Gideon Polya, “Book Review: “Australian History In 7 Questions” By John Hirst Ignores Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”, Countercurrents, 30 November, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya301114.htm .
Melbourne, historian John Hirst's book “Australian History in 7 questions” attempts to summarize Australian history by answering 7 key questions but ultimately fails through Eurocentrism, Anglocentrism and denial - Australian history becomes an aren't-we-nice, White, Anglo Australian history that ignores Anglo Australian involvement in 30 genocidal atrocities of which some, like the over 2-century, post-1788 Aboriginal Genocide, and the 1-century, post-1914 Iraqi Genocide, are continuing today.
Make no mistake, “Australian History in 7 questions” by John Hirst [1] is a well-written, entertaining and interesting book but it fails more by omission than commission. Indeed the whole premise of resolving all of Australian history into answers to 7 key questions is highly flawed and misleading. The book would have been more correctly called “Answers to 7 questions in Australia history”.
Thus by way of analogy, just imagine a similar approach of “German History in 7 questions” that failed to mention genocidal German racism in the 18th century (robbing Jews and hanging Gypsies, a policy that forced my Jewish forebears to flee Poland for Hungary and Austria) and in later centuries culminating in the following atrocities (numbers killed through from violence or violently-imposed deprivation in parentheses): the Namibian Genocide (100,000 Namas and Hereros killed, 1904-1907), the Armenian Genocide by WW1 German ally Turkey (1.5 million Armenians killed, 1915-1923), the 1941-1945 WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed) which was part of the general WW2 Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Gypsies and Jews killed including most of my Hungarian relatives) [2], the German-funded, ongoing Palestinian Genocide (2 million Palestinians killed since1936) [3] and the ongoing, Germany-complicit US War on Muslims (12 million Muslims killed since 1990) [4] that includes the ongoing, Germany-complicit Afghan Genocide (6 million killed since 2001) [5].
This German analogy is germane because the huge German influence on White Australian history is utterly ignored in “Australian History in 7 questions” by John Hirst. If one includes German migrants, German-as-a-second language migrants, former subjects in formerly German and Austrian-occupied lands of Eastern and Central Europe, Yiddish-speaking and other Jewish migrants, and Australian devotees of German classical music culture, the German contribution to White Australia is second only to that of Britain. However the only mention of Germany in John Hirst's Anglocentric book is in relation to customs union as a prelude to German unification (a model for pre-Federation Australia ) and copy-cat German Imperialism that was opposed by established French, British and Russian Imperialism, culminating in the carnage of WW1 and WW2.
Notwithstanding these Anglocentric and “7 questions-based” limitations in Hirst's approach, in reviewing Hirst's book it is useful to summarize and critique his answers to his 7 questions as set out below.
1. “Why did Aborigines not become farmers?”
Hirst incorrectly asserts that the Aborigines did not become farmers before and after invasion : “The mindset of the hunter-gatherers survives” ([1], page 26). In contrast, as described by Professor Jared Diamond in “Guns , Germs and Steel” [6], the geographically isolated Australian Aborigines in a high-risk environment practised “fire-stick farming” and referred to as such by Hirst ([1], page 9) - in which intelligent use of fire generated a park-like grasslands environment that maximized kangaroo and emu populations and was interspersed with forested reserves for koalas and possums. Indeed Anglo settlers were amazed at how suitable this engineered landscape was for sheep and cattle grazing. Aborigines created sustainable economies in a continent subject to periodic severe drought. Aboriginal bread-making involved a limited set of plant seeds. In Central Australia , native millet (Panicum decompositum; Panicum australianse) and spinifex (Triodia) were commonly used and wattleseed could also be used. There were thus very limited plant seed sources and no domesticable animals (apart from the dog) available to Australian Aborigines. Noting that there were as many as 750 tribal groups with different languages and cultures, Aborigines variously cultivated yams, made fish traps, ensured reserves for target animal populations in bad times, and detoxified Cycad seeds and nardoo flour before consumption. Hirst correctly noted ([1], page 9) that members of the Burke and Wills desert exploration party ate nardoo seed flour but incorrectly called it a “native grass” (it is a fern resembling the legume clover) and failed to mention that they failed to detoxify and were poisoned by a thiamine-destroying component, with R.O. Burke, W.J. Wills and C. Gray dying and J. King surviving with permanent peripheral neuropathy ([7], page 591). Post-invasion, many surviving Aborigines were used as effective slave labour on farms until recent times, notably most recently on cattle farms i.e. they also became farmers in the Anglo sense post-invasion.
