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== Talk Page is a record == |
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Do not archive it. If you do, the discussion will have to repeat from the beginning. The talk page is a record of how inaccurate the article is.[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:10, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
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== Undue Weight == |
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While this article pretends that Windschuttle's views of the events on Tasmania is mainstream, it is not mainstream anywhere outside the Australian right. The section on the Tasmanian genocide needs to reflect the accepted mainstream consensus that the native inhabitants of Tasmania were slaughtered by genocidal colonizers from Britain, with approval of the governing body. This consensus is widely reflected in all mainstream sources of the events. In order to fascilitate the discussion, I will place my preferred version of the section below.[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:10, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
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== Genocide debate section Should Read Thusly == |
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<div class="boilerplate" style="background-color: Beige; margin: 2em 0 0 0; padding: 0 10px 0 10px; border: 1px dotted #aaa;"> |
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There has been debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the [[genocide]] of groups of [[Indigenous Australians|Aborigine]]s, and in particular the [[Tasmanian Aborigines]]. |
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=== Tasmania === |
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Ever since the introduction of the modern term in the 1940s, [[Raphael Lemkin]] and most other comparative genocide scholars have included the events of the [[Black War]] on Tasmania as a defining example of a genocide. During the Black War, European colonists in Tasmania nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines.<ref>Colin Martin Tatz, ''With Intent to Destroy'' p.78-79</ref> From a population of approximately 5,000 individuals, they were hunted down and killed until only a few hundred individuals were left. These were then relocated to Flinders Island, where disease and neglect reduced their numbers still further, until the [[Truganini|last full blooded native Tasmanian]] died in 1876. |
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Most Australian historians don't dispute the historical events, but some of them don't agree that it should be called a genocide.<ref name=Moses-2004>A. Dirk Moses, ''Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History'', Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814108, 9781571814104. Chapter by [[Henry Reynolds (historian)|Henry Reynolds]] "Genocide in Tasmania?" [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5zHAGNPTkqIC&pg=PA127&dq=Tasmanian+Genocide pp. 127-147].</ref><ref name=Moses-2008>A. Dirk Moses ''Empire, Colony, Genocide,: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History'', Berghahn Books, 2008 ISBN 1845454529, 9781845454524 See the chapter entitled "Genocide in Tasmania" by [http://arts.anu.edu.au/history/curthoys/ Anne Curthoys] [http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RBgoNN4MG-YC&pg=PA250&dq=Tasmanian+Genocide#PPA229,M1 pp. 229-247]</ref> Some of the debate is over to what extent the governing body of the settler outpost had the goal of complete extermination in mind<ref>http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html</ref>. What is known is that in 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times declared that "The Government must remove the natives -- if not they will be hunted down and like wild beasts and destroyed."<ref>[http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2448994 Colonial Times, and Tasmanian Advertiser, Friday 1 December 1826]</ref> Governor [[George Arthur]]<ref>http://[George Arthur biography adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010034b.htm]</ref> declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered whites to kill full blooded Aboriginals on sight. A bounty for was declared for the head of a native, £5 for the killing of an adult, £2 per child.<ref>[http://www.scribd.com/doc/7682790/Tasmanian-Aborigines-DestuctionRunoko-Rashidi Runoko Rashidi, Black War: the destruction of the Tasmanian aboriginals, 1997]. </ref> Journalist and publisher Henry Melville<ref>[Henry Melville biography: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm]</ref>, described the results in 1835: "This murderous warfare, in the course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score of the European population were sacrificed” <ref>Melville, 1835, p 33, requoted from Madley</ref><ref>http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf</ref> |
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While accepting that most of the natives were killed by exterpationist settlers, [[Henry Reynolds]] has nevertheless rejected the label of genocide, because he believes that the settler's goal of extermination did not include every native, and that the governor of the island did not intend annihilation. Tatz has criticized Reynolds position as follows: |
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<blockquote> |
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Genocide of a part of a population is still genocide... criminality is inherent in incitement participation ''and'' complicity <ref>Colin Martin Tatz, ''With Intent to Destroy'' p.78-79</ref></blockquote> |
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Mindful of these disputes between genocide scholars and Australian historians, Anne Curthoys has said: "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century, how best to conceptualize it, and how to consider what that historical knowledge might mean for us now, morally and intellectually, in the present.<ref>Moses (2008)</ref> |
