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Archive 1Archive 2Archive 3Archive 4

Divisions

Do the History Wars really break down into the dichotomies of the political right and left, as this article implies? --Our Bold Hero 04:51, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Windschuttle

I'm planning to extend this article over the next several months to incorporate more detailed information on Windschuttle's major arguments and the responses to his works by members of the academic left. I will be using The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Whitewash, Washout and the compilation of Windschuttle articles at sydneyline.com as the primary sources of information. Any suggestions for additional sources of information would be most appreciated. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 220.245.91.117 (talk • contribs) 04:26, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Currently the text says "Keith Windschuttle said the history of European settlement in Australia.'[7]". I'd like to know what he said! Martin Rundkvist 19:39, 7 June 2007

This article is ridiculous you have one man's words vs an entire nation of Indigenous Australians + Countless published works by both non-Indigenous & Indigenous peoples + government records = poorly educated, closed minded, grasping at straws attempt to air one misguided person's frustration.

As a user I have always found Wikipedia to be a fantastic source of information and opinion especially when researching information from overseas. I don't oppose you having created this article as it illustrates an 'Australian viewpoint'. However I do think that you should include in this article that this is a very small and unrecognised view amongst Australians.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Miaraw (talk • contribs) 23:32, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually no, Keith represent many australians and - as he has pointed out in his own works - the current academic left tend to ignore the work of their predecessors (pre 1970's) that donot lend credence to the notions of genocide etc that are put forth today. 08:11, 8 June 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 211.30.161.222 (talk)

Relationship with US culture war

Unless I'm missing something big, the History Wars of Australia have no particular similarity to the American Culture war. I'd recomend removing the comparison.Rbl 05:09, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

The History wars appear to be the main Australian expression of the left/right stuggle for cultural dominance in Australia, I see a clear parralel to the US Culture war. Paul foord 05:41, 19 November 2006 (UTC)

Merge article

Very little information in Black armband view of history is not already covered in the broader article History Wars, and the former is really inseparable from the latter. I would suggest that the articles be merged.Edelmand 12:23, 11 February 2007 (UTC)

  • Oppose merger - appreciate the comments by Edelmand, however, the topic History Wars is broader, the phrase Black armband has some currency on its own and I think they are worth being separate articles, notwithstanding the Black armband article could do with some work. The black armband phrase is more political and more mainstream than historians having divergent points of view.--Golden Wattle talk 19:48, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
Comment - do you mean duplicity or duplication? :-) --Golden Wattle talk 20:54, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
  • Merge This will create a fairer and balanced for and against argument. I know this is not supposed to be personal but this article is tremendously insulting and upsetting to me as an Indigenous person. I do believe the argument has a right to exist however by itself it comes across as a stab at Indigenous people, it comes across as making a mockery of what Australian Indigenous people experienced, especially after fighting so hard (and still fighting today)to get recognised. I hope this is not the intention of this article. Thankyou (Miaraw 04:21, 10 August 2007 (UTC))

I've merged the text into this article. There is now some duplication and this article will need fettling. --Philip Baird Shearer 23:18, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Stolen Generations debate

The first paragraph states:

... the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Some commentators have questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report...

"Some commentators" are weasel words. I think that this paragraph needs citations and the name the most prominent of the commentators. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Title of article

I suppose the title would be fine as-is, if this was the Australopedia. But since WP has worldwide coverage and readership, the title really needs to specify that it's about Australia. I'm perfectly happy to leave it up to the regular editors to settle on a name (perhaps "History wars of Australia" or "Australian history wars") -- but please don't just leave it as it is, mates. Cgingold 12:11, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

I would leave it as it is. "History Wars" is a term and phenomenon specific to Australia. If ever there's another nation where there's a debate frequently referred to as the "History Wars", then we can create a disambiguation page. Until then, it seems unnecessary. Aridd (talk) 18:38, 2 February 2008 (UTC)

Avoid OR/SYN

I've deleted some material inserted as rebuttal in the middle of a description of the position of one side in the debate. Please read policy on this. Finding research and using it to develop an argument of your own is illegitimate synthesis, when it isn't Original Research. If a participant in the debate has advanced these points, then include it in the summary of their position, not as a rebuttal to someone else's. If (as in the case of smallpox) the researchers drew the conclusion that their research refuted, say, Reynolds, quote them saying so. If, on the other hand, they didn't say this, and you are "putting two and two together", read WP:SYN and see why this is explicitly prohibited.JQ (talk) 11:21, 19 March 2008 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !

In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :)

  • "Australian-debate-on-genocide" :
    • [http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=364&op=page#arti Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History], Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Ringwood, Viking, 2001, p. 2.
    • [http://www.hyperhistory.org/index.php?option=displaypage&Itemid=364&op=page#arti Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History], Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training

DumZiBoT (talk) 22:29, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Opposition to Henry Reynolds

An anon editor has asserted that Henry Reynolds arguments are false, however they have provided no references for this claim. They also attacked other editors in the article. I have reverted twice. If reliable sources arguing against Reynolds are found and cited the article can be developed further, however unreferenced assertions of error and attacks on other editors are inappropriate. Paul foord (talk) 11:39, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Australian NPOV vs. World NPOV

This article deals with Australian issues, but it must be NPOV outside Australia too. In particular, nobody outside Australia believes that the actions in Tasmania were not a genocide.Likebox (talk) 08:21, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

I'd be fascinated to see the research that backs up the statement "nobody outside Australia believes that the actions in Tasmania were not a genocide". When do you plan to publish it and how did you keep secret such a massive undertaking as a thorough survey of the opinion of the entire world's population on this issue? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Webley442 (talk • contribs) 12:55, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

I'm sorry--- I was using shorthand. Not everybody is aware of the issue of course, but within mainstream history, the events of the Black War were classified as a genocide starting with the very first documents on genocide in the 1940s. The historical record is now controversial within Australia, but I havn't seen any controversy outside of Australia.Likebox (talk) 13:59, 5 January 2009 (UTC)


Try talking with some Americans familiar with their own colonial history and with relations between native Americans and white settlers. I've met quite a few who are aware of how overlooked the devastation of introduced diseases on a non-resistant population has been and who regard Tasmania as a parallel example to their own history, i.e. an example of how the level of violent conflict has been inflated to explain the dramatic native population crashes when the real explanation for 90%+ of the deaths was introduced diseases. PS the demise of a native population due to unintentionally introduced disease does NOT fit the internationally accepted definition of genocide, no matter how much some people want it to. Webley442 (talk) 21:31, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

You are right for many parts of American history, but the actual events were different in different areas and at different times. Within parts of the area of modern U.S., there was disease, in other case, it was due to systematic genocidal policy.
While the death of natives by infectious disease is not a form of genocide, you don't have to concern yourself with hair splitting in this case, because that's not what happened in Tasmania. The historical record is clear--- the natives were exterminated by systematic mass murder which not only went unpunished, but was socially sanctioned. They were hunted for sport, women were taken as sexual slaves, and the few survivors were herded into camps, where they starved and succumbed to disease. If you don't know what happened, please read the stories of the survivors.
As for the current surviving descendents, they the product of the mass rape of the women. They do not maintain a continuous line of native language or culture.Likebox (talk) 01:43, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

The sort of claims you are making have been debated endlessly and it has taken a lot of work by a number of different editors to get this article to a point where it had something resembling balance and a NPOV. Don't expect to come in and rewrite it back to the extreme black armband view that had prevailed. If you have changes you'd think are relevant and supportable try using this discussion page to get a consensus on acceptable changes. If, for example, you can produce solid evidence, not mere opinion, to support a significantly higher death toll from violent conflicts with settlers than the approx 120 or so Windschuttle was able to extract from the colonial archives, please feel free to present it, but I wish you luck in doing so. The contributors to Whitewash, which was supposed to the ultimate refutation of Fabrication Vol 1, weren't able to find credible evidence of more extensive violent conflict that KW did. One of the major points of the History Wars was that, especially in the case of Tasmania, the historical record was not clear. It had been muddied by a generation of historians who made claims regarding massacres and genocidal intent which weren't supported by the historical evidence and who had instead supported their claims with footnotes which when traced back to the original sources were found to be false (ie the source documents said something completely different to what had been claimed or in some cases didn't exist at all). Even Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan no longer try to claim that a case for genocide in Tasmania is supportable. Webley442 (talk) 03:43, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

On the issue of Undue Weight: the article is on the History Wars. Rewriting the article to tip its balance so far in the favour of one side of the debate does give undue weight to the claims made by that side. The previous version was more balanced. Webley442 (talk) 03:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't know much about either side of this debate, but I think if Likebox is going to make claims in the article that the anti-genocide revisionists are only a small minority, then the onus is on him to prove that with appropriate cites. Gatoclass (talk) 10:52, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
This is what Undue Weight is all about. In the 1990s, a historian in Australia wrote a revisionist tract, which denied the tasmanian genocide. This tract has not gained wide acceptance within the mainstream historical community either in Australia or outside, but was supported by Australian prime minister Howard. This article is written to make it look like there is a debate on this subject within mainstream history. I didn't get rid of the revisionists, I just modified it to comply with undue weight, to make it clear that they are in a small minority. The article on Tasmanian Aborgines talks about their claims some more.Likebox (talk) 20:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

(deindent) I copied this from the talk page for Black War. I have no patience to dig up links to stuff that is this well known, but thankfully somebody else did. The point of these is to show that mainstream thinking thinks of this as a genocide with nearly no exceptions.

How about these for starters:
  • Here we have a discussion of historian Keith Windschuttle dismissal of "the conventional thinking on what's been is widely-accepted as one of the darkest moments in Australian history, the genocide of Tasmanian Aborigines".
  • Turnbull, Clive (1948) Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. Melbourne and London: F.W. Cheshire.
  • This may or may not be a reliable source, but it discusses the Black War in the context of other genocides.
  • This is almost certainly not a reliable source, but gives some evidence to it being commonplace to consider it as genocide.
  • This seems reputable. Minogue is apparently reluctant to use the label genocide, although the site editors seem to want to push that angle. Part of a multi-part series sparked by Windschuttle's publications.
  • Yet another discussion of Windschuttle supposed debunking of among other things, Tasmanian genocide.
  • http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf "Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia" by Benjamin Madley in the Journal of Genocide Research (2004), 6(2), June, 167–192
  • "Modern by analogy: modernity, Shoah and the Tasmanian genocide" by Jesse Shipway in the Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(2), June, 205-219

Windschuttle makes absurd, loathsome, claims, among them that the hunter-gatherer Tasmanians were largely killed off by diseases that are epidemic in towns and villages. Remember that every single one of these people died, except for those women taken as slaves, who left only half-white descendents. Their bodies were mutilated, and the body of the last surviving Tasmanian was put on public display, only to be interred in 1947. Windschuttle blithely dismisses the accounts of natives, and the massive literature on the topic. His argument is based on a the existence of a few faulty citations in a couple of history books. In short, he is a historical fraud, and to debate his ideas leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But somebody has to do it, or else this article is going to stay offensively crappy.Likebox (talk) 21:12, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Likebox: As Webley442 advised, try going for some consensus on this article. It's not a venue for unsupported opinion and exaggerated claims as you seem to believe. I have only occasionally contributed to editing this article but I have to agree with Webley442 that it had settled on something approaching a NPOV. It still needs work but Undue Weight does NOT mean editing out an accurate representation of the position of one side of the argument and replacing it with an absurd misrepresentation of that side's position (eg the historians you call revisionists do NOT argue that the rapid reduction in the Aboriginal population had nothing to do with the presence of the white settlers....their argument is that the vast majority of aboriginal deaths were due to introduced diseases against which Aboriginal populations had little or no resistance and which can spread just as fast in an aboriginal camp as in a town or village). The Schoolteacher. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.202.43.53 (talk) 03:15, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

I am not going for consensus with the revisionists, I am trying to give these minority claims the treatment they deserve. They are about as plausible as "flat earth". You are talking about people who lived in over a hundred groups of 50 dying out from a disease like syphilis, which takes 30 years to mature and doesn't spread well in these types of societies, or a disease like smallpox which would be hard pressed to jump from one camp to another. Its a selective sort of smallpox that leaves only the slave women alive to bear children for their masters. Here's a statistical sample: How many of Truganini's relatives died of smallpox? How many by murder?
The deaths in the camps after the Black War were due to disease, neglect, and malnutrition. But according to the mainstream view aired in Tasmanian Aborigines, disease did not play a role before the survivors entered the camps after the "war". The revisionist argument is so idiotic that I don't see it entering the mainstream academic debates anytime soon. But good luck. Until then, this article should adhere to undue weight.Likebox (talk) 05:43, 7 January 2009 (UTC)


You seem to need to do some basic research before you go further. Firstly syphilis may take 30 years to mature in a member of a resistant population but it can kill many members of a non-resistant population much faster (i.e. a population never exposed to the disease before, like the Tasmanian Aborigines, isolated from all contact with the rest of humanity for thousands of years). See Black Robinson: Protector of Aborigines by Vivienne Rae-Ellis, Melbourne University Press, 1988, page 32 for an account of how Truganini’s father died of a venereal disease, probably syphilis, within 4 months of contracting it. That’s 4 months not 30 years. You’ll also find that Truganini herself and many of her friends contracted a venereal disease, probably gonorrhoea, a disease which isn’t often fatal or particularly debilitating but which explains why she (and many other Aboriginal women of the time) never had children having been rendered infertile. (If left untreated, gonorrhoea can lead to pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), which can cause infertility.) You might also like to read Plomley, N.J.B., Disease among the Tasmanian Aborigines, Medical Journal of Australia, 151, December 4-18, 1989. As far as I’m aware, none of Truganini's relatives died of smallpox. Truganini was a Tasmanian Aborigine and I don’t believe that any evidence has been recorded of smallpox epidemics in colonial Tasmania, though there were 4 major smallpox epidemics on the Australian mainland, each of which wiped out a significant proportion of the mainland Aboriginal population. See Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 - 1880, by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press. Respiratory diseases were the major killer in Tasmania. Influenza was particularly lethal and you might remember that the common cold killed a lot of Inuit, too. Combine fatal diseases with infertility and any non-resistant population is on the way out. As for diseases jumping from camp to camp, the primary vector for disease was contact with white settlers. All it took was for 1 Aboriginal person to have contact with 1 white settler with a cold or influenza and then bring it on back to the camp. There’s also reason to believe that ordinary contact between Aboriginal groups (trade, raids, etc) would help spread diseases. And, of course, the black armband brigade dismissed disease. It got in the way of their massacre/genocide theories. None of them came up with credible arguments for doing so, of course, just mere assertion. Webley442 (talk) 09:36, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

So you can claim that the Aborigines were killed by foreign VD? In 30 years? The children too? How much fucking do you think is going on in a tribal society? Truganini's father (and all her other relatives, except her sister who was taken into slavery) was murdered by a settler. You are almost certainly confusing his story with that of the last surviving male Tasmanian, no relation to Truganini, who died of mysterious disease in a camp after the war.
Since it is obviously a self-serving idiotic lie to blame any form of VD, and since there was no smallpox, You now make the unsupported contention that it was a form of influenza. Until you convince anyone else, we'll keep this page honest to history and say it was mass murder.Likebox (talk) 21:44, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

As I said above, the primary killers in Tasmania were RESPIRATORY diseases. No antibiotics to treat things like pneumonia, etc. Venereal diseases played a secondary role, mainly by inducing infertility. Try reading the original sources. There are ample records of the devastating effect that disease had upon the Aboriginal population (the black armband historians simply chose to omit all mention of those records as it didn't suit their story) and any epidemiologist can tell you what the effect of introduced diseases on a non-resistant population would be. The journals of George Augustus Robinson show the role of disease. He records that, in the year or so he spend on Bruny Island, most of the Aboriginal population there were wiped out by disease. It was Truganini's UNCLE, not her father, who was killed by whites. That's pretty well-known. As I said before, do the basic research. Webley442 (talk) 22:16, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

What epidemic could wipe out a population dispersed in small groups in twenty years? There is historical consensus that this was murder, not disease, and that disease only played a minor role at best. The revisionists get their space, and then you say that they are in the minority academically. That's all that is justified.Likebox (talk) 23:18, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Not 1 epidemic but repeated exposure to white settlers carrying what were to the whites relatively minor, survivable diseases. Unfortunately a considerable proportion of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population actively sought contact with white settlers for the purposes of trade, requesting gifts and rations, general curiousity, etc, etc. The result was that they were constantly being infected with whatever bugs were going around in the white community at the time and carrying them back to camp. As for the revisionists, as you call them, getting their space .. (a) you really need to accurately portray their arguments and evidence in that space and not distort or misrepresent them and (b) please tell us on what basis you are calculating the amount of space they 'deserve'. If you look at this issue in a historical context, for most of "Australian" history, what you call the revisionist position WAS the accepted academic position. That only started to change in the late seventies and early eighties when a bunch of truly revisionist historians started to rewrite history to suit their ideological leanings and to support their revised history with false footnotes and falsified evidence. Considering that their version of history was disputed from day 1 and that many Australians never accepted it as accurate, history being distorted by a relatively small group of revisionists for 20 or 30 years (until someone comes along and loudly and publicly pointed out their deception) doesn't really justify giving their version too much Weight. Webley442 (talk) 04:08, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Genocide is never easy to get accepted, for obvious reasons. Within academic circles, this difficult battle was fought and won in the 1940s, in the wake of WWII. Within Australia, the political battle was fought and won in the 1970's and 1980's. Those battles led the social consensus to change, from silent denial to acceptance. Respect for the struggles of the past generation compels us to acknowledge this change. But here we have vocal denial, which is better than silent denial, because it leads to discussion so that the truth will emerge. But this denial is a fringe position, it should not be allowed to dictate the historical record. The amount of space and the type of treatment that a book deserves is always decided by a political debate, which is why the arguments must be forceful. I only wish that I was widely read on this subject, so that my arguments could be more forceful.Likebox (talk) 19:15, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Relation to Holocaust denial

There is a section on the relation to the American culture war. This link seems to be a little stretched. Perhaps the parallel to Neo-Nazi holocaust denial is more appropriate.Likebox (talk) 08:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

No, it's not appropriate, because the neo-nazis are not mainstream within Germany. On second thought, the right parallel is to modern Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide.Likebox (talk) 19:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Protection

See Wikipedia:The Wrong Version

I have protected this article from a revert war that has been ongoing over several days. I have set the protection for a month. I will monitor this talk page and if I think progress is being made I will take the protection off before then.

Likebox please read #Avoid OR/SYN and WP:SYN. One of the papers used in this article is Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History which has a banner at the top right which says Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. Is this or is this not an Australian Government sponsored page? If it is then you will have to explain why an Australian Government paper does not dismiss the claims made by those who question the label genocide as a minority, but present the debate along the lines in this article. Given what appears to be an Australian Government sponsored paper, as Gatoclass suggests you will need to come up with some reliable sources that contradict that paper and support you position that it, and this article, are giving undue weight to a minority point of view (I am not going for consensus with the revisionists, I am trying to give these minority claims the treatment they deserve. They are about as plausible as "flat earth".)

As the changes to the text are quite considerable. I suggest that we take the changes by section. I suggest that Webley442 lists the section which have changes (s)he finds least objectionable and agree on those first working backwards to the most contentious. I some changes are agreed but the most contentious issues are still outstanding then an administrator can be asked to make the changes. --PBS (talk) 12:09, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I find it hard to discuss things that are so loathsome, so I'll just wait for someone else to take it up. While I agree that the Australian government (at least until recently) has given it's support to these outrageous, ridiculous claims, just as the Turkish government denies the Armenian genocide, and the South African government believed that HIV is not the cause of AIDS, articles are meant to be written based on the academic, not political, consensus. The claims of the revisionists are not accepted as history by any significant number of historians, even within Australia.Likebox (talk) 18:05, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
At least add a POV tag before protecting.Likebox (talk) 18:12, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
NPOV added as requested --PBS (talk) 20:14, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Also, please note that there are SPAs and anons. I believe this was written by one editor.Likebox (talk) 19:54, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
What are SPAs? No it was not. --PBS (talk) 20:14, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
Single-purpose accounts. I was arguing with one for a while.Likebox (talk) 20:16, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

When I first reverted all Likebox’s revisions to the article, it wasn’t merely a knee-jerk reaction. I first went through them to see if there was anything reasonably arguable, supported by appropriate citations, which should or could be left in. I didn’t want to be seen as someone who wiped out reasonable revisions along with the extremist material. What I found was so heavily biased and inferior to the previous version that I went ahead and reverted the lot. Having said that I am happy to review it again, as you suggest, and look for the least “objectionable” material so it might be discussed. Webley442 (talk) 22:34, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

I think a little OR on this talk page might help clear the air. First of all there is more than one definition of genocide see genocide definitions. So when an historian or genocide scholar talks about a "genocide" they do not necessarily mean the legal definition -- I think that the Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990) is an elegant one. This difference is noted in the Bosnian Genocide Case by International Court of Justice (ICJ) President Rosalyn Higgins when she noted that case dealt "exclusively with genocide in a limited legal sense and not in the broader sense sometimes given to this term."
Only months after the ICJ returned its judgement in February 2007 the European Court of Human Rights returned a judgement on whether the verdict of the German courts in the conviction of Nikola Jorgić should be upheld given the developments in interpretation of the Genocide Convention by the ICTY and the ICJ. The ECHR upheld the convictions but they also gave an expert summary of the ICJ Bosnian Genocide Case which was built on the findings of various ICTY cases. So it is well worth reading the section "European Court of Human Rights" in the "Bosnian Genocide article, and specifically the last two paragraphs in that section if one is not already familiar with what international courts consider to be genocide.
The interpretation of what is or is not a genocide under international law has become much clearer in this decade because unfortunately there have been a number of mass killings in the 1990s for which international tribunals have been set up to try those responsible and as always international law case law (which is interpreted in a similar way to case law under common law) has evolved to clarify the original Genocide Convention. So it is possible that papers published before the ICJ ruling may make assumptions over what is genocide that are different from those which cover similar events published after February 2007.
In the late 1990s there were a tranch of papers that looked at various episodes in history and using the new term of ethnic cleansing concluded that they were genocidal events (a good example is the Cromwellian clearance of eastern Ireland). This was not unreasonable given the German courts rulings 1997 judgement against Nikola Jorgic, however 10 years later, after the ICJ ruling, it is likely that historians will not link ethnic cleansing and genocide quite so closely in future, because under international law ethnic cleansing is a war crime and probably a crime against humanity but it is not necessarily genocide.
To round up the OR with one last point. One important consideration that needs to be looked at is that talking about the genocide of Australian Aborigines or Tasmanian Aborigines genocide might not be the way that future genocide studies go in Australia. There has been a shift in British history over the last 40 years away from looking at the big picture towards looking much more at the local picture (to be cynical probably because it is easier to get a doctorate in an area not much studied that in one where hundreds have gone before). If one couples that with the Brazilian court rulings over incidents such as the Helmet Massacre, it may result in claims that specific incidents were genocides rather than trying to prove that the whole extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines was a genocide.
I have put in that quick OR summary to place in context any new sources that are brought forwards to resolve the dispute, but it is not OR that builds articles it is referring to reliable sources.
A Google book search is a good place to start. I did a search on [Australia genocide]. The first books returned was "Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History" By A. Dirk Moses, Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814116, 9781571814111 pp. 16-20 (but probably more) I have no idea of Moses's political position and if he is considered a revisionist perhaps some one else does. --PBS (talk) 11:21, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
There is no OR in the article, and I didn't put any in. There is undue weight.Likebox (talk) 16:36, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
please read what I wrote, I did not accuse anyone of putting original research into the article. What I was doing was some OR on the talk page. But if there is undue weight in the article then please produce some reliable sources that state which researchers and authors hold a minority point of view so that a judgement can be made as to how much weight we should give to researchers and authors cited in the article. The Moses's book seems to present views in a similar way to the Australian government paper, but I have only skimmed it and a more detailed analysis of it or some other book might confirm you assertions (I only presented that book because it was the first returned by the search and others might be more appropriate). --PBS (talk) 17:31, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
What I'm saying is that you can't usually determine if there is undue weight by a simple literature search, because people don't take polls all that often, and they don't talk about common knowledge. You determine it by reading, by seeing what the tacit assumptions are, the stuff that goes without saying. Then you get a "sense" of what the preponderance of historians say, what the reasonableness of what they are saying is, and how many of them say it in what context. This is what historians do within their field. All you have to do is ask them whether Windschuttle is in a fringe minority, or whether his is accepted history.
Anyone with a good familiarity with the literature is a reasonable judge of this. I am not one of those people, but I am pretty sure I know the answer anyway. I think even the critics agree that people who think that mass-murder was not the primary cause of death of the native Tasmanians are a fringe minority.Likebox (talk) 19:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
Also, the correct search is Tasmanian Genocide, and it is better just to go to use the academic references in Talk:Black War as a starting point. There is a separate question about whether the events on mainland Australia, where mass-murder did not kill off most of the inhabitants, should be thought of as a genocide. In that case, I would agree that it is a neutral description to say that there is no consensus. In Tasmania, it's idiotic.Likebox (talk) 19:16, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
It is not idiotic because under the legal definition of genocide, mass murder is only genocide if the intent was to destroy a group. There are more details of this in the Bosnian Genocide article:
In September 2006, former Bosnian Serb leader Momcilo Krajisnik was found guilty of multiple instances of crimes against humanity, but while the ICTY judges found that there was evidence that crimes committed in Bosnia constituted the criminal act of genocide (actus reus), they did not establish that the accused possessed genocidal intent, or was part of a criminal enterprise that had such an intent (mens rea) (Staff. Momcilo Krajisnik convicted of crimes against humanity, acquitted of genocide and complicity in genocide, A press release by the ICTY in The Hague, 27 September 2006 JP/MOW/1115e).
So even with the death of all the Tasmanian Aborigines it is not obvious that it was genocide in the legal sense unless Intent to destroy can be shown. People can disagree over whether the deaths were a result of a genocide or not while agreeing on the number of deaths. For it to be genocide comes down to the interpretation of primary sources which may not be at all clear. You will have to show that the vast majority of reliable sources call it a genocide to substantiate the POV you are putting forward that there is a overwhelming agreement that it was a genocide. I am not saying that your POV is wrong just that I don't know and you have yet to produce any evidence that it is correct. --PBS (talk) 19:43, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
You make a good point. The edits I made were in response to the outrageous implication implicit in the phrasing of the article that the deaths were due to disease and that the settlers in Tasmania were only guilty of "crimes of omission". In the case of the Black War, the intent to commit genocide by the white leadership in Tasmania (if there was any) might be a matter of debate. I am not sure. But from what I read, the intent is pretty well established too. Perhaps this is not as well established as the methods and outcome.
Remember that you don't need to prove unanimous consent. Genocide is usually perpetrated by a violent minority with a silent approval of the community.Likebox (talk) 21:46, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Judy Campbell paragraph

In the meantime, as an example, one the most ‘minor’ of Likebox’s revisions was as follows. Likebox changes:

“Historian Judy Campbell argues that some historians, including Henry Reynolds, influenced by an idea of European ‘blame’ for an attempted genocide of the Australian Aborigines, have used tenuous evidence to link smallpox epidemics to British colonists. She suggests that these historians have overlooked evidence which indicates that the smallpox epidemics which devastated the Aboriginal population were not a result of contact with British settlers, but instead spread south from contact in the far North of Australia between Aborigines and visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia.” to

“Historian Judy Campbell argues that historians have used tenuous evidence to link smallpox epidemics to British colonists. She suggests that the epidemics, which coincided with the arrival of British settlers, were not a result of contact with these settlers, but instead spread south from the far North by visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia.”

