"I Cannot Say the Numbers That Were Killed": Assessing Violent Mortality on the Queensland Frontier
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Tatz MIC Castan Essay Dec 2011
Indigenous Human Rights and History: occasional papers Series Editors: Lynette Russell, Melissa Castan The editors welcome written submissions writing on issues of Indigenous human rights and history. Please send enquiries including an abstract to arts- [email protected]. ISBN 978-0-9872391-0-5 Genocide in Australia: By Accident or Design? Colin Tatz © Indigenous Human Rights and History Vol 1(1). The essays in this series are fully refereed. Editorial committee: John Bradley, Melissa Castan, Stephen Gray, Zane Ma Rhea and Lynette Russell. Genocide in Australia: By Accident or Design? Colin Tatz © Colin Tatz 1 CONTENTS Editor’s Acknowledgements …… 3 Editor’s introduction …… 4 The Context …… 11 Australia and the Genocide Convention …… 12 Perceptions of the Victims …… 18 Killing Members of the Group …… 22 Protection by Segregation …… 29 Forcible Child Removals — the Stolen Generations …… 36 The Politics of Amnesia — Denialism …… 44 The Politics of Apology — Admissions, Regrets and Law Suits …… 53 Eyewitness Accounts — the Killings …… 58 Eyewitness Accounts — the Child Removals …… 68 Moving On, Moving From …… 76 References …… 84 Appendix — Some Known Massacre Sites and Dates …… 100 2 Acknowledgements The Editors would like to thank Dr Stephen Gray, Associate Professor John Bradley and Dr Zane Ma Rhea for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Myles Russell-Cook created the design layout and desk-top publishing. Financial assistance was generously provided by the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and the School of Journalism, Australian and Indigenous Studies. 3 Editor’s introduction This essay is the first in a new series of scholarly discussion papers published jointly by the Monash Indigenous Centre and the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law. -
Canadian Official Historians and the Writing of the World Wars Tim Cook
Canadian Official Historians and the Writing of the World Wars Tim Cook BA Hons (Trent), War Studies (RMC) This thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Humanities and Social Sciences UNSW@ADFA 2005 Acknowledgements Sir Winston Churchill described the act of writing a book as to surviving a long and debilitating illness. As with all illnesses, the afflicted are forced to rely heavily on many to see them through their suffering. Thanks must go to my joint supervisors, Dr. Jeffrey Grey and Dr. Steve Harris. Dr. Grey agreed to supervise the thesis having only met me briefly at a conference. With the unenviable task of working with a student more than 10,000 kilometres away, he was harassed by far too many lengthy emails emanating from Canada. He allowed me to carve out the thesis topic and research with little constraints, but eventually reined me in and helped tighten and cut down the thesis to an acceptable length. Closer to home, Dr. Harris has offered significant support over several years, leading back to my first book, to which he provided careful editorial and historical advice. He has supported a host of other historians over the last two decades, and is the finest public historian working in Canada. His expertise at balancing the trials of writing official history and managing ongoing crises at the Directorate of History and Heritage are a model for other historians in public institutions, and he took this dissertation on as one more burden. I am a far better historian for having known him. -
The Making of White Australia
The making of White Australia: Ruling class agendas, 1876-1888 Philip Gavin Griffiths A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University December 2006 I declare that the material contained in this thesis is entirely my own work, except where due and accurate acknowledgement of another source has been made. Philip Gavin Griffiths Page v Contents Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xiii Abstract xv Chapter 1 Introduction 1 A review of the literature 4 A ruling class policy? 27 Methodology 35 Summary of thesis argument 41 Organisation of the thesis 47 A note on words and comparisons 50 Chapter 2 Class analysis and colonial Australia 53 Marxism and class analysis 54 An Australian ruling class? 61 Challenges to Marxism 76 A Marxist theory of racism 87 Chapter 3 Chinese people as a strategic threat 97 Gold as a lever for colonisation 105 The Queensland anti-Chinese laws of 1876-77 110 The ‘dangers’ of a relatively unsettled colonial settler state 126 The Queensland ruling class galvanised behind restrictive legislation 131 Conclusion 135 Page vi Chapter 4 The spectre of slavery, or, who will do ‘our’ work in the tropics? 137 The political economy of anti-slavery 142 Indentured labour: The new slavery? 149 The controversy over Pacific Islander ‘slavery’ 152 A racially-divided working class: The real spectre of slavery 166 Chinese people as carriers of slavery 171 The ruling class dilemma: Who will do ‘our’ work in the tropics? 176 A divided continent? Parkes proposes to unite the south 183 Conclusion -