In contrast to 60,000 years of sophisticated and sustainable Aboriginal “fire-stick farming”, it has taken the Anglo invaders a mere 2 centuries to devastate flora, fauna, ecosystems and indeed agricultural land. Professor Jared Diamond in his book “Collapse” [8] says that the settlers have “mined” agricultural land in Australia through overstocking, over-grazing, over-clearing, land degradation, nutrient exhaustion, salinization, industrial pollution and urbanization (Australians overwhelmingly live in cities and towns and all of Australia's capital cities involve massive suburban sprawl over some of Australia's richest and best-watered agricultural land). Professor Jared Diamond: “To those of us inclined to pessimism or even just to realistic sober thinking, all these facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environment… On the one hand , the development of environmental problems in Australia , as in the whole world, is accelerating exponentially. On the other hand, the development of public environmental concern , and of private and governmental countermeasures, is also accelerating exponentially, Which horse will win the race? Most readers of this book are young enough, and will live ling enough, to see the outcome” ([8] pp 409 and 416 ).
2. How did a penal colony change peacefully to a democracy?
Hirst: “The penal colony of New South Wales , established in 1788, became by 180 a self-governing colony and a democracy, with all men having the right to vote… Australian women got the vote in the new [Federated] Commonwealth in 1902 and in all the states by 1909” Australian men got the vote quickly and with almost no struggle at all” ([1], pages 27 and 58). Australia led the world in “one man one vote” and in female suffrage (Aboriginal Australians were excluded until after the 1967 Referendum). Hirst details the rise of the ex-convict class as accepted members of society. Remote, “we are all in the same boat” White Australia did not have the corrupt and exploitative English class system based on extremes of wealth and draconian suppression of the working class by police, army and starvation. Indeed prosperous 19th century Australia achieved religious tolerance, free trade unions, and free and secular education, as well as universal male suffrage that quickly led to universal suffrage (excepting Aboriginal Australians until after 1967),
However the Australian democracy was not as pristine as asserted. Thus State Upper Houses dominated by the wealthy acted as a break on the democratically-elected State Lower Houses (e.g. in South Australia until circa 1970). The States-based Federal Senate remains undemocratically elected with all states having the same number of Senators regardless of population e.g. Tasmania (population 0.5 million) has the same number of Senators (12 ) as Victoria (population 5.8 million) (this leading to former Labor Federal Treasurer and former Prime Minister Paul Keating describing the Senate as “unrepresentative swill”).
The wealth gap has increased in Australia and the trend is worsening. French economist Thomas Piketty in his book “Capital in the Twenty First Century” [9, 10] catalogues how the share in total income of the top 1% in France, Germany, Sweden and Japan declined from about 20% in 1910 to about 8% in 1950 and thence remained low ([9], Figure 9.3, page 317). In contrast, in the US, Canada, the UK, Canada and Australia a similar decline occurred from about 20% in 1910 to 6-9% in 1970 but after 1980 the One Percenter share of total income variously increased to 10-18% (in Australia the One Percenter share doubled from about 5% in 1980 to about 10% in 2005). A similar pattern obtains with the top 10% in these countries, a phenomenon that Piketty describes as “the rise of the supermanager: an Anglo-Saxon phenomenon” ([9], Figures 9.2-9.8, pages 315-324).
Currently the One Percenters own about 50% of global wealth and the bottom 50% own about 1% of the wealth [11, 12]. Australian democracy has increasingly become a Plutocracy, Murdochracy, Lobbyocracy and Corporatocracy in which Big Money purchases people, politicians, parties, policies, public perception of reality and political power. Indeed by way of a blatant example, in Australia a coal and mining billionaire, Clive Palmer, was elected to Federal Parliament having set up his own party, the Palmer United Party, which was crucial in the recent Australian Senate vote to abolish of a Carbon Tax and a Mining Tax.
3. Why was Australia so prosperous so early?
Hirst: “In the 1870s and 1880s Australia has the highest living standards in the world”. Hirst makes the point that Australia as an exporter did well out of free trade: “” When Australia was flourishing in the nineteenth century and more recently, world, markets were open. Between the wars they were not , which makes slower growth unsurprising”. ({1], page 87).
