Empire, Colony, Genocide (War and Genocide) by A. Dirk Moses

Author:A. Dirk Moses [A. Dirk Moses]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2008-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

New Understandings: The Impact of World War II

From the late 1930s, changes in government policy and thinking about the place of Aboriginal people in Australia's future began to have an impact on historical scholarship. World War II, especially as knowledge and understanding grew of the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews, also had a profound impact on thinking about race and history. Several specialist studies on Australian Aboriginal history, all involving original research, were completed just before or during the war, though in wartime conditions they took varying amounts of time to appear in print. 36 One of these was by Clive Turnbull, a Tasmanian-born journalist working for the Melbourne Herald, whose book Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, appeared in 19 4 8. 37 So radical a break did it mark that it is worth close examination.

Black War signalled a challenge to the comfortable extinction discourse that had prevailed since the 1870s. It began: “Not, perhaps, before has a race of men been destroyed utterly within 75 years. This is the story of a race which was so destroyed, that of the aborigines of Tasmania.” 38 More clearly than anyone since Bonwick, Turnbull attributed this destruction directly to the effects of colonization. He places the blame squarely with the British authorities who made the decision to colonize the island, first as a prison and later as a place of profit: “Either object [prison or profit] might have been, and both were, fatal to the aborigines who were superfluous and, indeed, a hindrance to those achievements. Their fate was written when [Governor] King turned his thoughts toward the island as a penal settlement.” 39 Indeed, he wrote on page two: “The extinction of the people of Van Diemen's Land was foreseen from the earliest years of the European settlement but that did not in any degree dissuade the Government from its course.” 40 Turnbull writes that while many were “appalled by the atrocities committed upon the natives” the policy of colonization was not abandoned. After all, he says, “the only remedy would have been to deny to the invaders all property rights in the island.” This was not done, and instead the authorities attempted “one pious palliative after another,” to little effect, until “eventually the aborigines solved the problem in the way most convenient for all by dying.” 41

The idea of a mysterious disappearance in the wake of a meeting of two incompatible cultures was still popular in Australia, and Turnbull set out to refute it. “These people,” he wrote, “were not destroyed by a foreign culture. They were destroyed by arms and expatriation as part of a ruthless policy.” 42 They were destroyed “not only by a different manner of life but by the ill-will of the usurpers of the race's land.” 43 In explanation of what he means by “policy,” he says: “It was not so much that there was a general will for the extermination of the aborigines—though that was sometimes expressed—as that there was no general will against it.

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