Australian Historians and Historiography in the Courtroom
Advance Copy AUSTRALIAN HISTORIANS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE COURTROOM T ANYA JOSEV* This article examines the fascinating, yet often controversial, use of historians’ work and research in the courtroom. In recent times, there has been what might be described as a healthy scepticism from some Australian lawyers and historians as to the respective efficacy and value of their counterparts’ disciplinary practices in fact-finding. This article examines some of the similarities and differences in those disciplinary practices in the context of the courts’ engagement with both historians (as expert witnesses) and historiography (as works capable of citation in support of historical facts). The article begins by examining, on a statistical basis, the recent judicial treatment of historians as expert witnesses in the federal courts. It then moves to an examination of the High Court’s treatment of general works of Australian history in aid of the Court making observations about the past. The article argues that the judicial citation of historical works has taken on heightened significance in the post-Mabo and ‘history wars’ eras. It concludes that lasting changes to public and political discourse in Australia in the last 30 years — namely, the effect of the political stratagems that form the ‘culture wars’ — have arguably led to the citation of generalist Australian historiography being stymied in the apex court. CONTENTS I Introduction .................................................................................................................. -
Our Cup Runneth Over | 431
1987 – Our cup runneth over | 431 1987 Our cup runneth over Life-stories from Fremantle go national Per Henningsgaard Fremantle was a busy place in the lead-up to 1987. Four years earlier, an Australian yachting syndicate skippered by John Bertrand, bankrolled by Perth businessman Alan Bond, and armed with a secret weapon – the controversial winged keel – had wrenched the America’s Cup away from the New York Yacht Club, where the trophy had, until then, resided for an unbroken 132-year stint. A nation that reserved most of its sporting attention for cricket and various football codes was momentarily enthralled by this historic win. The Prime Minster of the day was memorably recorded on television declaring an unofficial public holiday: “Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum,” Bob Hawke eloquently proclaimed. (Hawke had a personal appreciation for record-breaking feats: he boasted a world speed record in beer drinking as a university student). Quickly, sleepy Fremantle, a port town in Western Australia not far from Perth and better known for its well-heeled hippies and stevedores than yachting prowess, found itself at the centre of massive infrastructure projects funded by government and private sources. Following Fremantle’s lead, the State itself was rebranded. Vehicle registration plates no longer incongruously decreed it “The Wildflower State” and “The State of Excitement.” Instead, Western Australia was declared “Home of the America’s Cup.” It was a heady claim that could be made for a short time only; the Cup was lost in 1987 when “Stars and Stripes 87” trounced “Kookaburra III.” Fremantle’s status as the address of the America’s Cup was fleeting, and with it vanished the port town’s claim to have originated a story big enough to capture the nation’s imagination and alter the State’s image. -
A Typology of the Traditional Games of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples
A Typology of the Traditional Games of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Ken Edwards Author Ken Edwards has studied health and physical education, environmental science and sports history. He has taught health and physical education at both primary and secondary school level and has been a Head of Health and Physical Education at various schools. Ken completed a Ph.D. through UQ and has been an academic at QUT and Bond University and is now an Associate Professor in Sport, Health and Physical Education at USQ (Springfield Campus). Ken has had involvement in many sports as a player, coach and administrator. Wener ganbony tilletkerrin? What shall we play (at) first (Language of the Western people of Victoria) A Typology of the Traditional Games of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Ken Edwards Artwork by Aboriginal artist Maxine Zealey (of the Gureng Gureng people in Queensland). Copyright © 2012 by Ken Edwards. All rights are reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the Copyright owner. ISBN 978-0-9872359-0-9 Paper size: 16.5cms X 23 cms Page printing for ebook: Scale to fit A4 Acknowledgements Great excitement existed amongst the players in this game, which was begun in this manner: each player had one of these toys in his hands, standing at a mark on the ground some 30 yards or 40 yards from the disc. The thrower standing on the mark would measure the distance with his eye, and turning round would walk some few yards to the rear, and suddenly turning to the front would run back to the mark, discharging his weitweit with great force at the disc. -