Of course the prosperity was assured by conquest of a whole continent, dispossession and mass murder of the Aborigines, and conversion of the Aboriginal “kangaroo parks” to gazing of sheep and cattle and thence much later for science-based, broad acre crop agriculture. The gold rushes brought wealth and immigration. For a brilliant account of Australian colonial prosperity see Humphrey McQueen's “A New Britannia” [13].
Hjrst mentions convict slave labor that was important in the penal colony stage of Australia but skirts the issue of other forms of slave labour, notably the effective slave labour of rural Aborigines as farm workers and domestics that continued up to the late 20th century. This Aboriginal slave labour was compounded by the policy of enforced removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers, with many of the Stolen Generations being employed as domestics. The miserable low wages were often seized by Anglo officials and recent legal attempts to recover these stolen wages have failed or been blocked by government.
Hirst mentions the use of “Pacific Islanders as indentured labourers on the Queensland cane fields” that was finally banned after Federation with many being forcibly repatriated from newly Federated White Australia . ([1], pages 116-117). The term “indentured labour” hides the reality of de facto slavery , the large-scale kidnapping of Melanesian Islander “kanakas”, the associated huge mortality in the Melanesian Pacific Islands due to introduced disease, and the post-Federation exploitation of residual kanakas in night-time cane cutting (to evade Whites-only cane cutting legislation) [2].
Hirst fails mention Indian slave labour for the Australian Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) and other Anglo plantation owners in Fiji . In 1874 Fijian paramount chief Ratu Cakobau returned from a trip with his sons to Sydney that was then suffering a measles outbreak . Chiefs paying respect to Ratu Cakaobau at Ovalau took the measles back across Fiji with the result that 40,000 Fijians died out of a population of150,000 [2]. The British then commenced an indentured labour system in which 61,000 Indians were induced (80% dishonestly and with a socially disruptive male-to-female sex ratio of 3 to 1) to sign up to 5 year terms. Thus extremely brutal and exploitative “5-year-slave” system commenced in 1879 as a condition of the British agreeing to rule Fiji and was finally stopped through outcry in India and Britain in 1916 with the last “girmityas” being released form bondage in 1920 [14, 15]. The freed girmitiyas and their descendants were thence locked into exploitation by the CSR company throughout the 20th century (rather like Black Americans in the Deep South after 1865).
Slavery is highly profitable for the slave owners and the prosperity of Australia was due not just to hard work by free men and freed convicts but also to dispossession, genocide and slavery [2, 16].
4. Why did the Australian colonies federate?
Hirst provides an interesting account of the road to Australian Federation. The bottom line was money, racism, nationalism and hence profound self-deception [14]. Hirst quotes a prize-winning poem by George Essex Evans that sums up Australian attitudes then and held by many today in PC racist (politically correct racist), look-the-other-way, “aren't we nice” Australia: “Free born of Nations, Virgin White, Not won by blood, nor ringed with steel, Thy throne is on a loftier height, Deep-rooted in the Commonweal” ([1], page 102). Hirst deals with the formulation of the White Australia Policy immediately on Federation. The British Government ensured that the White Australia Policy was never officially called that and was imn0lemnted in a sneaky fashion so as not to offend the Japanese nor the hundreds of millions of non-European subjects. Nevertheless Australia 's first PM and convinced racist Edmund Barton couldn't help himself during the Parliamentary debate on the White Australia Policy, stating (1901) :” “The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman” [16]. Indeed shortly after Federation, on 20 August 1908 over half a million Sydney inhabitants watched the arrival of the United States (US) Navy's so-called “ Great White Fleet ”.
Of course the ultimate in racism is invading and devastating other countries and Australia has a long history of doing exactly that before and after Federation, at the behest of the British Empire before 1941 and at the behest of the Americans after Pearl Harbor as regular down-payments on a notional security insurance policy with the USA [2, 16]. Australia has been involved in all post-1950 US Asian wars, bloody conflicts (some still continuing ) that have been associated with 40 million Asian deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation [2]. However the re-mergence of India and China as world economic powers after several centuries of Western suppression has changed the equation. China is now a major trading partner of Australia and Australia is having to choose between a burgeoning China and a bankrupt, warmongering and Sinophobic US. In an article entitled “Slavish devotion to the US a foreign policy folly for Australia ”, former conservative Coalition Australian PM (1975-1983) Malcolm Fraser stated (2010) : “ The challenge for Australia is to recognise the reality of this world. To learn to live with a superpower whose overall impact is declining and at the same time to pursue close relationships with a power whose influence will continue to grow ” [17]. With about 3 billion Africans, Asians and Muslims between Australia and Mother England, a sensible policy would be to “be nice to them” but instead a now politically correct racist (PC racist) Australia clings to the UK and US imperial policies of invading and subduing those non-European countries that can't effectively defend themselves from foreign invasion.
