Professor Colin Tatz is an Australian of Jewish South African origin and one of the world’s foremost scholars of genocide. Formerly director of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Centre, Macquarie University, Sydney, he is currently the Director of the Australian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies based at the Shalom Institute, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Tatz ).
Professor Colin Tatz on Australian political and scholarly avoidance of the “g’ word (genocide) in relation to the Aboriginal experience (2003): “In the current climate of heat in Aboriginal affairs, which I will describe later, very few people sue the word genocide. Nearly all who hear it abjure it. Almost all (white) historians of the Aboriginal experience avoid it, as I also discuss later. They write about pacifying, killing, cleansing, excluding, exterminating, starving, poisoning, shooting, beheading, sterilising, exiling, removing, but avoid “genociding”. Are they ignorant of genocide theory and practice? Or simply reluctant to taint “the land of the fair go”, the “lucky country”, with so heinous and disgracing a label? Australians appreciate only the filmic scenes, the by-now conventional scenes, of historical and present-day slaughter, where genocide means bulldozed corpses at Belsen, or serried rows of Cambodian skulls, or panga-wielding Hutu in pursuit of Tutsi victims, or “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. As Australians see it, we can’t be connected to, or with, the stereotypes of Swastika-wearing SS psychopaths, or crazed black tribal Africans. Apart from Australia’s physical killing era, there are clear differences between what these perpetrators did and what we did in assimilating people and removing teir children. But images notwithstanding, we are connected by virtue of what Raymond Gaita (1998) calls “the unexpurgable moral dimension” inherent in genocide, whatever its forms or actions”. [1].
Professor Colin Tatz on the extent of the post-invasion Aboriginal Genocide (2003): “Aborigines probably landed on Capr e York, in northern Australia, between – and this is hotly contested among prehistorians at present – 24,000 and 60,000 years ago, forming about 500 tribes with different languages and customs, and numbering between 250,000 and 750,000 at the time of the British arrival, or invasion, in 1788… By 1911, 123 after settlement, the “rough work” had reduced the aboriginal population to 31,000. Much of this section examines and explains that catastrophic reduction, under headings which borrow from the Convention definition. Disease as genocide …
“Killing members of the group”…”Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” …Forced assimilation …”Forcibly transferring children oif the group to another group””. [2].
Professor Colin Tatz on Australian denial of the Aboriginal Genocide in “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide” (2003): “Reflecting on genocide denialism, memory and the politics of apology….Denialism. I have some critical reflections on this consequence of genocide. My two main concerns are: first, the motives of those who deny the genocides of the Jews, the Armenians and the Australian aborigines; second, their power and, by contrast, their impotence. The outpourings and “products” of thr Holocaust and Turkish denialists are known well enough, the Australian variety less so. My focus is on their political rather than their psychological motives. Exploration of what propels these people might help develop more effective strategies to deal with, or perhaps even nullify, their activities. Because the Australian case is less well known abroad, I treat it more fully. The motives of those who deny - including Prime Minister John Howard, two ex-state premiers, several retired senior bureaucrats , a small grouping of senior journalists and a quartet of academics with scholastic credentials – have little in common with the Holocaust denialists but they strongly echo and parallel the [national honour-based] Turkish denial industry. ”. [3].
Professor Colin Tatz on Australian Aboriginal Genocide (1999): “In South Africa I studied “native policy”. On arrival here in 1961, I studied “Aboriginal policy”. People who know of my dual interest still ask me, “Is it true to say that Apartheid was a malevolent instrument of racial oppression, whereas racism in Australia was a from of ignorant innocence, or innocent ignorance, an inability to understand or respect indigenous culture and values , albeit with some nasty consequences?” Comparisons aside, how does one categorize Australia’s race relations? Much of that inter-racial history I call genocide” [4].
[1]. Colin Tatz, “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide”, Verso, London, 2003, pp 67-68.
[2]. Colin Tatz, “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide”, Verso, London, 2003, pp 74-94
[3]. Colin Tatz, “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide”, Verso, London, 2003, pp122 -123.
[4]. Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia”, AIATSIS Discussion Paper, Number 8, 1999: http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research/docs/dp/DP08.pdf .