, D. Ruessschemeyer, & T. Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png SAGE Open SAGE

The Impacts of English Colonial Terrorism and Genocide on Indigenous/Black Australians:

Jalata, Asafa
SAGE Open , Volume 3 (3): 1 – Aug 7, 2013
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Abstract

This article critically explores the essence of colonial terrorism and its consequences on the indigenous people of Australia during their colonization and incorporation into the European-dominated racialized capitalist world system in the late 18th century. It uses multidimensional, comparative methods, and critical approaches to explain the dynamic interplay among social structures, human agency, and terror to explain the connection between terrorism and the emergence of the capitalist world system or globalization. Raising complex moral, intellectual, philosophical, ethical, and political questions, this article explores the essence, roles, and impacts of colonial terrorism on the indigenous Australians. First, the article provides background historical and cultural information. Second, it conceptualizes and theorizes colonial terrorism as an integral part of the capitalist world system. Specifically, it links capitalist incorporation and colonialism and various forms of violence to terrorism. Third, the article examines the structural aspects of colonial terrorism by connecting it to some specific colonial policies and practices. Finally, it identifies and explains different kinds of ideological justifications that the English colonial settlers and their descendants used in committing crimes against humanity. Keywords capitalism, colonialism, terrorism, genocide, capitalist incorporation, and indigenous/Black Australians With the expansion of European-dominated capitalist world settlers in 1788. They were hunters and food-gatherers, and system to the Australia continent in the late 18th century, the survived on wild foods. While men hunted or fished, women English settlers started terror and genocide on indigenous collected vegetable foods, insects, shellfish, honey, and other Australians to expropriate their economic resources and to small creatures; they did not have permanent settlements, takeover their homeland. These crimes against humanity had and moved depending on the availability water and food continued in the 19th century until the indigenous peoples resources (Cranstone, 1973). They did not keep domestic were almost destroyed and the ownership of their land was animals, except the dog. Men used weapons such as the stone entirely transferred to the English colonial settlers and their axe, hunting spears, throwing sticks or clubs, shields, and descendants. These colonial settlers and their descendants boomerangs, and they were “expert at tracking and stalking have justified their theft and robbery of the resources of the game and knowledgeable about its habits, and even in open indigenous people in the discourses of race, backwardness, country” (Cranstone, 1973, p. 13). Indigenous women used a civilization, and modernity. This article first introduces the digging stick for digging up food resources such as grubs, indigenous Australians, their cultures and social organizations roots, edible ants, and burrowing animals. Men usually trav- that made them vulnerable to the British attack. Second, it eled over higher grounds to see and hunt animals, and women explains how the British colonial settlers expropriated the land walked on lowlands to collect vegetable foods (Tindale, of indigenous Australians through terrorism and genocide, and 1974). justified their criminal actions in the doctrine of terra nullius They changed their environment through burning, man- (empty land), (Lindqvist, 2007). Third, it identifies and aged their resources, and reached “a possible technological explores different mechanisms of terrorism and genocide and peak in the ‘eel farming’” in some areas (Bultin, 1993, p. 56). their impacts on different groups of indigenous Australians. University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA Background Corresponding Author: Asafa Jalata, University of Tennessee, 901 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN The indigenous Australians occupied the continent for more 37922, USA. than 65,000 years before the arrival of English colonial Email: ajalata@utk.edu 2 SAGE Open Like other nonagricultural societies, indigenous Australians (1930) estimated between 250,000 and 300,000, and D. J. might have started some practices that might have led to the Mulvaney and J. P. White (1987) proposed about 700,000. initial domestication of animals and plants, irrigation, and N. G. Bultin (1993) estimated that they were between 1 and gardening (Tindale, 1974). According to Norman B. Tindale 1.5 million in 1788 and concluded that “precontact popula- (1974), tions of 700 000, 1 or 1.5 million imply massive depopula- tion and widespread destruction of indigenous societies and Australia has one of the largest areas of territory occupied by economies” (p. 99). In 1901, however, fewer than 100,000 peoples in an approximately uniform state of hunting culture of them remained (Kiernan, 2007). Bultin (1993) suggested differing from region to region chiefly because of the different three major reasons for the societal destruction: disease epi- animals and plants upon which the people depend for a living sodes, the withdrawal of resources, and killing. European and because of the acquisition of ideas by some which have not diseases that exposed the population lacking immunological yet spread to all. (p. 30) defenses to destruction included smallpox, venereal disease (e.g., gonorrhea), influenza, measles, pneumonia, and tuber- Indigenous Australians produced for their own consump- culosis. The English settlers and their descendants expropri- tion or satisfaction, not for exchange; they had small group ated native land and removed the indigenous people by property rights in land and other assets (Bultin, 1993). As G. cutting them from their food resources, and engaged in Bultin (1993) wrote, indigenous Australians genocidal massacres. The indigenous Australians were oral communities and recognized larger kinship relations, vital to many of their social kept “their cultural heritage alive by passing their knowl- and economic practices and these larger kin groups, in turn, edge, arts, rituals and performances from one generation to acknowledged property, ritual and other rights. From time to another, speaking and teaching languages, protecting cul- time, [they] came together physically in larger associations for tural materials, sacred and significant sites, and objects.” special purposes. To a limited degree, they traded within and beyond these kin groups; and there were episodes of conflict Customary laws that passed from generation to generation between them. (p. 53) through values and oral discourse governed them. As N. B. Tindale (1974) noted, indigenous Australians controlled their They not only spent their times in economic activities, but communities they also engaged in other activities