In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People.īritain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair.

Volume 1, Introduction examines the insidious effect of creeping revisionism and whitewash into the Tasmanian genocide debate, where the role of the British Government can be lost.īritain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People.

Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land.

Extermination by E. William Brown