I have to ask what purpose does this revision serve? Judy Campbell assembled an impressive body of evidence to support her position in her book ‘Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 – 1880’. It appears that the only purpose of such a revision is to change a reference to a position supported by EVIDENCE to a mere suggestion, someone’s “wacky” idea. And as I said before, this is perhaps one of the most minor of the disputed revisions. Webley442 (talk) 22:34, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

The first purpose is to shorten, because this is a minority position. The second purpose is to remove the scholarly authority from the dry academic prose, and instead give a neutral statement of the position without any pompous words and erudite repetition. This does not mean that the book has no scholarly weight, I don't know if it does or doesn't and I don't really care. It just means that you shouldn't use big pompous words and syntax to give a position is more reasonableness. The second phrasing is a neutral summary--- It gives the same ideas in a more direct and more unbiased manner.
This type of phrasing is common in physics, where you can check claims. There's no need to repeat yourself pompously or use big words if anybody can check whether or not you are right.Likebox (talk) 16:34, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

EVIDENCE is a pompous word? I'm stunned! Webley442 (talk) 00:21, 10 January 2009 (UTC) Just to clarify that, apparently it was only the second use of the word EVIDENCE in the original version that was pompous, where it indicated that there was evidence to support her position, i.e. the spread of smallpox from the North. Where it was used earlier to indicate that there was some evidence, however tenuous, to support the claim of British introduced smallpox, apparently that wasn't pompous. I'm confused. Webley442 (talk) 00:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Look, that could have easily been fixed by adding the phrase "provides evidence" back. My only goal in this edit was to remove the tone of authority, which could make it seem that her position has been widely adopted. It's just style.Likebox (talk) 01:24, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

On the issue of your desire to ‘shorten’ the material in the article on the ‘minority view’: this article is about a debate, often acrimonious, between 2 different positions. That’s why it’s called “History Wars”. In order to report fully on any debate or conflict, an article has to report, fairly and accurately, on the motivations, arguments and evidence of both sides. In this context, it is not the role of Wikipedia to decide which side of the debate is correct or preferable and then exclude or misrepresent some or all of the motivations, arguments and evidence of one of the sides. That would be giving Undue Weight to one side and it could not be considered to have the required NPOV. An article on, for example, the debate over gun-control laws in the USA would not be fair or accurate if it reported in favourable terms all the arguments of the pro gun-control organisations and the only material that the article included about the opposing side was a pro gun-control organisation’s characterisation of them as “gun-crazy rednecks who like to kill”.

You seem to rely heavily on the established academic point of view. History is full of examples of where the established or orthodox academic position on a particular issue ultimately turned out to be wrong and where it took decades or even generations of sometimes vitriolic debate before a minority view was recognised as correct. That’s why free debates are important as a mechanism for assisting to bring about changes in the status quo. Freedom to debate can’t achieve much if those who report on the debate exclude or don’t fully report on both or all (there can be more than 2) sides of the debate.

In the context of the History Wars article, as a quick example, the version you seem to prefer relies heavily on characterising the motivations of Keith Windschuttle and others as purely political, springing from some kind of right-wing conspiracy. Well fine, it is OK to report that this is the contention of that side of the debate. It is not OK or NPOV to write the article as though that contention were true or proven. The article has to balance that against the contentions of, for example, Windschuttle that at one time he was a believer in the ‘orthodox’ version of Aboriginal history and that this changed when he began cross-checking the claims and the footnotes of the ‘orthodox’ historians against the original source documents and found extensive misrepresentation and falsification. Misrepresentation and falsification so widespread that when the false evidence was excluded, the ‘orthodox’ position was completely undermined. Webley442 (talk) 01:26, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I tend to agree with you. This is one of the major goals of Wikipedia--- to make sure that all ideas are accessible, including ones that have been suppressed. But the process which decides what type of treatment and what length of treatment each side deserves is political. In your American example on gun control, the position of the gun lobby that guns reduce crime should be fairly labeled as a fringe minority position. That's because it contradicts well established convensional academic wisdom, based on statistical evidence. On the other hand, some other gun-nut position might not be as fringe.
The same thing is true here. The Australians who say there was no genocide in Tasmania are morons. The historical evidence that they are delusional is overwhelming. So to include them, you say "there is a fringe that believes there was no genocide in Tasmania". As for the other arguments, the ones that don't involve Tasmania, you give them fair space. There is no simple method to decide how much space and how much weight each argument deserves.Likebox (talk) 19:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
About the treatment of Windschuttle: ok, yes, he did once believe in the left history, and yes he did change his mind after becoming disillusioned with some aspects of leftist dogma. But his argument that the history is wrong is based on footnote chasing, and footnote chasing is a difficult art. Sometimes, when you want to verify a historical fact and you start with a well known textbook, the footnotes seem to peter out into a haze of uncertainty. The reason is that the trail of documentation is always incomplete, and requires experienced interpretation, based on reading many uncited primary sources. A lot of historical claims, especially about subjects like genocide, need to be teased out from a limited sample of documents, and different people do it differently.
So Windschuttle couldn't find direct evidence that there was mass murder on Tasmania by following the footnotes of the most notable textbook. But that does not mean that he did his homework. In order to get a fair picture of what was going on, a researcher has to make a thorough review of all the relevant primary literature, or at least a good sample. Sometimes people make claims in later literature that are supported by documents that they do not cite directly.
This means reading the current newspapers looking for signs of genocide, keeping an eye on what we have learned about the patterns of ethnic conflict in the intervening decades. The smoking guns in Tasmania are everywhere: unpunished mass murder, rampant slave-taking, total annihilation of a population, declaring war on a civilian population, declaring of a bounty of 5 pounds for each native killed, and the black line. These are documented in contemporary newspaper accounts of slaughter, the contemporary common wisdom that the Tasmanians were exterminated, and the recollections of the survivors. It's an open-and-shut case. In order to get academics to question it, you need to find evidence of a large conspiracy of natives and whites to put incriminating evidence into the public record.
I didn't read Windschuttle's book (or much of anything else about this, I'm sorry, I am incompetent). But maybe some of his arguments are OK. For example, maybe the claims of ethnic slaughter on the Australian mainland were exaggerated. Maybe the smallpox didn't come from Europe. Maybe there was a vocal minority of white Australians who advocated native rights. I didn't look it up, and I don't know. So you need to comb through each argument in order, and decide which ones fit within mainstream history and which ones are fringe. It's hard work, but it must be done in order to give a fair encyclopedic treatment of history.Likebox (talk) 20:43, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

It can sometimes be a matter of some debate as to what is a fringe position and what is mainstream. Harking back to your point that “the position of the gun lobby that guns reduce crime should be fairly labeled as a fringe minority position”, consider this; until the mid-1980’s, the majority of US states had laws (and policies on the implementation of those laws) which made it extremely difficult/impossible for ordinary citizens to obtain a permit to carry a concealed weapon (CCW). In about 1985, Florida introduced a new type of law that made it much easier to get a permit, what’s known as “shall-issue” CCW laws in that the authorities were required by law to issue a permit to anyone who met a fixed set of criteria. Florida experienced such a large drop in violent crime that State after State followed suit and today, a majority of US States have laws similar to Florida. Others have changed their policies, which were basically that while the law says we MAY issue a permit, in practice we would always refuse to do so. (And you can add in Vermont, which always allowed concealed carry without a permit.)

Now the very vocal US gun-control lobby still like to label the idea that guns reduce crime as a fringe minority position but since legislatures elected by a majority vote in a majority of US States have implemented laws and policies based on that position, isn’t it time to admit that it is now a mainstream position in the US?

Or do we judge what is “fringe” and what is “mainstream” only on what is “fringe” and “mainstream” amongst academics, not society in general? There are some who like to believe that academia represents all the best thinkers in society and that the position generally adopted in academia must be correct. There are others, however, who wonder why it is that so many members of academia or what is sometimes referred to as the “intelligentsia” are unable to escape the ‘groupthink’ and apply their minds to the evidence rather than simply parroting and supporting what has become the accepted, politically-correct “position”. George Orwell: "One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool."

It doesn’t surprise me that you say you haven’t read Windschuttle’s book. I’ve been discussing it with people for years, in person and on-line. I’ve found that most of the people who express negative opinions regarding his work haven’t actually read it but base their opinions on commentary, articles or reviews written by his opponents such as Robert Manne or Henry Reynolds. When they are talk or write about KW’s writings on any particular point, what they impart is what Manne, Reynolds or the like have said that KW has written, blissfully unaware that those parties routinely provide their readers with a misrepresented and distorted version of what KW actually said.

I recommend that you do read Fabrication and also his earlier book: The Killing of History: How a Discipline is being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists, Macleay Press, Sydney (1994. The latter is pretty enlightening on how what has happened in Aboriginal history has been going on in other fields of history.

I also recommend that you read Fabrication with the books of Ryan, Reynolds, etc open in front of you, too so you can see that he is accurately representing what they said and thoroughly demolishing it. The book can be a hard slog in places because it involves an intensive examination of what the “orthodox” historians have written, then focussing on their footnotes which point to the source documents which are supposedly the evidence for the story they are telling. Windschuttle spent months in the Tasmanian archives and various other repositories tracking down those source documents only to find that some don’t exist (which makes one wonder how an orthodox historian could be relying on them) and others tell a very different story to that of the orthodox historians. When you compare what the source documents actually say to what the orthodox historians said they contained, it becomes obvious that much of the work of the orthodox historians amounts to no more than historical fiction.

Windschuttle also visited the sites of many of the ‘events’ of Tasmanian history which proved enlightening. In one instance, for example, at Cape Grim he found that it would have been logistically impossible for four shepherds armed with single shot muskets to massacre 30 Aborigines, as claimed. The terrain allowed for too many escape routes and the Aborigines (fit from their tough lifestyle) could easily get out of the effective range of muskets while the shooters were reloading (you can only really hope to hit what you are aiming at to about 100 yards, an average person can run out of that range in less than 30 seconds, the Olympic record is under 10 seconds for 100 metres). Assuming these shepherds were incredible sharpshooters and that they killed an Aborigine with each shot, it would still take several minutes to fire the first 4 shots, reload, fire and hit 26 more. Did the Aborigines just stand there and wait to be shot? The death toll of approximately 6 that he finds most likely is contained in the original report of Edwin Curr, manager of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. John Maynard Keynes: "When the evidence changes, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" Webley442 (talk) 03:03, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Google Books on the Tasmanian Genocide

I did as user:Likebox suggested on my talk page,[8] and did a Google Book search on "Tasmanian Genocide"

Ben Kiernan Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 0300100981, 9780300100983 p 273 states most Tasmanian Aborigines perished in armed conflict. Not all of the chapter is available but of that which is, Kiernan does not seem to argue forcefully that it was a genocide, but reports details of the war between the British and the Aborigines which the Aborigines lost. However Kiernan is not a specialist in the events in Tasmania.

There are a number of books on the first page which are by people who are not specialise in the events that occurred in Tasmania during this period which state it was a genocide. For example: Kevin Reilly et al. Racism: A Global Reader, M.E. Sharpe, 2003 ISBN 0765610590, 9780765610591. there is a chapter by Jared Diamond "In Black and White" pp. 23-26 is firmly of the view that it was a genocide. He states in conclusion "Today, the attitudes of white Australians towards their murderous history vary widely. While government policy and many whites' private views have become increasingly sympathetic to the Aborigines, other whites deny responsibility for genocide."

Diamond suggests that the view in Australian society is split on the issue. But the split opinion of Australians are not necessarily those of experts in the field. Luckily the same page has two papers from historians who specialise in the events that occurred in Tasmania during this period.

A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814108, 9781571814104. There is a chapter by Henry Reynolds "Genocide in Tasmania?" pp. 127-147.

The last two pages 146,147 get to the heart of the problem. Clearly Reynolds recognises that whether or not genocide is a complicated question, and although he thinks that much of the settler population (many of whom he points out were still serving convicts) were "extirpationists" (a word meaning in favour of extinction) but that there is no conclusive evidence that the British Tasmanian authorities took the same view. In Reynolds opinion there is no simple answer to the question if the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines was a genocide. But don't take my word for it read please read it and see what you think.

In the Wikipedia text Reynols is described as a "progressive historians such as ... Henry Reynolds began to publish books and articles which they saw as a corrective to the narrow, selective historiography which had, in their view, hitherto misrepresented or simply ignored Indigenous Australian history."

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

Curthoys's conclusion is similar to that of Reynols "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."

Neither of these detailed essays by Australian historians suggest that this debate is concluded and the "it was a genocide" or it was "not a genocide" is settled. Quite the contrary, if anything there is more acceptance now that the explanations presented in the past are not the complete story and more research and deliberation is needed before a consensus can be arrived at.

So I suggest user:Likebox that unless you can come up with a detailed paper similar to the two above that argues that the view "it was not a genocide is a minority view by a few cranks", we should continue to present the argument as we do as it is supported by the Australian Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training paper Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, and the two detailed papers by Australian historians above. --PBS (talk) 22:53, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

I see what you are saying, and it seems fair minded. If the article read like what you write above, I would have no complaint with it. I am not interested in quibbling about what the word "genocide" means, so long as it is made clear that the deaths in Tasmania were due to murder (murder of civilians, not armed conflict, not disease). The view that I say is espoused only by cranks is that the death of the Tasmanian aborigines was due to disease, or justifiable killing, and that the settlers were guilty only of crimes of omission, such as withholding aid.Likebox (talk) 23:48, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
If you read the two chapters by the two Australian historians above I think you will have a much better understanding of the finer points of the debate. You will also find paragraphs that you can cite in the article to add those points that you think are glossed over at the moment. Please read them (you can access the text by clicking on the page number links) and then discuss which paragraphs you think could be cited for additions to the article to bring a better balance to the Wikipedia article. I am sure that if you do that and present it in a fair tone in the narrative voice of the article there will be little opposition to such additions. --PBS (talk) 00:39, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

I have to say that I don’t regard Ben Kiernan as a credible source regarding genocide. He was a supporter of the Pol Pot regime on Cambodia and perhaps the most vocal DENIER of genocide in Cambodia up until Communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Then, once it became acceptable in extreme left-wing political circles in Australia to do so, and the evidence of genocide suddenly becoming undeniable (having, at last, been confirmed by Communist Vietnamese sources) he did a 180-degree turn and became outspoken in criticising the genocide in Cambodia and condemning the Khmer Rouge for it.

In a book supposedly A World History of Genocide, Australia is allocated 61 pages, the Nazi Holocaust gets 39 pages, the Soviet Terror 28 pages, the Japanese massacres in Asia 31 pages, Maoist China 27 pages, Turkey and the Armenian genocide 21 pages, and Cambodia and Rwanda get 32 pages. The British and the colonial societies they set up in Ireland, North America, Australia and Africa apparently deserve a total of 228 pages (including Australia's 61 pages) while all the genocides of the 20th century only rate 178 pages. Just a little unbalanced, I think.

To Kiernan, the mass murders of the Nazis and the Soviet Union are minor issues compared to colonial and settler societies. His reasoning and justifications for these claims are pretty bizarre ideological stuff and, as far as I can tell, he hasn’t done much original research in Australia, at least. He just relies on his predecessors, Reynolds, Ryan etc, thus assuming that their work was accurate. Webley442 (talk) 04:11, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

End of protection in January?

At the same time that user:Likebox altered this page (s)he also altered the section "Australia" section in the article "genocides in history" to reflect what (s)he considered to be a more accurate reflection of the debate.[9][10]

Using the information gleaned from the two articles by well known Australian historians (Henry Reynolds, and Anne Curthoys)which were presented above in #Google Books on the Tasmanian Genocide, I have re-written the "Australia" section in the article "genocides in history". [11] After discussing it on the talk page user:Likebox is satisfied with the re-write.

I think this shows good will by user:Likebox and so I hope we can come to a working accommodation on this page.

I would like to take the protection of this page, but user:Likebox to do so I have to have your agreement that you will not make changes for which there is no consensus, and User:Webley442 I need you to agree that providing user:Likebox provides reliable sources for the changes (s)he wishes to make that you will try to edit around the changes and not just revert them. If we can agree on this then I will unprotect the page. --PBS (talk) 10:48, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

I’ve read the rewritten section "Australia" section in the article "genocides in history" and agree it is balanced.

I am willing to restrict myself to editing around any changes so long as it is at all possible to do so. If someone, not necessarily a party to the current dispute but anyone out there, decides to rewrite an article making extensive changes so that only their point of view is represented, it can make editing around the changes a bit difficult, especially if none of the changes are supported by appropriate (or any) citations.

The issue of “reliable sources” may prove interesting as the crucial point of the “History Wars” was Windschuttle’s contention that the field of Aboriginal History was “taken over” by a relatively small group of highly politicised historians who then rewrote or revised history by using falsified, exaggerated and misrepresented source material (and then taught that falsified history to future generations of students). He contends that they did so to suit their own political, social and personal agendas. In that context, who is a reliable source?

I think it can be done if it presented correctly, in particular if the contentions of each side are presented as just that, not as proven fact, and the arguments of both sides are represented fairly and accurately. As I’ve said elsewhere, when reporting on a debate, it is not the role of Wikipedia to decide which side of a debate is correct or preferable and then exclude or misrepresent some or all of the motivations, arguments and evidence of one of the sides. Webley442 (talk) 13:30, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

No worries, you can remove protection--- I don't think I am widely read enough to fix this problem. The main problem is that the point of view that is being pushed here is both biased and absurd--- that the natives died of diseases, and the white settlers did not kill them. The (probably mainstream) genocide debate which PBS brings up is whether there was active government involvement, which is always a question, especially in a frontier with settlers and weak government, and if this is presented as a literature debate, I probably wouldn't be too worried. But the text of this article should stick to the agreed upon historical facts, not to some rant by one historian with a chip on his shoulder. His views can be quarantined in a few paragraphs, considering that nearly all historians think he is dead wrong.Likebox (talk) 05:44, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
But please keep the POV tag in place, so someone else can do the edit.Likebox (talk) 16:08, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
As a compromise I'll leave it there for a month, and we can see if anyone else presents any new information, but you have yet to produce any reliable sources that supports you POV that this article is not balanced, while several have been presented that show that it is, so it is not reasonable for it remain there indefinitely without any evidence being presented that it is a biased article --PBS (talk) 23:03, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
Look, the article explicitly makes the claim that the natives died mainly of disease and that the settlers were only guilty of "crimes of omission". If that's not a bias, I don't know what is.Likebox (talk) 23:06, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Judy Campbell paragraph revisited

I've restored the previous wording on the Judy Campbell paragraph regarding smallpox. It seems to me that the shorter version proposed by the previous editor misses the whole point of this article which is about the History Wars. The article can't report on the History Wars if it doesn't mention the opposing claims involved: in this case the claim by Henry Reynolds and other historians that the smallpox was introduced by the British and Judy Campbell's work which argues that the evidence they rely upon is pretty tenuous and that there is better evidence of epidemics spreading from contact with fisherman in the far north of Australia. The Schoolteacher. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.202.43.53 (talk) 06:35, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Judy Campbell's evidence explained in more detail

I would like to thank all contributors for achieving a balance on this article, and add some commentary (but only that) on Judy Campbell's e-book, which I have just purchased and read. The case she makes for the source of smallpox in Australia being Maccassan trepang fishermen who had contacts in the Northern Territory and the North coast of Western Australia depends on a combination of medical evidence about smallpox itself, gained during the WHO smallpox eradication campaign, and historical evidence about the dates of three epidemics that occurred in different parts of Australia in the 1780s, 1820s/30s, and 1860s. In relation to the WHO data, she thanks Professor Frank Fenner,a virologist from the Australian National University who worked on the smallpox eradication campaign. The essential information she uses from this is the epidemiology of smallpox, in particular the rapid incubation and short duration of the infectious period; the (short) survival time of the virus in hot and humid conditions; and the validity of pock-marks on survivors as a good indication of when an epidemic occurred. It is also relevant that in small sparse populations, a disease such as smallpox does not become "endemic" and thus occurs as "epidemics" when a new source of infection spreads through a population of those born to the (partially) immunised survivors of a previous one.

There is no need to attribute the belief that smallpox was introduced by the British to "Henry Reynolds and other historians", since it was a possibility considered by Captain-Lieutenant Watkin Tench in 1791 when he was writing about the 1789-90 epidemic, and you can find most of the contemporary accounts at Project Gutenberg. Tench lists the options thus:

Is it a disease indigenous to the country? Did the French ships under Monsieur de Peyrouse introduce it? let it be remembered that they had now been departed more than a year; and we had never heard of its existence on board of them.—Had it travelled across the continent from its western shore, where Dampier and other European voyagers had formerly landed?—Was it introduced by Mr Cook?—Did we give birth to it here? No person among us had been afflicted with the disorder since we had quitted the Cape of Good Hope, seventeen months before. It is true, that our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles; but to infer that it was produced from this cause were a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration. ' '

The medical evidence about smallpox gathered during the eradication campaign makes the worst case possibility of deliberate infection with "variolous matter" (probably scabs to be used for inoculation - the procedure using live virus that was replaced a few years later by Jenner's vaccination with cowpox) or other means (eg, infected clothes) very unworthy of consideration, simply because the virus does not survive very long without a living human host (and there is no other host) in hot or humid conditions. At a minimum (that is, if the variolous matter had been bottled from a live case in Cape Town and /or clothes or bedding had been infected from a case there) and most of the trip from Cape Town to Botany Bay was in reasonably cold conditions, there is still the period from January 1788 until the first cases were seen amongst Aboriginal people in April 1789 to be explained, which covers two hot and humid summers in Australia, whereas:

... investigations during the eradication campaign showed that even virus protected in scabs retained infectivity for only three weeks at temperatures of 35°C (95°F) and relative humidity of 65–68 per cent, and for very ittle longer even when temperatures and humidity were lower.

Thus even if the British had been intending genocide by smallpox from Day #1 (18th January, 1788) they would have lacked the means to infect anyone. [Note: now qualified by additional material from WHO book on smaallpox eradication, below.] This leaves the ships of La Perouse, which arrived on the same day, nearly, and had just come from the Kamchatka Peninsula,where an epidemic of smallpox had killed more than 4,000 of the indigenous people and more than 300 of the Russian settlers only 17 years earlier (1769-70),and prior to that La Perouse's ships had visited the western coast of the United States and Alaska, where the indigenous populations had been devastated by smallpox around 1775-8, introduced by traders from Siberia, or a Spanish exploring vessel from Mexico, or overland from the epidemics on the east coast, or some other means - no-one knows. Judy Campbell's book does not discuss La Perouse at all, but they were at Botany Bay until 10th March 1788, and a possible source of infection - if there had been a live person with smallpox on board, since they had travelled by way of Samoa and Tonga in summer - that is, through the hot and humid tropics. The only other possibility would be if a very obvious and familiar illness had somehow been transmitted live through the First Fleet and one of the convicts who absconded early and vanished had transmitted it and none of the medical staff were aware. This is possible, but does not seem likely.

Judy Campbell presents the evidence that trepang fishers from Macassar (where smallpox was endemic) began to visit the north coast of Australia from the mid 1700s, that the voyage was short enough for infectious people to survive the trip, and that some did in fact die of smallpox. In the case of the epidemic from the late 1820s through the early 1830's, she presents quite strong evidence that the earliest dates were in the North, and became progresively later in the south, and - a critical point - occurred in inland NSW before they reached the coast - and then there was smallpox in Victoria and later again in South Australia. These dates are estimated from either direct observations of (probably) active illness at the time, or pockmarked survivors who later gave the dates in various ways. She presents evidence for a similar sequence of dates for an epidemic in the 1860s that did not seem to reach the south, and (probably) a separate one from the 1860s that began in the north of Western Australia and was transmitted south. The evidence for the 1789-90 epidemic in Sydney is weaker, since it is based on pockmarked people judged to be in their 50s and 60s when observed many years later, and their oral accounts of when they were infected. The uncertainty around the few dates of this kind doesn't establish a very strong north-south sequence prior to the epidemic in Sydney in 1789-90. However, in the absence of any evidence of a live infected person on either the ships of the First Fleet or those of La Perouse and the strong evidence against the survival of the virus in the absence of such a living host, it is more plausible to suppose that what (probably) happened in the 1830s also happened 40 years earlier. It is certainly more plausible than any other theory, even if the case is not as strong as the way the author expresses it in the book - in my opinion.

None of this alters the fact that the Aboriginal populations would have recovered but for the fact that the British brought other diseases, and dispossessed the owners of the land by force of arms, and all the rest. However, the evidence of the effects of smallpox on naive populations is clear, with death rates of 30-70% on the first exposure, and with much higher rates in pregnant women and women in general and young children,and much higher infection rates wherever the populations were most concentrated. Thus there is every reason to believe that this one disease had a devastating effect on Aboriginal people all down the east coast of Australia and across to the coast of South Australia in two main waves, in the late 1780's and late 1820's-early 1830's, leaving the survivors with even less chance to resist, and that probably the source of infection was from the north.

Thus the wikipedia summary is accurate enough, whether in the long or short version, so long as it contains the reference to the book in which the evidence is presented in detail. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.3.98.39 (talk) 00:51, 25 May 2009 (UTC)


The WHO Book on Smallpox Eradication

The conclusion about the near-impossibility of infection by smallpox after long durations need to be qualified a little by information in the book Fenner F, Henderson DA,Arita I, JeZek Z, Ladnyi ID. Smallpox and its Eradication. Geneva: World Health Organization, 1988. This can be downloaded from [12]. Note that the first author, Frank Fenner, wrote a foreword to the Judy Campbell book.

Their (1988) acount of possible origins for the epidemics amongst Aboriginal people in 1789, the 1830's, and the 1860's is very similar to that of Judy Campbell. It is described as part of the general "History of smallpox and its spread around the world in Chapter 5. Figure 5.5 in the book shows two arrows showing smallpox reaching Australia in 1789, one drawn directly from England, the other coming down from Indonesia, with a question mark on each, and the caption : "Fig. 5.5. The spread of smallpox to the Americas, South Africa and Australia with European exploration and colonization. It is not known whether the outbreaks among Australian aborigines in 1789 were caused by the transmission of the disease by ship from Great Britain or spread from islands of the East lndies to northern Australia."

In the text quotations below I have retained the original wording, though some if it may be offensive.

"The First Fleet, comprising 11 ships carrying about 1500 persons - convicts and their guards and keepers - sailed from England on 6 January 1787, called at Rio de Janeiro on 4 August and at Cape Town on 13 October, and arrived in Botany Bay, just south of the present city of Sydney, on 20 January 1788. No addition was made to the infant colony until the arrival of the Second Fleet in 1790. ...

The late 18th century was a period of severe smallpox in Great Britain, mitigated somewhat by the increasing adoption of variolation. Knowing that the natives of other distant lands, such as South Africa and the East Indies, were infected with smallpox, the surgeons of the First Fleet brought with them "variolous matter in bottles" for inoculation if it proved to be necessary. In fact they found a sparse population of hunter-gatherers who, like the aboriginal Americans, were free of smallpox, measles and most other of the common infectious diseases of Europeans.

However, in (April) 1789, only a year after the landing, an outbreak of what was probably smallpox was recognized among the aborigines near the new European settlement, Sydney town, and appears to have spread far and wide among the aboriginal population of south-eastern Australia. as determined bv explorers and by later commentators (Cumpston, 191 4 ; Butlin, 1983, 1985 ; Campbell, 1983, 1985). None of the white settlers was affected, but one coloured seaman suffered from the disease. The origin of this outbreak has never been determined, but two possibilities have been canvassed. Although there is no record of the variolous matter brought by the surgeons of the First Fleet ever having been used, lost or stolen, it was a potential source of infection. On the other hand, the newly arrived Europeans may, by chance, have witnessed the passage through the Sydney area of a very rare epidemic of smallpox that had been introduced along the north coast of the continent and spread southwards.