such as education, learn- ing-by-doing, leisure, ritual and religion, order, reproduc- by the use of song and the powers of ridicule and rebuke in them, although in some songs the added power of the man tion, administration and management, warfare, and practicing ‘death magic’ [was] also seen as a controlling force. investment (Bultin, 1993). Based on customary laws and val- In this regard old dances and songs, describing the fate of ues, indigenous communities had coherence-based similar ancients who misbehaved and suffered for their actions were thought and communication because of their common lan- made topical, ‘pieces’ being put in to make them fit the new guage, common life experiences, like exchange of women circumstances. (p. 34) between extended families, and sharing of initiation rites. Euro-American scholars call indigenous people tribes to The British Captain James Cook who visited Australia in claim that they are primitive and less developed and call 1770 appreciated their egalitarian social system (Kiernan, Europeans or their descents nations or ethnic groups. Tindale 2007). Indigenous Australians had a loose political organiza- (1974) defines tion based on the authorities of elders or holders of tradi- tions: There were situations in which the “tribe” as the normally endogamous unit most commonly recognized in Australia, generally known as occupying a given a good hunter, a man given either to sorcery or to magical territory, speaking mutually intelligible dialectics, having a practices, or even a particularly skilled fighter, could [or] common kinship system, and sharing the performance of sometimes has exerted some authority. There is in general no ceremonial rites of interest to them all. (p. 33) formal institution of ‘chief’ or true leader, although ever since white settlement began efforts have been made to establish some In this discussion, the term tribe is rejected as it is a mod- sort of leadership role, and some pretense of chiefly authority ernist or racist concept. The indigenous groups prefer to be has been made by natives who have adopted white ways. called by their ethno-national names. There were between (Tindale, 1974, p. 33) 600 and 700 cultural-linguistic groups when English settlers arrived in Australia, and there are about 250 languages in use Indigenous Australians were organized in families, clans, today. kinship networks, and ethno-national groups. According to Eleanor Bourke (1998) estimated that in 1788 there were John Mulvaney (1981), they were between 300,000 and 1 million indigenous people inhabited in Australia. There are different precontact population esti- organized around small social units, families and clans, which mates of indigenous Australians: A. R. Radcliffe-Brown coalesced on occasions when seasonal conditions permitted or Jalata 3 when kinship obligations required. Hundreds of individuals Although the English settlers and their descendants often congregated for ceremonial activities such as initiation rejected the artistic contribution of indigenous Australians rituals, and for reciprocal gifts or marriage exchange. These until recently, systematic archaeological investigation larger social groupings are termed tribes. (p. 18) reveals the significance of their artistic heritage in the world (Mulvaney, 1981). Indigenous arts include carving, painting The smaller social groups, such as the family, extended (i.e., the decoration of the body, the preparation of ritual families, the patrilineal or matrilineal descent group, and grounds, and totem ceremonies), and visual art. Because of clans were the effective economic, social, and political unites their capitalist technology, social organization, and the desire (Cranstone, 1973). Indigenous Australians were not warlike to acquire land and accumulate wealth at any cost, the people, and they did not engage in war to capture territory or English settlers overpowered, terrorized, and almost exter- to dominate others; there was small-scale fighting for rea- minated indigenous Australians. sons connected with magical killing, revenge expeditions, with disputes about women, and with trespassing on hunting Conceptualizing and Theorizing grounds or sacred places (Cranstone, 1973). Terrorism Indigenous communities made decisions based on the sim- ple family, extended families, clans and kinship systems: Considering the historical and global context in which terror- ism developed and intensified, we need a more comprehen- Kinship influences marriage decisions and governs much of sive, historical, and broader definition of terrorism. So, I everyday behaviour. By adulthood people know exactly how to define terrorism as a systematic governmental or organiza- behave, and in what manner, to all other people around them as tional policy or strategy through which lethal violence is well as in respect to specific land areas. Kinship is about meeting practiced openly or covertly to instill fear on a given popula- the obligations of one’s clan, and forms part of Aboriginal Law, tion group beyond the direct victims of terror to change their sometimes known as the Dreaming. behavior of political resistance to domination or the behavior of dominant group for political and economic gains or other The Dreaming is as an aspect of indigenous beliefs that reasons. State and nonstate actors use terrorism; the former recognizes mythical beings that in the beginnings arrived in has used it to maintain state power or to loot resources and Australia fighting, hunting, and forming the natural features; the latter mostly to resist the oppressive and exploitative these religious “myths usually conclude with the Dreamtime policies of states. There are also nonstate terrorist agencies heroes turning into rocks or animals or going to live in water that advance extremist religious and racist ideologies and holes, and losing individual physical existence, but their practices on a subnational or international level. non-material essence survives and they are still actively con- As the frequency, intensity, and the volume of terrorism cerned with human affairs” (Cranstone, 1973, p. 24). have increased with the development of global capitalism, a According to some stories of the Dreaming, the spirits of definition and theory of terrorism cannot be adequately ancestors had created the world and then changed into rocks, developed without considering terrorism as an aspect of the stars, trees, watering holes, and have remained in sacred racialized capitalist world system. Beginning in 1492, sites; “the Dreaming is never-ending, linking the past and the European colonialists engaged in terrorism, genocide, and present, the people and the land.” Furthermore, some of the enforced servitude in the Americas and extended their vio- Dreaming stories claim that lence into Africa through racial slavery. Then, in the the ancestors’ spirits came to the earth in human form and as 17th, 18th, 19 centuries, they incorporated other parts of the they moved through the land, they created the animals, plants, world into this system through colonial terrorism and geno- rocks