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The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and historian [[Keith Windschuttle]] disagree with the mainstream historical narrative, and believe that no mass killings took place on Tasmania.<ref name=Australian-debate-on-genocide-2> [http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=384&op=page Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History]. Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training</ref><ref name=KW>Windschuttle, Keith</ref> Minogue thinks Australians fabricated this history out of [[white guilt]],<ref name=Australian-debate-on-genocide-2-Kenneth-Minogue>[http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=384&op=page Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History]. Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. Citing Kenneth Minogue, 'Aborigines and Australian Apologetics', Quadrant, (September 1998), pp. 11-20.</ref> while Windschuttle believes that most of the native Tasmanians died of disease. Disease is not believed by other historians to have played any major role in Tasmania before the 1829 relocation to Flinders Island.<ref>http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/tasmania.htm</ref> |
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=== Mainland === |
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Regarding events on mainland Australia, there have been occasional accusations of genocide, but no clear consensus. Many of the deaths on the mainland were due to smallpox, which is commonly believed to have come from Europe with the settlers. Many historians, like Craig Mear, support the thesis that the settlers introduced smallpox either intentionally or accidentally.<ref>http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34755365_ITM</ref> |
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Intentional introduction would be considered a form of genocide.<ref>Flood, Dr Josephine, The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People, published by Allen & Unwin, 2006, p125.</ref> |
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Historian Judy Campbell argues that the [[Smallpox|smallpox]] epidemics of 1789-90, 1829-32, did not start with the Europeans. She believes that the smallpox was not a result of contact with British settlers, but instead spread south from the far North of Australia, and was due to contact between Aborigines and visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia.<ref>''Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 - 1880'', by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press, pp 55, 61</ref> While this has always been the accepted consensus about the source of the later smallpox epidemics of the 1860s, for the earlier epidemics this view has not met with widespread acceptence<ref>'' However, in separating European presence and Aboriginal disease, Invisible Invaders is not entirely convincing. Untying Aboriginal disaster from European activity ... becomes a mantra almost uncritically repeating official documents and settlers' and explorers' memoirs. Here Campbell's examination moves from scientific to somewhat naïve''' from [http://www.api-network.com/main/index.php?apply=reviews&webpage=api_reviews&flexedit=&flex_password=&menu_label=&menuID=homely&menubox=&Review=4576 from this API review] by Lorenzo Veracini</ref>, and has been specifically challenged by historian Craig Mear.<ref>[Craig Mear The origin of the smallpox outbreak in Sydney in 1789. ''Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society'', June 2008;Vol.94, Part 1: 1-22 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2557307.htm]</ref> Mear writes: |
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<blockquote>They had been coming to this coast for hundreds of years, yet this was the first time that they had brought the deadly virus with them.</blockquote> |
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He also argues that the scientific model that Campbell uses to make her case is flawed, because it modelled the smallpox at significantly higher teperatures than those recorded at the time. It has also been argued by Lecture in Indigenous Studies Greg Blyton that smallpox did not reach the Awabakal people north of Sydney in 1789-90 and that non-genocidal violence including massacres accounted for depopulation there after 1820[36] [37] |
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=== Genocide in a broader sense === |
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{{See also|Genocide definitions}} |
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In the April 2008 edition of ''[[The Monthly]]'', [[David Day (historian)|David Day]] wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."<ref>{{cite journal | author = David Day | year = 2008 | month = April | title = '''Disappeared''' | journal = The Monthly | pages = 70–72 }}</ref> These questions of definition are important for the [[stolen generations]] debate. |
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<references/> |
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</div> |
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[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:12, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
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== Introduction to this article == |
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The intro to this article is written in a manipulative propagandistic way. Instead of declaring that the broad consensus is that the colonization of Australia was marred by systematic genocidal and racist policies, it presents a multiple choice view which makes the middle ground look like a compromise. In fact, denying the genocide on Tasmania is a historical fabrication, and a moral lapse comparable to that of any other movement that seeks to deny genocide. |
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Here is the intro as I think it should be written: |
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<div class="boilerplate" style="background-color: Beige; margin: 2em 0 0 0; padding: 0 10px 0 10px; border: 1px dotted #aaa;"> |
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The '''History wars''' in [[Australia]] are a debate over the history of [[Australian_history#British_settlement_and_colonisation|British colonisation of Australia]], and its impact on [[Indigenous Australians]] and [[Torres Strait Islanders]]. It resembles internal historical debates about past oppression in other countries.<ref>ABC Radio: History Under Siege (Japan, Australia, Argentina, France)[http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/features/historyundersiege]/</ref> |