There was little contact between aborigines and whites, except near Sydney, for many years after this, and smallpox appears to have been absent until 1829-1831, when it spread extensively through the indigenous population of south-eastern Australia, affecting a few Europeans as well. Once again, its origin was never determined. Two other outbreaks of smallpox occurred among the aborigines in the 1860s, the first extending from the north coast across central Australia to the southern coast between about 1861 and 1866, and the second extending along the north-west coast in 1865-1869 (Fenner, 1985). Both probably originated from the voyages of trepang traders coming from the islands to the north of Australia. Butlin (1983) has recently analysed the demographic effects of the 1789 and 1829 outbreaks and suggests that they played an important role in the great decline of the aboriginal population of south-eastern Australia in the first half of the 19th century.' '

(For the record, the "coloured seaman" probably refers to Joseph Jeffries, described as a "native of North America" in a contemporary account, who was a sailor on the "Sirius", came from Staten Island, NY, and joined the ship in Rio de Janeiro. He died in May 1789.)

Judy Campbell's book mainly adds history and estimated dates to support the view that the north-south route was very probable for the later epidemics, and might be plausible for the 1789 one also, especially if there was no likelihood of transmission from either the "variolous matter" or infected clothes from either the First Fleet or the ships of La Perouse.

To evaluate that possibility directly, I have searched the WHO book for evidence of viability of the virus and report it here.

In Chapter 30 they discuss potential sources for a return of smallpox after eradication. In the section on "Viral persistence in the environment" most of what they say confirms the arguments made by Judy Campbell and summarised above. For example: "Although it does not cause persistent infection in man, variola virus in scabs is, for a virus, very resistant to inactivation, especially at moderate temperatures and out of sunlight. Clothing and bedding from smallpox cases ... were an occasional source of outbreaks... However, the periods for which the virus survived to cause such infections were measured in days or weeks - not years.

In Chapter 2 (Table 2.11, pp 115-116) they report studies of the viability of smallpox in scabs held at various temperatures and humidity levels during summer in Bangladesh. At 35 degrees C and 65-68% relative humidity, active virus could not be found after three weeks. At 25.8 to 26.4 degrees C, and 85-90% relative humidity, active virus persisted for 8 weeks. At the same temperature and <10% relative humidity, it persisted for 12 weeks. At 4 degrees C, it persisted for 16 weeks even at 65-68% relative humidity.

However, in considering "Material stored by (traditional Afghan) variolators" as a possible sources, they say this: "... major concern with the danger of variolators' material causing outbreaks of smallpox after the interruption of transmission centred on Afghanistan. Tests for viable virus in material collected from variolators there gave positive results in one sample 9 months after the material had been collected from a patient; all the others were negative long before this (see Chapter 14, Table 14.1 5). All the variolators who were questioned about their mode of operation said that, if it was available, they preferred to use fresh material (from a recent case), and as smallpox became less common they usually added fresh scabs or pustule fluid to their stored material whenever possible. ... Within scabs, out of sunlight and in cool surroundings, viable variola virus can survive for several years. However, variolators' material was never held under such "ideal" conditions, and tests showed that it rarely contained viable virus for as long as one year."

In Chapter 14 they discuss the practice of variolators in Afghanistan, in more detail. "The scabs were usually kept either as such or in a powdered form. Sometimes, a liquid (e.g., honey or spices in water) was added either soon after the scabs had been obtained or immediately before inoculation. Because variola virus is exceptionally stable when dried,especially if kept in a cool place, efforts were made to learn from the variolators how long they believed they could satisfactorily store the virus. Most of them stated that it was necessary to obtain new material each year. A few observed that material could be retained for as long as 2 years, but they noted that such material was not reliable and often did not induce the desired infection.

The variolators kept the scabs in all manner of jars and boxes, usually in their houses. A particularly interesting case was that of a variolator who kept the material in a horn, stored in a cave at a high altitude, quite far from his home. Although storage in a cold environment such as this should have served well to preserve the virus, the variolator reported that the material he collected was not very effective if more than a year old. Six specimens were obtained and tested in WHO reference laboratories. Variola virus was isolated from 4 of them, of which 2 had titres that were presumably high enough to induce infection if inoculated (Table 14.15). The 4 specimens from which virus was isolated were collected between March 1969 and April 1970. One specimen collected in April 1976 consisted of scabs said to have been obtained in Pakistan in October 1974. In this specimen, virions were seen by electron microscopy but the virus did not grow on egg membrane.


Table 14.15. Afghanistan: results of laboratory testing of specimens collected from variolators


Number Type of specimen Date of collection Age of specimen Technique Electron microscopy Technique Gel precipitation Technique Variola virus isolation Titre (Pock-forming units/ml) Note a
1 Fluids March 1969 ? Note b Note b + 2 500
2 Scabs May 1969 9 months Note b Note b + 10 000
3 Scabs September 1969 4 months Note b Note b + 30
4 Scabs April 1970 ? Note b Note b + 14
5 Scabs January 1972 ? - - - -
6 Scabs April 1976 18 months + + - -

Note a: Titre of vaccinia virus necessary to obtain successful vaccinations in 50% of those vaccinated-about 300 pock-forming unlts per ml. Note b: Not performed.

In summary, although it is unlikely that the "variolous matter" brought out by the surgeons of the First Fleet would have been viable, or that scabs in clothing or other material would have transmitted infection, it cannot be said to be impossible. It is just that the alternative routes have been made more probable, depending on how one reads the evidence assembled by Judy Campbell about the evidence for earlier infections in the North, and later ones in the South,in the 1829-31 epidemic.

The WHO history also notes that smallpox was not endemic in Cape Town, but occurred as intermittent epidemics, the first brought ashore in laundry from a ship from India in 1715, and the second in a ship from Ceylon in 1755. There is no record of smallpox in Cape Town at the time the First Fleet called there in October 1787, which is probably why the line in Figure 5.5 is drawn direct from England. It was endemic in England at this time: "During the last 2 decades of the 18th century, smallpox killed over 36 000 persons in London, and an equal number in Glasgow. This constituted almost 1 out of every 10 deaths in London, and nearly a fifth of all the deaths in Glasgow in that period. In British towns, 9 out of every 10 persons who died of smallpox were under 5 years old. Smallpox was always present in Great Britain's densely populated large cities, even between epidemics, whereas in the more sparsely populated countryside it commonly appeared only in epidemics, separated by smallpox-free intervals of several years. For young adults from these rural areas who had previously escaped infection, smallpox was one of the most serious risks thev faced in the big cities."

The WHO book also describes the impact of smallpox in North America, and the events that tend to underly beliefs that deliberate infection might have happened in Australia:

In both New England and the South, smallpox broke the resistance of the Indians to the white invaders, and as white settlement moved westwards it was accompanied by smallpox, to which the local Indians had no resistance. A few of these 18th century epidemics among the Indians were probably initiated, or at least fostered, by whites. The most notorious record is contained in correspondence between Sir Jeffery Amherst, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America, and Colonel Henry Bouquet in 1763, at the time of the Pontiac rebellion :

AMHERST: Could it not be contrived to send smallpox among these disaffected tribes of Indians? We must on this occasion use every strategem in our power to reduce them."

BOUQUET: "I will try to inoculate them with some blankets that may fall in their hands, and take care not to get the disease myself." (Heagerty, 1928.)

By 1785 smallpox had occurred among the Sioux Indians of the Great Plains and crossed the Rocky Mountains with them, and was reported in Alaska and California. Further south, Catholic missions in New Mexico had been invaded by smallpox much earlier, because of their contacts with New Spain.

There is an analysis of these events in Wikipedia at Pontiac's Rebellion.

Naval officers in the First Fleet (or marines like Watkin Tench had served in the American War of Independence, where smallpox in the forces had a major impact. The WHO book says: "In 1777 Washington ordered the compulsory variolation of all new recruits to his armies" for example. Thus the knowledge needed to conduct "germ warfare" was certainly available. The motivation to use it is another matter entirely. The situation of Phillip and the colony was very different from that of Amherst 25 years earlier, in land only seized from the French in a war two years earlier, and with another war on his hands in which eight forts had been taken and hundreds killed. At the time of the epidemic Phillip was in the fourth month of trying to establish communication via Arabanoo (originally called 'Manly'), and Arabanoo's death in the epidemic ended that attempt. Tench presented the options quite openly, including the possibility that they had brought the disease, including the reference to the "variolous matter". Anything is possible,and no-one in authority would be likely to admit such a crime, even in 1789, but it is hard to believe that a colony of convicts would fail to report even a rumour that might be discreditable to those in authority over them. So, to my mind, Judy Campell's work puts a slightly bigger question mark over the line direct from England, and a slightly smaller one on the line from indonesia.

My apologies to anyone who finds this footnote to the History wars boring in comparison with the point-scoring debates of the history warriors. In fact I am not sure that Judy Campbell's book even belongs in article on the the History wars at all, since it seems to me that it is it is just ordinary old history.


Well "ordinary old history" is what the History wars were about. On one side there were those who said that history should be fact-based with footnotes which lead to verifiable evidence, with said evidence being logically, reasonably assessed for credibility and reliability, i.e. "ordinary old history". On the other side there were those who wanted history to be a tool for advancing their favoured political causes (and their careers) and who decided that it was OK to fabricate false history and ‘support’ the stories they wanted to tell with false footnotes if it was in aid of the ‘right’ cause (and benefited their careers). This is the same camp which was so outraged when Windschuttle dared to go through the work of some of their number and put down in black and white which footnotes were false and which parts of their preferred ‘histories’ were gross distortions of the truth or simply works of imagination. As a historian, Judy Campbell produced work that is fact-based and well researched so that makes her a ‘history warrior’; either she volunteered or she was drafted. Webley442 (talk) 07:01, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

Political commentary on Howard Government policies.

I've removed a recently inserted paragraph about the Howard Government policies regarding ATSIC, etc. The History wars article should be kept to the specific issue of the History wars and not broadened to all things Aboriginal. If someone wants to create a separate article on such policies feel free. But first consider the Wikipedia policy regarding NPOV. Wikipedia articles aren't the forum for deciding whether government policies are appropriate or not. You can state that commentator X or politician Y said that the Howard Government policies were to the detriment of the Aboriginal community but the article shouldn't be written as though that particular position was proven fact. For example the removed paragraph effectively stated that the abolition of ATSIC was the destruction of a 'gain' made by Aboriginal people. There is a position that is diametrically opposed to that, arguing that ATSIC was a failure in its intended purpose, as a means of improving the lives of Aboriginal people in that it took in vast amounts of public money intended to improve conditions for Aboriginal people and that much of this funding 'disappeared' in ways that have never been properly explained, with very little 'trickling down' to those it was intended to benefit. So it's arguable that the abolition of ATSIC was a 'gain' for Aboriginal people as the removal of an organisation that had effectively functioned as a barrier to them receiving the funding that they were supposed to get. Webley442 (talk) 10:16, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

No problem with the overall removal on grounds of direct relevance to an (excessively?) NPOV that divorces the History squabbles from why they were of interest to anyone other than the warriors themselves. But by all means let's leave the history of 1996-2007 to the next generation of history warriors.

But, by way of clarification, the "gain" I was talking about in relation to ATSIC was just having an elected representative body. Read the Senate Inquiry for a balanced view of the pros and cons, at [13]. If elected bodies were abolished every time they failed to behave well, we would be very short of governments in this world, and the Mother of Parliaments would never have survived. Is Westminster being abolished now, just because folk have been caught with their fingers in the petty cash? Of course not. We usually fix such things, and the Senate Inquiry had plenty of good recommendations for so doing. But not ATSIC. Different standards apply. Why? Why is it OK to replace an elected body with an appointed one, rather than sorting it out? However, it was wrong to attribute that particular action to a particular government, since the other mob didn't like the elected body either. Which would have been one of the few things they agreed about. Why was it so easy for Australia to achieve bipartisanship on the Abolition of the elected Aboriginal body, as distinct from sorting it out?

At for the "etc" that was removed, it is stretching the notion of NPOV a long way to say that the 1998 amendments to the NTA were NOT a loss, objectively, by any standard, for Aboriginal people. As to relevance, why is Windshuttle so preoccupied with a long and tedious semantic debate over the word "land" in Tasmania, and his opponents equally concerned, if the 1998 changes in Native Title legislation are irrelevant to the History wars? Could it possibly be that this stuff about having or not having recorded words for "land" are just another aspect of the search for security of tenure with a dodgy Title deed? Or what about the Mabo judgement and the curious argument about rights (including those related to and derived from land) being "washed away" by the so-called "tides of history"? If history can wash away rights to country (just by happening? or do some kinds of history have more effect than others?) then the active legislative washing-away of 1998 is irrelevant to this particular History war, but I don't think that's the way it works. I think the History wars were - well, not exactly a tsunami, but at least splashing around in the mud.

Or consider the relevance the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN-DRIP), which was another part of the "etc", but wasn't discussed in the rationale for removal. Why did Australia (Version 1996-2007) have a problem with an aspirational standard of moral behaviour in relation to indigenous people, when 144 other countries (or 143 if you only read the newspapers rather than viewing the whole debate) didn't? And why is it that Australia (Version 2009-????) doesn't have a problem with endorsing this standard? That's not a political point, nor is it a POV, it's just one of those written-down historical facts that really-truly historians like so much. And the History wars, if they are about anything other than personal squabbles amongst historians and journalists, are surely about different interpretations about how the rights of Aboriginal people were and are recognised and/or respected (or not) at different periods of Australian history. So, if persom {noname} espouses one side of the History wars, and person {noname} also votes against the UN-DRIP (quite contrary to Australia's usual behaviour in relation to Human Rights instruments at the UN) is this just a coincidence? Or is there a commonality in the POV being expressed in {noname}'s objectively recorded historical behaviour that made the History wars more important than they would otherwise have been? On account of {noname} having a particular role?

The UN-DRIP simply specifies an internationally agreed aspirational standard against which our history (and behaviour in the present and future) might be judged, so what's the problem with it for anyone who is quite happy with the objective demonstrable written down footnoted truth outlined on their favourite side of the History wars? None. Unless the UN-DRIP exposes our interpretations of our History to an internationally agreed minimum moral standard rather than a local debating competition, so that winning a local history squabble (or even a local election) mightn't be good enough on the world stage. Or even good enough in the Southern hemisphere. Golly, not even as good as New Zealand, which based its opposition to the UN-DRIP on the Treaty of Waitangi being better. The catch is that (view the cleverly worded speech by the UK representative in voting to endorse the UN-DRIP) HM's representative has made it very clear that the UN-DRIP has NO retrospective effect(ie, historical consequences), so far as the Mother Country is concerned. The colonies are on their own, and Australia owns the historical legacy from 1788 as well as the one from 1901. If our historical legacy is just a squabble over footnotes, and the exact degree of coercion Vs legal shenanigans used to dispossess Aboriginal people, and we think that's IMPORTANT, then we've missed the point. And maybe deliberately. But enough. The article WAS getting way too long, anyway. 123.3.98.39 (talk) 20:51, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

‘Is Westminster being abolished now, just because folk have been caught with their fingers in the petty cash?’ No, but it’s not really an equivalent situation. If ‘folk’ at Westminster had been diverting, for their personal benefit and that of their friends and family, not just the ‘petty cash’ but the bulk of the budget going back for years and only allowing the ‘petty cash’ to trickle down down to the public, perhaps it would be different. And if, when what was going on started to come out, instead of acknowledging that reforms are needed, those at Westminster had denied everything, accused those who exposed them of being anti-British racists attempting to take control of what was rightfully Westminster’s prerogative and had clung onto their positions defiantly, perhaps then people there would be looking at a more radical solution.

Why was there unilateral support for abolishing ATSIC rather than reforming it? Because when in power the ‘other mob’ did make tentative moves towards reforming ATSIC and found it was impossible, i.e. no admission that what had been done was wrong and cries of it being racist intervention made it politically impossible to do anything especially since their own left-wing wouldn’t tolerate the ALP being seen as doing anything against Aboriginal “rights”.

Windshuttle is “so preoccupied with a long and tedious semantic debate over the word "land" in Tasmania” because it goes to the heart of his argument that there wasn’t extensive violence in Tasmania because the Tasmanian Aborigines didn’t feel a need to defend ownership/possession of the land. The other side of the debate is also preoccupied with a debate over the word "land" because they want to use history as a political tool in current land rights debates. That Tasmanian Aborigines were not concerned about ownership or possession of particular pieces of land and were more interested in acquiring food, metal implements, blankets, tobacco, alcohol, etc from white settlers is something they don’t want established. The idea that Tasmania Aborigines didn’t want to drive the British settlers off the land but instead treated them as a new resource to be exploited as a source of large quantities of highly desirable items doesn’t help with land rights claims.

In terms of what constitutes a ‘gain’ for aboriginal people, there are counter-arguments for pretty much everything. If you argue that having an elected representative body is a ‘gain’ for aboriginal people; even if it functioned perfectly and did what it was originally envisaged to do, someone else can argue that such a body is a mistake, that the very concept of a separate elected representative body for aboriginal people encourages separatism and that separatism isn’t in their best interests. Similar arguments and others can be applied to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UN-DRIP), to a Racial Discrimination Act written in such a way as to prevent intervention if a National Government believes it’s needed. It doesn’t matter that you and I may not agree with such a position, it’s still possible to make the argument.

Lastly the History wars is a lot more than a squabble over footnotes. It’s about whether ‘history should be fact-based with footnotes which lead to verifiable evidence, with said evidence being logically, reasonably assessed for credibility and reliability’ (I’m quoting myself here which is something of a rarity.) or whether people can just make stuff up, throw in a few false footnotes and call it History. Webley442 (talk) 04:52, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Excessive quotes and NPOV on the "Genocide debate"

I agree with 203.202.43.53 that excessive quotes are not needed. But I disagree with this edit as removal of statements such as

Much of this debate centers on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or whether the term 'genocide' might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers."(Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training)

I think it is useful because it explains to a person particularly a foreigner what the debate is about. I would like the person to explain why they think that line carries a biased point of view. --PBS (talk) 17:36, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

"Much of the debate over smoking concerns whether the term carcinogen should be applied to an agent like tobacco. Does the term carcinogen apply to a substance that merely fails to cure cancer?"
This is an issue of framing. By framing a debate about mass-murder as a debate over "crimes of omission", you make it sound like the debate is over crimes of omission. It's not. Its about killing lots and lots of people on purpose, so as to wipe them out.Likebox (talk) 19:00, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
I think you are misunderstanding the sentence, it is not saying that one or the other is correct but summing up in one sentence the two points of view. The legal definition of genocide has advance a long way in the last decade. Under that tight legal definition (as developed by the ICTY an the ICTR) only the deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers to exterminate the Aborigines would be a genocide, however the legal definition is not the only definition, other include genocide as including such things as reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers if they end up by causing an extermination similar to that which would have occurred if there had been a deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers intending to exterminate them. For example if the Europeans were to use the ground water to water their animals which dried up the traditional water holes, then failing to provide alternative drinking water for the animals and Aborigines could cause mass deaths though "unintended actions and omissions of settlers". --PBS (talk) 19:30, 29 May 2009 (UTC)
Yes, I know that this is how you would like to frame the debate. No dice. That framing is inappropriate for the actions in Tasmania, which were a wholesale reckless murder of an entire population. The sentence is more appropriate for other actions within mainland Australia, where the actions of the government were not so obviously, blatantly genocidal.Likebox (talk) 21:59, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Firstly, the removal of excessive quotes has my support, too. It is used far too often as a way of 'burying' an opposing point of view under a mass of quotes supporting the user's preferred position. The problem with quotes is that just because the person quoted said/wrote something doesn't mean he/she was right (or even truthful).

Secondly, Likebox, a considerable body of evidence has been presented (see Windschuttle’s Fabrication Vol 1) that relatively few Aborigines in Tasmania were killed by the direct action of settlers, i.e. by violence; and that the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian aboriginal community was largely the result of their lack of immunity to introduced diseases along with a number of other factors (including the loss of significant number of women of child-bearing age to sealers and other white settlers). Now obviously you don’t believe this. That’s your opinion. That doesn’t mean all other points of view have to be erased from the article otherwise this would be Likeboxpedia.

I personally don’t believe that the definition of genocide should be expanded to include the unintended consequences of British settlement, i.e. the spread of such diseases to people with little or no resistance/immunity. In my opinion, it is vitally important that genocide be defined in terms of intent, such as an intentional attempt to exterminate a particular group. Is there really no difference between the Nazis who deliberately piped toxic gas into the ‘showers’ and an otherwise peaceful colonist who unwittingly infects an indigenous group with influenza, especially if he/she has no way of knowing that it will be lethal to the indigenous group (and no way of preventing his/her own infection, anyway)? But obviously some people have different points of view and have a legitimate expectation that the article will be broad enough to encompass that. I’d have a problem with it if the paragraph had been framed as though it was accepted or proven fact that that genocide encompassed the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers. I don’t see any harm in reflecting the fact that some people think that it should. The readers of the article can make their own judgments on the issue. Webley442 (talk) 03:40, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

I started this commentary before Webley442's input, so I'll keep the indentation. Otherwise I haven't changed it. I have a problem with the argument of Likebox for a number of reasons, and I agree with those who would want to reinstate the extra words, but I simply hope to persuade Likebox to reinstate them. My POV is that the "Genocide debate" in the History wars went beyond what happened in Tasmania. However, so far as that part of it is concerned, the main problem with Likebox's argument is that the charge of "wholesale reckless murder of an entire population" is (a) impossible to prove and (b) offensive to the descendants of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, whose views on the matter have a right to be considered. In relation to the possibilities of proof, I recommend a 2002 PhD thesis by Ian McFarlane, supervised by Henry Reynolds which has "Genocide" in its subtitle, which you can read here [14]. McFarlane has assembled the best evidence available to him, but there are too many gaps in the record. On the one hand there is the undisputed fact that many more Aboriginal people lived in Tasmania than were found when George Augustus Robinson assembled the survivors in 1830 and later. But there is also the fact that the number known to have been killed in events like the Cape Grim massacre is far fewer than the number who died, whether one takes the minimal estimate of Windshuttle or the larger ones of his critics.
Or again, take Henry Reynolds' own article on "Genocide in Tasmania?" in Dirk Moses (ed) "Genocide and settler society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History" (2004), which you can partly read on the publisher's site here [15] I don't know if this supports Windshuttle's claim here [16] that "...even some people, like Henry Reynolds, agree with me there was no genocide, but others, like Lyndal Ryan, claim there was genocide. My critics have now walked away from the charge of genocide. They are not defending it in any way, shape or form, and so I take that as conceding that my charge there was no genocide in Tasmania, is now established." However the Green Left review by Ruth Ratcliffe of Reynolds' "The Indelibile Stain", which you can read here [17] cricises Reynolds for applying the definition of genocide in international law, thus:" To weigh into the genocide debate with abstract legalism and intellectual pedantry is a huge retreat for Reynolds and a disappointment for those who have gained so much from his previous work. Even if events in Australia don't fit the genocide convention to the letter, is that the point? Even if events do not strictly fit the definition of the convention, they come incredibly close. Continuing policies towards Indigenous people continue to result in such serious discrimination and disadvantage that genocide is the only appropriate term to use."
In this Wikipedia article about the "History wars" - as distinct from an article about the History of Australia or the facts of the particular issues - there has been a progress in editing towards limiting the content to the ways the issues were presented WITHIN the debate itself. I don't necessarily agree with this view, since my own POV is that the History squabble was only important beccause of the context in which it occurred - the difficulties Australia has had in coming to terms with its history after the referendum of 1967. However I agree that this particular article needs some limitation on its scope. Within that frame, it seems to me that what is relevant to explain to the NPOV reader is the way the term "genocide" has been used in Australia by different parties, since those who assert or deny it are often using particular definitions that suit their own case/s. This is true of many other terms that were used, as in the Bolt/Manne squabble. The framing that Likebox wants to have left out is in fact critical, because it is varying uses of the term "genocide" that were at issue, expressing the POVs of the disputants rather than facts (or as well as interpretation of such "facts" as could be agreed).
So as to avoid a debate of that kind here, let's look at the definition agreed in International Law. Australia was one of the first to ratify the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which you can read here[18]. Article 2 defines the term, and Article 3 defines the acts that are punishable:

Article 2 In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, 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.

Article 3 The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide.

In this definition, intent is critical in defining the crime of genocide in international law, but as is clear from Article 3 the defining crime itself (3a) is extended to other crimes, namely acts associated with it. Thus if we combine article 2(c) with article 3(d), for example, Direct and public incitement to commit (the crime of) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group is something that has been recognised as punishable under international law since the Convention came into force in 1951, if it was done "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". This is true of other combinations, which collectively span all the issues that were disputed in various parts of the History wars. It would not even need evidence of "wholesale reckless murder of an entire population" for the crime of genocide to be proved, since the Convention refers to the intention to destroy "in whole or in part". There can be no doubt that the intent of the Van Dieman's Land Company stockmen in the Cape Grim massacre was genocidal in that sense. However, if the term were to be limited only to cases of that kind, it ignores the vast majority of deaths whose direct cause is simply unknown. Those who wish to broaden the use of the term genocide to cover the effects, irrespective of direct provable intent, are not only using it in ways "...more appropriate for other actions within mainland Australia, where the actions of the government were not so obviously, blatantly genocidal..." but also for the case of Tasmania, where it may be true that the ACTIONS of the government were obviously genocidal in EFFECT (this being the very use that Likebox rejects) but where the evidence of intent is that the removals organised by Robinson were an alternative to "extermination" by settlers if the government - that is, Governor Arthur - did not take other action.

[Section removed by author here to start new section on 1937 meeting]123.3.98.39 (talk) 08:31, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

However, in discussing the History squabble, it seems to be agreed by most editors that the issue is to describe how the "History warriors" CHOSE to argue, and how they cited selections of historical evidence, and defined what kinds of historical evidence were admissable or not, to suit their case/s. The use of the term "genocide" in this context is not the international law definition. It is the way the term was used in the debate, and if a participant used it to include the situation in which dispossession and neglect and all sorts of other things contributed to a high (and continuing) death rate amongst members of the group, whether intended or not, or extended it to include "cultural genocide", that is a legitimate aspect of the debate, and should be described.
It is also worth noting the moral standard set by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples[19] now belatedly accepted by the Australian Government, where many articles bear on these issues, in particular Articles 7 and 8:

Article 7 1. Indigenous individuals have the rights to life, physical and mental integrity, liberty and security of person. 2. Indigenous peoples have the collective right to live in freedom, peace and security as distinct peoples and shall not be subjected to any act of genocide or any other act of violence, including forcibly removing children of the group to another group.

Article 8 1. Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture. 2. States shall provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for: (a) Any action which has the aim or effect of depriving them of their integrity as distinct peoples, or of their cultural values or ethnic identities; (b) Any action which has the aim or effect of dispossessing them of their lands, territories or resources; (c) Any form of forced population transfer which has the aim or effect of violating or undermining any of their rights; (d) Any form of forced assimilation or integration; (e) Any form of propaganda designed to promote or incite racial or ethnic discrimination directed against them.