and other forms of the land that we know today. They also cidal wars. Most scholars have avoided providing a compre- created the relationships between groups and individuals to the hensive and critical analysis and an objective definition and land, the animals and other people. theorization of this aspect of the modern world system. Even critical scholars and others who have studied the emergence, Before English colonial settlement, like preagricultural development, and expansion of the capitalist world system and industrial European or other societies, indigenous have primarily focused on trade, the international division of Australians were living simple and egalitarian lifestyles: labor, exploitation, capital accumulation, political structures, development and underdevelopment, and social inequality, Their approach to life was minimalist yet nurturing of members and did not adequately address the role of terrorism in creat- of the group. Clothing was either not worn or minimal, shelter ing and maintaining the system. was easily assembled or non-permanent structures, tools were History teaches us that different forms of political vio- made from materials readily available on the land, there was no lence including terrorism have increased as different societ- written language, [and] children were cared for by the extended ies engaged in improved techniques of production, produced family group and Elders were treated as respected purveyors of surplus wealth, developed their organizational capacities, important spiritual and cultural formation. 4 SAGE Open and improved their technological innovations. The emer- violence or terrorism and confuse abstract theories of the gence of the nation-state with the development of capitalism state with reality. Based on the assumption of the ideal rela- in the 16th century in Europe increased the organizational tionship between the state and society, philosophers and and technological capacity to engage in more lethal violence political thinkers identified three functions of the state that including terrorism. In European countries such as England, would earn it legitimacy. According to these theorists, the France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, the 16th state protects and maintains internal peace and order in soci- century was the period of the formation of the nation-state ety; it organizes and protects national economic activities; (Frank, 1978). With the formation of the nation-states, state- and it defends national sovereignty and national interests centered colonial terrorism expanded all over the world. For (Campanella, 1981). In reality, most states violate most of instance, Bartolome’ De Las Casas, who traveled to the New these theoretical principles by engaging in political repres- World in 1502 with the Spaniards in their quest to colonize sion and state terrorism to defend the interest of powerful and rob the treasures and lands of the indigenous peoples of elites, particularly when they engage in colonial expansion. the Indies, provides an eyewitness account of the anatomy of Various forms of violence including political terrorism are colonial terrorism and genocide: closely related to the art of statecraft (Tilly, 1985). As capitalism developed in Western Europe, the need for raw materials like gold and silver, markets, and free or cheap They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there. . .Some they chose to keep alive and labor expanded due to the desire to minimize the cost of pro- simply cut their wrists, leaving their hands dangling, saying to duction and to increase the rate of profit and accumulation of them: ‘Take this letter’—meaning that their sorry condition capital or wealth. This need was fulfilled through colonial- would act as a warning to those hiding in the hills. (De Las ism, racial slavery, terrorism and genocide. “The treasures Casas, 1992, p. 15) captured outside of Europe by undisguised looting, enslave- ment, and murder,” Marx (1967) wrote, “floated back to the Such terrorist acts were sponsored by European states or mother-country and were there turned to capital” (pp. 753- state agencies. A. P. Schmid (1991) asserts that 754). Capitalism had “witnessed the first long, sustained, and widespread quantitative and qualitative development. . .in its state terrorism can be seen as a method of rule whereby some mercantile stage and the first period of concentrated capital groups of people are victimized with great brutality, and more or accumulation in Europe” (Frank, 1978, p. 52). Western pow- less arbitrarily by the state or state supported actors, so that ers and some states in the Global South still engage in terror- others who have reason to identify with those murdered, will ism and hidden genocide to implement their draconian despair, obey or comply. (p. 31) economic and political policies. “The war on terrorism is being used as a continuation of the war on social justice, as Furthermore, terrorism and war can be seen as a contin- waged with the economic weapons of the international finan- uum process, and it is often impossible to draw a clear and cial institutions” (Eisenstein, 2001, p. 136). Western powers, neat boundary between political repression, state terrorism, multinational corporations, and state elites in the Global war, and genocide. The policy of state terror can sometimes South have collaborated and engaged in massive human lead to genocide (Schmid, 1991). The Spaniards imposed rights violations and terrorism (Blakeley, 2009) even as fear through mass terror and genocide so that they could Western-based human right organizations have systemati- achieve their economic and political goals without any cally exposed such crimes. obstacle. These acts of terrorism and genocide were guided In theorizing nonstate terrorism, scholars like Senechal and financed by the government of Spain (see Cohen, 1969). de la Roche (1996) noted that the accumulation of griev- Later, several European governments engaged in committing ances causes terrorism and “social polarization” between similar crimes. Today mainstream Euro-American scholars socially and culturally distant groups. Long-standing col- gloss over such crimes and refer to them as actions of “dis- lective grievances and the right social geometry, such as a covery” and “civilization.” higher degree of cultural and religious differences, rela- Although some government elites and their apologists tional distance, and social inequality between the aggrieved claim that the state provides protection from domestic and and the dominant population groups can sometimes con- external violence, “governments organize and, wherever tribute to the development of nonstate terrorism (see Black, possible, monopolize the concentrated means of violence” 2004). Jeff Goodwin (2006) advanced a theory of categori- such as political terror (Tilly, 1985, p. 171). Political terror cal terrorism: and other forms of violence have always been involved in producing and maintaining structures, institutions, and orga- The main strategic objective—the primary incentive—of