5. What effect did convict origins have on national character?
Hirst states: “What to me seems the most challenging question in Australian history receives commonly a very confident answer. What effect did convict origins have on national character? Answer: they made us an anti-authoritarian people.” However Hirst cites Tasmania in which “convicts represented a higher proportion of the population than on the mainland” but which he (very arguably) asserts is quite submissive to authority and “Therefore convicts cannot be responsible for anti-authoritarianism.” ([1], pages 122-123). Hirst concludes : Australia has now emerged from the long era of repression about its origins…Suppressed or embraced, convict origins must have an effect. At the very least, a nation pleased about its convict ancestry cannot take itself too seriously.”
The Australian character is very egalitarian – Australians insist on being spoken to by first name and will typically sit in the front seat of a taxi. Most Australian men (and these days increasingly women too) refer to their friends and total strangers as “mate” as in “Good day, mate”. However there is a downside to this ingrained denial of differential wealth or status and that is denial in general – Australia is an extraordinarily “look the other way” society [16] and it seems likely that this significantly derives from its convict past as does the ethos of not “dobbing in” (informing on) people i.e. if you don't know you can't dob in and if you do know you don't.
6. Why was the postwar migration program a success?
The key Australian concept of White Australia arose out of racism and White Australian labour fears of being supplanted by cheap non-European labour [13, 16]. Hirst correctly observes that the huge postwar migration of so-called “New Australians” did not threaten “Old Australians” in a period of great prosperity and low unemployment. Friction was further minimized by different ethnic groups tending to congregate in particular areas and otherwise making an effort to “fit in”. Indeed I remember at school in Tasmania the 1950s that English kids were targetted rather than other migrant kids and that kids speaking “good English” were resented (shades of class war and of Australia 's convict past?). Inspection of lists of MPs reveals that today they are still overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic in origin, but much less so than in the 1970s. We now have a new Australia in which about half the population are migrants or children of migrants.
The free state education and access to universities (greatly boosted by the abolition of university fees by the remarkably reformist Whitlam Labor Government) was a great leveller. The immigrant phenomenon of urging children to study and go to university has been apparent in Australia as in the US . Indeed I remember attending a Medicine graduation ceremony in Melbourne in the 1990s in which from scanning the names of the graduates I estimated that about half had Asian names (typically Indian, Vietnamese or Chinese names).
Nevertheless the long tradition of White Australia has left a fading legacy that ensured significant popular support for the anti-Asian migration and populist One Nation Party of Pauline Hanson in the 21st century. The Zionist-promoted Islamophobia since 1990 was boosted further by the US Government's 9-11 false flag atrocity (the Australian Mainstream media have brainwashed the Australian populace with the US Government “official version” , jingoism and with terror hysteria [18. 19]). This Islamophobia has found expression in the Cronulla riots, draconian anti-terrorism laws directed at Muslims [19], and appalling treatment of Muslim and Tamil refugees coming to Australia by boat. Hirst concludes : “It was the boat people's mode of arrival that caused resentment … the most telling critsm of the boat people was that they were queue jumpers” ([1], page 166).
The same Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted Mainstream media brook no essentially criticism of genocidally racist, neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel and a tiny fanatical Zionist minority with a prime loyalty to another country have the blind support of virtually all the Coalition and the Labor Right (collectively known as the Lib-Labs or Liberal-Laborals) . In vain Australia's most eminent Jewish public figure, Sir Isaacs, first t Australian –born Governor –General of Australia, declaimed in 1946: “ The honour of Jews throughout the world demands the renunciation of political Zionism." and that "the Zionist movement as a whole...now places its own unwarranted interpretation on the Balfour Declaration, and makes demands that are arousing the antagonism of the Moslem world of nearly 400 millions, thereby menacing the safety of our Empire, endangering world peace and imperilling some of the most sacred associations of the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem faiths. Besides their inherent injustice to others these demands would, I believe, seriously and detrimentally affect the general position of Jews throughout the world" [20]. What Australians (and not just Australian xenophobes) have feared most within Australia – subversion of Australian values and political life by an alien and fanatical foreign group with a prime loyalty to another country – has been realized in Australia as in the US due to Zionist perversion of the Mainstream media, politicians and academics and thence Mainstream perversion of the general populace.