At the risk of raising another contentious issue, I would point out that Article 8(e) seems to apply to the History wars. 123.3.98.39 (talk) 07:27, 30 May 2009 (UTC)


I am well aware that the notion of "genocide" extends to include acts other than wholesale slaughter. I also know that it is rarely applied to those cases, and it is mostly reserved for cases where one people decides to wipe another people out, and then tries to do it.
The historical consensus regarding Tasmania is that the white settlers decided to wipe out the Tasmanian aboriginal population, and then went ahead and did it, until the Tasmanians were all wiped out. Then some windbag wrote a book denying it. So what? It doesn't change historical consensus very much. The debate was, and is, over the question "did they kill lots and lots of people?" not over the question "Is withholding flu medicine genocide?".
The "debate", as far as I can see is entirely confined to Australia. If you are not subject to the political pressures unique to Australia, you don't see much of a debate.Likebox (talk) 13:20, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
It is normally the detailed research done by local historians that tend to undermine general theories. For example the work done in the UK on the local events (micro history) of the the English Civil War has had a dramatic impact on the macro interpretation of the war in general (see the section "Historiography and explanations of the English Civil War" in the article ECW. So it is likely that Australian historians are going to be at the forefront of any new developments in the understanding of Australian history, particularly those developments about the events involving internal Australian history. Under your gingering I re-wrote the section on this in the Genocides in history article entitled "Australia". For the re-write used
  • 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
I do not think we should go into details about what is or not the correct genocide definitions on this talk page that is not necessary, nor do I think we should blank out half the debate just because we do not like the point of view put forward by historians we disagree with. I intend to re-instate the section as it was before the edit Likebox, not because the section could not do with improvement. But because the sentences removed by Likebox bought balance to the section. Likebox I would strongly recommend that you read WP:writing for the enemy and try to understand that Wikipedia has to present all POVs including those you disagree with. If you can find reliable sources that back up your opinions then include them, but last time we asked you to do so you did not come up with one reliable source. --PBS (talk) 14:00, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
Likebox build a consensus for the changes you wish to make. You made a bold change, I reverted that bold change after giving you time to explain you position (see WP:BOLD). You have not managed to get one other editor to agree with your position. If you revert my revert without building a consensus for the change you are likely to find your account blocked for edit warring. -- PBS (talk) 16:28, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
Likebox I am reverting your changes again "Many mainstream figures considered the events on Tasmania as a defining instance of genocide, among them Raphael Lemkin who coined the term." is bias as such a statement could easily be turned on its head, to present another point of view. EG "The view in the 1930's by such people as Raphael Lemkin working with less information than is available to modern historians, were of the opinion ..."
"The entire native population of Tasmania was wiped out by settlers, many of whom were extirpationists, which means that killing the native population was their aim ( Henry Reynolds, from Genocide and settler society By A. Dirk Moses, p 128-148)" If one reads what he wrote this is a misinterpretation. In the words of Richard J. Evans "Reputable and professional historians ... do not consciously attribute their own conclusions to books and other sources which in fact, on closer inspection, actually say the opposite."paragraph 6.20.
Likebox, I am not sure why you want to keep removing the fact that at the centre of this debate is different interpretations of what genocide means. For example the Genocide article includes the paragraph:
Writing in 1998 Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Björnson stated that the CPPCG was a legal instrument resulting from a diplomatic compromise. As such the wording of the treaty is not intended to be a definition suitable as a research tool, and although it is used for this purpose, as it has a international legal credibility that other lack, other definitions have also been postulated. Jonassohn and Björnson go on to say that non of these alternative definitions have gained widespread support for various reasons.
There is no point discussing the Australian debate unless this point is brought to the for, because without it it make it seem that there is a right and wrong answer to the debate when in fact, neither party is wrong they just have different opinions. Given that I am not sure why you delete the paragraph "Historians such as Tony Barta ...or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aborigines to starve to death, the result is in his opinion genocide." when Tony Barta is Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and his opinions are noted and mentioned in the given source (Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training) which shows that his views are notable and are within some of the definitions of genocide. For example the article genocide definitions includes definitions by Tony Barta (1987), Henry Huttenbach (1988), and Israel Charny (1994) which all support the view put forward by Tony Barta.
For these reasons I am going to revert your changes. Please in future discuss the changes you wish to make to the section "Genocide debate" here before making them so we can reach a consensus on the changes. --PBS (talk) 10:40, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
(I got caught in an edit conflict on this one, since I came into the debate just after (talk) 16:28, 30 May 2009 (UTC) had asked Likebox to build consensus. I have no idea where we aare now with these reverts of reverts, but the following remains relevant, probably) 123.3.98.39 (talk) 12:20, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
I am willimg to go with Likebox in presenting Henry Melville's 1835 account, though I agree with others that it is important to explain that much of the "History wars" (as distinct from real History in which people died) is over definitions. That is why I added the "see also", to respond to PBS's comment that: "I do not think we should go into details about what is or not the correct genocide definitions on this talk page." It is pretty obvious that it needs to be mentioned somewhere, and I don't understand why anyone would want to remove it. However, to get back to the immediate point, the Melville ref is useful since it allows links to the ADB biographies of Henry Melville, who was a journalist of the time and in nearly as much trouble with the courts as Andrew Bolt and not popular with the colonial administration of Governor George Arthur, and of Arthur himself, as well as a wiki link. Collectively these make a point that the debate is not new. Melville undoubtedly said what he said, and Arthur's progression from "soft" to "hard" policies might well be related to the money he was making from land sales, as the ADB biographies show. Whether or not Melville's account of deaths is true is anyone's guess, but he was on the spot at the time, and it seems he had trouble writing his history because the Government refused to supply him with statistical information.
The paper that quotes Melville would generally be regarded as quoting only the pre-Windshuttle views, but they are in fact a majority view, as Likebox keeps saying. (Which is important for History, but not so important for the History wars, since the issue is why such a minority view created such a fuss, which in my POV is because it had powerful supporters and is related to the fact that Keith Windshuttle got to be a commissioner on the ABC, just as Ron Brunton had done earlier, and just as Blainey was, for a while, appointed with Gerard Henderson to correct the national history syllabus, and just as the Aboriginal director of the museum lost her job and the Braille inscriptions of "sorry" and "forgive us our genocide" were covered over with aluminium disks.) However, staying within the frame in which none of this has anything to do with Howard government policies, I should point out that the link for historians (plural) believing that disease played a minor role in Tasmian before 1829 is weak. The author may or may not be a historian, since all we have is the name, and elsewhere the "Inventory of Conflict and the Environment" (ICE) website indicates that these "cases" are student projects. The structured analyses of conflict are very interesting, and the Tasmanian one strips the conflict to the bone - ie competition for resouces, ie land. However, the Author Rehan Ali is otherwise unidentified, and in any case says only: "Unlike in North American, disease from the colonists was not really a major decimating factor for the aboriginal population until 1829. By that time extended periods of interaction and transmission of diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, and dysentery via aboriginal women started to effect the remaining population. There are not really any records of aboriginal deaths due to disease so the actual impact is hard to estimate." There are no in-text citations to know what evidence is being relied on for the various parts of this statement. The references include all the standards, and also Windshuttle. It seems balanced, but it is superficial in places and doesn't really prove anything: for example, one could quote it just as accurately by saying: "There are not really any records of aboriginal deaths due to disease so the actual impact (of disease prior to 1829) is hard to estimate". This is true, and not just in Tasmania, so in the absence of another reference, I think this one should go, or be considerably watered down in the claim made for it. It certainly shows how the Tasmanian situation looks to outsiders - another point that Likebox has made repeatedly, and which is relevant for Wikipedia.
However, since one thing we DO know is that there is no record of smallpox in Tasmania, that might be worth mentioning since there was no known epidemic that would have killed many people, as occurred on the mainland. In that context, I note that PBS said '...I rewrote the section on this in the Genocides in history article entitled "Australia"'. When I went to look I saw text about Aboriginal people in Tasmania dying of diseases "such as smallpox", which I could not fix since the whole article is locked because of edit wars in other places. So perhaps PBS could put other diseases in place of smallpox. regards, 123.3.98.39 (talk) 12:20, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
I should really have said I re-wrote the section. After a lot of binary chopping through the history of the article Genocides in history, I found this edit: Revision as of 18:38, 23 October 2007 by user:Arcot which introduced the sentence with this "Historian dismisses Tasmanian aboriginal genocide "myth"" as the source. But the source only says "He argues only 118 Tasmanian Aborigines were killed directly by the British. The rest died from a lethal cocktail of introduced diseases." so I'll remove the specific diseases from the genocides article immediately, If anyone objects then I'll have to re-instate it. until the protection comes off.
As to your other points I think the two papers I mentioned above show that it is not just Windshuttle verses the rest. It seem that Henry Reynolds has modified his position (or his position was never as extreme as some others have claimed) and I think a particularly pertinent quote is Anne Curthoys' "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." --PBS (talk) 15:01, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Extermination camps

The events on Tasmania involve setting up extermination camps, after murdering thousands of people. This is not contested outside of Australia, and even there, only by a few right-wing buffoons.Likebox (talk) 04:59, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


Likebox, do the basic reading before making a fool of yourself again. Even the most extreme of the black armband historians don't claim that there were extermination camps in Tasmania. Webley442 (talk) 05:14, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I am not going to read anything more. My mind it made up. It's never going to change.
The setup on Flinder's Island was basically an extermination camp, minus the gas. The terminology didn't exist then, but the basic idea was put people in a place without sufficient supplies and care, until they all die out.Likebox (talk) 22:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Initial Meeting of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, 1937

(I am not sure what Wiki policy is on editing discussions, but it seems sensible to separate this one)123.3.98.39 (talk) 08:59, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I am surprised that no-one thus far has referred to the evidence of (later) government policies in the 1937 Initial meeting of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities where what they called "The destiny of the race" was spelled out unambiguously. It is tricky to find, but Google (in quotes) "Commonwealth and State Aboriginal" will work. You can read the report of the whole meeting in a scanned image at AITSIS here[1] You can read a contemporary report of the meeting in the "Canberra Times" here.[2] They resolved:

That this Conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end. (See p. 21.) In the light of this document, for Andrew Bolt or anyone else to argue that there was no government policy to remove children based on their "race" is nonsense. There is no doubt that the intent of this policy of assimilation was to forcibly transfer children from one group to another, and to destroy a culture. There is equally no doubt that the parallel policy of "protection" was based on the view that those "protected" would die out. Until the referendum of 1967 (in most states) there was no need to refer to Child Welfare laws as the main legal basis for removal.123.3.98.39 (talk) 08:59, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

Just to jump back to some of 123.3.98.39’s earlier comments. Perhaps the reason you, 123.3.98.39, are the first to refer to the 1937 Initial meeting of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities document as some kind of proof of a broad Government policy to remove children based on their "race" of the type that Andrew Bolt denies existed, is that you have somehow seen something in that document that no-one else does. I’ve been over it line by line (thanks for the link, much appreciated, I’ve only seen fragmented excerpts in the past, not very satisfactory) and it doesn’t seem to endorse achieving the ultimate absorption of persons of mixed descent by a policy of removing children at all. There are, however, references to colonies and settlements being established for persons of mixed descent and that the children in these colonies/settlements should be given at education “at white standards” and their “subsequent employment under the same conditions as whites with a view to their taking their place in the white community on an equal footing with the whites”.

The closest it comes to referring to the removal of children are the comments of A.O. Neville on the last page where he states that in “Western Australia we have power under the act to take any child from its mother at any stage of its life, no matter whether the mother be legally married or not.” However although referring to having that power, he goes on to say “It is, however, our intention to establish sufficient settlements to undertake the training and education of these children so that they may become absorbed into the general community.” The way that I read this statement is as an intention of establishing the sort of colonies/settlements I referred to above, i.e. that rather than use the power to take the children away from the mother, the preferred course of action would be to have persons of mixed descent live together in these settlements whilst educating their children “at white standards” in preparation for “taking their place in the white community on an equal footing with the whites”.

As for your statement: “There is equally no doubt that the parallel policy of "protection" was based on the view that those "protected" would die out.” Yes, absolutely true. At the time, it was believed that those under protection, the “full-blooded” Aborigines, were ‘dying out’ (not reproducing fast enough to keep up their numbers) and that as more Aborigines were attracted by the “delights‘ of Western Civilisation, there would be more and more people of mixed descent born and fewer “full-bloods”. At that time, it was thought that those of mixed descent when absorbed into the broader community would not consider themselves to be Aborigines. It’s not like anyone was setting up extermination camps. Webley442 (talk) 01:45, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

OK, now that I've put these together, let's start with a point of clarification, namely that it is Likebox, not me, who refers to "Extermination camps", and I don't aim to get involved in that debate, other than to say that my POV is that the EFFECT is clear, and the INTENT is not, and that the British authorities in Tasmania were no more or less guilty of the deaths than they were when they set up the Concentration camps for civilians in South Africa during the Boer War 70 years later and tens of thousands died in them.

The next point is about an edit that you made re Ernestine Hill that bears on this present issue of the opinions expressed by the "Aboriginal Authorities" at their 1937 meeting - one of them being Cecil Cook from the NT. Your rationale for removing it is that Hill only recorded Cecil Cook's "personal opinion". It is more complicated than that. The point is that in the Gunner and Cubillo cases - which were reviewed in the second link I gave about difficulties in disputing written records - a key point was that the Commonwealth was judged NOT to have Vicarious liability for the actions of the Protectors in the Northern Territory before self-government, because they were appointed with extremely wide discretion. Thus Gunner and Cubillo could sue the estate of the (dead) Protector relevant to their removal, if the actions (or failure to protect) was unlawful in other ways, but the Commonwealth was safe from paying compensation if the court found in favour of them.

A summary of the case is at [3] and in part it says this, where the role of Protector is actually called Director: "(T)he Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (NT) ... made a Director of Native Affairs guardian of every ‘aboriginal’ and ‘half-caste’ child (s 7). The Director could remove them if ‘necessary or desirable in [their] interests’ (s 6), and detain them in approved institutions (s 16). Although a child’s interests were the ‘dominant consideration’ under the detention power, the Director could also take account of the interests of their family and ‘the community generally’. ...

(b) Vicarious liability Justice O’Loughlin held the Commonwealth not liable for actions of the Directors or missions. The Director’s removal power (and, apparently, his detention power) was an independent statutory discretion turning on his opinion as to the child’s interests, not that of the Administrator or Minister. The Director bore responsibility for any torts committed in its exercise. Commonwealth vicarious liability might arise only if a Director acted outside his powers. Similarly, the Commonwealth was not responsible for Directors’ failure to supervise the institutions. Those duties were cast on the Directors and did not permit interference by the Administrator, the Minister or the Commonwealth.

Thus, by definition, Cecil Cook's personal opinions - which were freely expressed and probably shared by a majority of Australians and Territorians at the time - were the "policy", since he had discretion to make it, and act on it, in whatever he conceived to be the "best interests" of a variety of parties, including that convenient catch-all, "the community generally". This is (for example) quite different from the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child which the Commonwealth invoked in support of the NT intervention - or at least, certain parts of it.

So, you can't have it both ways. Either Cook was merely an agent of the Commonwealth Government/s and his personal opinions aren't directly relevant, or else - as the successor of those Governments argued in Gunner and Cubillo - he had discretion to act on those opinions, subject only - as everyone is - to the rest of the legal framework of the time. In the latter case his personal opinions are directly relevant. But it was not appropriate to put all of that in a non-main article where the issue was how the debaters failed to consider some pretty obvious documentary evidence of various kinds.

I gave the Ernestine Hill reference because a check of other wikipedia entries showed that there is no article on the Cecil Cook of interest here in the section on Protector of Aborigines, whereas Ernestine Hill connects with Daisy Bates who in turn married Breaker Morant amongst others, which connects the NPOV reader into some post-Federation history on these matters, and even a mildly relevant consideration of the morality of the British in (arguably) making a scapegoat of Morant when the British domestic public was questioning their method of carrying out the war - not least the Concentration camps. Someone should write an article on Cecil Cook, and the other NT protectors, such as Harry Giese -- see for example, Marcia Langton's mention of Giese, at [4]. They had immense power, and how they used it, and why, is probably more important to people living now than the squabble over British colonial history.

I figure that a personal "no revert" rule makes sense, so I leave it to you to do what you think best in the light of this. One could cite a mountain of material that was not covered in the debates, which sits poorly with (for example) Keith Windshuttle's stated preference for "facts" or Andrew Bolt's demand for "ten cases". Robert Manne's list was a lazy response from reports of Protectors like Walter Roth and although Bolt's response was just as superficial, the point is that neither seemed to be very interested in getting at a NPOV.

Which remind me of another edit that I propose to change slightly, to NPOV the "individual cases" statement, which in my original version was more against the Bolt style than the Manne style, and in yours goes the other way. I will aim to NPOV it, since both sides did it.

As to me seeing things in the 1937 meeting that aren't there, it is a couple of years since I read it, and I was reading it in conjunction with the BTH report and the Oral History project book and Gunner & Cubillo, and many other things. There is certainly no doubt in MY mind that there was a policy, that it was based on "race" as defined at the time, that all of the Protectors had theories about what was best for Aboriginal people and - since you have read it line for line - you know that they were not inclined to invite missionaries and anthropologists into their debates to help them theorise, that they had theories about "higher" and "lower" types of "half-castes" that might be offensive to some of Australia's current trading partners, or US President Obama, and so on. One could selectively cite to make them out to be much worse than they were, or much better thah they were, in modern eyes, whereas it would be fairer to say that they probably expressed the view of the majority of australians of their day. However, I simply chose to cite the broad result, namely that "Assimilation" was "broad policy" as agreed by the "Authorities', and that it was based on "race" as they defined it, and that it involved removal, using the (various) powers available to them - which were not the same in all jurisdictions. This reference is the conventional one for the clearest statement of the combined "protection"/ "assimilation" policies that existed for many years.

In my POV, a debate about the existence (or not) of "a broad government policy ...of the type that Andrew Bolt denies existed" is a pointless one, because one can quibble over the meaning of "broad", "government", "policy", and many other things, and frankly, the debate between Manne and Bolt about what did or did not exist is an undedifying spectacle. The "Authorities" who met in Canberra in 1937 were charged (with varying powers) by their Governments to manage Aboriginal people in ways that no-one else in Australia was managed. They stated their views as to how this was to be done, which is a reasonable definition of THEIR "policy". In a number of matters, such as "the destiny of the race" they agreed - which collectively covered the whole of Australia, and might thus be called "broad". The Governments who appointed and paid them did not disown THEIR policy, so one can reasonably conclude it was Government policy too. Did it involve "removal"? Well, some of them were in fact the legal guardians of "Aboriginal" people - which was variably defined at different time - and so one could argue that they certainly didn't remove children from their LEGAL guardians. Would that make Bolt correct? For a debating society, perhaps. They certainly had powers to remove children, and I have given the references for the discretionary powers that Cecil Cook had in that respect, in the NT, which included consideration of the interests of ‘the community generally’, though the interests of the child were supposed to be 'dominant'. In 1937 the interests of the Australian community generally - as expressed in that Initial Meeting - are probably best left there. In theory the "Authorities" might have carried out their various schemes without the use of any of the things that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was charged to examine under its terms of reference, namely: (a) trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies;. As a result, we know the "Authorities" used those powers of removal. Was it "laws", "policy", or "practice"? Bolt's debating-society games aren't really the point here. [Though in the article, they are.]

Note the words. "Laws, PRACTICES, and policies" which RESULTED in the "SEPARATION ... from their FAMILIES" by "COMPULSION", "DURESS" or "UNDUE INFLUENCE". The HREOC considered all of the last three as "forcible removal" - another definition, and people might disagree about it, but that is what BTH was charged to examine, by a Labor Government, though it reported to a Coalition one. OK, so what did I say I saw in the Initial meeting? In the light of this document, for Andrew Bolt or anyone else to argue that there was no government policy to remove children based on their "race" is nonsense. I leave it to readers to decide on the meaning of "policy" and "nonsense". And, since the link is hard to find, why not insert it somewhere, and let others form their own opinion? Regards 123.3.98.39 (talk) 08:59, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

My interest in this article is to balance the views on genocide or alleged genocide, so some of what you are debating is of no direct interest to me, however I wish to make some points. The first, 123.3.98.39 as you are now actively editing Wikipedia and not just making a small correction before passing on to another web page, please create an account, and secondly be concise (Wikipedia:TALK#How to use article talk pages). To all of us currently editing this page, it is necessary to be concise on the article page which ideally should not be over 32k in length, so if there is a dedicated article to a topic such as "Stolen Generations" then the section on the "stolen generation" can be in summary style, (in which case the debate about content over the stolen generation should take place on that page with an overview on this page). Finally on content of the article, see WP:ASF, WP:SYN and WP:UNDUE --PBS (talk) 09:54, 31 May 2009 (UTC)


OK, firstly my regrets if anything I did made you believe that I was implying you were Likebox. I’m confident you’re not. Actually I think that I used the term ‘extermination camps’ first, in the context you noted, and Likebox then started to use it.

Now, you state: “Thus, by definition, Cecil Cook's personal opinions - which were freely expressed and probably shared by a majority of Australians and Territorians at the time - were the "policy"…..” and the text I edited stated that the Hill interview “makes it clear what the policy was”. Whose policy, the Australian Federal Government’s? Until the 1967 referendum, the Federal Government didn’t have power under the Constitution to make laws with respect to aboriginal people, that power was expressly reserved to the States. Until 1967, the only areas in Australia where the Federal Government had any power to make laws and policy with respect to aboriginal people was in the Territories, N.T. and the A.C.T. Are you arguing that all the States just followed what was done in the N.T and adopted identical practices? I’m pretty sure that’s not what happened. So where is this one all-encompassing “policy” of stealing them away that apparently was applied to aboriginal children all over Australia? It’s not mentioned in the 1937 Initial meeting of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities document. Who formulated it? How was it promulgated?

Were Cecil Cook’s personal opinions the Australian Federal Government’s policies? From what you’ve quoted of the legislation “"(T)he Aboriginals Ordinance 1918 (NT) ... made a Director of Native Affairs guardian of every ‘aboriginal’ and ‘half-caste’ child (s 7). The Director could remove them if ‘necessary or desirable in [their] interests’ (s 6), and detain them in approved institutions (s 16). Although a child’s interests were the ‘dominant consideration’ under the detention power, the Director could also take account of the interests of their family and ‘the community generally’. ...” There’s nothing in there about removing aboriginal children from their people as a means of gradually exterminating the aboriginal race which is what people claim was the policy behind ‘stealing’ the children. Did the policy change when Cook left the position and did the opinions of the next Protector then become the policy? Was it different under the Protector before him?

It seems to me that the Australian Federal Government’s policy was to provide a broad legislative framework for the care of ‘aboriginal’ and ‘half-caste’ children, directing their agent to act when it was ‘necessary or desirable in [their] interests’ and then they got on with other business of Government.

Should the Federal Government be held liable for the actions of their agent? If he was acting ostensibly under their authority and they failed to properly supervise him, I’d say so. But that’s not the same as it being their ‘policy’, it’s more like negligence. Webley442 (talk) 10:42, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I will try to abide by my shiny new username and keep it short. I see that Robert Manne has tackled the 1937 conference and the expressions of opinions leading up to it at[5] found by Google="Cecil Cook" protector, so it is no longer true what I said originally, namely that the protagonists had failed to consider the documentary evidence such as Cook's opinions. And of course Manne is not bound by NPOV so he doesn't have to debate what is policy or not. We will have to agree to disagree.
I will summarise the (very long) opinions of the Justices of the High Court in Kruger v Commonwealth ("Stolen Generations case") [1997] HCA 27; (1997) 190 CLR 1; (1997) 146 ALR 126; (1997) 71 ALJR 991 (31 July 1997) at [6], which was cited by the Australian Government (1999)to CERD as part of its report in relation to the stolen generations. The plaintiffs argued that the relevant NT Ordinance was unconstitutional in various ways, and lost (since as the Justices so cogently pointed out, our constitution does not guarantee equality, or freedom of association, etc etc, especially in Territories); and argued in relation to the genocide convention,and lost. They did not challenge the legality of the actions, or a Director/Protector's use of his powers, but the validity of the law that gave them to him. (Presumably because there was no piunt suing the Director.) The Judges concluded the powers (mostly) were legal, in part because they expressed good intentions, and did not consider the lawfulness of how a Protector/Director used them, or the responsibility of the Commonwealth Government - as distinct from the courts - not to be "negligent" (as you say) in supervising the actions of its agent. As Justice Toohey said, of the argument about the Ordinance being illegal because it violated the "transferring children" component of the genocide convention: "Each of the "acts" which spells out genocide is qualified by the opening words "with intent to destroy". There is nothing in the Ordinance, according to it the ordinary principles of construction, which would justify a conclusion that it authorised acts "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part" the plaintiffs' racial group." but then he added "Once again, at the risk of undue repetition, it is necessary to keep in mind that it is the validity of the Ordinance, not any exercise of power under the Ordinance, which is the subject of these proceedings."
In other words, so long as you don't actually say in the legislation that the intent is to destroy, the actions taken under it have to be judged separately, by the courts, if someone brings an action. Toohey J continues: "The point of this legislative history (of the development of the 1918 Ordinance)is that it lends force to the submission that the Ordinance was seen at the time as serving a welfare purpose. While the means adopted to achieve such a purpose would now be regarded as entirely unacceptable, there is a question as to how far any assessment can be divorced from the perceptions of the time."" A bit later there is a quote from a 1951 case [7]where abuse of power was claimed by an Aboriginal person removed and sent to a reservation after being employed by a union in the NT, and Fullagar J said:
"The powers which the Director wields are vast, and those over whom he wields them are likely often to be weak and helpless. His responsibility is heavy. When he acts, every presumption has to be made in his favour. He must often act on his own opinion in circumstances of difficulty, and no court can substitute its opinion for his. But, on the other hand, the courts must be alert to see that, if that which is not expected does happen and he does mistake or abuse his power, the mistake or abuse does not go either undetected or unredressed. ... It was argued that, both under s 6 and under s 16, the only consideration which should affect the discretion of the Director was the welfare of the particular aboriginal concerned. This may be so under s 6, but, so far as s 16 is concerned, it is, in my opinion, by no means the only legitimate consideration. Unlike s 6, s 16 contains no reference to the formation of any particular opinion on the part of the Director. The discretion given is in terms absolute. I have no intention, on such an application as this, of laying down any rules for the guidance of the Director. But I think I should say that, in my opinion, he may legitimately take into consideration a number of other factors in addition to the welfare of the particular aboriginal concerned, and that these include the welfare of other aboriginals and the general interests of the community in which the particular aboriginal dwells." Judge for yourself. "No court can substitute its opinion for his" ..." "...terms absolute..." Cook's personal opinions were VERY relevant, and so were the perceptions of the Australians who wrote the constitution and attended the 1937 meeting. Now read Manne's POV on what they were. regards, Keepitshort (talk) 15:28, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Not real impressed by anything Manne has said in the past (he's a Professor of Politics and it shows) but I'll take a look at it. Webley442 (talk) 10:09, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Looked at the Manne material, still underwhelmed by Manne's opinions. He loves trying to link Australian policies to the Nazis but he's very careful to not to mention that the Nazis were horrified by the prospect of anyone having a drop of Jewish blood in them, so much so that they had genealogists go back I think 8 generations, or more in some cases, to establish that there were no Jews in the family. He also doesn't like to mention that their solution was to exterminate people with Jewish blood not intermarry with them. And the Australian policy that he compares to theirs? Part 1. an acceptance or acknowledgment that full-blooded Aborigines would eventually disappear as more mixed race children were born as more aboriginal women, in particular, had children by non-aboriginal fathers. Part 2. Acceptance of the mixed race children, proposals to provide them with education and employment "to white standards" and an expectation that as time went by and they inter-married with "whites", the differences between them and "white society" would disappear. Rather than objecting to a single drop of aboriginal blood, they expected and encouraged inter-racial marriage. Not really comparable at all but somehow Manne still manages to drag in the Nazis. Webley442 (talk) 08:09, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

References cited in discusson

  1. ^ Scanned Text of 1937 Meeting report at AITSIS [1]
  2. ^ Article on 1937 meeting in Canberra Times [2]
  3. ^ Review of Stolen Generations litigation [3]
  4. ^ Marcia Langton on Harry Giese [4]
  5. ^ Robert Manne on Cecil Cook [5]
  6. ^ Kruger v Commonwealth (1997) [6]
  7. ^ Case on abuse of power by Director (NT, 1951) [7]

Genocide Debate 1

The two acts considered in this section are:

  1. The annihilation by mass murder of the Tasmanian population
  2. The introduction, perhaps deliberate, of Smallpox into mainland Australia

This is mass murder, not withholding aid. So it is self-serving and ridiculous to frame the debate as "does genocide encompasses crimes of omission...", because these accusations are not of crimes of omission. They are crimes of mass-murder.Likebox (talk) 23:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

I see no point in debating what you or I or any other editor of Wikipedia thinks is or is not genocide. If you read the genocide article, the genocide definitions article, and the Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, there are a number of different opinions as to what is or is not genocide. Possibly the clearest indication of that was given in the Bosnian Genocide Case when the court president said the case dealt "exclusively with genocide in a limited legal sense and not in the broader sense sometimes given to this term." It is quite possible for experts on the destruction of the Aboriginal populations of Australia to agree that destruction took place without agreeing that it was a genocide, because of the "mens rea" aspect of the crime of genocide (see Momčilo Krajišnik). One interesting development in this area of the killing of indigenous peoples, is the use by Brazilian courts of laws derived from the the Genocide Convention to convict people for genocidal attacks on members of tribes such as the Yanomami (see Genocides in history#Brazil), as it implies that while there is no agreement that the destruction of the native populations of America at the macro level was a genocide, it is quite possible that the destruction of parts of that general population at the micro level can be considered so. -- PBS (talk) 06:45, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Section keeps getting changed

I don't feel like digging up the same sources again and again, so for future reference, here is what I think the section should look like:

Genocide debate 2

In recent years, there has been a debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the genocide of groups of Aborigines, in particular the Tasmanian Aborigines. Many mainstream figures, including Raphael Lemkin, consider the events on Tasmania as a defining instance of genocide. The entire native population of Tasmania was wiped out by settlers, many of whom were extirpationists, which means that killing the native population was their aim.[1]

The mainstream debate on the issue of genocide is to what extent the governing body of the settler outposts had a goal of extermination in mind[2]. What is known is that Governor George Arthur[3] declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered any soldier to shoot any Aboriginal on sight. Journalist and publisher Henry Melville[4], 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” [5][6]

Kenneth Minogue, an Australian political scientist, and Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian, believe that no genocide took place on Tasmania.[7][8]. Minogue believes that Australians fabricated the genocide out of white guilt, while Windschuttle believes that diseases were responsible for the deaths of the Tasmanians. Disease is not believed by other historians to have played any major role in Tasmania before 1829.[9]

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. [10]

Historian Judy Campbell argues that in addition to the well documented smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1829-32, there were earlier undocumented smaller epidemics in the 1860s. 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. [11] This view has not met with widespread acceptence[12], and has been specifically challenged by historian Craig Mear.[13] 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.

Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victims, it makes little difference if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated by European smallpox, or starve to death because of the introduction of European farming, the result is in his opinion genocide.[14]

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."[15] These questions of definition are important for the stolen generations debate, which did not involve mass murder.

  1. ^ Henry Reynolds, from Genocide and settler society By A. Dirk Moses, p 128-148
  2. ^ http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html
  3. ^ http://[George Arthur biography adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010034b.htm]
  4. ^ [Henry Melville biography: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm]
  5. ^ Melville, 1835, p 33, requoted from Madley
  6. ^ http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf
  7. ^ Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History. Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training
  8. ^ Windschuttle, Keith
  9. ^ http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/tasmania.htm
  10. ^ http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34755365_ITM
  11. ^ Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 - 1880, by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press, pp 55, 61
  12. '^ 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
  13. ^ [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]
  14. ^ Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Tony Barta, Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Isidor Wallimann & Michael N. Dobkowski (eds.), New York, Westport, Connecticut, London, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 237-251.
  15. ^ David Day (2008). "Disappeared". The Monthly: 70–72. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
I will copy and paste from this from now on. I will discuss the recent changes one by one, and explain why they are inappropriate.Likebox (talk) 15:14, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

First revision

The major changes (with comments):

See also: Genocide definitions
This is inappropriate. The debate is not, and never was, about what the exact definition of genocide is.

In recent years, there has been a debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the genocide of groups of Aborigines, in particular the Tasmanian Aborigines. Henry Reynolds points out that Raphael Lemkin, an expert on the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, considered the events in Tasmania as a defining instance of genocide. Reynolds also points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aborigines during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent"[1] and that he regards this as an indicator of genocide.

Too much attribution. "Reynolds says that Lemkin says" is redundant. Just say Lemkin says. Nobody disputes that Lemkin said it. Also, Lemkin was not an expert on the Holocaust when he talked about Genocide, he coined the term in 1943. He was referring to the Armenian Genocide, and to Tasmania.

Historian Keith Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the ‘deliberate genocide’ argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context. In particular, he accuses Reynolds of selectively quoting from responses to an 1830 survey in Tasmania in that Reynolds quoted only from those responses that could be construed as advocating "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" and failed to mention other responses to the survey, which indicated that a majority of respondents rejected genocide, were sympathetic to the plight of the Aborigines, feared that conflict arising from Aboriginal attacks upon settlers would result in the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines and advocated the adoption of courses of action to prevent this happening. [2]

Windschuttle's rebuttal does not deserve this much space, nor should it be placed in this section. He is writing for a minority position, which means he gets less space than the mainstream Lemkin and Churchill and everybody else.

The debate on the issue of genocide has also incorporated to what extent, if any, the Colonial Administration had a goal of extermination in mind[3]. Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur[4] declared martial law in November 1828, and created what he called 'roving parties' to rove the settled districts, to capture Aborigines there and to shoot any Aboriginal who resisted. He instructed the military officers and magistrates in the area that the use of arms was to be a last resort, with the policy of conciliation that he had instituted to continue. At the same time, he informed London that his aim was to force the Aborigines out of the settled districts rather than kill them.[5] During the period of martial law, on 19 August 1930, Arthur issued a notice: "His Excellency earnestly requests that all settlers and others will strictly enjoin their servants cautiously to abstain from acts of aggression against these benighted beings, and that they will themselves personally endeavour to conciliate them wherever it may be practicable; and whenever the Aborigines appear without evincing a hostile feeling, that no attempt shall be made either to capture or restrain them, but, on the contrary, after being fed and kindly treated, that they shall be suffered to depart whenever they desire it." [6]

This rewriting is not neutral--- the martial law declaration meant that murder of natives would not be prosecuted. Whether you think that was genocide or not. It is inappropriate to list government statements which contradict the consensus of historians about the events without revealing the historical consensus.
I don't have major complaints with the rewrite in the next parts, except for verbosity and style. The exception is the last sentence:

These arguments and dfinitions are also relevant to the issue of the stolen generations.

That's not appropriate. These arguments and definitions are only relevant to the issue of the stolen generations. They are not relevant at all for the events in Tasmania, which are exactly parallel to all other known genocides, except on a smaller scale. Likebox (talk) 15:28, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
  1. ^ Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Ringwood, Viking, 2001, p. 2.
  2. ^ Windschuttle, pp. 326-350.
  3. ^ http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html
  4. ^ George Arthur biography
  5. ^ Arthur to Murray, 4 November 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies Australia, 4, p 181
  6. ^ Colonial Times, 16 July 1830, p 3

Genocide debate 3

I am not sure that these edits have improved the section as I think if one reads Henry Reynolds chapter "Genocide in Tasmania?" in A. Dirk Moses's Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814108, 9781571814104, pp. 127-147 which was published two of three years after he cited source, he presents a different set of arguments and does not necessarily, disagree as fundamentally with Keith Windschuttle, as the 2001/2002 source implies. It seems to me (reading Anne Curthoys's chapter in "Genocide in Tasmania" in A. Dirk Moses's Empire, Colony, Genocide,: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History,pp. 229-247) that Australian historians have been busy synthesiaing a new paradigm, which may not be fully formed but the two camps as they were in the late 1990s are no longer so far apart.

Also I still think it is important to include the sentence "Much of this debate centers on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or whether the term 'genocide' might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers (Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training)"

Ho-hum, I see that Likebox has reverted to his/her new version (since I started to write this comment). Without trying to address any of the issues raised, by Webley442's edit to his/her version. -- PBS (talk) 15:30, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I adressed these changes in the previous section on this page. The problem is only this: there is a historical consensus on the events on Tasmania, and there is a debate on whether this constitutes genocide. The debate is over government intent, and complicity. The rewrites put Windschuttle and Lemkin on the same footing, when Windschuttle is arguing for a minority position and Lemkin for the majority. That's not consistent with Undue Weight.Likebox (talk) 15:35, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
OK then is this what you are saying "After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s the Black War and the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines became a text book example of a genocide. However more recent detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction by historians who specialise in Australian history have raised questions about this interpretation of history." --PBS (talk) 15:47, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
That's Ok, as long as you reveal what the debate is really about. The article on "frontier genocide" is a very good source--- it describes the issues when assigning responsibility to governing bodies in weakly governed entities, like colonian outposts. Is Arthur to blame? I don't think that he personally wanted to exterminate the natives. But his policies led to extermination. So most historians would say "yes, Arthur is to blame", and fewer say "no, the settlers are to blame". Then some people would say this is a genocide, while others would say it might not fit, because the government did not make extinction the end goal.
But then there is also the really loopy stuff, where one guy says "The Tasmanians really died of smallpox". This is a nonsense denialist position, and does not deserve much space at all. It only needs to be acknowledged at all because it raised so many hackles in the media.Likebox (talk) 15:59, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

A few quick points:

1. PBS I made my latest revisions as it appears certain that it isn't going to be possible to reach any sort of agreement or compromise with Likebox and it seemed the best way to get the article back to something resembling NPOV. No intention to offend, I just thought it better to revise and add material such as the Arthur notice to give other editors something to consider rather than going into a revert war (again).

2. To whom it may concern: Relying on Lemkin with respect to what happened in Tasmania is problematic. He died in 1959 which means he can't have seen anything more recent by way of historical research, than that. He was an acknowledged expert on the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust but, as far as I'm aware, did no research at all on Tasmania. Zip, zero, none. We simply don't know what he was basing his opinion of the Tasmanian situation on. Putting too much weight on what might be a relatively uninformed opinion of his, simply because he coined the word 'genocide' is a mistake.

3. PBS: assuming that you revert back to the Keepitshort version which I don't have much of a problem with, I'd like to move the paragraph currently in the Fabrication section where Windschuttle specifically addressed the claims made by Reynolds regarding extirpation up to where those claims are in the Genocide section. I think it is more appropriate there, it is pretty much divorced from relevance where it is. Can we get some agreement there?

4. Likebox, no-one but you said the Tasmanians died of smallpox. Windschuttle argues that the introduced diseases that devastated the Tasmanian Aborigines were mainly respiratory diseases: influenza (a later epidemic of which killed millions worldwide in 1918-19), tuberculosis, pneumonia, etc; with venereal disease playing a role mainly by causing infertility. Webley442 (talk) 23:23, 1 June 2009 (UTC)


Two more points: this article is about the History Wars, not specifically about what happened in Tasmania or the mainland. If it is going to accurately report on the History wars, it has to report accurately and fully on the positions of both sides of the debate, regardless of how many historians have positioned themselves on a particular side of the debate. So insisting on minimising the information on Windschuttle's position because it is a minority position is entirely inappropriate.

In terms of factual accuracy or truth, "consensus' is a meaningless word. At one time, the consensus was that the Earth was flat, now the consensus is that it's a ball. It didn't change shape because the consensus changed. What was originally a minority position was always correct. Webley442 (talk) 23:41, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I have to go with Philip on this. I've reverted it back to the earlier version and would encourage Likebox, Webley 442, PBS and anyone else with an interest in this article to reach a compromise on this discussion page before doing any further editing. The Schoolteacher (talk) 02:28, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

OK I can live with that, however I would like some discussion and hopefully agreement with regard to moving the the paragraph currently in the Fabrication section about how Windschuttle specifically addressed the claims made by Reynolds regarding extirpation, up to where those claims are in the Genocide section. I also would like to hear people's views on Lemkin as a reliable source considering he died in 1959 and we don't know what information he was basing his opinion on. Webley442 (talk) 03:41, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I will try to reach a "compromise", if possible. But let us be clear on what the word "compromise" means.
there is no need for "compromise" to hide the minority status of those denying a genocide. We've had this problem before, see Armenian genocide talk pages. The policy of "undue weight" is designed for this case. You include all sides, with no censorship, with the denial sources included too. The only thing is, the denial opinions are flagged with a statement that this is a minority position. That a statement is a minority position is something everyone can agree upon, even the deniers. The majority position needs to always be stated, and stated more prominently than the denialist position. Period. No compromise on this.
Webley is running afoul of this sensible Undue Weight policy. This is not obscure Wikilawyering here. This is exactly the sort of thing undue weight is supposed to adress. There is no need for censorship, the versions I am supporting include everybody's opinion, the only difference is that each opinion is labelled by the percentage of historians that support the view, and the majority opinion is stated first.Likebox (talk) 04:48, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

You state that there is no need for censorship, yet virtually every edit you make either reduces the amount of material explaining and expounding upon the 'minority' position or tweaks it so it has less impact (as Webley 442 has mentioned somewhere above before regarding the Judith Campbell paragraph where you repeatedly delete references to evidence and change her work to a mere suggestion). You state that you will try to reach a compromise but before doing so you revert back to your preferred text despite the fact that no-one else who has edited this page agrees with your version. I think that the only recourse is to refer this to an Administrator either for page protection or blocking of an account, whatever they feel appropriate. Since Webley 442 has, what seems a more dedicated interest in this article than I do, I'll give him or her first opportunity to do so but if Webley 442 doesn't, I will. The Schoolteacher (talk) 05:13, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

The problem with the "Windschuttle specifically addressed the claims made by Reynolds" is, as I have mentioned before, that Reynolds seems to have altered his position (see above), so to a degree that debate has passed, and if it is going to be mentioned, then Reynolds more recent position needs to be mentioned.
I would like to put back in the additions I made with this edit "Revision as of 15:44, 1 June 2009" that added a paragraph starting "After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s the Black War and the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines became a text book example of a genocide. However more ..." --PBS (talk) 08:25, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I don't have any real problems with the version you have reinstated. You have my support. The Schoolteacher (talk) 08:51, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

PBS I take your point regarding Reynolds' change in position. At some time in the future we need some text along the lines of: "Reynolds' original position was .... but in recent times, as evidenced in publication X, it has changed to ..... ". But, for the time being, the version of the section currently up is fine by me. Hopefully you won't have to resort to page protection again. Webley442 (talk) 10:03, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I can not protect the page, as I am actively editing the page, a request would have to be made at WP:ANI, but it is ways the wrong version that gets protected. There is also the WP:3RR rule to consider.
Would you object to the inclusion of the additional paragraph I mentioned above? --PBS (talk) 10:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

No objection PBS, go ahead. Webley442 (talk) 13:26, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Proposal #1a for resolution from Keepitshort (talk) 12:26, 2 June 2009 (UTC). I think this debate is getting tangled up between the topic (ie, the "wars" over various aspects of Australian history, of which this is one) and an analysis of the evidence for or against a judgement that what happened in Tasmania warrants being called "genocide". In the former debate, largely limited to Australia and related to a range of other disputed historical interpretations, Windshuttle is a major figure simply because his book triggered this aspect of the debate. In the world debates on the more general topic, there is widespread agreement to call it genocide, and in that debate Windshuttle is a minor figure, as Likebox has said many times. This leads to my first and most radical proposal for resolution,namely that this section no longer be considered as the "main article" on genocide in Australia, and that the section be relabelled as "Aboriginal history in Tasmania". This would be followed by a "see also" to the subsections on "Australia" in the Genocides in history article. There, the issues of concern to Likebox can be addressed properly, in a context where Windshuttle's opinions don't have the special status they do in the "History wars" article. Overall, this would make it simpler for PBS to monitor the things that are of main concern to him, and since there appears to be a long history of edit wars on that page, at least the wikipedia process has lots of experience mediating them. As a very simple example, the fact that Lemkin regarded the Armenian genocide as a type example has not prevented edit warring on it, and the same is true here. No member of a group who believes their ancestors were exposed to attempted genocide will lightly accept contrary views. Why should they? And no member of a group whose ancestors are accused of genocide will lightly accept the claim. Why should they? The place to argue that is in the general Genocide debate, where Tasmania (and the mainland) can be set alongside examples from elsewhere, within a consistent framework of definition. Then perhaps we can agree on how to summarise the "History war" as it applies to Tasmania, where many issues other than "genocide" were raised. Regards, Keepitshort (talk) 11:29, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
To Keepitshort, keep it short.
As regards this:"virtually every edit you make either reduces the amount of material explaining and expounding upon the 'minority' position or tweaks it so it has less impact"
Let's look at examples:
  1. Minogue does not try to define genocide but argues that its use is an extreme manifestation of the guilt felt by modern Australian society about the past misconduct of their society to Aborigines. In his opinion its use reflects the process by which Australian society is trying to come to terms with its past wrongs and in doing this Australians are stretching the meaning of genocide to fit within this internal debate
  2. Minogue says Australians fabricated the genocide out of white guilt.
The content of 1 and 2 are exactly the same, except 2 is shorter.
Similarly, let's compare the Judy Campbell paragraph:
  1. Historian Judy Campbell argues that some historians, including Henry Reynolds, influenced by an idea of European ‘blame’ for an attempted genocide of the Australian Aborigines, have used tenuous evidence to link smallpox epidemics in mainland Australia to British colonists. She suggests that these historians have overlooked evidence which indicates that the smallpox epidemics which devastated the Aboriginal population were not a result of contact with British settlers, but instead spread south from contact in the far North of Australia between Aborigines and visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia.[] This view has been challenged by historian Craig Mear in relation to the Sydney epidemic of 1789-90.
  2. Historian Judy Campbell argues that in addition to the well documented smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1829-32, there were earlier undocumented smaller epidemics in the 1860s. 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.[] This view has not met with widespread acceptance[], and has been specifically challenged by historian Craig Mear.[]
What's the difference? Except for being shorter, and for giving more information about the position, in terms of actual information about what Cambell says the two are identical. I also added the content of Mear's reply, which is missing now. So I don't see a single place where there was censorship.
I would suggest that the real problem is that version 2 is too clear. By explaining what these sources are saying, and laying out the accepted historical record which is accepted by the rest of the world, it just makes the sources look ridiculous. That's not my fault, that's the fault of the authors who take such ridiculous positions.Likebox (talk) 13:26, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Keepitshort "In the world debates on the more general topic, there is widespread agreement to call it genocide, and in that debate Windshuttle is a minor figure, as Likebox has said many times." The problem with this is, of course, that it's local historians who have the detailed knowledge of the situation in Australia and Tasmania; historians from other countries tend to know sweet f.a. about Australian history. It's not studied internationally, the way American history or European history is. What opinions they do have about it tend to be pretty uninformed based on very little reading or based on what is delivered to them by genocide 'enthusiasts' like Ben Kiernan. The international historians and genocide 'debaters' generally don't see the latest research, like that done by Windschuttle, so what they know is outdated. You are better off ignoring any supposed international 'consensus' and examining the evidence presented by local historians. See PBS's comments about the English Civil War and local historians. Webley442 (talk) 23:27, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Mischaracterization

This keeps coming back:

Much of this debate centers on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or whether the term 'genocide' might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers."[1] Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victim group it matters little if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated as a result of smallpox introduced to Australia by British settlers, or introduced European farming methods causing a group of Aborigines to starve to death, the result is in his opinion genocide.[2]

  1. ^ Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training
  2. ^ Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Tony Barta, Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Isidor Wallimann & Michael N. Dobkowski (eds.), New York, Westport, Connecticut, London, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 237-251.

None of the scholarly debate is over "whether the term genocide applies to reckless or unintended consequences and omissions". This is a fabrication whose source is an Australian government website, hardly a neutral reliable source. The only debate, if there really is any debate, is over whether the stated aim of many of the settlers, extermination of the natives, was also the aims of the government of colonial Tasmania. This is supported by scholarly articles.Likebox (talk) 16:43, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Please read the section "Rival Paradigms of Genocide" in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History By A. Dirk Moses, Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814116, 9781571814111, it should show you that it is not a "fabrication whose source is an Australian government website".
Also BTW when emphasizing the use of armed men by the government in Tasmania, one needs also to point out that these were not settlers like those it the United States fulfilling their "manifest destiny" but that many of them were in the opinion of HMG criminals, to whom giving guns would in the opinion of HMG have been a very stupid thing to do. -PBS (talk) 07:36, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
I am aware of all these things. I am objecting to the sentence
"whether the term 'genocide' might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers"
as regards Tasmania. The Tasmanian debate is not, and never was, over that. That's the stolen generations debate. The Tasmanian debate was about "who authorized the mass murder". That's it.Likebox (talk) 13:14, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
The section is not just about the events in Tasmania, but in Australia as a whole. -- PBS (talk) 13:27, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
Let me remind you of the previous sentence, "there has been much debate about genocide.... especially regarding Tasmanian Aborigines".Likebox (talk) 13:30, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
After inserting the agreed paragraph, to clarify the sentence, I made this edit "Much of this debate centers" to "Much of the debate over European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centers" so why then instead of continuing with a constructive dialogue did you then make a very large change to the section with this edit? --PBS (talk) 14:00, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
The reason is that the whole section is broken, because it is talking about three different topics, and mixing them up.
  1. The annihilation of the Tasmanians
  2. The mainland smallpox epidemics
  3. The debate on stolen generations/cultural genocide
The "unintended consequences and omissions" and "genocide definitions" applies only to issue 3, not at all to 1 or 2. By framing the debate in terms of definitions, the result is to mislead. This is all about mass-murder, not cultural impositions.
The resolution is to talk about 1 in a way consistent with Undue Weight. That means that you state the mainstream position regarding the facts, the mainstream interpretation regarding genocide, the mainstream debate regarding the government's role. Then you write the Minogue/Windschuttle fringe view that nothing happened.
Regarding 2, you write Cambell and Mear with equal emphasis, summarizing the key points. That's what I did. The version people revert to has a lot of Cambell and very little Mear (by erasing Mear). This is not acceptable. Both authors deserve at least equal weight.Likebox (talk) 14:38, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

This isn't Reynolds vs. Windschuttle

This is Reynolds and Windschuttle vs the whole rest of the world. Reynolds does not believe the actions on Tasmania were a genocide, but he accepts the mainstream history. Windschuttle rejects the mainstream history too.

The mainstream view is summarized in this excerpt from "Intent to destroy" by Colin Martin Tatz. This view is not consistent with either Reynolds or Windschuttle, and is missing entirely from this page.Likebox (talk) 17:32, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

See User_talk:Likebox#3RR --PBS (talk) 22:08, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

One of the great problems with what Likebox likes to refer to as the 'mainstream view' is that the case for genocide in Tasmania is something of a house of cards. If you look closely, there is actually a relatively small group of historians who have built and maintained the case for genocide in Tasmania. But it's all perched precariously on the same pieces of 'evidence', much of which was first sighted, then 'interpreted' and cited by an even smaller group (including Lyndall Ryan & Henry Reynolds) who started the whole ball rolling years before. It's no secret that a considerable percentage of historians do relatively little original research, such as visiting the archives to actually sight the original evidence. They rely on accepting that historians before them have accurately represented what the evidence says as well as relying that the historians before them did not ignore or conceal the existence of evidence contradicting the “preferred” position. The result is that they quote what Ryan, Reynolds and friends said, not what the original documents really said.

By actually going to the Archives and various other repositories of information and reviewing the original documents, Windschuttle found that the foundation of 'evidence' that the pro-Tasmanian genocide historians have relied upon for so many years has been misrepresented, exaggerated and falsified. Removing that, the whole house of cards falls. Webley442 (talk) 13:22, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Yes, yes, we all know each other's POV. That's not the issue. The issue is Undue weight. While you might think the international consensus is ridiculous, and based on bad data, and biased, and whatever, it's still what most international scholars believe. And until you can change their minds (which will be never), it should appear prominently. That means you can say "Windschuttle says that what they believe is based on bad historical data." or whatever you want, so long as you don't hide what they say. That's what Undue weight means.Likebox (talk) 17:11, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Likebox: as I say in more detail below in the Raphael Lemkin section, you seem to misunderstand Wiki policies, particularly Undue Weight and how to apply the policies to articles which are specifically intended to cover 'minority' viewpoints.

I don't think that the 'international consensus' is ridiculous; just largely uninformed regarding Australian history and where it has been somewhat 'informed', the persons doing the 'informing' have been extreme, ideologically biased genocide enthusiasts like Ben Kiernan. Webley442 (talk) 03:08, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

And I'm calling bullshit. You're not going to change your mind, I'm never going to change my mind. That's why we have policies.
I am not misunderstanding Wiki policies. This article, along with genocides in history and the redirect Australian genocide debate (which goes here) all give the minority viewpoint much more space without mentioning the fact that most scholars think it is infantile bunk.
Also, to Webley, please learn to indent--- it's easy, an extra colon will make the talk page more readable for everybody.Likebox (talk) 13:56, 6 June 2009 (UTC)


First, Likebox, I know how to indent, I choose not to as a means of keeping these pages from getting too long. Wikipedia recommends the use of indents however, since the discussions on the pages I edit generally tend to run long, not only because of the length of my own contributions, I made a conscious decision long ago to keep it more compact by not using indents. If you read the Wikipedia recommendation on the use of indents, it recognises that they can become a problem and that an occasional reversion to non-indented text will become necessary to keep the pages readable.

Secondly, a declaration that you have a closed mind is nothing to be proud of. I change my mind when someone presents evidence that indicates that what I previously believed was right is, in fact, wrong. And since I'm capable of doing the reading for myself, weighing up the evidence for myself and making my own judgments, I don't have to cling to a position simply because someone says most people believe in it. Sheep flock together; rational human beings should be capable of standing alone, if necessary.

As I’ve already said, I think you are misunderstanding Wiki policy re Undue Weight. It was never intended that a majority view should have a precisely measured ‘advantage’ of say 2 or 3 or 4 words to every word on a minority view and it specifically recognises that pages specifically about the minority view SHOULD have more detail on the minority view.

I quoted the relevant part of the policy below; here it is again:

"In articles specifically on the minority viewpoint, the views are allowed to receive more attention and space; however, on such pages, though the minority view may (and usually should) be described, possibly at length, the article should make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint wherever relevant…."

Note the use of: "more attention and space", "may", "should" and "at length".

So if you don’t think that there is adequate or “appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint wherever relevant” in this article, don’t remove material describing the ‘minority’ viewpoint, ADD material on the ‘majority’ viewpoint until you feel there is an “appropriate reference”. But add it in line with Wiki policy which means it has to be NPOV, supported by relevant citations, not just your opinion or what ‘everyone knows’.

As for your idea that most scholars think that the ‘minority’ viewpoint is 'infantile bunk', well, that’s your opinion, for what it's worth. I don’t know where you get your ‘survey’ data from because many of the historians and other academics with whom I’ve discussed these issues with over the past few years don’t agree with you. Many agree very strongly with the proposition that the level of violent conflict has been exaggerated, often through outright academic fraud, and the role of introduced disease grossly understated here as it was in the US and in colonial history pretty much world-wide. Webley442 (talk) 07:28, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Judy Campbell paragraph, yet again

Keepitshort: Let me state the reasons that I object to the way this paragraph is being edited, yet again.

This article is not “Genocide in Tasmania” or “Genocide in Australia” article. It is on the History Wars. By editing out all mention of the fact that, years before Mear made his comments, Reynolds and other historians had claimed that the British introduced smallpox, you are divorcing this paragraph from what it is actually about, the debate between 2 opposing sides in the History Wars. In terms of being a part of the History Wars, Mear made a pretty brief, very late and not very impressive appearance.

Why the insistence of removing all reference to EVIDENCE in this paragraph, in particular evidence that those who argue that the British introduced smallpox ignored although it was there in the historical records? As I said above: “what purpose does this revision serve? Judy Campbell assembled an impressive body of evidence to support her position in her book ‘Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 – 1880’. It appears that the only purpose of such a revision is to change a reference to a position supported by EVIDENCE to a mere suggestion, someone’s “wacky” idea.” That isn’t creating a 'neutral presentation'. It is neutering one side of the argument, as Schoolteacher said above: reducing its IMPACT as an argument by removing any mention of the existence of evidence to support the argument, evidence that the opposing side had overlooked.

