Genocide Of Indigineous Australia

12 Pages 2923 Words

ly what is meant by the term ‘genocide’. While sociologists and historians have come up with a myriad of definitions for this term, for ease of use and understanding I will refer to ‘genocide’ only as it is defined by Article II points (a) to (e) of the Genocide Convention Bill. Although the wording of this bill is by no means without controversy, it is currently the only internationally agreed upon classification by law. The bill defines genocide as thus:

Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly removing children of the group to another group (Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm).


Mass killing of the indigenous populace was a fixture of colonial Australia since first contact (Saul, Ben p 4-19). While one can hardly conjure the habitual images of genocide (such as the endlessly cycled film reels of what was awaiting the liberators of Auschwitz and Bergen-Beltzen) in relation to the Aborigines, it must be noted that the Genocide Bill does not place time restrictions on state-sponsored genocide, nor does it place some ‘minimum death count’ that must be reached. In fact, it is important that appeals to numbers not be taken into consideration, for in comparisons to the Holocaust there simply were not six million Aborigines living in Australia for the British to kill. Instead the emphasis needs to be placed on what percentage of the oppressed group was eliminated, as well as the intent behind the killings. The statistical genocide of the...