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Nettheim, Garth --- "Genocide in Australia by Colin Tatz" [1999] IndigLawB 62; (1999) 4(22) Indigenous Law Bulletin 23


Book Review: Genocide in Australia

by Colin Tatz

Research Discussion Paper No 8

Aboriginal Studies Press, AIATSIS, Canberra, 1999.

Reviewed by Garth Nettheim

One element in the Bringing Them Home Report that attracted a hostile response from the Howard Government was the proposition that the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families was an act of genocide contrary to the Convention on Genocide which Australia ratified in 1949.

Professor Colin Tatz is a distinguished political scientist with long experience in race relations issues in South Africa and Australia. He now heads the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquarie University.

In this 50 page monograph, he addresses the issue of whether aspects of the Indigenous experience since 1788 warrant the label of genocide. After noting various thinkers' ideas of what constitutes genocide, he bases his argument on 'the philosophy inherent in the legal wording' of the Convention, 'namely, that genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations'. He later argues that:

In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four, acts of genocide: first, the essentially private genocide, the physical killing committed by settlers and by rogue police officers in the nineteenth century, while the state, in the form of the colonial authorities, stood silently by (for the most part); second, the twentieth-century official state policy and practice of forcibly transferring children from one group to another with the express intention that they cease being Aboriginal; third, the twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed 'half-caste' Aborigines; fourth, a prima facie case that Australia's actions to protect Aborigines in fact caused them serious bodily or mental harm.[1]

The author goes on to examine these propositions and also to examine what

he calls 'Australia's Denialism'.

[Copies may be ordered from the Research Section of AIATSIS, GPO Box 553,

Canberra, ACT, 2601. Ph (02) 6246 1157. Fax (02) 6249 7714.]

Garth Nettheim is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales and Chair of UNSW's Indigenous Law Centre.


[1] Colin Tatz, Genocide in Australia (1996) 6.


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