nizations of privileged hierarchy and domination in society. categorical terrorism is to induce complicitous civilians to State terrorism is a massive and extreme aspect of political support or to proactively demand changes in, certain government violence. Those who have state power, which includes the policies or the government itself. Categorical terrorism, in other power to define terrorism, deny their involvement in political words, mainly aims to apply such intense pressure to Jalata 5 complicitous civilians that they will demand that ‘their’ the continent belonged to the Dutch East Indies Company. government change or abandon policies that the revolutionaries In 1606, Willem Janszoon, a Dutchman, with a ship called oppose. (p. 2038) the Duyfken and his crew explored the Australian coast and met indigenous people. In November 1642, Abel Tasman Using this theory, Godwin concludes that Al Qaeda reached the west coast of Tasmania with two ships known attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, because it as Heemskerck and Zeehaen and named it Van Diemen’s considered Americans to be “complicitous citizens” who Land. Anthony Van Diemen, Governor-General of the support the foreign policy of the United States in the Middle Dutch East Indies commissioned Abel Tasman, a sea cap- East. tain employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1642 to Recently a few critical scholars have started to explore the explore the unknown South Seas. Two years later, Tasman essence and characteristics of state terrorism or colonial ter- and his crew sailed along the northern coast of Australia rorism. These scholars include Caroline Elkins, Mark Curtis, (which later named New Holland) from Cape York to North Ruth Blakeley, Richard Jackson, Doug Stokes, Sam Raphael, West Cape. and Marie Breen Smyth. Elkins (2005) explains that the Following the Dutch mariners, Lieutenant James Cook, British colonial government used political terror to destroy a an English mariner, in 1770 explored the Australian east Kenyan liberation movement known as the Land and coast in his ship HM Barque Endeavour. King George III of Freedom Army (the Mau Mau) in the early 1950s through England instructed Cook on August 22, 1770, to claim the forced removals and deportations of millions of Kenyans, possession of the east coast of Australia that was later tortures (“a kind of public spectacle, often conducted in the named New South Wales. Queensland was separated from open barbed-wire areas for all to see”) and public rape at New South Wales in 1859. Although French expeditions led gunpoint for introducing public terror to the whole popula- by D’Entrecasteaus, Baudin, and Furneaux visited a few tion. Scholars such as Blakeley (2009) and Curtis (1995, areas of Australia between 1790 and the 1830s, as the Dutch 1998) explored how the Global North or the West particu- mariners did in the 17th century, the continent of Australia larly the United States and the United Kingdom have been was totally colonized by England. The first British colonial contributing to gross human rights violations and state ter- fleet led by Captain Arthur Philip reached at Botany Bay rorism in the Global South. Particularly Blakeley (2009) between 18 and 20 January 1788. This fleet consisted of 11 provides ships and around 1,350 crew and convicts. These English colonialists found that Botany Bay was unsuitable for set- a detailed history of Northern state terrorism, within the context tlement, and hence they moved to north to Port Jackson on of the foreign policy objectives of those states and the strategies January 26, 1788, and camped at Cove called Cadi by the they use to achieve them, dating back to the European colonial Cadigal people. They traded food with indigenous people. era, through to the practices of the US and its allies in the “War Richard Broome (2002) asserted that the English colonized on Terror.” (p. 4) Australia beginning January 26, 1788, when “ships con- taining 290 seamen, soldiers and officials and 717 convicts Western powerful states directly or indirectly engage in sailed into Port Jackson, to confront the Gamaraigal people terrorism to dominate economic resources and markets in the of the Sydney area” (p. 26). Global South and to promote the politics of order at the cost Because of the following three reasons the Gamaraigal of democracy and social justice. Generally speaking, as some people avoided to deal with these settlers for 2 years: The states and their agencies engage in terrorist activities to pro- first reason was that they did not like how the British ordered mote their economic and political domination, nonstate ter- convicts around and flogged or hanged them. The second rorist forces use similar tactics to oppose and challenge such reason was that they did not like the British unearthing of policies, behavior, and practices, and to advance their agen- graves to steal the bones of indigenous people. The third rea- das. In this piece, I demonstrate that colonial terrorism was a son was that the Gamaraigal people “objected to the form of state terrorism as it was planned and executed by Europeans clearing the ground around a waterhole (possibly colonial states and their agencies. sacred) and casting nets in the area without permission” (Broome, 2002, p. 26). The second fleet arrived in 1790 with needed food and other supplies. George Vancouver started Terror and Genocide the process of British colonialism in Western Australia in The European mariners started to explore the waters of the 1791 by claiming the Albany region in the name of King Australian continent in the 17th century; between 1606 and George III. Tasmania was occupied in1803 and 1825, 1770, about 54 European ships arrived on the coast of Western Australia in 1827, South Australia between 1836 Australia and made contact with the inhabitants of the con- and 1842, Victoria in 1851, and Northern Territory in 1825. tinent. These European explorers called the Australian con- England sent to Australia over 162,000 convicts in 806 ships tinent Terra Austalis Incognita (unknown southern land). In between 1788 and 1850 to colonize the continent. Mathew the 17th century, many of the merchant ships that visited Flinders suggested the name Australia and later it was 6 SAGE Open adopted as the name of this country. Australia emerged in Depriving . . . victim of their rights to life or property is the very act by which the injured party is constructed as Other . . . Naming 1901 as a federation of the six English colonies. and killing often are indeed two sides of the same coin. Naming How did the English colonialists create this new country? the Other is often a way of obliterating their identity. . .This What happened to indigenous Australians in the process of metaphorical murder of people who are marginalised by creating this country? The English settlers and indigenous mainstream society boils down to an exclusion that can be felt people initially exchanged items such as food, cloth, arti- by the victim as complete annihilation. (p. 1) facts, and other supplies in amicable and understanding ways. How did these relationships change? Indigenous Once indigenous Australians were objectified and dehu- Australians did not resist when the British invaders were manized it became easier to terrorize and kill them: arriving in Australia. Richard Broome (2002) argued, Massacres of Aborigines were usually the work of groups of Had they known the implications the arrival of these strangers settlers or colonial police, and less often military units, would have for their future, they may have met the intruders sometimes in a part-time or volunteer capacity. But . . . killings more frequently with violence and less with curiosity. The could occur with impunity in an ideological atmosphere that irony was that the Aborigines had often helped the European mixed expansionism, racism, and classical models with a fetish explorers and the first settlers as they bumbled through the for cultivation and contempt for indigenous land use. (Kiernan, bush loaded down with equipment and plagued by inexperience. 