Don’t have time to edit the article myself right now, maybe later. Webley442 (talk) 04:17, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

I have already stated my view of what should happen here - ie the debate and evidence should be moved to the the main article on the topic. This would leave the debate here to be about over the history of Tasmania, not genocide per se. After all, Windshuttle's book is about the so-called "Fabrication" of history there, and about the degree of deliberate killing, but also other things. For the world at large, the issue is whether what hapened in Tasmania qualifies as a type example of genocide. The mainland smallpox debate is a separate one, in relation to the possibility of DELIBERATE smallpox introduction in 1789-90 and at no other time. However, when checking the strength of Campbell's dataig in detail, guess what? There were variolators - ie people using live smallpox - in action around Bathurst in the 1830 outbreak. They variolated some aboriginal people when vaccination failed - Campbell says so. And wiradjuri people were troublesome to settlers at the time. So. You do no-one any favours by putting "Dr" in front of the tertiary source of DR Flood's low-grade popularisation of Campbell's work and her claims that Fenner said thus and thus. Read the article on Frank Fenner himself, which I have made more comprehensive so it could be linked when you and Likebox had finished reverting one another's work, and his particular role in the certification of eradication. In that book both the Northern and Sydney routes for infection were drawn, with a query on each. His foreword to Campbell emphasises the historical work in dating a spread from the North for the 1830 epidemic - but she just mentions the variolators in the middle of it as if that's irrelevant!! The evidence for a northern route in 1789-90 is weaker than Campbell says, and Mear makes some valid points (though he fails to mention Caampbell's reported (but unreferenced) temperatures well into the 90's F in Sydney in the period. And so on. Likebox has a case, and it isn't as clear-cut as you seem to think. let's archive and start over. Keepitshort (talk) 15:50, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Keepitshort: the History Wars aren’t just over the contents of Fabrication Volume 1. Windschuttle has published articles with respect to mainland issues and there have been books and articles by other writers who disagree with the ‘mainstream’ position. Windschuttle isn’t the only person who has published something on ‘his’ side of the debate although, no doubt, there are those who’d like people to believe it’s just him and him alone. So the article needs to be far broader than just Tasmania if it is going to be about the History Wars.

Of course there were variolators operating in the 1830’s. Aside from humanitarian reasons for trying to stop the spread of smallpox in the aboriginal communities, the British settlers were terrified that smallpox in the Aborigines would spread into non-immune members of the British community, to those who hadn’t been vaccinated (yet), particularly their children whom they tended to be fond of, or to those for whom vaccination hadn’t been successful. Rather than wanting to spread smallpox into possibly hostile aboriginal tribes, they were smart enough to realise that letting smallpox become endemic in the aboriginal tribes could turn around and bite them where it hurt most.

As for calling Dr Flood “Dr Flood”, well, sorry. I didn’t intend doing anyone any kind of favours by including that in the reference. I just automatically transcribed it off the back cover of the book having turned it over to read the publishers’ name. (Unlike some who have edited this article in the past, I actually do read the books, all the way through, no skimming, and weigh the evidence for myself rather than relying on what some partisan reviewer or commentator has to say about it.) Would you prefer it if I took out the “Dr” and substituted something else from the back cover: “ …. Josephine Flood is a prominent archaeologist, winner of the Centenary Medal and former director of the Aboriginal Heritage Section of the Australian Heritage Commission. She has published a number of books on Australian archaeology and history, including the influential Archaeology of the Dreamtime and The Riches of Ancient Australia."?

As for your description of (Dr) Josephine Flood’s book as “low-grade”, never mind my opinion, read the description of Emeritus Professor Campbell MacKnight, Australian National University: “This is an up-to-the-minute and balanced account of Aboriginal experience from earliest prehistory to today. Clearly written and well-illustrated, this is the best book to give someone who wants to know about Aborigines, their survival through the millennia, and the experiences they have to contribute to modern Australia.”

By the way, are you seriously suggesting by your reference to “her claims that Fenner said thus and thus” that (Dr) Flood didn’t interview (Dr) Fenner or that he didn’t say what she recorded him as saying in the book? The books been out a while and I haven't heard any contrary claim from (Dr) Fenner.

As far as I’ve been able to find, there is no support in the medical or scientific community for the idea that live smallpox could survive either in the ‘passengers’ and crew of the First Fleet or in the variolous material in bottles brought from England on an eight month voyage across the equator, through the tropics to Botany Bay and then for a further fifteen months or so (until the first cases were seen in Aborigines). It just doesn't survive that long under those conditions. It takes modern refrigeration to keep samples ‘alive’ that long, something that was sadly lacking in the equipment of the First Fleet. This entire argument originated in the speculations of certain ‘historians’ and no one but them and those whom their speculations have misled supports it. Webley442 (talk) 02:20, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Just pointing out that the most mainstream reference, which is Tatz, supports Webley442 on this issue. Tatz says that the thesis that smallpox was introduced deliberately doesn't really make sense to him, because the settlers were afraid of smallpox themselves. But that doesn't mean that the smallpox came from the north. That's Campbell's minority opinion.Likebox (talk) 17:21, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, I didn't read the whole thing. The refrigeration business is not in the sources I read. They say that the virus was carried live to Australia, but it isn't clear that it was deliberately introduced to the natives.Likebox (talk) 17:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
While yous have been chatting amongst yourselves I have been at the digital newspaper beta site of National Library of Australia helping out the national effort to clean up OCR text of old Australian newspapers (1803-1954)to see what they had to say. And in a debate over compulsory vaccination in Queensland in 1881 I found this: "The public journals are threatened with an epidemic of variola literature scarcely less objectionable than the fell disease itself. Certain correspondents are even trying to improve the occasion by propounding smallpox conundrums such as the following :-" If I am vaccinated with lymph direct from the calf, shall I not be liable to foot and mouth disease ?" Really this kind of question is embarrassing. In such a case much would depend upon the calf, but probably more upon the imaginative receptivity of the subject. Cacoethes loquendi is popularly believed to be a mouth disease, and cacoethes scribendi is understood to be developed through the hand. Its relation to the foot it is not our province to determine." I will get back to yous when I have sorted out what was happening in the "war" with Wiradjuri people around Bathurst around 1824-1830, and what the variolator (not vaccinator) was doing, apart from acquiring lots of land and going bankrupt later. It is not OR, since I will eventually have newspapers to cite, except that some of the letters about exterminating people need a lot of cleanup for their charming thoughts to be fully legible. And yes, there are some people back in 1824 arguing the other way too. Feel free to help out. regards Keepitshort (talk) 17:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Archive

This talk page is very large I propose to archive it unless anyone objects to me doing so in the next 24 hours.

I think that some of Likebox's observations warrant further discussion but I would like to clear the page and summarise what I think are pertinent points without all the old clutter. -PBS (talk) 10:52, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

agreed Keepitshort (talk) 15:52, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
Disagreed. Keep the most recent dispute for at least a few weeks, because it is still relevant. Maybe we can discuss it further, but if not, we can bring it up for dispute resolution. The following points I think should be made:
  1. Undue weight requires that the mainstream consensus regarding events on Tasmania be included somewhere.
  2. Windschuttle/Reynolds are both denying genocide on Tasmania, that puts them outside of mainstream international opinon. Reynolds arguments are not kooky, but Windschuttle's are.
  3. There are plenty of sources for the mainstream international view, and the sources should be kept here for future reference.
But precisely because the international view is so clear, this article might not be the best place to discuss it in detail. I understand that the History Wars are an Australian phenomenon, and within Australia, Windschuttle and Reynolds represent polarities, even though they are both considered wrong internationally. The minority revisionist views might be appropriate to discuss here, but there should be mention of the academic consensus. Just in case this disappears, I'll copy it to my user space, in User:Likebox/HistoryWars. The really old stuff, from before the current dispute is most of the really verbose stuff, you can archive that.Likebox (talk) 16:34, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
By old stuff I mean the stuff before "old accumulated references". It's really long and goes into a lot of irrelevant detail.Likebox (talk) 16:43, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

If you have to archive the whole page or nothing, i.e. if you can't do it by sections, then go ahead. This page is getting HUGE. Is it near the 'allowable size limit', if there is such a thing? We can always open the archive and refer back to it or copy bits of it for ongoing arguments in a fresh page. Webley442 (talk) 01:28, 6 June 2009 (UTC) And we probably will, ad nauseum. Webley442 (talk) 03:42, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

There is no size limit--- this is for convenience. When a text changes, so that old arguments no longer apply, then you can archive a bunch of stuff. Also when consensus becomes entrenched, and has no chance of getting altered.
This page is so out of line with NPOV and Undue Weight, that I can't imagine that it will stay this way. If it does, a separate article on the genocide on Tasmania and the smallpox epidemic of 1789 will have to be split off, one which can actually talk about the majority view without censorship.Likebox (talk) 13:47, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Raphael Lemkin

I have a problem with the alteration of the sentence

After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s the Black War and the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines became a text book example of a genocide.

to

Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in the 1940s with the specific example of the Black War of the 1820's and 1830's in mind.

as it implies that Lemkin relied on his own primary research. He did not as Anne Curthoys in her chapter "Genocide in Tasmania" in A. Dirk Moses's Empire, Colony, Genocide,: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, pp. 240 makes clear

One of the forty chapters was about Tasmania. [Lemkin's] research on Tasmania relied on secondary sources, especially Bonwick, though he also consulted other works by Giblin, Blackhouse, Calder, Melvile, Merivale, and West. It was written without the benefit of Clive Turnbull's Black war, which was just appearing on the other side of the world as he wrote. In this chapter, we see Lemkin applying his own method of analysis ...

Page 235 in the same chapter has more on James Bonwick and his book The last of the Tasmanians (1870).

The next point is that it is not clear from what Curthoys writes that Lemkin had studied the details of the events of the Black Wars in detail before he coined the word genocide, and that the Black Wars were specifically on his mind when he coined the word genocide.

However at the moment we also have the hanging one sentence "Reynolds also points out that Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term, considered "the action of the Tasmanian colonial government in the 1820s and 1830s" as genocide." So I would suggest that we change the sentence to something like this:

After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin and other genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, presented the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide.

Thoughts? -- PBS (talk) 18:29, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

You think Lemkin didn't do a good job.
You think more newspaper accounts and more detailed summaries of the orders of the high command of the Tasmanian leadership would have made him reassess. Maybe. But I don't think so. Looking at the documents people have brought up, the newspapers, the orders, there's nothing there that fails to support the thesis of wholesale murder and government complicity (if not outright intent).
But your opinion of Lemkin is completely moot. The majority of scholars don't agree with you on this issue. Looking at all mainstream genocide journals, they still think that what happened was a Genocide. So your opinion is not very important. Here are the questions you should ask yourself:
  1. Is it verifiable that Lemkin said it?
  2. Is it notable that Lemkin said it?
  3. Do the prepondenrence of scholars still believe it?
You already know the answer is yes to all three.Likebox (talk) 23:09, 5 June 2009 (UTC)
I will suggest this form for the sentence: "Starting with Raphael Lemkin's very first definition of the notion of genocide in 1943, the events of the Black War in Tasmania have been consistently used as a textbook example. Sixty odd years later, Lemkin's conclusion is is still the worldwide consensus in the Genocide community, contested only by some groups within Australia."
Pretty much the only way you're going to convince the world that what happened in Tasmania wasn't genocide is if a UFO comes down with the murdered Tasmanians, and said "We hoaxed you with our mind beams". That's it. When the governor of the land says "oh no! Whatever have we done! We've killed the natives! Quick, save a few specimens." that's not evidence against genocide, that's evidence for.Likebox (talk) 23:17, 5 June 2009 (UTC)


PBS I support your proposed change. It provides accurate information on the basis for Lemkin’s opinions as well as those of other genocide scholars. Readers can then make an informed judgment on the value of such opinion rather than being told what to believe by IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

It strikes me that the argument over this issue involves a classic logical fallacy: Argumentum ad Verecundium: qualitative, i.e. “the appeal to reverence”. For readers who aren’t familiar with it, the qualitative Argumentum ad Verecundium fallacy is based on the status or authority of the person or persons who believe in a proposition. Lemkin coined the word ‘genocide’ and is a revered figure. That’s high status in the genocide field so there are those who are prepared to ignore evidence that his opinion was based on secondary sources only and that he was not an expert on what happened in Tasmania.

The argument that this article should be dominated by the “worldwide consensus in the Genocide community” and that the opposing view should be cut to a few brief statements is a pretty good example of the quantitative version of the Argumentum ad Verecundium fallacy, i.e. it is based on the number of people who believe in a proposition. It ignores the fact that the people in that “worldwide consensus” tend to know as, I’ve said before, sweet f.a. about Australian or Tasmanian history. As I said above, at one time the consensus was that the world was flat. The consensus were wrong and no number of people agreeing on something that is wrong makes it right. It takes time, open minds and a willingness to look at new evidence, not UFO’s, for a “worldwide consensus” to react to new research and change position (just as it took some time for Henry Reynolds to change his position), especially if they have ideological or career reasons to cling to their established views. This article should reflect, accurately and fully, the positions and evidence of both sides of the debate. Webley442 (talk) 00:05, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

This isn't an "argument from authority". This is an "argument from wikipolicy".
An argument from authority would be if I was trying to convince you by saying "lots of genocide researchers believe it, so you should believe it too". I don't try to do that. I don't try to convince you of anything anymore. Frankly, if you don't already agree that what happened in Tasmania was mass murder, there's not enough to make talking to you worth it.
You want to know something? I would bet you money that if you took Windschuttle aside and put a gun to his head, and said "We found a historical cache of documents of the death certificate of every single native. On your life, what do you think they died of?" He would say they were murdered. Do you think that he believes his own horse manure? He is just showing off his historical prowess. Remember that he is a former Marxist, and Marxists are experts at fabricating history.
He's saying, "Reynolds, Reynolds. You tried, but that's not denial. You don't do denial with a small lie. You don't say 'The natives were murdered, but the government wasn't involved'. If you're sincere, no one will believe you. No. You have to do it with a Big Lie. You say the natives died of diseases! Yes, I know that's ridiculous. That's the whole point of a big lie. It's needs to be ridiculous. What are they going to do? Dig up the death certificates? At best, you have to admit only to the exact number of murders in the newspapers, and that's that."
The reason wikipolicy is so specific that majority opinions must always be listed first, is because this is the only way that people with different political opinions can agree on a text. Even if we cannot agree that A is "true" and B is "false", we can agree that the majority of researchers believe A and not B.
Yes, sometimes the minority will eventually convince the majority, but, you know what? If the minority idea is correct, it doesn't need any protection. It will survive very well on its own power.Likebox (talk) 00:34, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Likebox: you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of Wiki policies and how to apply them. I suggest you re-read them. In particular, Undue Weight does NOT mean cutting back the explanation of a ‘minority’ position to the point it is unintelligible to the reader or completely unsupported by a lack of any mention of the evidence on which it relies. "In articles specifically on the minority viewpoint, the views are allowed to receive more attention and space; however, on such pages, though the minority view may (and usually should) be described, possibly at length, the article should make appropriate reference to the majority viewpoint wherever relevant"

The reader has to be supplied with enough detail on the ‘minority’ position that he/she understands what it is and what the basis for it is. Now for some extreme positions such as the ‘theory’ of a flat Earth, which has practically no supporters today, it may take very little space. In an article on a debate over a particular issue which is precisely what the History Wars article is, there may well be a significant majority on one side but in order to report on the DEBATE, not the issue being debated, the positions and evidence of both sides much be presented in enough detail that both are understandable to a 'casual' reader not versed in the issues. It would not be appropriate for an article on the mid 19th century debates between Darwinists/evolutionists and representatives of the Christian churches to go into detail on the Darwinist position and limit information on the churches' position to "They say God made Adam and Eve".

The changes you keep insisting on deprive the reader of any information to make his/her own judgment on the 'minority' position and instead make them totally reliant on your own.

And yes, the minority opinion will eventually overcome the the majority one, if it is correct but it will happen a lot faster if the minority opinion isn't suppressed or erased from public view. Webley442 (talk) 01:19, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

user:Likebox you suggest we add "Starting with Raphael Lemkin's very first definition of the notion of genocide in 1943, the events of the Black War in Tasmania have been consistently used as a textbook example." however Curthoys makes it clear that Lemkin never published his chapter and that Clive Turnbull published in 1948 probably did use the term genocide because he did not know of its existance (Curthoys pp. 239,240). So what is your source that from 1943 "events of the Black War in Tasmania have been consistently used as a textbook example"? If it had one would have thought that Turnbull would have mentioned it.
Likebox, you go on to write "Sixty odd years later, Lemkin's conclusion is is still the worldwide consensus [among genocide scholars], contested only by some groups within Australia." Do you have a source for this statement?
Likebox, it is usual that when a genocide scholar is studying a number of genocides, they do not base their research on primary sources, instead if they are competent scholars they base their research on the best available secondary sources available at the time that do their research. It is quite possible that over decades historians who study the specific events unearth new information and reach new conclusions about the events they study (if not we would not have to fund historical research out of tax payers money, as there would not be any new history). Those specialists in other areas (such as genocide scholars, sociologists, and economists) will then update their views depending on what the historians have found. See for example War in the Vendée#Accusation of Genocide. Why is it that you do not want mention that Lemkin relied on secondary sources? --PBS (talk) 13:37, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't know how to say this: I don't care about Lemkin. I don't care who you cite. It could be my high school teacher. Just say that nearly all scholars believe that what happened on Tasmania was mass murder of all the natives, and that most of them classify it as genocide.
It makes absolutely no difference which of the hundreds of authors you can choose from you cite. This stuff is common knowledge, I mean, I knew about it!Likebox (talk) 14:01, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
If we are in dispute over the wording it is important that we can agree on new wording. I think it is important to mention that Lemkin relied on secondary sources, if you don't care then presumably you don't mind if that is added.
If it is common knowledge then you will have no problems coming up with a source to confirm that most of them classify it as genocide. I know it is frustrating, but see WP:SUBSTANTIATE and avoid weasel words.
The wording "Lemkin and other genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, presented the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide." I think conveys the information that the current paradigm is that it is a genocide took place, while the second half of the paragraph "However more recent detailed studies of the events..." covers the revision of that interpretation that is currently being debated. --PBS (talk) 15:24, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
My only complaint is that none of your suggestions for little additions work to make it NPOV. The reason is that they don't introduce detailed sources for this interpretation. They also don't state the numerical split in the historical community. Honestly, I don't care what the precise wording is, or if you say that Lemkin didn't read primary sources, so long as you make it clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of scholars who did read primary literature agree with him. There are a few that disagree too, and there is no reason that everyone can't be included fairly.Likebox (talk) 16:53, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
To comply with verifiability, I think the Tatz reference is very good to list up front, that's why I included it. It's a mainstream chronicle of events, and a critique of Reynolds position. Reynolds is also OK for the events, because he doesn't contest the mainstream version, but he is not in the majority regarding interpretation. I want to emphasize: that doesn't mean he is wrong, just not in the strict majority.
Windschuttle contest the mainstream version of events. All you need to say is that Windschuttle is in a minority that believes something completely different from all other historians. That also doesn't mean he is wrong. I think he is wrong, but to comply with NPOV, I wouldn't say that. I would just say what he thinks, neutrally, and let the reader make up his or her mind.Likebox (talk) 17:17, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Ok, in short, I agree with you. It is appropriate to say that Lemkin did not do primary literature research regarding Tasmania, and was relying on the consensus interpretation of events in his time. But you should also say that this consensus has not budged, and that Madley, who did do primary research, and many hundreds of others, have agreed with Lemkin's interpretation. That doesn't mean they are "right", it just means that they accepted this without question.Likebox (talk) 17:38, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
Also, maybe it is appropriate to use Madley's term "frontier genocide", instead of using the generic term "genocide". "cultural genocide" is certainly inappropriate for the events on Tasmania, but "genocide" is too loaded with holocaust imagery. Madley's term makes it clear that issues of government responsibility is hard to figure out, and that the parallels are with campaigns against indiginous peoples, not with the european or Rwandan genocides.Likebox (talk) 17:45, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

OK so I am going to make the change to the sentence we have been discussing unless you raise further points. I am also starting two new section (immediately below this one) to discuss the paragraph that Madley's term "frontier genocide" addresses. --PBS (talk) 13:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

The changes I am suggesting will not be cosmetic. This whole part is badly, badly broken, and omits many sources.
I think that the term "frontier genocide" is very good, because it gives you the picture of the events, but only as long as Madley's description of the events are referenced and quickly summarized. If you apply the term "frontier genocide" and use Windschuttle's idiotic version of events, you are making things worse, not better.
Madley is aware that there is no sharp line between frontier genocide and the holocaust. It's a continuum. I discuss this in detail below, along with suggestions. I again repeat, cosmetic changes to the sentences that are already here will not work, ever, ever. You need a bunch of new sentences to summarize the new sources, and to delete sentences which are framing the debate in a ludicrously biased way.Likebox (talk) 21:16, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Relative size of the parties to the genocide debate

I think I have found a source that we might be able to use, that quantifies the situation -- something I was asking for in the previous section: "The debate about whether the term genocides is applicable to the broad Australian context... However it is notable that while comparative genocide scholars assume the specifically Tasmanian case to be on of unmitigated genocide, the majority of Australian experts are considerably more circumspect." (Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The rise of the West and the coming of genocide, I.B.Tauris, 2005 ISBN 1845110579, 9781845110574 p. 344 footnote 105)

I want to add a sentence based on this source to the first paragraph of the section. --PBS (talk) 13:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

That's a fantastic source. Thank you.Likebox (talk) 15:58, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
This is only a fanatastic source if you summarize it properly. This does not mean that the majority of Australian experts question that the Tasmanians died by being killed by settlers. Only Windschuttle questions that. It means that the majority of Australian experts don't like calling these killings a genocide, because they don't think it was top-down.Likebox (talk) 23:48, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Did European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide

I apologise in advance for the length of this entry but I wanted to pull some sources and points of view together so that they are available to expand the section if we consider it necessary.

The paragraph "Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide,..." is meant to explain to the reader that there is more than one meaning to the word genocide and is based on "Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History" by the Australian Education Science and Training department. Which also includes the

From the previous section User:Likebox suggests that it is appropriate to use Madley's term "frontier genocide" (Madley, Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia" by Benjamin Madley in the Journal of Genocide Research (2004), 6(2), June, 167–192.

Two other sources to consider are:

  • In the the section "Rival Paradigms of Genocide" in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History By A. Dirk Moses, Berghahn Books, 2004 ISBN 1571814116, 9781571814111, Moss makes a distinction between "Intentionalists" (intentional genocide like the Holocaust) and "structuralists" (structural genocide which "averts the issue of perpetrator agency and intention by highlighting anonymous 'genocidal processes' of cultural and physical destruction.") Moss goes on to say that "The dominant approach has been the Intentionalist one, because until recently genocide studies has been virtually monopolized by North American social scientists. [Which] ... frames the Holocaust as the prototypical genocide" ... "The intentionalist view has lost ground among genocide scholars, but still suffuses the popular imagination" (he footnotes this as 123 which can be found on page 45 and cites 5 papers). The trouble with this last comment is while it may be true among comparative genocide scholars, legal scholars' definition of the crime of genocide has been going the other way (tightening up the definition) thanks to the trials of the monsters involved in the Bosnian and Rwanda genocides (see Bosnian Genocide article).
  • Colin Martin Tatz, "Intent to destroy: reflecting on genocide" Verso, 2003, ISBN 1859845509, 9781859845509. p. 79. This section seems to be arguing that the events in Tasmania were a genocide within the definition of the Genocide Convention (CPPCG). The trouble with Tatz's opinion like the others that use the CPPCG, the do not present the recent developments in the interpretation of the convention by judges at the international tribunals, but instead interpret them directly themselves (something they are not as qualified as the judges to do). Now there is nothing wrong in reporting that in the opinion of Tatz and others (David B. MacDonald, Identity politics in the age of genocide: the Holocaust and historical representation, Routledge, 2007 ISBN 0415430615, 9780415430616 pp. 65-68 {although he also uses terms like "genocidal atrocites"}) that they consider Raynolds et all wrong and it was an "intentional genocide", but there are lots of sources that claim that what whatever happened in Australia was not that. For example John Connor (The Australian frontier wars, 1788-1838, UNSW Press, 2002 ISBN 0868407569, 9780868407562 p. x) states "Windschuttle's argument that genocide was not committed in Van Diemen's land should be driected towards popular historians and journalists who hold this idea rather than those in academia who generally do not". BTW the piece is very critical of Windschuttle's ability as a military historian.