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Mainstream history has described Australian colonization as marred by both official and unofficial [[imperialism]], [[exploitation]], ill treatment, [[Colonialism|colonial dispossession]], violent conflict and [[genocide]]. This version of history, nearly unanimously supported by academics, is still largely denied by the Australian right. |
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Conservatives within Australia maintain, along with the Australian government, that the history of European settlement was mostly humane and peaceful, with specific instances of mistreatment of [[Indigenous Australians]] being aberrations. They claim that that the standard story of dispossession and genocide is harmful for Australian [[national identity]], and is based on bad [[Historiography]] tainted by leftist ideological biases. |
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<references/> |
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</div> |
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[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:16, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
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== Note to readers == |
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If you stumble across this page, it is written from a right-wing Australian point of view, which has led to an endless debate. The viewpoint of Windschuttle, that the Tasmanian genocide never happened, is rejected by nearly all mainstream sources. Despite showing this by providing textbooks, primary literature, and secondary literature, Windschuttle's opinion, and that of his right wing friends at Quadrant, is still given undue weight.[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:18, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
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== Summary of Sources == |
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It was suggested at some point that the editors list the sources that support their respective positions. In addition to the sources listed in the proposed rewrite above, here are some sources which provide evidence of undue weight. These sources describe the Tasmanian genocide in the standard mainstream way, completely different from Windschuttle. |
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#[http://www.ancientweb.org/Australia/index.htm this site] |
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# Runoko Rashidi, "Black War, The Destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines" |
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# [http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/downloads/Paper_6_Ryan.pdf this paper], primary research, analyzes Windschuttle's methods and finds them wanting. |
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# [http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/downloads/200409420.pdf same author, another paper] about a massacre that Windschuttle discounts. |
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# [http://books.google.com/books?id=bEklWVfXlBkC&pg=PA212&lpg=PA212&dq=tasmanian+genocide&source=bl&ots=w3xpxzK3FS&sig=PRan2_nnuKpLZWGgG6Y5IRJEz9U&hl=en&ei=LUKDSsvQCOTcmQeO3rihDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10#v=onepage&q=tasmanian%20genocide&f=false secondary source] mentions genocide with no qualification |
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The articles by Ryan are particularly illuminating, since they refute Windschuttle's analysis of specific massacres by a detailed review of the evidence. The bias and confusion in Winschuttle's book is made evident in this way.[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:27, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
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I collected the mainsteam references which don't equivocate about the Tasmanian genocide from the text above, for the comparison of sources required for undue weight analysis. |
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# Colin Martin Tatz, ''With Intent to Destroy'' (mainstream genocide textbook) |
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# Henry Melville: [http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm this biographical text] |
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# Madley: [http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf this article] |
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Melville was an eyewitness to the events. Madley (and Ryan) are mainstream scholars who study this history. In addition, the two equivocating sources Moses and Reynolds (which I have not read), seem to agree with the mainstream accounts of massacres and intentional de-population, but they seem to disagree with the assessment that the events constituted genocide. |
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The remaining mainstream source, Mear, is not about Tasmania. It is devoted to refuting the idea that the Smallpox on the Australian mainland came from indonesian fisherman. This idea is given undue weight in the article too, but is a separate issue.[[User:Likebox|Likebox]] ([[User talk:Likebox|talk]]) 21:48, 11 September 2009 (UTC) |
Revision as of 21:48, 11 September 2009
Australia: History / Indigenous peoples Start‑class Mid‑importance | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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Talk Page is a record
Do not archive it. If you do, the discussion will have to repeat from the beginning. The talk page is a record of how inaccurate the article is.Likebox (talk) 21:10, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Undue Weight
While this article pretends that Windschuttle's views of the events on Tasmania is mainstream, it is not mainstream anywhere outside the Australian right. The section on the Tasmanian genocide needs to reflect the accepted mainstream consensus that the native inhabitants of Tasmania were slaughtered by genocidal colonizers from Britain, with approval of the governing body. This consensus is widely reflected in all mainstream sources of the events. In order to fascilitate the discussion, I will place my preferred version of the section below.Likebox (talk) 21:10, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Genocide debate section Should Read Thusly
There has been debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the genocide of groups of Aborigines, and in particular the Tasmanian Aborigines.