7. Why is Australia not a republic?
The entrenched jingoism in Australia and Australian participation in British wars has meant a solid half of the population identifies with Britain , the British Commonwealth and the Monarchy. In a key referendum on the matter in 1999 the Republicans would have had a majority but the devious PM John Howard manipulated the issue as the Monarchy status quo versus an Australian head of state appointed by politicians of the Federal parliament. Australians'well–justified distrust of politicians led to a rejection of the republic on those terms. As Hirst comments: “At the moment when a republic seemed possible, the growing distrust of politicians meant that politicians and people were at odds with each other on how to replace the monarchy” ([1], page 198).
Fundamentally Australians are still worried about (a) having conquered whole continent, (b) having devastated and killed off most of the Indigenous inhabitants and cultures, and (c) being separated from Mother England by 3 billion non-European Africans, Asians and Muslims. These deep-seated concerns have been met by:
(a) environmentally disastrous policies of “populate or perish” (some fanatics speculate about Australian populations of 40 million or even 100 million for a continent that has been environmentally devastated already en route to 24 million);
(b) resolute denial of the over 2 century and continuing Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide ( before the British Invasion in 1788, Indigenous Australians had been living in Australia for about 60,000 years; there were 350-750 different tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered; after the brutish British Invasion, the Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million in 1788 to about 0.1 million in the first century through introduced disease, deprivation and genocidal violence; and the last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the 1920s but no Treaty has ever been signed ) and notions of “terra nullius” (an empty land; the PM Tony Abbott recently notoriously stated that when the British arrived in 1788 Australia was “just bush”); and
(c) tight connection with the US through the ANZUS Treaty (Australia has agreed to host 2,500 child-killing US Marines in Darwin; hosts nuclear-armed US ships; hosts a joint Australia-US spying facility at Pine Gap that is critical for targetting war criminal US drone strikes from Africa to South Asia; and participated in all post-1950 US Asian wars that are linked to 40 million deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation) and linkage to the nuclear-armed UK and the White Commonwealth through the Monarchy.
Of course, security and White Commonwealth solidarity aside, having an inheritance-based English Monarch as Head of State has worked quite well, the only serious blip being the US CIA-backed sacking of the reformist Whitlam Labor Government in 1975 by the Governor–General (although Her Majesty the Queen was at pains not to be involved in any way with the actions of her Australia-appointed representative in Canberra). Indeed since Australia has become a Plutocracy, Murdochracy, Lobbyocracy and Corporatocracy in which Big Money heavily decides major political issues, thoughtful Australians would prefer the idiosyncratic, inheritance-based, hands-off, English Monarch arrangement (well exampled by the much-loved and admired Queen Elizabeth II) to a President with the same formal powers but effectively appointed by king-maker multi-billionaires like Rupert Murdoch.
What John Hirst did not mention – Australia 's secret genocide history involving 30 genocidal atrocities.
“Australian History in 7 questions” by John Hirst gives an “aren't we nice” history of Australia that is rather like a history of Germany without mentioning the WW2 Holocaust. The horrible reality is that Australia has been involved in 30 genocidal atrocities, noting that “genocide” is defined in International Law as “ acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group” as set out by Article 2 of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention : “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [21, 22].