I think that the current wording of the paragraph suffices --although I would like to add the Madley and Moss as citations so that readers can read about this issue in more detail, -- but if other editors wish to expand the paragraph, then could they please discuss what they would like to add or subtract here. --PBS (talk) 13:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

The problem here is that you won't let anyone expand the actual badly broken text with sourced material. This is why we need dispute resolution.Likebox (talk) 15:59, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
By the previous cryptic remark I just meant the following: There are at least three new sources here, Madley, Tatz, and Mear. They are international mainstream counterparts to Windschuttle and Campbell. The text should probably give equal weight to both sets of authors. If you like, this task can be split up between two people. You can write the preferred text summarizing Winschuttle/Campbell, and if I am up to it, I will write a summary of Tatz/Madley/Mear, to give balance, without editing the summary you like. Then we can iterate and converge. But please don't view the iteration process as an edit war--- I think there is no reason that people can't converge by iterated editing from two opposing points of view. Look at palestinian exodus for an example of the kind of fine editing that can happen when two irreconcilable political camps edit in good faith.
Overall, the mainstream sources should get more space in Wipipedia, because they represent the international consensus. But on this page, which is devoted to the Australian debate, I can live with the idea that the Australian sides should be given the majority of space. But the international point of view should be mentioned.
With regards to Mear, he is part of the Australian debate. So are Reynolds and Moses and many others, who don't dispute the international consensus regarding the events on Tasmania. Windschuttle's is an extreme point of view even in Australia, and this should be admitted honestly. That's it.Likebox (talk) 17:03, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
I am trying to keep this focused just on the paragraph "Much of the debate on whether European colonisation ..." which is not about the right or wrongs of the issue of whether a genocide took place, but the framing of what is meant by "genocide". This has nothing to with main stream or non mainstream, it is do do with the fact that when an expert uses the unqualified word "genocide" most non specialist readers will assume Holocaust or the Srebrenica massacre (what Moses describes as "intentional genocide"), they will not be expecting it to mean "frontier genocide"/"structural genocide", this paragraph is meant to explain this to a reader of this article. The reason for including the two quotes to to make that clear to a non specialist reader. --PBS (talk) 17:27, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, that's the offending paragraph. Here is the offending part:
Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide, centers on whether "the term 'genocide' only applies to cases of deliberate mass killings of Aborigines by European settlers, or ... might also apply to instances in which many Aboriginal people were killed by the reckless or unintended actions and omissions of settlers.
This sentence is awful in so many ways, I don't know how it can be salvaged. It isn't summarizing the debate, nor is it NPOV. It is a ridiculously biased framing of the debate to make it look like it is about something completely different. None of the debate is over "whether genocide applies to reckless and unintended actions and omissions of settlers". The actions of the settlers that are being discussed are intentional, and they are not omissions, they involve hunting down and poisoning people for sport and for space.
The essential point is that the line between a "structural" and "intentional" genocide is very blurry. A government is a collective entity, it doesn't just give orders which are automatically obeyed. Even in Nazi Germany, they tried to have a small scale euthenasia program for mentally handicapped people in the 1930s, and the public outcry forced the program to stop. You need to have preconditions which make it clear to the perpetrators (always a small minority) that they will not be punished for murder, then you allow chains of self interest to do most of the work.
I have suggested replacements before, but I'll try again. How about this:
"Much of the debate on the Tasmanian genocide centers around the government intent: did the colonial government intend the mass-killings? The international consensus among scholars is that the settler government was indeed responsible, because it did not act to prevent the killings, and that this amount of complicity is enough (Tatz). Within Australia, there is widespread disagreement with this consensus. Henry Reynolds believes that the government was trying to take some steps to prevent a complete destruction of the Tasmanians, so that the genocide label is inappropriate."
"Madley has used the term 'frontier genocide' to describe racially motivated mass killings in weakly governed territories like settler outposts in Tasmania... (madley)".
I don't expect you'll like this any more than the other versions.Likebox (talk) 21:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)


Even if PBS were to decide that he didn't have a problem with the paragraph, I do. The framing of the paragraph presumes that there were mass killings, which is disputed and that there was genocide, which is also disputed. The characterisation of Tasmania as a 'weakly governed territory' is another presumption. Where is the evidence for that? The paragraph sets up the presumption that the pro-Tasmanian genocide position is basically correct and that it's just a question of the degree of involvement or negligence of the colonial government. A long way from a NPOV. Webley442 (talk) 01:27, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

The mass killings are a generally accepted historical fact contested only by a few idiots and kooks within Australia. These morons' opinions need to be included too, because their ideas should get a fair hearing, without censorship. But the way you include the opinions of idiots is by stating that they are not accepted by many people, even within Australia. That's called "undue weight". If the minority idea is correct, there is nothing to worry about, they will gain acceptance. But don't hold your breath in this case.
The only real debate in the not fringe crazy literature is over settler government intent, and the distinction between structural and intentional genocide which is indeed a big point.Likebox (talk) 16:03, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Structural Vs Intentional, and "weakly governed?": From The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser of July 1824, reporting Government Policy in Tasmania as announced by the new Lieutenant Governor (later Governor) George Arthur. Unfortunately the National Library of Australia has not yet digitised the corresponding Tasmanian Gazettes (which were semi-official) beyond 1821, but instead of debate about secondary and tertiary sources, try reading what was said at the time, and judging the intentions. There's plenty of it at, for example [20]


"In the midst of the public acts that bespeak the wisdom exercised in the administration of the Government of the Dependency of Van Diemen's Land, we cannot forbear noticing the interposition of His Honor Lieutenant Governor ARTHUR, in behalf of the aborigines of that Island, to protect them from those acts of atrocity which are too often inconsiderately and wantonly inflicted by the polished or civilized European upon his sable brother. We subjoin the Proclamation of His Honor upon the subject, taken from the Hobart Town Gazette of July 25.
" Whereas, it has been represented to His Honor the LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, that several Settlers and others are in the habit of maliciously and wantonly firing at, injuring, and destroying the defenceless Natives and Aborigines of this Island ;-And whereas it has been commanded by His Majesty's Government, and strictly enjoined by His Excellency the GOVERNOR in CHIEF, that the Natives of this Colony, and its Dependencies, shall be considered under British Government and protection ; These instructions render it no less the duty, than it is the disposition of His Honor the LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR, to support and encourage all measures which may tend to conciliate and civilize the Natives of this Island ; and to forbid and prevent, and when perpetrated to punish, any ill treatment towards them. The Natives of this Island, being under the protection of the same laws which protect the Settlers, every violation of those laws, in the persons or property of the natives, shall be visited with the same punishment as though committed on the person or property of any settler. His Honor the LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR therefore declares, thus publicly, his determination, that if, after the promulgation of this Proclamation, any person or persons shall be charged with firing at, killing, or committing any act of outrage or aggression on the Native people, they shall he prosecuted for the same before the Supreme Court. All Magistrates and Peace Officers, and others His Majesty's subjects in this Colony, are hereby strictly required to observe and enforce the provisions of this Proclamation, and to make them known more especially to stock-keepers in their several districts, enjoining them not only to avoid all aggression, but to exercise the utmost forbearance towards the Aborigines, treating them on all occasions with the utmost kindness and compassion." Webley442 has a point. regards, Keepitshort (talk) 17:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, you have brought up stuff like this before. Despite orders and proclamations such as these, the socially sanctioned murder of natives on Tasmania was not prosecuted. This is the consensus of historians, both within and outside of Australia, and no amount of debate here will change it.
These types of orders, and Arthur's hand-wringing in general, lend credence to the claims that the genocide was not intended to exterminate the whole of the population, despite the end result. But, as Tatz emphasizes genocide of a big chunk of the population is just as much genocide. This is the "intentional/structural debate again, that is a legitimate dispute in the literature.Likebox (talk) 23:34, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
Now that I see that this is from 1824, this is probably important for the structural/intentional debate. This is something people talk about, and it is something that we should talk about in the article.Likebox (talk) 23:36, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
OK, with the debate on structural/intentional in hand, let's look at how "justice" worked in a colony full of "assigned servants", ie convicts, from 1823-1826, considering only the crimes for which people were executed, as listed here: [21]
List of prisoners tried, found guilty, and executed, at Hobart Town, Van Diemen's Land,from the 1st of January 1823, to the 1st of January 1827. (4 years)
Sheep-stealing (James Smith, George Richardson, Robert Oldham, William Davis, Ralph Churlton, Thomas Butler, Samuel T. Fielding, Jas. Chamberlaine, William Pollock, George Harden, Richard Brown, James Brown, John Green, Patrick Brown, Robert Cable, John Davis, John Cruit, Thomas Savell, George Farquharson.) Robbery (Henry M'Connell, James Rowles, Timothy Swinscow, William Wickens) Burglary (Stephen Lear, Henry Fry, John Johnson, Samuel Longman, Charles Wigley, John Clark, John Dadd, John Penson) Burglary and Ox-stealing (James Major) Burglary and stealing a boat (Thomas Bosworth, Richard Miller, William Craven) Absconding and Robbery (John Taylor, George Watters, James Edwards, John Mc Farlane, Thomas Balfour). Bush-ranging and robberies (Patrick Connolly, James Tierney, Isaac Walker, John Thomson, Peter Thackery, William Buckley, Joseph Broadhead, John Everiss, Wm. Preece, George Brace) Attempted Murder (John Logan) Bush-ranging, robberies and murder (Jas. M'Cabe, Matthew Brady, Patrick Bryant, Thomas Jeffries, John Perry, James M'Kenney, John Gregory, William Brown, John Tilley, James Goodwin, Samuel Hodgetts) Murder (Alexander Pearce, Thomas Hudson, William Allen, Francis Oates, John Reid Riddle, Thomas Peacock, John Godliman, Jonas Dobson, John Thompson, Thomas Dunnings, Edward Everitt, William Smith, Musquito (Aboriginal Native), Jack Roberts (Aboriginal Native), Jack (Aboriginal Native), Dick (Aboriginal Native)). Now read the trial where Musquito was convicted and his co-accused was acquitted on the charge of being "principals in the second degree for aiding and abetting in the wilful murder of William Hollyoak", and the trial where they were both acquitted on the charge of being "principals in the second degree for aiding and abetting in the wilful murder of Mammoa, the before named Otaheitean" (Tahitian), here. [22]. Note that one of the other defendants on that day was hanged for a relatively minor crime. This is not "Justice" as we understand it nowadays, but it is not Lynch law on the Frontier, either. Regards,Keepitshort (talk) 11:10, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

In the first criminal trial held in the Supreme Court of Van Diemen’s Land in 1824, William Tibbs was convicted of the manslaughter of an Aboriginal man. R. v. Tibbs, Supreme Court, Van Diemen’s Land; noted in the Hobart Town Gazette, 28 May 1824. Tibbs was sentenced to transportation for three years Hobart Town Gazette, 6 August 1824. Considering what a sentence of transportation meant when imposed in Van Diemen’s Land, i.e. being sent to a place like Norfolk Island, Tibbs would probably have preferred hanging but it wasn’t the penalty for manslaughter. Webley442 (talk) 10:44, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Maybe, but since he was already an assigned servant (ie, transported) and had only been a few months in the Colony in 1824, and a William Tibbs received a Certificate of Freedom in Hobart Town in 1829,five years later, it is probable that he just had another three years added to the original sentence of about 3 years, whereas sheep-stealing got you hanged. Transportation for three years was a slap on the wrist, back then, as the sentences went. Keepitshort (talk) 13:58, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Well, even assuming that he wasn't sent to someplace far worse, like Norfolk Island, for 3 years before being allowed back in Tasmania, an extra 3 years in which you remain a convict and are subject to the kind of control and discipline that someone still serving a sentence of transportation would have been, is a bit more than a slap on the wrist. However, I think the most significant things are that the first trial in the Supreme Court was for an offence against an Aborigine so the colonial authorities were certainly prepared to prosecute someone for such an offence, the no doubt all white jury (and it was a jury trial unless my sources are completely wrong) was prepared to take such an offence seriously and convict him and that he did get a penalty that was somewhat more than a slap on the wrist. (There have been people convicted of manslaughter recently who have got less time). Webley442 (talk) 10:16, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Your sources are correct about jury. The inquest report is here [23] and the trial is here [24]. However, when I refer to a "slap on the wrist" I am comparing the sentence with people getting hanged for stealing a sheep, as against three years more Transpotrtation for shooting at and killing a "man of colour". By the standards of the time, it was a very light sentence. But let's leave Tasmania and look at what was happening in Bathurst at the same time, where the Sydney Gazette editorialised as follows: " "Are we (the Europeans) to kill them , in our own defence ? Or, are they (the natives) to butcher us, with impunity ?" [25] In such a climate, maybe it isn't surprising that the accused in the trial here [26] were acquitted of the alleged manslaughter of three Wiradjuri women. Considerable reference is made in the trial to a Proclamation issued by Governor Macquarie in 1816, which makes interesting reading, here [27]. We will come to Governor Brisbane's proclamation of Martial Law in Bathurst in due course. I am still looking for the wording of Governor arthur's proclamation in Tasmania, so as to compare the terms. regards, Keepitshort (talk) 14:30, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

This digression from the topic piqued my curiosity, what is the source for the assertion that John Jackson (d. 17 Jan 1824) was an "Aboriginal man"? cygnis insignis 17:36, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I've come across various descriptions of the victim in which he's described either as 'black' or 'aboriginal'. One in which a description of him as 'aboriginal' can be found in the biography: Sir John Pedder: First Chief Justice of Tasmania, 1824-1854, by JM Bennett, Federation Press. I've never come across any description characterising him as non-aboriginal e.g as a 'negro' or 'Jamaican' or whatever and I suspect that the newspapers of the day would have described him in that manner if he were; just standard journalistic practice. Webley442 (talk) 03:19, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

From Keepitshort, for cygnis insignis: Two of the three links I gave above take you to Tasmanian newspapers of the time. At the inquest (Jan 1824) John Jackson is described as "a man of color" - which seems to be an unusual phrase for the time, from what I have read thus far - and the jury found Tibbs guilty of manslaughter. At the trial (May 1824) John Jackson is described as "a black man" and the charge is that Tibbs shot at him, and that he died - not described as either "murder" or "manslaughter". The third reference is a Sydney newspaper repeating the Tasmanian news of the trial, where they repeat "a black man" and get the name wrong: "William" Jackson rather than John, and describe the crime as "murder". So much for written history and original sources.
More generally,there is a progression in language used to describe Aboriginal people, both in Tasmania and on the mainland. The First Fleet journals often used "Indians", presumably because many of the naval personnel had experience in the British forces fighting the American rebels - they did not withdraw from their base on Staten Island in New York until 1783, so it was all quite recent, in 1788. A sailor from Staten Island, John Jeffries, was the only First Fleet victim of the smallpox epidemic of 1789, and is described as "a native of North America", which does not necessarily mean he was an American Indian. The term "native" is a tricky one, except where - later - it appears in full as "the aboriginal natives of (some part of australia)". This usage seems to have become more common as children were born to "Europeans" or "British" in the Colony, since it seems to have been common to describe people as "a native of (some local part of the UK)" and the term "native" started to be used to distinguish those of non-Aboriginal descent born in the Colony, from others. The term "currency" (ie local coinage, as as opposed to "Sterling") seems to have appeared later. Thus, when a Sydney trial around 1830 describes an assigned servant (ie, convict) having permission to marry a "native girl", who then applied to have him assigned to her, it is unclear whether this refers to an Australian-born girl of European-only descent, or to an "aboriginal native" girl.
During times of conflict in particular, the terms became more abusive, and "the blacks" or "the black (derogatory description)" tends to be used, in opposition to "the settlers". To complicate matters further, however,even when Hobart Town was established in 1804, there were Aboriginal people from Sydney on board, one of whom was treated with "jealousy and indignation" by those who lived there. [28] Or again, Musquito was described as "a Sydney black" at his trials in 1824, to distingish him from his co-accused who was "a native of this island".
(Windshuttle makes a fuss about Musquito not being a local, by way of arguing that there was no systematic Tasmanian defence of of territory, but in fact contemporary journalism expresses a worry that the locals are learning to apply imported military skills from people like Musquito, so the issue was a huge gap in the technology of warfare, rather than lack of a wish to defend territory. In fact, something generally similar happened with the Inca in Peru, who captured some Spanish gunners and forced them to make arms for them, and did quite well for a while. Thus the government of Tasmania had no wish for the local people to learn the arts of "civilized" warfare, or acquire firearms,of course.)
Also, Musquito was acquitted, in the second trial, of being responsible for the death of Mammoa, a Tahitian. In brief, the British carried people from their colonies all over, and we mustn't forget that slavery was still legal in the British Empire for much of this time. The phrase "a man of color" might mean anything. The only other evidence bearing on John Jackson is just the fact that he had a "British" name, which doesn't seem to have been the norm for referring to the Aboriginal people of Tasmania, except as below:
Here [29] you can read an account of two Aboriginal boys from Tasmania who were taken to England to be educated in 1822. It goes like this: "The Courier of the 20th Sept. [1822] notices an article in the Liverpool Paper, announcing the arrival at that port of the black native boy, George Van Diemen, who went home under the care of Mr. Kermode, in the ship Mary, Captain Kneale. -- Many benevolent persons had, in consequence of a statement of this boy being previously given in that Paper, expressed a wish to subscribe something towards educating him, and teaching him some useful trade, in order to make him instrumental in reclaiming the aborigines of his native land from their wandering habits, and raising them in the scale of civilization. -- A book for the contributions of those who were disposed to aid the proposed object had been placed in the office of the Liverpool Courier newspaper, where subscriptions were received. Mr. Thomas Banning, of Liverpool, had consented to act as Treasurer, and to see that the money was faithfully applied to the purpose intended. The other native boy, William Thomas Derwent, who was sent home in the Medway, died shortly after his arrival." (Note that "home" means the UK, of course.) Possibly Webley442 would not regard this as an early application of the "stolen generation" approach, but there are quite a few reports of children, usually boys,being acquired by settlers or colonial officials, and in such cases they were usually given "British" names. So maybe "John Jackson" was an Aboriginal Tasmania who acquired his name in this way, or maybe he was "a man of color" from somewhere else on the planet.
And, so as to be strictly relevant to the topic of this section, even if Likebox might not regard it as evidence against genocide, maybe the bottom line on the matter of History wars about identity comes from the Australian Census of 2006, which reports 16,720 who identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people in Tasmania,including 1,251 who identified as Torres Strait Islanders only. The total is between two or three times the highest estimates of the pre-settlement Aboriginal population, and although only a minority may be descended from that population, it says to me that whatever the intentions of settlers and governments may have been, Aboriginal people have survived in Australia to reach a time where Governments are finally willing to issue apologies, both symbolic and practical, for at least some of the history. Which is a good thing. Regards Keepitshort (talk) 08:27, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

Martial and other Law(s) in Tasmania, 1804-1876

Removed to user's talk page to save space Keepitshort (talk) 14:49, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Perhaps you can make a user-space section called User:Keepitshort/TasmanianMartialLaw, and then put a short summary here, with a link to the longer reference? You can make the user-space page by clicking on the red link here.Likebox (talk) 15:43, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Done. I aim to assemble the various Martial Law declarations (eg Castle Hill 1804, Bathurst 1824), for an "Australia" sub-section in Martial Law, and maybe check out some other colonies. There's nothing there at present. Thx for the advice on how to set up a user-space page. Now tidy up those scattered refs, huh? regards, Keepitshort (talk) 16:49, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Your primary research is appreciated, and these declarations would make a great addition to the Black War page, which is currently empty. I am afraid to touch it, because I am afraid that if I did, it would get filled up with Windschuttle rubbish.Likebox (talk) 17:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

We need dispute resolution

Edits on 8 June 2008

This is probably not going to work. PBS just edited the section, and his additions make things even worse.

To PBS, your opinion that Lemkin based his judgement on old research, and that new research tells a different story is just your opinion. You are obviously wrong (and obviously biased), and most genocide historians agree.

NPOV means that you don't make editorial comments about "new histories" and "old histories". Histories are valuable long after they are written, and to restrict attention to the spate of recent books by Australian right wing lunatics and revisionists introduces a monstrous bias. Even if you restrict yourself to recent literature, the pro-genocide side outnumbers the anti-genocide side.

To say "but more recent detailed studies ... have raised questions" is POV. Just say "more recent detailed studies by Australian historians have raised questions about this.". If you say "details" were questioned, you have to say which details were questioned by which source--- and you have to treat each source independently with the weight it deserves from undue weight.

Here's an example of a sentence you introduced:

(lemkin thought it was genocide) but recent detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction by historians who specialise in Australian history have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in the earlier histories.

Not NPOV. It is implying that previous studies were not detailed (that's not true), that the previous studies were not by specialists (also not true), and that the questions are about the vague "details" in the earlier histories, which makes them seem inaccurate on the facts, which the majority of scholars don't believe.

These types of addition reveal a hopeless bias.Likebox (talk) 16:19, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I edited it to remove the "but", and to add a sentence that says that the Tasmanian historians don't dispute the events on Tasmania the way the fringe does. I hope this is OK with everybody. The Curthroys blurb now makes sense, because it is asking for a dialog between genocide specialists and Tasmanian historians, and for the latter group the events, while still involving mass murder, are not necessarily genocide. I can live with that, I think that's a pretty neutral summary.Likebox (talk) 17:30, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

(Move comments here--- please don't intersperse comments, it makes the discussion difficult to follow for others)

It only makes it difficult to follow if one has not grown up using internet news groups. For anyone who has then it is not at all difficult to follow. if are going to insist on then we are going to have even more verbose conversations:
Likebox you wrote above "NPOV means that you don't make editorial comments about "new histories" and "old histories". Histories are valuable long after they are written, and to restrict attention to the spate of recent books by Australian right wing lunatics and revisionists introduces a monstrous bias. Even if you restrict yourself to recent literature, the pro-genocide side outnumbers the anti-genocide side."
John Connor is of the opinion (see above) that among academics, (as opposed to journalists and popular historians), the non-genocides are in the majority. Do you have a source that contradicts him? --PBS (talk) 09:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
Read your own source. He says that the non-genocides are the majority in Australia, and the "genocides" are the majority in the world.Likebox (talk) 17:04, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
This article is about the History wars in Australia! Do you have a source to back up your assertion? --PBS (talk) 23:28, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Likebox: you seem to be the only one who thinks that your version is NPOV. It doesn't seem like anyone else who edits this article does. The citations provided by PBS support his text as being an accurate representation of the current position. Yours doesn't even match up with the commentary in the books in the citations which you didn't edit out presumably because you don't have anything that you can cite in their place which supports your POV. Don't make changes unless you can provide a credible citation to support your changes. If you do, don't expect anyone to leave them up there. If you want dispute resolution then apply for it but don't first edit back to your preferred text and expect it to stay there. NPOV does not mean "whatever Likebox agrees with". The order from Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, cited by Keepitshort in the "Did European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide" section just above, should at least give you something to think about. Webley442 (talk) 23:05, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

I have plenty of sources for a neutral edit, Tatz and Madley should be sufficient. Only two people are opposing these changes, you and PBS. I believe that both of you write hopelessly biased text, so a few new editors would be nice. The change I made was to remove an editorializing "but", and the editorializing adjectives "detailed" "specialist" etc which are ridiculous in this context.
Your insistence that the "order" which requested "no unjustified killings" means that mass murder didn't happen is hopelessly naive. The killings are well documented, and are not disputed even by the majority of Australian scholars. The only thing that is disputed is the label "genocide", and then only because of structural/intentional issues.Likebox (talk) 23:22, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
FYI, I requested that new editors take a look at this at Wikipedia:Editor assistance/Requests‎. I don't know what that does, really, but maybe it will bring new eyeballs in.Likebox (talk) 23:56, 8 June 2009 (UTC)

Your statement that the killings are well-documented is very revealing. If you actually read the works of the authors who advocate that there was or may have been genocide, you find they really don't "document" many killings at all. Try counting up the numbers of actual documented killings in your preferred historians' books. There aren't many at all. Rather it's all based on the presumption that all the full-blooded Tasmanian aborigines died out, there was conflict, therefore it must be that the settlers wiped out the Aborigines. There are a lot of 'estimates' and ratios, 4 to 1, 10 to 1, etc.

They reviled Windschuttle as being 'ghoulish' for producing a table in which he recorded all the killings of Tasmanian Aborigines for which there was some report in the Archives (about 120 in total, including those observed only by Tasmanian Aborigines and then recorded somewhere). All that they had to do to prove him wrong was produce evidence of more killings which you say are well documented. How many did they come up with that Windschuttle hadn't already found and reported in Fabrication, Vol 1, (2nd ed)? One. That's it. One. Say you add in the exaggerated death tolls like that of Cape Grim where 4 shepherds armed with muzzle-loading single-shot weapons are supposed to have killed 30 Aborigines in a location with so many escape routes that they all could have got out of effective range (100 metres) while the shepherds were reloading. That's a feat of marksmanship and reloading that 4 trained professional troops couldn't achieve. But let's say you add in the extra 24 (Windschuttle includes 6), it's still not a lot of "well documented" killings.

It's only been in recent years that the effect of introduced disease on non-immune populations like the Tasmanian Aborigines has entered the equation. Histories of the Americas and other colonised parts of the world are being reconsidered because only NOW are we are getting a better understanding of what introduced disease can do. Earlier historians simply didn't have an awareness of what a cocktail of 'new' diseases (to some of which Western peoples had a degree of resistance) can do, when introduced to a non-immune population like that of Tasmania who were isolated from all contact with the rest of humanity and their diseases for perhaps 10000 years. They just assumed that it was all the result of violence. Webley442 (talk) 00:09, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

The reason this was "assumed" is because the settlers wanted to exterminate the natives, organized the black line to exterminate the natives, killed the natives in this operation an in small massacres, until all the natives were dead.
Disease played no role, that's the international consensus. Mass Murder did it all, that's international consensus.Likebox (talk) 14:59, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
What is your source that "Disease played no role, that's the international consensus." ? --PBS (talk) 23:30, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
My sources are Tatz and Madley. I've brought them up a thousand times. Tatz is a mainstream text, Madley is primary literature research. If you want, I could find a dozen parallel examples by going further in the google search.Likebox (talk) 02:35, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Poisoned flour

Tatz is a good example of the dangers of relying on secondary sources rather than doing primary research. For example, he repeats the tale told by Ryan and many others about Aborigines in Tasmania being murdered by being given poisoned flour. But there are NO primary sources that say Tasmanian Aborigines were ever given poisoned flour. The tales of the poisoned flour stem from a report by GA Robinson about something he was told by George Robson, a superintendant of the VDL Company. Robson was asked to provide some poison by some shepherds who said that they planned to poison some of the "natives' dogs". Robson did not supply them with any because he suspected, merely suspected, that they planned to put it in flour to poison Aborigines. Robinson speculated that no doubt hundreds of Aborigines had been killed by poisoned flour but, as I said before, there are no documented accounts of it actually happening. Perhaps if Tatz and others had done primary research in the Tasmanian Archives and elsewhere, they'd have found the evidence of the effects of disease on the Aborigines which actually is there. But if a historian relies only on the work of historians who went before them as so many do, they just wind up repeating the same mistakes and people wind up believing something is a well established fact when it has no basis in reality. Webley442 (talk) 13:22, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Good job, you might have identified a fabrication. That's why we need genocide deniers, because when something horrible happens, stories tend to propagate, not all of them true.
A few fabrications entered the history books during the holocaust too: the camp fable about soap made from jewish fat, and human skin lampshades. These were eventually discredited (but it took a long time), and perhaps the stories of settlers distributing poisoned flour will be eventually discredited too. But the black line and the killing of the entire population cannot be erased from the collective memory.
But the general background to false stories during genocide is the horrific genocide itself, and this is why the stories propagate in the first place. Stories and fables are ancient means of communication, only slowly replaced by much more precise histories and mass media. The stories and fables convey the spirit of events, without being accurate on the details. Now we don't need the fables, really, because we can be accurate on the details. But that means, be accurate about the details!Likebox (talk) 15:15, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Thanks but I can't take any credit, it was you-know-who who established the facts. By the way, it has been confirmed by default, you might say. He first published these facts at least as early as 2002. Since then no-one has come forward with anything that contradicts it, i.e. still no documented accounts of poisoned flour being given to Tasmanian Aborigines.

Unfortunately what has happened has been that authors like Tatz are still regurgitating already discredited stories. Also unfortunately, it isn't just a few fabrications and misrepresentations of what the primary sources say. It appears to have been endemic amongst the 'majority' historians who wrote about what is supposed to have happened in VDL. Webley442 (talk) 04:08, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

I wasn't complimenting, but "you're welcome", I guess. I was only agreeing that it is possible that the poisoned flour story is not true. It is similar to the stories of Serbian soldiers spearing babies on bayonettes (babies/bayonettes are a recurring motif). The poisoned flour story is a simple memorable story that gets the main idea across--- the settlers treated the natives like dogs. If all of human writing were wiped out, this story would preserve this history as well as possible.
But an inaccuracy in one detail doesn't change the main theme. The fact that the camp soap wasn't made from jews doesn't change the fact that 2000 people a day died at Auschwitz. The fact that baby-throwing-then-bayonette-spearing is not a common phenomenon does not change the details of the Armenian genocide.
The jewish soap story was discredited by neo-nazis and holocaust deniers. Nobody else is willing to challenge such stuff. The same groups also helped to get the number of Auschwitz victims more or less right. But these corrections, helpful as they are, were made by stupid people who denied the genocide itself. It is a flaw of human politeness that these fixes could not be made by sensible people. It is very hard to tell a person who lost their entire family, "Yes, Schmuel, I know you lost all your family, but I don't know about this soap business."
It must be made clear that even if Windschuttle got the poisoned flour right, it doesn't change much of anything at all. Tatz does not become a bad reference simply because it repeated a popular falsehood, just as textbooks that repeat the apochryphal "I cannot tell a lie" George Washington story are not automatically discredited. Myths and legends are a part of what makes us human, and these textbooks have acted to preserve them. They should be preserved, because they are often better at conveying the spirit of the events than the unadorned facts.Likebox (talk) 14:45, 12 June 2009 (UTC)

One of my points is that Tatz and so many others rely on secondary sources like Ryan rather than primary sources, i.e. what's in the Archives. Another is that anyone who has read Fabrication thoroughly and checked it against the works of Ryan and the others and against what's in some of the original documents like the journals of GA Robinson knows that it isn't just a 'few' minor fabrications or a 'few' bad footnotes; it's on a far larger scale. It's not 'just one detail'. When you cross out everything in Ryan's The Aboriginal Tasmanians that turns out not to be supported by the primary sources (often even directly contradicted by the primary sources), there's not much left. And it's the same for many of the other secondary sources that Tatz and others base their work on. Like I've said before, it's a house of cards. When you know how bad the situation is in terms of the accuracy of the work of Ryan and the other Tasmanian 'specialists', you just can't take seriously anything built on that foundation. Webley442 (talk) 03:44, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

And I'm telling you that it pretty much is just one or two details. The idiotic stuff that Windschuttle writes is exactly parallel to holocaust denial--- he takes minor inaccuracies like the poison-flour story (which might be true still, I don't know), and spins that into a web of doubt that suckers gullible people who don't want to believe such awful things could be true.
I urge you to read the primary literature yourself. Find out about the black line, about the virulent, murderous, racism. Look at the results of the murders, and please, change your mind. But I won't hold my breath.
For this article, mind you, you don't need to change your mind. Just rest assured that nobody else is going to change their minds either.Likebox (talk) 04:35, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

And therein lies your problem, because over the years I have read the primary sources, as many of the primary sources as I and many of my historian friends have been able to get our hands on; the journals of GA Robinson, newspapers of the day, settlers' letters and journals, official colonial documents and they support Windschuttle's characterisation of the events, not yours. Webley442 (talk) 05:41, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

And I am telling you that if you think that, your brain is damaged. This is the problem with wearing a "white blindfold", as they say. There is a plan to kill everybody, then everybody is killed. They are killed by shooting, and rarely occasionally by sadistic methods (but atrocity stories propagate better). You must have read about the black line, and you must have ignored it. You read about the unpunished murder, and you ignored it. You read the reports of native survivors, and the reports of international observers, and ignored them. Good for you. You won't change my mind, or anybody elses. Please make this page reflect the MAJORITY POSITION that the natives were murdered.Likebox (talk) 13:09, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

dispute resolution

Outside view — several points I wanted to make here.