Dislocating the Frontier Essaying the Mystique of the Outback
Dislocating the frontier Essaying the mystique of the outback Dislocating the frontier Essaying the mystique of the outback Edited by Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis Published by ANU E Press The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200, Australia Email: [email protected] Web: http://epress.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Dislocating the frontier : essaying the mystique of the outback. Includes index ISBN 1 920942 36 X ISBN 1 920942 37 8 (online) 1. Frontier and pioneer life - Australia. 2. Australia - Historiography. 3. Australia - History - Philosophy. I. Rose, Deborah Bird. II. Davis, Richard, 1965- . 994.0072 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Indexed by Barry Howarth. Cover design by Brendon McKinley with a photograph by Jeff Carter, ‘Dismounted, Saxby Roundup’, http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3108448, National Library of Australia. Reproduced by kind permission of the photographer. This edition © 2005 ANU E Press Table of Contents I. Preface, Introduction and Historical Overview ......................................... 1 Preface: Deborah Bird Rose and Richard Davis .................................... iii 1. Introduction: transforming the frontier in contemporary Australia: Richard Davis .................................................................................... 7 2. -
Rachel Perkins
Keynote address / Rachel Perkins I thought I would talk today about a project called First Australians, which is a documentary project. We are still in the midst of it. When I talk to people about it, like taxi drivers, they ask “What do you do?” and I say I make films. They say, “What are you working on?” and I say, “I’m working on this documentary series called First Australians” and they go “Oh great, it is about the migrant community coming to Australia” and I say, “No, no! It is actually about the first Australians, Indigenous Australians. So, we are still grappling with the title and whether it is going to be too confusing for people to grasp. But the name First Australians sort of makes the point of it trying to claim the space as Australia’s first people. If anyone has any better suggestions, come up to me at the end of the session! First Australians. It is probably the most challenging project that I’ve worked on to date. It is the largest documentary series to be undertaken in Australia. It is being made by a group of Indigenous Australians under the umbrella of Blackfella Films, which is our company. It has a national perspective and it is really the history of colonisation, which is a big part of our story. It charts the period from the 1780s through to 1993. It began in 2002 when Nigel Milan, who was the then General Manager of SBS, approached me. They had shown a series on SBS called 500 Nations, which is a series on Native American people. -
Chapter Eleven Mabo and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History
Chapter Eleven Mabo and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History Keith Windschuttle Let me start by putting a case which, to The Samuel Griffith Society, might smack of heresy. There are two good arguments in favour of preserving the rights of the indigenous peoples who became subjects of the British Empire in the colonial era. The first is that, since 1066, British political culture has been committed to the “continuity theory” of constitutional law, in which the legal and political institutions of peoples who were vanquished, rendered vassals or subsumed by colonization were deemed to survive the process. Not even their conquest, John Locke wrote in his Second Treatise of Government, would have deprived them of their legal and political inheritance.1 So, after colonisation, indigenous peoples would have retained their laws and customs until they voluntarily surrendered them. The second argument is that the previous major decision in this field, by the Privy Council in 1889, was based on the assumption that, when New South Wales became a British colony in 1788, it was “a tract of territory practically unoccupied”. This is empirically untrue. At the time, there were probably about 300,000 people living on and subsisting off the Australian continent. Under any principle of natural justice, the Privy Council should have started by recognizing this. According to a forthcoming book on the history of Australian philosophy by James Franklin, provocatively entitled Corrupting the Youth, the Mabo decision derived primarily from the Catholic doctrine -
Drawing Inferences in the Proof of Native Title – Historiographic and Cultural Challenges and Recommendations for Judicial Guidance