The following atrocities (details of deaths from violence, introduced disease or imposed deprivation are given in parentheses) are - with the exception of the ethnic cleansing applied to the Indigenous Australians (as many as 600 cultures and languages destroyed) - totally ignored by The Cambridge History of Australia [21] , by John Hirst's' “Australian History in 7 questions” [1], and indeed by nearly all Australian histories, this being testament to Australia's entrenched “look the other way” culture and an extraordinary Anglo culture of holocaust denial that is explored in my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” [16] :
(1) 18th-19th century Aboriginal Genocide (1 million deaths, 1798-1900);
(2) Tasmanian Aboriginal Genocide (t he “full-blood” Tasmania Indigenous population dropped from about 10,000 to zero in 1803-1776);
(3) British Indian Genocide, Indian Holocaust ( 1.8 billion excess deaths, 1757-1947);
(4) 19th century European Chinese Genocide (up to 100 million deaths in the European imperialism-driven Tai Ping rebellion; Australia helped suppress the Boxer rebellion);
(5) Maori Genocide (t he New Zealand (Aotearoa) Maori population dropped from 0.1-0.2 million in 1800 to 42,000 in 1893; Australians were variously involved in the 19th century Maori Wars);
(6) African Genocide ( scores of million perished over 5 centuries of European slavery and colonialism. Australians participated in the Sudan War, 1881-1898);
(7) Pacific Islands Genocide, Melanesian Genocide ( catastrophic population decline in parts of the Pacific due to introduced disease through the “blackbirding” slavery of Melanesian “kanakas” to work on Australian sugar plantations e.g. in 1860 25% of the population of Vanuatu was wiped out by a measles epidemic);
(8) Fijian Genocide (40,000 Fijians died out of a population of 150,000 in 1876 from measles introduced from Australia, necessitating British and Australian use of “indentured” Indian slave labour, 1879-1920);
(9) Boer (Afrikaaner) Genocide ( during the 1899-1902 Boer War 28,000 Afrikaaner women and children died in British concentration camps; Australians participated in the Boer War);
(10) Armenian Genocide ( about 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the 1915-1923 Armenian Genocide that was precipitated by the Allied and Australian invasion of Gallipoli , Turkey );
(11) Bengali Genocide, Bengali Holocaust, Bengal Famine ( 6-7 million Indians perished in Britain's “forgotten” man-made Bengal Famine atrocity in Bengal and adjoining provinces in British India, 1942-1945; Australia withheld grain from its huge wheat stocks) [2, 16, 23];
(12) British post-1950 Third World Genocide ( 1950-2005 excess deaths in countries subject to British occupation as a major occupier in the post-war era totalled 727 million; Australia was a loyal military ally of the UK in Korea, Malaya, Occupied Iraq and Occupied Afghanistan);
(13) US post-1950 Third World Genocide ( 1950-2005 excess deaths in countries subject to US occupation as a major occupier in the post-war era totalled 82 million; Australia participated in all post-1950 US Asian wars);
(14). Australian Colonial Genocide ( 1950-2005 excess deaths in countries subject to Australian occupation as a major occupier in the post-war era, namely Papua New Guinea (PNG) and the Solomon Islands, totalled 2.1 million);
(15) 20th and 21st century Aboriginal Genocide (since 1900 Indigenous excess deaths from deprivation were clearly of the order of 1 million; Australian forced removal of circa 100,000 Aborigjnal children from their mothers, known as the “Stolen Generations” and which is continuing unabated at record levels despite a well-publicized “Sorry” by Australian PM Kevin Rudd);
(16) Palestinian Genocide (2 million deaths from Zionist violence or imposed deprivation since 1936; Australian soldiers were involved in the conquest of Palestine and Syria in WW1 and were responsible for the 1918 Surafend Massacre of 100 Palestinian villagers);
(17) Iraqi Genocide. Iraqi Holocaust ( associated since 1990 with 1.7 million violent deaths, 2.9 million avoidable deaths from violently -imposed deprivation, 2.0 million post-invasion under-5 infant deaths and 5-6 million refugees; Australia invaded Iraq in 1915-1918, 1990-2011, and now 2014 onwards in a Fifth Iraq War [22]);
(18) Afghan Genocide, Afghan Holocaust (since the US Government's 9-11 false flag atrocity [18], 1.3 million Afghans have been killed violently, 4.2 million have died from war-imposed deprivation, refugees total 3-4 million and under-5 infant deaths total 3.0 million, 90% avoidable and due to horrendous US Alliance and Australian war crimes [5]);
(19) Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide (annual avoidable deaths as a percentage of population was 1.8% for Indigenous Australians in 2000 but 0.4% in 2010 as compared to 1.0% for non-Arab Africans and 0.4% for Indians; ongoing forced removal of children from their mothers is genocidal and ethnocidal );
(20) Biofuel Genocide ( 17 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation in the Third World (including Aboriginal Australia), this being increasingly biofuel-impacted through the legislatively-mandated US, UK and EU biofuel perversion; Australia is a major sugar cane grower and sugar exporter with 60% of sugar going to bioethanol production worldwide);