Tasmania
Ever since the introduction of the modern term in the 1940s, Raphael Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars have included the events of the Black War on Tasmania as a defining example of a genocide. During the Black War, European colonists in Tasmania nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines.[1] From a population of approximately 5,000 individuals, they were hunted down and killed until only a few hundred individuals were left. These were then relocated to Flinders Island, where disease and neglect reduced their numbers still further, until the last full blooded native Tasmanian died in 1876.
Most Australian historians don't dispute the historical events, but some of them don't agree that it should be called a genocide.[2][3] Some of the debate is over to what extent the governing body of the settler outpost had the goal of complete extermination in mind[4]. What is known is that in 1826, the Tasmanian Colonial Times declared that "The Government must remove the natives -- if not they will be hunted down and like wild beasts and destroyed."[5] Governor George Arthur[6] declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered whites to kill full blooded Aboriginals on sight. A bounty for was declared for the head of a native, £5 for the killing of an adult, £2 per child.[7] Journalist and publisher Henry Melville[8], described the results in 1835: "This murderous warfare, in the course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score of the European population were sacrificed” [9][10]
While accepting that most of the natives were killed by exterpationist settlers, Henry Reynolds has nevertheless rejected the label of genocide, because he believes that the settler's goal of extermination did not include every native, and that the governor of the island did not intend annihilation. Tatz has criticized Reynolds position as follows:
Genocide of a part of a population is still genocide... criminality is inherent in incitement participation and complicity [11]
Mindful of these disputes between genocide scholars and Australian historians, Anne Curthoys has said: "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century, how best to conceptualize it, and how to consider what that historical knowledge might mean for us now, morally and intellectually, in the present.[12]
The political scientist Kenneth Minogue and historian Keith Windschuttle disagree with the mainstream historical narrative, and believe that no mass killings took place on Tasmania.[13][14] Minogue thinks Australians fabricated this history out of white guilt,[15] while Windschuttle believes that most of the native Tasmanians died of disease. Disease is not believed by other historians to have played any major role in Tasmania before the 1829 relocation to Flinders Island.[16]
Mainland
Regarding events on mainland Australia, there have been occasional accusations of genocide, but no clear consensus. Many of the deaths on the mainland were due to smallpox, which is commonly believed to have come from Europe with the settlers. Many historians, like Craig Mear, support the thesis that the settlers introduced smallpox either intentionally or accidentally.[17] Intentional introduction would be considered a form of genocide.[18]
Historian Judy Campbell argues that the smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1829-32, did not start with the Europeans. She believes that the smallpox was not a result of contact with British settlers, but instead spread south from the far North of Australia, and was due to contact between Aborigines and visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia.[19] While this has always been the accepted consensus about the source of the later smallpox epidemics of the 1860s, for the earlier epidemics this view has not met with widespread acceptence[20], and has been specifically challenged by historian Craig Mear.[21] Mear writes:
They had been coming to this coast for hundreds of years, yet this was the first time that they had brought the deadly virus with them.
He also argues that the scientific model that Campbell uses to make her case is flawed, because it modelled the smallpox at significantly higher teperatures than those recorded at the time. It has also been argued by Lecture in Indigenous Studies Greg Blyton that smallpox did not reach the Awabakal people north of Sydney in 1789-90 and that non-genocidal violence including massacres accounted for depopulation there after 1820[36] [37]
Genocide in a broader sense
In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly, David Day wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names."[22] These questions of definition are important for the stolen generations debate.
- ^ Colin Martin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy p.78-79
- ^ A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814108, 9781571814104. Chapter by Henry Reynolds "Genocide in Tasmania?" pp. 127-147.
- ^ A. Dirk Moses Empire, Colony, Genocide,: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, Berghahn Books, 2008 ISBN 1845454529, 9781845454524 See the chapter entitled "Genocide in Tasmania" by Anne Curthoys pp. 229-247
- ^ http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html
- ^ Colonial Times, and Tasmanian Advertiser, Friday 1 December 1826
- ^ http://[George Arthur biography adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010034b.htm]
- ^ Runoko Rashidi, Black War: the destruction of the Tasmanian aboriginals, 1997.
- ^ [Henry Melville biography: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm]
- ^ Melville, 1835, p 33, requoted from Madley
- ^ http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf
- ^ Colin Martin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy p.78-79
- ^ Moses (2008)
- ^ Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History. Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training
- ^ Windschuttle, Keith
- ^ Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History. Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. Citing Kenneth Minogue, 'Aborigines and Australian Apologetics', Quadrant, (September 1998), pp. 11-20.
- ^ http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/tasmania.htm
- ^ http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34755365_ITM
- ^ Flood, Dr Josephine, The Original Australians: Story of the Aboriginal People, published by Allen & Unwin, 2006, p125.
- ^ Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 - 1880, by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press, pp 55, 61
- '^ However, in separating European presence and Aboriginal disease, Invisible Invaders is not entirely convincing. Untying Aboriginal disaster from European activity ... becomes a mantra almost uncritically repeating official documents and settlers' and explorers' memoirs. Here Campbell's examination moves from scientific to somewhat naïve from from this API review by Lorenzo Veracini
- ^ [Craig Mear The origin of the smallpox outbreak in Sydney in 1789. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, June 2008;Vol.94, Part 1: 1-22 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2557307.htm]
- ^ David Day (2008). "Disappeared". The Monthly: 70–72.
{{cite journal}}
: Unknown parameter|month=
ignored (help)
Likebox (talk) 21:12, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Introduction to this article
The intro to this article is written in a manipulative propagandistic way. Instead of declaring that the broad consensus is that the colonization of Australia was marred by systematic genocidal and racist policies, it presents a multiple choice view which makes the middle ground look like a compromise. In fact, denying the genocide on Tasmania is a historical fabrication, and a moral lapse comparable to that of any other movement that seeks to deny genocide.
Here is the intro as I think it should be written:
The History wars in Australia are a debate over the history of British colonisation of Australia, and its impact on Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. It resembles internal historical debates about past oppression in other countries.[1]
Mainstream history has described Australian colonization as marred by both official and unofficial imperialism, exploitation, ill treatment, colonial dispossession, violent conflict and genocide. This version of history, nearly unanimously supported by academics, is still largely denied by the Australian right.
Conservatives within Australia maintain, along with the Australian government, that the history of European settlement was mostly humane and peaceful, with specific instances of mistreatment of Indigenous Australians being aberrations. They claim that that the standard story of dispossession and genocide is harmful for Australian national identity, and is based on bad Historiography tainted by leftist ideological biases.
Likebox (talk) 21:16, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Note to readers
If you stumble across this page, it is written from a right-wing Australian point of view, which has led to an endless debate. The viewpoint of Windschuttle, that the Tasmanian genocide never happened, is rejected by nearly all mainstream sources. Despite showing this by providing textbooks, primary literature, and secondary literature, Windschuttle's opinion, and that of his right wing friends at Quadrant, is still given undue weight.Likebox (talk) 21:18, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Summary of Sources
It was suggested at some point that the editors list the sources that support their respective positions. In addition to the sources listed in the proposed rewrite above, here are some sources which provide evidence of undue weight. These sources describe the Tasmanian genocide in the standard mainstream way, completely different from Windschuttle.
- this site
- Runoko Rashidi, "Black War, The Destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines"
- this paper, primary research, analyzes Windschuttle's methods and finds them wanting.
- same author, another paper about a massacre that Windschuttle discounts.
- secondary source mentions genocide with no qualification
The articles by Ryan are particularly illuminating, since they refute Windschuttle's analysis of specific massacres by a detailed review of the evidence. The bias and confusion in Winschuttle's book is made evident in this way.Likebox (talk) 21:27, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
I collected the mainsteam references which don't equivocate about the Tasmanian genocide from the text above, for the comparison of sources required for undue weight analysis.
- Colin Martin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy (mainstream genocide textbook)
- Henry Melville: this biographical text
- Madley: this article
Melville was an eyewitness to the events. Madley (and Ryan) are mainstream scholars who study this history. In addition, the two equivocating sources Moses and Reynolds (which I have not read), seem to agree with the mainstream accounts of massacres and intentional de-population, but they seem to disagree with the assessment that the events constituted genocide.
The remaining mainstream source, Mear, is not about Tasmania. It is devoted to refuting the idea that the Smallpox on the Australian mainland came from indonesian fisherman. This idea is given undue weight in the article too, but is a separate issue.Likebox (talk) 21:48, 11 September 2009 (UTC)