2007, p. 252) (p. 40) The Australian colonial government used eugenics and Despite the fact that indigenous people never tried to social-Darwinist ideology to legitimize a series of racist harm these invaders at the beginning, the invaders turned policies and colonial terrorism on indigenous Australians; to their cooperation and friendly relationship into conflict, war, dispossess the rights of indigenous Australians to life and and terrorism to expropriate the homeland of the indigenous property, it developed “classification schemes allegedly people. Gradually indigenous people realized that the English proving the inferiority of the native populations living on settlers were expropriating their land and other resources on the territory they conquered” (Deschamps & Prum, 2007, which they depended and disturbed their ways of living. p. 2). Only a few of the settlers recognized the humanity of Consequently, between 1790 and 1810, the Eora group in the indigenous people. For instance, Tom Browne, one of the Sydney region initiated the campaign of resistance against settlers, wrote that many indigenous warriors were “grandly- the English invaders in a series of attacks under the leader- formed specimens of humanity, dignified in manner, and ship of Pemulwuy. Did other indigenous Australians engage possessing. . .intelligence by no means to be despised. Why in such resistance? How did such conflicts end? According to should these proud men give ground peacefully to white set- Michael Cannon (1993), tlers and their abominable convict servant” (quoted in Cannon, 1993, pp. 3-4). The English settlers considered the The white newcomers were determined that the whole continent of Australia should belong to them—the soil, the beasts and Australian continent birds, the rivers and fish, the minerals and trees. A dream of total possession had taken hold of normally stolid men. Such lust for a paradise on earth, for here laid one of the fairest domains ever new lands ran through the whole British race that monarch and created by nature. Permanent life-giving rivers meandered lowliest labourers alike glowed with the glory of creating a new through its extensive plains; lush grasslands and forests empire. (pp. 1-2) flourished on its rich soil. The white men could scarcely believe their luck, as they penetrated further into undulating pastures and negotiable bushlands. (Cannon, 1993, p. 10) The more the settlers expropriated the native land and destroyed their means of survival, the more the indigenous The British settlers used the doctrine of terra nullius to population groups engaged in resistance. The settlers inter- expropriate native lands through violence; according to this preted the resistance “as barbarous opposition to the enlight- doctrine, Australia belonged to no one and as indigenous peo- ened forces of White civilization” (Cannon, 1993, p. 169). ple did not have concept of law of ownership, they did not have The English colonizers and their descendants called rights to land. “The continuing pressure of agrarian ideology indigenous Australian Aborigines by giving them a new even when actual settlement patterns were pastoral took on name that had no meaning for peoples who had their own new virulence with spread of scientific racism,” Ben Kiernan ethno-national group names. For the English settlers, the (2007) wrote, “which justified mass murder of indigenous name Aborigines characterized the backwardness, inferior- communities to safeguard investments in animal stock” (p. 309). ity, and otherness of indigenous Australians. This name was As hunters and food-gatherers, the land use of indigenous peo- invented to create a racial boundary between White ple was different from a European way of land use. The British Europeans and Black Australians for dehumanizing them colonizers used this as pretext in confiscating the land of indig- later. According to Bénédicte Deschamps and Michel Prum enous people calling it terra nullius, free wasteland for taking. (2007), Jalata 7 As mighty was right in colonialism, the British settlers used edible fruit that grows in the ground are common property. . .For every black man you fellows shoot, I will kill a white man. this ideological discourse and terrorism to extinguish all indig- (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 289) enous rights to land and other resources. These activities involved “multiple deliberate killings and a series of genocidal Colonial governors granted land and ordered their troops massacres” (Kiernan, 2007, p. 250). “As killing escalated, to kill indigenous people and to kidnap their children as racial justification did, too”; colonial officers said, “disgrace unpaid laborers; they ordered their troops to strike the Blacks would it be the human race to call them Men” (Rowley, 1972, with terror or teach them by terror (Kiernan, 2007). On a p. 275). Colonial terrorism in Australia involved the destruc- public meeting a colonial officer declared, tion of essential foundation of the lifestyles indigenous people in economic, political, social cultural, biological, physical exis- the best thing that could be done would be to shoot all the blacks tence, religious, and moral arenas. and manure the ground with their carcasses. Cox or others The English settlers confiscated land and other eco- recommended likewise that the women and children should nomic resources and destroyed or obliterated indigenous specially be shot as the most certain method of getting rid of the institutions of self-government by replacing them with the race. (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 262) structures of colonial governments and by repressing cul- tural and knowledge systems, by reducing quality of food One English juror called indigenous Australians “a set of and depriving basic nutrients and causing physical debilita- [monkeys] and the earlier they are exterminated from the tion and death, by engaging in mass killings, intellectual face of the earth better” (Kiernan, 2007, p. 286). Nobody and resistance leaders, by destroying indigenous religions, exactly