(21) Climate Genocide (5 million people already from carbon pollution and climate change each year; climate criminal Australia is a major per capita greenhouse gas polluter and a worsening climate genocide will involve deaths of 10 billion people this century due to unaddressed climate change [24]);
(22) Tamil Genocide ( in Sri Lanka's Tamil Genocide about 100,000 Tamils have been killed, 0.3 million have been incarcerated in concentration camps, and there have been horrendous human rights abuses involving “disappearing”, torture, rape and killing; Australia is directly involved in this atrocity by selective application of anti-terrorism laws, preventing medical aid for Tamils, “suspending” the human rights of Tamil refugees and providing military, diplomatic and lying propaganda assistance to the genocidal Sri Lankan authorities);
(23) Bougainville Genocide (about 15,000 Bougainvilleans died from violence and deprivation out of a population of 175,000 in the war in which Australia provided helicopter gunships and arms to the PNG government);
(24) Muslim Genocide, Muslim Holocaust and the US War on Muslims ( about 12 million Muslims have died from violence or war- and occupation-imposed deprivation in the post-1990 Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist -promoted US War on Muslims, the breakdown since 1990 including 4.6 million (Iraq, 1990-2011), 5.5 million (Afghanistan, 2011-present), 2.2 million (Somalia, 1992 to present) , 0.1 million (Libya, 2011 to present), 0.2 million (Syria to present), 0.1 million (Palestine, 1990 to present) and many people in Lebanon, sanctions-crippled Iran, NW Pakistan, Myanmar, and Mali; Australia has been militarily involved in Somalia,, Iraq and Afghanistan as well a targeting US drone attacks from Africa to South Asia [19]);
(25) War on Terror carnage ( about 10 million Muslims have died from violence or violently-imposed deprivation in the post-9-11 US War on Terror; Australia participated in Iraq and Afghanistan [2, 4, 5, 22]);
(26) Asian Holocaust ( deaths from violence or from war-imposed deprivation in the post-1950 US Asian wars – in all of which Australia participated – now total about 40 million, the breakdown including about 5 million Koreans, 1 million Laotians; 6 million Cambodians, 15 million Vietnamese, 5 million Iraqis, and 6 million Afghans);
(27) Somali Holocaust, Somali Genocide (the invasion and occupation of Somalia by US Alliance forces has been associated since 1992 with an estimated 0.4 million violent deaths, 1.8 million avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation, 2 million refugees and 1.3 million under-5 infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to horrendous US Alliance war crimes in gross contravention of the Geneva Convention; Australian military forces were involved in 1992-1996 and Australian naval forces operate in collaboration with the US in the Horn of Africa region, noting that the US routinely invades Somalia which is subject to US Alliance occupation);
(28) American Holocaust (about 1.5 million Americans die preventably each year and 20 million have died thus since 9-11) associated with the horrendous financial cost of US wars and the cost of Apartheid Israel to Americans which has now reached a gigantic $40 trillion in today's dollars; US lackey Australia backs the US and Apartheid Israeli warmongers);
(29) Australian Holocaust ( the long-term accrual cost the War on Terror to Australia is $125 billion and about 80,000 Australians die preventably each year linked to this horrendous fiscal perversion of supporting the War on Terror of US state terrorism at the expense of nearly 0.8 million Australian preventable deaths since September 2001 [19]); and
(30) Bedouin Genocide (Australian forces massacred 100 Bedouin Palestinians in the 1918 Surafend Massacre; a Bedouin Genocide is continuing by enforced displacement and ethnic cleansing by Apartheid Israel; Australia is Apartheid Israel's strongest supporter after the US).
Of course this holocaust and genocide Ugly Australian history so assiduously ignored by John Hurst and by nearly all Australian historians is but part of an even uglier history. Thus ihe former Gillard Labor Government instituted a Royal Commission into child sexual abuse that is unfortunately confined to investigating horrendous institutional child sexual abuse (up to 40,000 cases over the last 40 years by Catholic Church personnel). However both the Coalition and Labor major parties and Mainstream media continue to ignore the awful reality that 34% of Australian women and 16% of Australian men – 4.4 million Australians in all - have been subject to child sexual abuse i.e. the Coalition and Labor have ignored huge non-institutional child sexual abuse [25]. . Thus widespread child sexual abuse, other child physical abuse and child intellectual child abuse continue unaddressed in Australia at such a high level that child abuse must be regarded as having been a major part of Australian culture since the transportation of child convicts to Australia in 1788.
Conclusions.
