The meaning of genocide

Of course, the distinction between absorption (which was genocidal in rhetoric) and assimilation (which was not, though it did target Aboriginal culture) is hardly likely to have meant much to Indigenous families after World War II. As in the 1930s, they were traumatised by welfare officers who took the children against their will. Quite rightly Prime Minister Kevin Rudd did not distinguish between these periods in his official apology to the Stolen Generations. In any event, it would have been politically impossible for him to raise the genocide issue at the same time as the apology.

Unfortunately, concern for these families is notably absent in current the debate, which is characterised by the usual point scoring by senior, white newspaper columnists. Instead we might ponder the fact that many Indigenous people use the term genocide to name the traumatic experience of British colonisation. Asking why they do so may lead to a voyage of discovery that opens new vistas on our collective past.

What books like Kiernan’s survey of genocide and world history show is not that the Australian past is equate-able with totalitarian crimes, as some fear - no historian I know entertains such a proposition - but that, since antiquity, all too many states and empires have been founded on the violent, often genocidal conquest of others peoples. Some were worse - much worse - than others, to be sure, but rather than waging history wars about the honour of the victors, perhaps we ought to try to understand the experience and perspective of those who were conquered and suffered.

Doing so need not entail subscribing to the simplistic dichotomy of wicked Europeans and virtuous Indigenes who are forever victims - a debilitating identity rejected by Noel Pearson, for instance - but pondering the lives of others is the first step towards a less self-centered historical understanding.