knows how many indigenous people were extermi- and by undermining moral and ethical values. Depending nated. Indigenous people were on their capitalist technological and organizational capac- ity, the English setters expropriated more and more land to shot down like dogs while sleeping round their fires, their make more money by engaging in agricultural capitalism. women taken from them to gratify the lusts of white men, hunted As Cannon (1993) asserts, “Australia was suitable for rapid and persecuted in all directions, and in fact looked upon as expansion of wool-growing. Flocks spread over all avail- savage beasts of the forest, whom it was necessary to get rid of, able grasslands. By the end of the 1840s, the then-amazing no matter how. (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 278) figure of 40,000,000 pounds of wool was being exported to Europe each year” (p. 2). To justify their crimes against For instance, in colonial Victoria, in 1834, Blacks were humanity, the English settlers promoted the idea of a White estimated between 5,000 and 10,000, but by 1886, only 806 Australia and the extinction of indigenous Australians; the of them survived (Kiernan, 2007). Tasmania’s Blacks were native “land was declared desert and uninhabited later reduced from an estimated 4,000 or more to under 2,000 by represented as terra nullius and the various nations declared 1818; “settlers would shoot on sight. . .killing the men and uncivilized.” The English setters gradually decimated taking the children from the women”; the settlers would indigenous population groups, obliterated their cultures, often “chase the mother through the bush until she had to and challenged their survival and identity (Bourke, 1998, leave her children, then make a selection” of child labor p. 40). (Rowley, 1972, pp. 44, 120). The British settlers expropriated the land of indigenous The Tasmania indigenous people were also terrorized and hunters and food-gatherers for farming and pastoral interests destroyed. The genocide of indigenous Tasmanians was con- and destroyed their livelihood. A. P. Elkin (1951) noted, sidered “the only true genocide in English colonial history” (Hughes, 1987, p. 120). The genocide of the early 19th cen- tury in Tasmania “directed and organized by the government When cultivation is associated with grazing cattle and sheep. . .ever increasing in numbers, the settlers required all the grass and substantially eliminated the indigenous population” (Bultin, must not be disturbed by hunts-men’s activities. So the native 1993, p. 134). Similarly, in the colony of Queensland, the fauna must go, including the Aborigines, unless they change settlers’ inroads were “marked with blood, the forests were their ways of living. (p. 166) ruthlessly seized, and the [Blacks] hunted down like their native dogs” (quoted in Kiernan, 2007, p. 303). Between 1824 Indigenous people did not understand why the English and 1908, the settlers killed approximately between 8,000 settlers expropriated their land and claimed private owner- and 10,000 Blacks in Queensland (Kiernan, 2007). According ship on it. For instance in 1843, Yagan, an indigenous man, to Kiernan (2007), the told the advocate general of Victoria the following: roaring expansion [between 1850 and 1900] produced a Why do you white people come in ships to our country and crescendo of genocidal killings that exceeded all previous shoot down poor blackfellows who do not understand you—you Australian catastrophe. What the governor termed a ‘steady, listen to me! The wild blackfellows do not understand your silent flow’ of pastoral settlement included a series of large-scale laws, every living animal that roams the country, and every massacres of Aboriginal communities. (pp. 303-305) 8 SAGE Open more overtly murderous acts such as shooting and poisoning. In Mechanisms and Discourses of Terror particular, the 1789 epidemic laid the foundation for the notion and Genocide that Aboriginal people were not killed outright, but owing to their own personal weaknesses and cultural flaws, sadly just “faded The English settlers used several mechanisms of terrorism and away.” It was as if smallpox was nothing more than the first stage genocide against indigenous Australians, and justified them in the tragic but necessary workings of evolutionary law, with a racist discourse. These mechanisms included shooting, annihilating all species slow to “adapt.” (p. 82) burning, disease, rape, ethnocide, or cultural destruction. According to A. Dirk Moses (2004), terrorism and genocide or In their political discourses, the colonialists and their “indigenocide” involved five elements: apologists blamed the conflicts among indigenous people, lack of healthy conditions, and the behavior of indigenous the intentional invasion/colonization of land; the conquest of the people for the destruction of indigenous communities. indigenous peoples; the killing of them to the extent that they While openly advocating and engaging in exterminating can barely reproduce themselves and thereby come close to extinction; their classification as vermin by invaders; and the indigenous people, the settlers and their descendants were attempted destruction of their religious systems. (p. 27) also arguing that “indigenous society was not destroyed by the Europeans, but collapsed under the weight of its own Raymond Evans and Bill Thrope created a new term called pathologies” (Moses, 2004, p. 15). In other words, they sug- indigenocide to explain the extermination of the indigenous gested that it was not the English settlers and their violence population in Australia: Indigenocide that destroyed indigenous communities, but the indigenous communities themselves that caused their own destruction: is a means of analyzing those circumstances where one, or more “Coupled with emphasis on intertribal killings, alcoholism, peoples, usually immigrants, deliberately set out to supplant a unhygienic living conditions and, more recently, deaths in group or groups of other people whom as far as we know, police custody, the result has been to blame the victims of represent the Indigenous, or Aboriginal peoples of the country their own demise” (Kociumbas, 2004, p. 82). In reality, the that the immigrants usurp. (Moses, 2004, p. 27) British settlers and their descendants declared their inten- tions to exterminate indigenous communities and translated The English settlers shot indigenous people and divided them into actions through different mechanisms although them to turn them on one another. The colonial government they tried their best not to take responsibility for their crimes created the “Native Police Force” by providing food, money, against humanity. uniforms, horses, and guns to motivate some opportunistic The settlers and indigenous communities have exactly elements to fight against and kill their own people (Broome, known who were responsible for the crimes that were com- 2002, pp. 48-49). Furthermore, diseases like smallpox, mea- mitted in Australia. For example, Dalaipi, a Queensland sles, and tuberculosis killed several thousands