“Australian History in 7 questions” by John Hirst purports to summarize Australian history by answering 7 key questions, a flawed enterprise from the outset. Hirst's book is entertaining and interesting but ultimately fails through Eurocentrism, Anglocentrism and denial - . Australian history becomes an aren't-we-nice, White, Anglo Australian history that ignores Anglo Australian involvement in 30 genocidal atrocities of which some, like the over 2-century, post-1788 Aboriginal Genocide, the 1-century, post-1914 Iraqi Genocide and the post-Industrial Revolution Climate Genocide are continuing today. John Hirst and his fellow Australian, American and British historians are simply operating in an entrenched academic culture of denial in Anglo historiography [16]. Thus the recently-published, authoritative Cambridge History of Australia similarly ignores 30 genocidal atrocities involving Australia [21].
People around the world should also look critically at their own histories from a base-line perspective of human avoidable death, holocaust commission, genocide commission, holocaust ignoring, genocide ignoring , holocaust denial and genocide denial. History ignored yields history repeated. Thus most Australians don't' realize that in re-invading Iraq in 2014 Australia commenced its Fifth Iraq war since its First Iraq War in 1915-1918 – apart from buying our wheat and selling us oil what did the distant Iraqis do to justify this 100 Years War by Australia on Iraq?
Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent people around the world should (a( inform everyone they know about the genocidal atrocities of White Australia and .its British, American and Zionist puppet-masters and (b) apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, politicians, parties, countries, companies and corporations complicit in such atrocities, as were successfully applied against neo-Nazi Apartheid South Africa and are being currently applied worldwide against neo-Nazi Apartheid Israel. Would you buy good and services from genocidal rogue states? Would you buy soap made in Auschwitz ?
References.
[1]. John Hirst, “Australian History in 7 questions” (Black Inc, Melbourne, 2014).
[2]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007), that includes an avoidable mortality-related a history of every country since Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ .
[3]. “Palestinian Genocide””: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/ .
[4]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .
[5]. “Afghan Holocaust Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/ .
[6]. Jared Diamond, “Guns , Germs and Steel” (Jonathan Cape, London, 1997).
[7]. Gideon Polya, “Biochemical Targets of Pant Bioactive Compounds. A pharmacological reference guide to sites of action and biological effects” ( Taylor & Francis, London & New York , 2003).
[8]. Jared Diamond, “Collapse” (Penguin, London , 2005).
[9]. Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty First Century” (English translation, Belknap, Harvard, 2014).
[10]. Gideon Polya, “Key Book Review: “Capital In The Twenty-First Century” By Thomas Piketty”, Countercurrents, 1 July, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya010714.htm .
[11]. Oxfam, “Rapidly growing inequality is worsening poverty around the world”, 20 January 2014: https://www.oxfam.org.au/2014/01/rapidly-growing-inequality-is-worsening-poverty-around-the-world/ .
[12]. Oxfam, “Working for the Few”, 20 January 2014: https://www.oxfam.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/bp-working-for-few-political-capture-economic-inequality-200114-embargo-en.pdf .
[13]. H. McQueen, “A New Britannia” (Penguin, Melbourne, 1971).
[14]. A. Ali, (1979), “Girmit, the indenture experience in Fiji ”, Bulletin of the Fiji Museum No.5, 1979.
[15]. Rajendra Prasad, “Tears in Paradise.Suffering and struggles of Indians in Fiji , 1879-2004” (Glade, Auckland , 2004).
[16]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne , 1997, 2008), now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com.au/ .
[17]. Malcolm Fraser, “Slavish devotion to the US a foreign policy folly for Australia”, Sydney Morning Herald, 13 December 2010: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/slavish-devotion-to-the-us-a-foreign-policy-folly-for-australia-20101213-18vec.html .
[18]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .
[19]. Gideon Polya, “ Australian State Terrorism - Zero Australian Terrorism Deaths, 1 Million Preventable Australian Deaths & 10 Million Muslims Killed By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 23 September, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230914.htm .
[20]. “Jews against racist Zionism”: https://sites.google.com/site/jewsagainstracistzionism/ .
[21]. Gideon Polya,”Review: “The Cambridge History Of Australia” Ignores Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”, Countercurrents, 14 October, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya141013.htm .
[22]. “Iraqi Holocaust, Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/geneva-convention .
[23]. Gideon Polya, “ Australia and Britain killed 6-7 million Indians in WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .
[24]. “Climate Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ .
[25]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous child abuse by pro-war, pro-Zionist, climate criminal Australian Coalition Governments”, Countercurrents. 4 December, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya041213.htm .
Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1445960.htm ) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures - for images of Gideon Polya's huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .