Short Black 3 the War of the Worlds by Noel Pearson

Author:Noel Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.

Reynolds’ discussion focuses on the coining of the term “genocide” by the Polish Jewish jurist and American émigré Raphael Lemkin, in the 1940s, and its adoption in the Genocide Convention of 1948, following the Holocaust. Lemkin was clear that while the term and its establishment as a crime in international law was new, its occurrence in history was not. Lemkin specifically assumed that the events in Tasmania which I am discussing here constituted such an occurrence.

Applying the definition of the crime of genocide to events before the enactment of the Convention involves retrospectivity, and indeed its application to the Holocaust was necessarily retrospective. It was applied by Lemkin and is generally not considered anachronistic when applied to the history of the Armenians at the hands of Turkey in 1915. How far back does retrospectivity turn into anachronism?

But anachronism is not the only objection to taking terminology invented in the 1940s and applying it to events in colonial Tasmania. In his discussion in An Indelible Stain? and Forgotten War (2013), Reynolds comes down against the application of genocide to Australia because the 1948 Convention requires intention on the part of the offending state. The absence of an explicit intention on the part of the colonial authorities, who frequently expressed concern at the treatment of indigenous peoples at the frontier, ultimately underpins Reynolds’ conclusion. It is a lawyer’s conclusion. The lawyer in me protests that the circumstances and the evidence clearly speak of a constructive intention on the part of the colonial authorities, but this debate is not merely a legal argument. John Docker’s point is apposite:

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