of indigenous Black, in the late 19th century said: people. The settlers used food poisoning to kill Blacks; they distributed poisoned flour to commit premeditated murder We were hunted from our ground, shot, poisoned, and had our (Broome, 2002). Biological warfare was also used in colo- daughters, sisters and wives taken from us. . .What a number nies such as New South Wales, particularly at Port Jackson in were poisoned at Kilcoy . . . They stole our ground where we 1789, in the form of affecting the White settlers. According used to get food, and when we got hungry and took a bit of flour to Jan Kociumbas (2004), or killed a bullock to eat, they shot us or poisoned us. All they give us now for our land is blanket once a year. (quoted in The British had at their disposal “variolus matter in bottles,” but Broome, 2002, p. 55) though written accounts from the period describe with wonder and sometimes horror the number of corpses strewn around the The settlers raped women or slaughtered and massacred harbor, none mention the use of the variola, even for the purposes women, children, and the aged (Broome, 2002). They also of inoculating the newly-born white children who, though kidnapped young children to satisfy their demand of labor particularly susceptible to the disease, nevertheless appeared to for housework and harvesting (Kociumbas, 2004). As there have survived. (pp. 80-81) were no rich mines and manufacturing industries in Australia, “the settlers had never wanted much from Aboriginal people The colonialists and English scholars tried to minimize except their women and their land; for labor the settlers the effects of colonial shooting and poisoning on indigenous mainly depended on convict labor and imported coolies” Australians; they argued that indigenous Australians died out (Kociumbas, 2004, p. 92). because of their inability to adapt to a changing socioeco- Rape was also used as a mechanism of terror to destroy nomic environment. Jan Kociumbas (2004) asserts, indigenous families and communities. Some settlers held indigenous women and small girls and used them for sexual By dwelling on smallpox and other infectious diseases as faceless gratification. According to Richard Broome (2002), killers, colonialists and historians directed attention away from Jalata 9 The violence took sexual forms as well . . . Reverend Threlkeld colonialists and scholars started to theorize, “indigenous . . . in 1825 wrote that he was tormented “at night [by] the survivors were not really people at all” (Kociumbas, 2004, shrieks of girls, about 8 or 9 years of age, taken by force by the p. 96). Colonial officials justified the total extermination of vile men of Newcastle. One man came to see me with his head indigenous people by calling them nonhuman beings. They broken by the butt-end of a musket because he would not give proclaimed that “let us at once exterminate these useless and up his wife.” Some of the worst abuses occurred in Tasmania, obnoxious wretches” (Moses, 2004, pp. 15-16). where Aborigines were allegedly flogged, branded, castrated The English settlers engaged in trade in body parts of and mutilated by convicts. (p. 45) indigenous people for scientific purposes. Medical schools and scientific societies in Europe were interested in living The use of sexual violence is a tactic of terrorism and and dead specimens; they purchased skeletons and skulls too genocide that a dominant society practices in destroying the (Kociumbas, 2004). According to Jan Kociumbas (2004), dominated communities. Terrorism and genocide studies ignore The fact that Australia’s indigenous people were so extensively dismembered and exhibited as scientific freaks made for a the full extent of the humiliation of the ethnic group through the particularly virulent form of racism, which rendered it rape of its women, the symbols of honor and vessels of culture. increasingly impossible for even model, educated Aboriginal When a woman’s and [or a girl’s] honor is tarnished through people to find acceptable in settler society. Men became illicit intercourse, even if against her will, the ethnic group is extremely vulnerable to capital conviction of rape against white also dishonored. The after affects of rape—forced impregnation, women, though white men continued to rape Aboriginal women psychological trauma, degradation, and demoralization—go virtually as a right. (p. 98) beyond the rape victims themselves. (Sharlack, 2002, p. 107) It is disturbing to realize that one human group used mod- Some English settlers and their descendants captured ern education, technology, and legal means to hide crimes indigenous women and small girls from their husbands and against humanity: families without any fear and repercussion because colonial governments sanctioned these actions. Such inhumane activ- What is unique about genocide in Australia is not its violence, but ities were sanctioned to demoralize, destroy, and to show that its apparent legality and above all its modernity. It was modern the English settlers and their descendants had power to do technology that made possible the pace and effectiveness of the any thing on indigenous families and communities. killing, and modern law that provided the judicial niceties that Explaining such abuses Catharine MacKinnon (1994) says, condoned it. [I] T was modern education, not colonial ignorance that helped create the conditions where official silence and legally- It is . . . rape unto death, rape as massacre, rape to kill and to sanctioned cover-ups could prevail. (Kociumbas, 2004, pp. 98-99) make the victims wish they were dead. It is rape as an instrument of forced exile, rape to make you leave your home and never want to go back. It is rape to be seen and heard and watched and Conclusion told to others: rape as spectacle. It is rape to drive a wedge The English colonialists and their descendants had used cap- through a community, to shatter a society, to destroy a people. It italist technology and social organization and engaged in is rape as genocide. (pp. 11-12) violent crimes against humanity in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and Asia. They perfected their acts of terrorism and In addition to raping small indigenous girls and women, genocide in the Australian continent to benefit the English the English settlers and descendants killed them whenever settler community at the cost of indigenous Australians. they wanted. Ward Churchill (1997), the indigenous American activist- Genocide can occur in many ways: scholar, considers the English as The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of global leaders in genocidal activities, both in terms of overall political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of efficiency—as they consummated the total extinction of the their languages, their national feeling and their religion. It may Tasmanians in 1876—and a flair for innovation embodied in be accomplished by wiping out all [bases] of personal security, their deliberate use of alcohol to effect the dissolution of many liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine of North America’s indigenous peoples. (p. 405) gun can always be utilized as a last resort. (quoted in Moses, 2004, p. 21) But most of the English descendants still refuse to accept the moral, economic, and political responsibility for the The English colonial settlers and their descendants in crimes committed against humanity in Australia despite the Australia used all these mechanisms of terrorism and geno- fact that they enjoy the economic and political benefits of cide. They used the discourse of racism to hide their crimes these crimes that resulted in destruction of indigenous com- against humanity. As the brutal dispossession of land munities. According to Michael Cannon (1993), increased in the early 19th century in the continent, 10 SAGE Open The whole white community [has] benefited economically from The indigenous communities deserve apologies and repa- the development of productive enterprises on the European rations. By taking such actions, governments and dominant model. However, it may now be accepted that these enterprises societies recognize that there are always prices to be paid for were established on land seized by force from an almost the crimes committed against humanity and learn how to defenseless race of people, and that most of the population is avoid such in humane acts in present time. According to still benefiting from that original seizure. If the Australian ideal Bénédicte and Michel Prum (2007), of ‘fair play’ has any meaning at all, it is surely time to redouble efforts to give descendants of the Aboriginal race a better chance Portraying colonisers’ atrocities or the systematic victimisation in life. (p. 265) and extermination of specific groups by a dictatorship provides a mirror which is essential not only to the understanding of the While boasting about dominating the world and spreading dark pages of a country’s history, but also to addressing past English civilization, modernity, Christianity, and commerce, governments’ errors, abuses and misconduct. Only in this way the descendants of English colonialists, like others who have can the malfunctions of the present be acknowledged and a just committed similar crimes against humanity, do not want to future constructed. (p. 3) deal with the crimes of the past and they prefer to be silent in Austria and other continents. As Jürgen Zimmerer (2004) Successive Australian White governments not only exter- notes, minated indigenous Australians and refused to recognize the crimes they committed against them, but they also attempted The question of colonial genocide is disturbing, in part to commit ethnocide on the survivors. They kidnapped those because it increases the number of mass murders regarded as mixed children of the settlers and indigenous mothers to genocide, and in part, too, because it calls into question the Anglicize them and distance them from their Black mothers: Europeanization of the globe as a modernizing project. Where the descendants of perpetrators still comprise the majority or Assimilating communities by trying to wipe out differences a large proportion of the population, and control political life through what could be called an ethnocide has been the common and public discourse, recognition of colonial genocides is policy of the various Australian governments. While authorities even more difficult, as it undermines the image of the past on have sought to achieve aboriginal conformity to a national which national identity is built. Australian conservatives, for culture modeled on white values, thus forcing the indigenous example, have difficulties recognizing the genocide of the population into an uncalled-for sameness, this has meant trying Aborigines. (p. 51) to negate their historical specificity as a colonial group, and play the card of “sameness” to reduce them to the status of It is impossible to bring national reconciliation between “disadvantaged minority.” Paradoxically, then, the inclusion of White and Black Australians without recognizing and deal- Aborigines into the wide spectrum of a “diverse Australia” is a ing with the crimes of the pas and present adequately on the way of excluding them once more, by depriving them of a past latter by the former. According to Bruce Elder (1988), that not only constitutes a part of their identity but also entitles to reparation in today’s society. Indigenous people are currently involved in a judicial battle, and demand compensation for the The blood of tens of thousands of Aborigines killed since 1788, abuse of human rights they have endured. (Deschamps & Prum, and the sense of despair and hopelessness which informs so 2007, p. 2) much modern-today Aborigine society, is a moral responsibility all white Australians share. Our wealth and lifestyle is a direct consequence of Aboriginal dispossession. We should bow our The settlers and their descendants attempted to totally heads in shame. (p. 200) eradicate the culture of the surviving of indigenous people. “Obsessed by the need to impose on [the survivors] their own There are White politicians in Australia who would like to kind of organization,” Michael Cannon (1993) writes, use the discourse of the ignorance of past generations with- “Anglo-Australian settlers could visualize no other end but out explaining their inhumane behavior and the conse- that the black people should behave like white people or die quences of their criminal acts: Some contemporary politicians out” (p. 253). Once governments and dominant societies in Australia claim that their European ancestors acted to the commit crimes against humanity, unless they realize and “standards of the time,” and the present generation does not change their criminal policies, they continue to engage in need to acknowledge, apologize, and compensate for the gross human rights violations in an attempt to hide the injus- crimes committed on the indigenous Australians. In 1999, tices committed in the past and present by attacking cultural Prime Minister John Howard announced that diversity in the name of “national culture” and the politics of the sameness. present generations of Australians cannot be held accountable . . . for the errors and misdeeds of earlier generations . . . To apply Declaration of Conflicting Interests retrospectively the standards of today in relation to their The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect behaviour does some of those people who were sincere an to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. immense injustice. (quoted in Deschamps & Prum, 2007, p. 3) Jalata 11 Funding Cohen, J. M. (Ed.). (1969). Christopher Columbus: The four voyages (J. M. Cohen, Trans.) London, England: Penguin The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or Books. authorship of this article. Cranstone, B. A. L. (1973). The Australian aborigines. 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SAGE Open – SAGE

Published: Aug 7, 2013

Keywords: capitalism; colonialism; terrorism; genocide; capitalist incorporation; and indigenous/Black Australians

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