DRAWING INFERENCES IN THE PROOF OF NATIVE TITLE – HISTORIOGRAPHIC AND CULTURAL CHALLENGES AND RECOMMENDATIONS FOR JUDICIAL GUIDANCE SCOTT SINGLETON N2076357 BA, LLB (Qld), LLM (Hons) (QUT), Grad Dip Mil Law (Melb) Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Queensland Legal Practitioner of the High Court of Australia Submitted in fulfillment for the degree of Doctor of Juridical Science SUPERVISOR: PROFESSOR BILL DUNCAN ASSOCIATE ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR BILL DIXON SUPERVISOR: EXTERNAL PROFESSOR JONATHAN FULCHER (UQ) SUPERVISOR: Faculty of Law Queensland University of Technology 2018 KEYWORDS Evidence - expert witnesses - historiography - inferential reasoning - judicial guidance - law reform - native title - oral evidence - proof of custom 2 | P a g e ABSTRACT On 30 April 2015, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) delivered its report Connection to Country: Review of the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) (ALRC Connection Report). The terms of reference for the inquiry leading up to the ALRC Connection Report included a request that the ALRC consider “what, if any, changes could be made to improve the operation of Commonwealth native title laws and legal frameworks,” including with particular regard to “connection requirements relating to the recognition and scope of native title rights and interests.” Amongst its recommendations, the ALRC Connection Report recommended guidance be included in the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) regarding when inferences may be drawn in the proof of native title, including from contemporary evidence. To date, this recommendation has not been taken up or progressed by the Commonwealth Government. This thesis therefore develops such “Inference Guidelines” for the purposes of the proof of connection requirements in native title claims, in the form of a “Bench Book.” This thesis identifies various motivations for ensuring comprehensive, consistent and transparent guidelines for drawing inferences from historically-based sources of evidence. -
THE FABRICATION of ABORIGINAL HISTORY Photo – David Karonidis Keith Windschuttle
20 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY Photo – David Karonidis Keith Windschuttle For some years, controversy has surrounded the history of Australia’s earliest white settlement and the treatment of the Indigenous Australians. Historian Keith Windschuttle has now provoked new questioning in his latest book – The Fabri- cation of Aboriginal History (Macleay Press) where he has challenged much of the evidence previously used by historians in this field. Keith Windschuttle addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 11 February 2003 THE SYDNEY PAPERS SUMMER 2003 21 THE FABRICATION OF ABORIGINAL HISTORY Keith Windschuttle Over the past 30 years, university-based historians of Aboriginal Australia have produced a broad consensus. They have created a picture of widespread killings of blacks on the frontiers of settlement that not only went unpunished but had covert government support. Some of the Australian colonies engaged in what the principal historian of race relations in Tasmania, Lyndall Ryan, has called “a conscious policy of genocide”. In Queensland, according to the University of Sydney historian, Dirk Moses: “… the use of government terror trans- formed local genocidal massacres by settlers into official state-wide policy”. The expatriate Australian Ben Kiernan, who is director of the genocide studies program at Yale University, writes that nineteenth century Australian colonists mounted numerous punitive expeditions against the Aborigines in which they committed “hundreds of massacres”. In Central Australia, Kiernan claims 40 per cent of the indigenous population was shot dead. In Queensland, the Aborigines “were hunted like wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror of white predators”. For most of my adult life I was a true believer of this story. -
Collaborative Histories of the Willandra Lakes
LONG HISTORY, DEEP TIME DEEPENING HISTORIES OF PLACE Aboriginal History Incorporated Aboriginal History Inc. is a part of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University, and gratefully acknowledges the support of the School of History and the National Centre for Indigenous Studies, The Australian National University. Aboriginal History Inc. is administered by an Editorial Board which is responsible for all unsigned material. Views and opinions expressed by the author are not necessarily shared by Board members. Contacting Aboriginal History All correspondence should be addressed to the Editors, Aboriginal History Inc., ACIH, School of History, RSSS, 9 Fellows Road (Coombs Building), Acton, ANU, 2601, or [email protected]. WARNING: Readers are notified that this publication may contain names or images of deceased persons. LONG HISTORY, DEEP TIME DEEPENING HISTORIES OF PLACE Edited by Ann McGrath and Mary Anne Jebb Published by ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc. The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] This title is also available online at http://press.anu.edu.au National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Title: Long history, deep time : deepening histories of place / edited by Ann McGrath, Mary Anne Jebb. ISBN: 9781925022520 (paperback) 9781925022537 (ebook) Subjects: Aboriginal Australians--History. Australia--History. Other Creators/Contributors: McGrath, Ann, editor. Jebb, Mary Anne, editor. Dewey Number: 994.0049915 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.