1) I'm concerned that some editors of this article are trying to determine the "truth" and write an article that tells "the truth". Please don't! Wikipedia doesn't judge truth, which is why we have an article on bigfoot. Articles need to reflect what the sources say. And if it isn't sourced, don't say it.
2) If the sources contradict each other, that represents no particular problem. If some older scholarship has been replaced by newer scholarship, again, it represents no problem. Just report what the sources say. So for example: "Smith (1921) contended that X. Jones (1957) disagreed because Y. The most recent study, Evans (2001) holds that Z."
3) On the killings: If there are sources for these killings, then it's okay to include them. If other sources challenge the first sources, say on what grounds.
4) In a content dispute situation, please assume other editors are editing in good faith. It's okay to disagree with them, but please try to challenge their arguments and not them personally.
5) In a content dispute, avoid the word "you". Content disputes are best conducted in the first person, with the second person completely unused. So say "This is what I think", or "my position is," and then stop.
6) Try to avoid the emphatic declarative. Don't say "Black is white"; say "I think black is white because."
7) When contradicting another editor, say "I disagree because".

The statement "we need dispute resolution" up there is a bit hopeful, I'm afraid. Dispute resolution is about conduct disputes (edit-warring, etc.); its purpose is to make people discuss things on the talk page. But you're already discussing like adults on the talk page, so there aren't any other mechanisms to help you except the basics of civility, no personal attacks, assuming good faith, etc. Sorry.—S Marshall Talk/Cont 00:58, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Likebox in the previous subsection, when you write revisionists I presume you mean historical revisionism (negationism) and not historical revisionism. If so please remember that this is a public page and if you must not liable living people, on Wikipedia in articles or on the talk page. So please consider if the remark you made above could be taken in the context you have written it as libelous and if so remove it (WP:BLP). --PBS (talk) 08:48, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
PBS--- you mean to please the REVISIONISTS? Like YOU? Like, never!
But seriously, it's not libelous to call someone a revisionist--- it doesn't necessarily carry negative connotations. It just means they are in the minority.Likebox (talk) 15:29, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Detailed studies

Likebox from this edit and the comments you have made further up the page, it is clear that you don't like the wording:

because more recent detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction by historians who specialise in Australian history have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in the earlier histories.

I think that this is because you are interpreting the clause in a different way from me, so can we look at it in detail and see if it needs changing to clarify it, or if the current wording is OK. You seem to be concerned that the phrase "because more recent detailed studies" implies that earlier histories were not detailed, and if that phrase is taken on its own I agree it could imply that, but when it is coupled with "the details and interpretations in the earlier histories", the first clause is balanced by the second because the second makes it clear that the earlier histories were also detailed studies. If on further consideration you do not see it that way please could you explain to my why you think my interpretation of what I wrote can be construed in another way. --PBS (talk) 08:48, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

I gave up talking to you. Ergo, dispute resolution. This is the n-th iteration of this text, and it just gets more and more biased. This needs to be a neutral summary of the literature, with the mainstream consensus view put first. I don't have anything new to say that isn't said (again and again) in the previous sections.Likebox (talk) 15:33, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
Doesn't the paragraph start with that assertion: "..., Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars, ..., present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide," ? --PBS (talk) 16:42, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
All right, I'll pretend I didn't say this a million times already. The article starts off with the following
After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide, however the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect...
This is wrong in the obvious ways, which you must be aware of, because whenever I fix them you revert. First, it doesn't acknowledge that it is not "after", but "ever since". Second, it pretends like this conclusion is based on "previously published histories". That doesn't apply to the hundreds or thousands of people who did original primary literature research on the subject.
The rest of the paragraph conflates the "circumspect" Australians (who agree with the mass-killings but disagree on intentional/structural) with Windschuttle and his friends, who are crazy.Likebox (talk) 23:44, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
What is your evidence for "since"? It implies that at the same time the word was introduced Tasmaina was listed as a genoide. What is the earliest date you have for such a published assertion? The OED lists the first published usage as 1944 R. LEMKIN Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, clearly a specialised publication and 1945 Sunday Times 21 Oct. 7. (a general publication). Clive Turnbull published in 1948 probably did use the term genocide because he did not know of its existence (Curthoys pp. 239,240), which suggests that calling the events that happened in Tasmania a genocide occurred after the introduction of the word genocide. If you have a source that lists the first publication date as 1944, then we can change the word to "since".
There is nothing in the paragraph that suggests that mass murder either did or did not happen, it is quite possible for there to be mass murder without it being a genocide (see List of Bosnian genocide prosecutions).
Do you have evidence that hundreds or thousands of [qualified professional academics] did original primary literature research on the subject?
The paragraph says "by historians who specialise in Australian history", it does not mention "Windschuttle and his friends" and the citations used are from professional historians, a former associate professor and a professor in main stream Australian Universities. --PBS (talk) 11:30, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Again, I am not going to argue with you, because it is hopeless. The evidence for "ever since" are the mentions (which YOU brought up) of Lemkin's 1948 or so catalog of genocide, and the fact that this is still the consensus in the international genocide literature.
Lemkin's work was not published, and even if it had been it would have been after 1945 the documented us of the word in a mainstream newspaper. So it was used "after" the introduction of the word genocide not "since". --PBS (talk) 15:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
"Hundreds" or "Thousands" of specialists study every well known thing. The only thing in acedemia that has not been studied by hundreds or thousands of people are new things. You can go and verify this yourself, it is as obvious as "thousands of people solve a quadratic equation every day".
Most will study secondary sources, it is rare for people to do primary research and publish their results, that is usually done for doctrinal or post doctrinal papers. --PBS (talk) 15:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
The paragraph is bad by omission, as you very well know. It needs to say this
  1. Consensus is that natives died of mass murder
  2. The murder was collective and organized by the settlers
  3. It has been traditionally labelled as genocide
Then you can say that within Australia, there is a structural/intentional debate (not much of a debate, really), and that there is also a fringe minority which says that the killings never happened. That's it. It's very simple.
But you know all this--- I have said it many times.Likebox (talk) 14:52, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Why does the paragraph have to mention mass murder? This paragraph is about the genocide debate, as I said above and gave an article link, mass murder does not mean genocide (it is all to do with whether the "murders" intended to bring about extinction of a substantial part of the group). If one uses the structural/frontier definition of genocide then it can be genocide even if there was no intent but the group died in substantial numbers because of other consequences (such as killing of native flora and fauna for European farming which leads to the starvation of the native population). This is explained in the next paragraph. This paragraph is restricted to informing the reader that there is currently a debate about the use of the term genocide for the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines. --PBS (talk) 15:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
Look, your opinion that the research people do is based on secondary sources is ridiculous. Most people who are studying a given field take at least a cursory glance at some primary literature, and some plow through it deeply. All but a few kooks agree about the mass murder.
I think you mean "Look, [I think] your opinion that the research people do is based on secondary sources is ridiculous." --PBS (talk) 23:28, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
No, actually, what I meant was, ARE YOU NUTS??? DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT YOU'RE THE FIRST PERSON TO READ THE OLD NEWSPAPERS?? WHEN THOUSANDS OF PHD'S HAVE BEEN WRITTEN?? But I rephrased it more politely above.Likebox (talk) 01:48, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
The reason this needs to be mentioned is because the "genocide debate" has two different "debators". There are the sane debators, like Reynolds, that question whether this can be classified as a genocide because the government's role is not established. I think these people are wrong, but at least they don't deny the basic historical facts. Then there are the people that deny the facts, which are Windschuttle et al, who are not just wrong, but produce what mainstream scholars consider to be outright fabrications.
When talking about a subject such as this, especially when framing it as a debate that includes Windschuttle, you need to explicitly say three things:
  1. mainstream consensus on events--- mass murder, the black line, complete extinction
  2. mainstream Australian debate--- was the government responsible
  3. fringe Australian figures--- the historical events are wrong.
you don't take a position on whether they are right or wrong, and you don't editorialize about which and who used secondary sources, because there are plenty of people that used primary sources and secondary sources in all three camps. You also clearly say, without equivocation or qualification, that the first camp is the majority in the world, the second is a position common in australia, and the third is a small minority even in Australia. Then you comply with undue weight. Once you said these things, you have fulfilled your obligations to undue weight.Likebox (talk) 16:58, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

(outdent) Do you have a source that makes the distinction of three camps that you are making. --PBS (talk) 23:28, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

That's not for the article, it does not need a source. That's to explain it to YOU, because you pretend to be so thickheaded. This is "UNDUE WEIGHT" not "VERIFIABILITY". That means, you need to know how many people believe what.
  1. How many people believe the Tasmanians died of diseases? (a few morons in australia)
  2. How many people believe the Tasmanians died by murder? (everybody else)
  3. How many believe it was genocide? (almost everyone outside Australia, a certain percentage in Australia)
This listing of who believes what. It doesn't come from a source, it comes from common sense, and everyone so far agrees about the breakdowns of opinions, so don't start playing devil's advocate here. When you list unpopular opinions, you say that they are unpopular. Period. It's not even really an insult.Likebox (talk) 01:29, 11 June 2009 (UTC)
It is becoming harder for me to keep editing here, because I keep repeating points which are obvious applications of undue weight, and it is infuriating slow process. Here's a link to what I am pretty sure is a decent, well sourced, more or less neutral version of the disputed section: user:Likebox/HistoryWars.Likebox (talk) 02:20, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure that this dispute can ever be resolved. Obviously the parties to this, including myself, have differing views of what is NPOV and what is Undue Weight and how best to represent what the History wars are about. Can I just ask that we try and keep this civil? And I say that fully aware that I've used some critical language myself. Insults don't help reach a resolution.

But, I have to say that it's fairly obvious that the version and language that PBS proposes has more support amongst those editing this page than any alternative version proposed and that's just how it stands at present. Webley442 (talk) 13:46, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree that it is impossible to resolve this while talking to people such as the editors here. The issues are that "NPOV" means "neutral voice", and "undue weight" means majority opinions first. These are usually pretty clear to everybody, but when compromise is not acceptable, Wikipedia is not a democracy. This needs to go further in dispute resolution.Likebox (talk) 15:05, 11 June 2009 (UTC)

Genocide 4

I’m a little concerned that these pages oversimplify the arguments made by Windschuttle and others regarding the causes for the extinction of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines. He and they don’t just say: “It was disease, not the settlers”.

So for clarification purposes, I’m setting out the factors involved in the arguments:

Factors involved in the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines.

1. The original aboriginal population of Tasmania was low to start with. 2000, 4000, 5000, whatever guess you use and they are all pretty much guesswork, it was low.

2. Life expectancy was low as it was for most hunter-gatherer societies but exacerbated by Tasmanian issues including a cold climate and the fact that the Tasmanian Aborigines wore little or no clothing of any kind, just the occasional kangaroo/wallaby skin tied or draped around them, built very little by way of shelter from the cold, had poor hygiene standards in their camps, and so on.

3. Infant mortality was high. Exacerbated by the issues mentioned above.

4. There was ongoing internal violence: casual violence, feuds, killings over suspected sorcery, and raids on other tribes/bands for women or for other reasons. This internal violence did not cease when white settlers arrived.

Population growth in pre-colonial Tasmania would have been extremely slow due to factors 1 to 4. There could even have been points at which the pre-colonial population suffered declines rather than growth. There has been speculation that the reason for the Tasmanian Aborigines apparent island-wide refusal to consume/fierce aversion to fish may have been an event or series of events in the past when a significant proportion of the population was killed through the consumption of fish made poisonous by an algal bloom. It has also been speculated that enough of the adult population may have died in such a poisoning event that it affected Tasmanian aboriginal society in other ways such as the loss of technology through the loss of those who knew how to make and use various Neolithic tools, weapons and hunting implements and perhaps the development of a more violent, less sophisticated culture through the loss of the structures and the elders who socialised young males.

5. There were deaths through introduced diseases. Diseases could have been introduced not only through the British settlement but also through contact with passing ships (e.g. Two French landfalls were made at Recherche Bay on the Tasmanian coast, the first in April 1792 when they stayed for 26 days and in January 1793 staying for 24 days. Records show that there was friendly contact between the French and the Tasmanian Aborigines. Friendly contact is even better for transferring disease than unfriendly contact). It is generally agreed that smallpox never made it to Tasmania; there is no doubt that other diseases including respiratory diseases, particularly colds, influenza and pneumonia, did. GA Robinson: “The aborigines of this colony are universally susceptible to cold and that unless the utmost providence is taken in checking its progress at an early period it fixes itself on the lungs and gradually assumes the complaint spoken of i.e. the catarrhal fever.”

6. Infertility through introduced venereal diseases. Untreated venereal diseases can lead to infertility. Specifically, untreated venereal diseases can lead to Pelvic Inflammatory Disease. PID can result in abscesses and scarring in the fallopian tubes. These can block fertilisation outright or cause an ectopic pregnancy and loss of the foetus (and often the mother). Venereal disease can also lead to people being ‘effectively’ infertile, i.e. though not technically infertile, the sores and physical effects of venereal disease can rule people out as sexual partners.

7. The loss of a significant number of women of childbearing age from the full-blooded aboriginal gene pool to white sealers and settlers. Some aboriginal women were abducted, some (possibly including captives taken from other tribes or bands) were traded, i.e. sold by aboriginal men, some may have been given as ‘gifts’ meant to incorporate the new arrivals into aboriginal society through marriage and a not insignificant number voluntarily associated themselves with various white sealer and settler groups. Life as a woman in Tasmanian aboriginal society was hard and violent. Trading their ‘favours’ for food and other things from white sealers and settlers may have meant an easier life for some of them.

8. Deaths through what conflict there was between the Aborigines and the British. There’s evidence for about 120 known violent deaths of Tasmanian Aborigines in some kind of conflict with the colonists. Undoubtedly there were an undetermined number of deaths for which there are no records. There is a range of arguments as to why this undetermined number may not have been as large as some people would like to believe including the Aborigines’ possession of dogs warning them of anyone attempting to approach their camps and the fact that the Aborigines were very good at evading the British when they wanted to. Note the Black Line, a determined effort to round up two ‘hostile’ tribes in 1830, which captured only an old man and a crippled boy (and they both escaped later) and also caused the shooting of 2 Aborigines and the accidental shooting of 5 troopers.

Ultimately there is no question that if somehow there had been no British/European colonisation of Tasmania, the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines would still be there. For me the question is, do we characterise the complex interaction of the factors above as genocidal or what? Webley442 (talk) 05:56, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

What you don't point out is that this analysis is A MINORITY VIEW. The black line was a line of human beings that swept out the entire island, looking to hunt down and kill every native inhabitant. It failed, but it showed genocidal intent.
The individual massacres before the black line, and after, did succeed. The "undocumented murders" (your term only, because they were well documented by the surviving natives and by the outside world) are widely acknowledged to have killed everyone else.
On an island without farming, a population of about 5-8000 is the stable equilibrium. Without the Europeans, their life would have continued in the traditional way at about the same numbers. All these people were murdered by the settlers, that is the international consensus. Everything else is denialist speculation by a lunatic fringe.Likebox (talk) 13:02, 13 June 2009 (UTC)

"All these people were murdered by the settlers, that is the international consensus." Likebox what is your source that this is the consensus? --PBS (talk) 18:36, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

Every source except Windschuttle. I have given you six or seven already and I'm not going to dredge up any more.Likebox (talk) 21:13, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Anne Curthoys on page 247 of Genocide and settler society by A. Dirk Moses, writes "Generalizations have been made about Tasmanian history with little recourse to the detailed Australian studies that demonstrate that it is not clear and sustained case of state planning of mass killing, but rather of land seizure .... [with] too little too late, to protect the indigenous people from settler attack and from the effects of the loss of the necessities of life". Henry Reynolds explains on pate 146 of the same volume that some of the deaths at least were during a war. So this means that if any Aborigines were killed in combat then All these people were not murdered. Even if you do not accept that a war was in progress, then if you accept that self defence is a legitimate legal defence against murder, then if even one settler killed an Aborigine in self defence then not all were murdered.
Stop rationalizing. They were killed by settlers who wanted their land. That's what everyone knows, and whether you want to call it genocide is your business.Likebox (talk) 13:56, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
See #Relative size of the parties to the genocide debate. To make a statement like you do you have to have a source that backs up you assertion that "All these people were murdered by the settlers, that is the international consensus." --PBS (talk) 10:26, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
As I already told you, it's every source, it is obvious. I refuse to source the obvious.Likebox (talk) 13:58, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
I am glad to see that you no longer think that intersperse comments makes the discussion difficult to follow for others.[30]
You have now changed your position, before you said all "All these people were murdered by the settlers" now you are saying "They were killed by settlers who wanted their land" are you still saying the sources say that all of them were murdered? If not do you mean all the sources say that all of the Tasmanian Aborigines were directly killed by settlers or do all of the sources say that some of them killed indirectly? --PBS (talk) 19:32, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Look, I'm sorry about interspersing--- it was an accident--- I thought I was at the end of the section. I didn't bother to fix it, but if you like I will. I don't like interspersing, because if someone replies to the reply, etc, etc, two paragraphs of the original text will end up widely separated, and the original thought is completely lost.
Interlacing comments with indention has been the norm in Internet New groups since the 1980's. It saves a lot of repetition and verbosity (e.g. you said "quote" in reply to my statement "earlier quote" which was an issue you addressed "an even earlier quote") and allows threads to develop from where they are initially raised. (Just as I am doing here). --PBS (talk) 08:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I didn't "change my position"--- these are minor quibbles over wording. To say they were "killed" is not so different than to say they were "murdered" in these asymmetric situations. But that's not the point. The point is the natives did not die of "omissions" or of diseases.Likebox (talk) 23:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
Most people found not guilty of murder, for reasons of self defence would not consider murder and killed to be minor quibbles, but the person is just as dead. I think in this case the use of murder in place of killed is a rhetorical devise, not a legal description. Note that I used the word most at the start of this paragraph, Likebox do you have any source that says "All these people were intentionally killed by the settlers"? -- for example how does at square with Aborigine women taken as wives/sex slaves, do you have a source that states they were all murdered after they were no longer useful?.
BTW we have not yet started to discuss the paragraph that starts "Much of the debate on whether European ..." as we have yet to agree that the wording of the paragraph before that one, ("After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s..."). If we are going to move on to the next paragraph "Much of the debate..." then I would point out that it is talking about "European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide" not specifically about Tasmania. --PBS (talk) 08:50, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I am not objecting over minor wording issues. If you want to quibble over whether to say "murdered" or "killed", honestly I would be fine with either. If it said consensus is "most were killed" or "men were killed, some women were taken as sex slaves" I wouldn't care. Right now it is implying something completely denialist, that there is serious possibility that the natives just died of diseases. All I am objecting to is the tiptoeing around stating the international consensus on this. It's painful to come face to face with this sort of stuff, but it must be done.Likebox (talk) 00:25, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Here is how I phrased it in User:Likebox/HistoryWars


Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in the 1940s with the specific example of the Black War of the 1820's and 1830's in mind. The colonists in Tasmania during this period are widely acknowledged to have nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines[1]. They were reduced from a population of several thousands in 1800 to a few hundred by 1829, and then to zero by 1876.

Some recent studies by Australian historians have raised questions about the appropriateness of the genocide label for these events.[2][3] Much of the debate is over to what extent the governing body of the settler outpost had the goal of extermination in mind[4]. What is known is that Governor George Arthur[5] declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered any soldier to shoot any Aboriginal on sight. Journalist and publisher Henry Melville[6], 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” [7][8]

Accepting that most of the natives were killed by exterpationist settlers, Henry Reynolds has nevertheless rejected the label of genocide...

  1. ^ Colin Martin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy p.78-79
  2. ^ 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.
  3. ^ 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
  4. ^ http://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html
  5. ^ http://[George Arthur biography adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010034b.htm]
  6. ^ [Henry Melville biography: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm]
  7. ^ Melville, 1835, p 33, requoted from Madley
  8. ^ http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf
I don't know what's wrong with this.Likebox (talk) 00:31, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

What’s wrong with it? Let’s see the first sentence: “Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in the 1940s with the specific example of the Black War of the 1820's and 1830's in mind.” Lemkin coined the word in 1943, after having studied the Armenian genocide. At the time, there was ongoing genocide in Europe under the Nazis (the victims including 49 of his relatives) plus mass killings in China, Korea and elsewhere in East Asia under the Japanese occupations but no, Lemkin wasn’t thinking about these, he was focussed on what happened in Tasmania in the early 1800’s when he came up with the word ‘genocide’. He must have been a pretty odd bloke. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.202.43.54 (talk) 09:00, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

"The colonists in Tasmania during this period are widely acknowledged to have nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines". Likebox do you mean the "colonization of Tasmania" or the "colonists in Tasmania"? -- PBS (talk) 18:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
Now at least this is getting somewhere. How about this then:

Since the 1940's, when the modern definition of genocide was adopted, the Black War of the 1820's and 1830's has been considered a defining example. During the Black War, European colonists in Tasmania during are widely acknowledged to have nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines.[] From a population of approximately 5,000 individuals, the native Tasmanians were reduced to a few hundred by 1829, and then to zero by 1876.

Some recent studies by Australian historians have raised questions about the appropriateness of the genocide label for these events.[]Much of the debate is over to what extent the governing body of the settler outpost had the goal of extermination in mind[]. What is known is that Governor George Arthur[] declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered any soldier to shoot any Aboriginal on sight. Journalist and publisher Henry Melville[], 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” [][]

And to answer PBS, yes I do mean the colonists, that is what Tatz writes.Likebox (talk) 00:29, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
I don't think we are getting anywhere with this for example take this sentence "Since the 1940's, when the modern definition of genocide was adopted, the Black War of the 1820's and 1830's has been considered a defining example." It has been pointed out to you repeatedly that this is not true. Lemkin's work was not published, and the link was bought to the attention of the world until in the 1970s when serious academic research into comparative genocides got underway (Anne Curthoys Moses p. 241), Reynolds says first major work published on the subject was Leo Kuper in 1981 (Henry Reynolds, Moses p. 128). --PBS (talk) 12:10, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
You don't think we are getting anywhere because you don't want a neutral text. Don't say "for example". List all your problems, specifically, one by one. "For example" means there are more.
The statement you are contesting is absolutely true and easily verified. The 1948 ref you brought up listed the black war, and that should be enough, but it was also talked about in popular books in the 1960s as an example of a genocide. It was used as a type example.Likebox (talk) 12:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
Likebox How do you know that "you don't want a neutral text" and do you really think that such a comment helps us build a consensus? "The 1948 ref you brought up listed the black war" what 1948 reference? What are the "popular books in the 1960s"? But in both cases they do not validate the "Since the 1940's, when the modern definition of genocide was adopted" as the definition for genocide was coined a number of years before 1948. Further I do not see it as an improvement on the sentence in the article that starts "After the introduction of the word genocide..." --PBS (talk) 17:07, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
The reason I say you don't want a neutral text is because you have consistently deleted any material sourced from Tatz, Madley, or Mear. Anything put in there from these sources is removed, and then if I put it back you say I am edit warring.
If consensus means that we can't say that nearly all sources agree that the native Tasmanians were killed by settlers, then there will never be consensus. I just will not agree, ever, ever, ever. I know from reading a representative sample that this is indeed what all mainstream sources say, and I know that this is not a new phenomenon. The extermination of the Tasmanians is casually mentioned in at least one of Kurt Vonnegut's books from the 60s, in addition to H.G. Welles history book (1930s or 1940s).Likebox (talk) 17:25, 19 June 2009 (UTC)
To point out the improvement, there are at least THREE NEW ACADEMIC SOURCES I introduced, and a host of non-academic sources to bolster the Undue Weight balancing.Likebox (talk) 17:26, 19 June 2009 (UTC)

The reason that the changes that you made mentioning Tatz, Madley, or Mear (along with a lot of the other changes you’ve made) get removed is not that they are not valid sources to cite. It is the construction of your own text that is the problem as it consistently implies that what Tatz, Madley, Mear or YOU say has to be considered the TRUTH and that any source that contradicts them or you is therefore FALSE. That’s not what Wikipedia is about,; it doesn’t determine what TRUTH is. You do this by using ‘loaded’ words and phrases, like “since”, “widely acknowledged”. The word “since” implies that there has been no change in positions or opinions ‘since’ then. You’ve been cited several sources that should show any reasonable person that there has been movement in those positions and I’m not going to cite those sources again. The word “after” allows for the possibility that there can be changes in the position “since” doesn’t. The phrase “widely acknowledged” in general parlance has the implication that what is being said is the TRUTH. Once again, Wikipedia doesn’t decide what the TRUTH is.

You keep trying to reinsert the sentence: “Much of the debate is over to what extent the governing body of the settler outpost had the goal of extermination in mind.” Once again it’s heavily loaded, it implies that there is no doubt that it is the TRUTH that the Aborigines in VDL were deliberately exterminated and that it is merely a question of whether the Colonial Administration was in it up to their necks or merely negligent.

You keep trying to reinsert the sentence: “What is known is that Governor George Arthur declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered any soldier to shoot any Aboriginal on sight.” but you object to any mention of his detailed orders which required that the use of force be a last resort and that when settlers encountered Aborigines who were not hostile, they should be “fed and kindly treated” and allowed to leave unharmed. And on what basis did you object? “It is inappropriate to list government statements which contradict the consensus of historians about the events without revealing the historical consensus.” We are actually expected to exclude all mention of what Arthur actually ordered except for a small portion that suits your purposes. That gives the appearance of an attempt to conceal the TRUTH rather than portray it.

Need I go on? Virtually none of the text that you have written meets the Wiki standards for neutrality, either that or it lacks appropriate citations, but you seem to be the only one who can’t see this. Webley442 (talk) 02:52, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

The position I am trying to insert is a commonly accepted MAJORITY OPINION among scholars and historians. Nearly all of them agree that the natives were killed by the settlers. That is just A FACT. You can ask them if you don't believe me. THERE HAS BEEN NO DRIFT OF OPINION, nor is there going to be any.
So you need to say "This is what the vast majority believe", then say what I said. Then you can say "Some believe" and list what Reynolds believes. Then you can state what Windschuttle believes, and say "One fringe position is this...". That's what you do on Wikipedia. You need to include all sources, and if you don't like the phrasing, you can haggle over that.
But you shouldn't insert irrelevant orders. The orders that you quoted for "the natives should be kindly treated" are completely out of context, as Keepitshort has shown you. These orders have nothing to do with the activity of the black line or the extermination campaign, or the declaration of martial law. You can put these quotes in a paragraph, but you had better add a sentence "This is from 18XX, and is believed to have been obeyed towards such and so and such and so from this time to this time", so that the order itself will not be used to give UNDUE WEIGHT to Windschuttles crackpot rants.
The claims I made were each supported by sources, and are MAJORITY OPINIONS. This is a no-brainer.Likebox (talk) 03:17, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Irrelevant orders? The original 1828 proclamation of Martial Law by Arthur contained these words: “BUT, I DO, nevertheless, hereby strictly order, enjoin, and command, that the actual use of arms be in no case resorted to, if the Natives can by other means be induced or compelled to retire into the pieces and portions of this Island hereinbefore excepted from the operation of Martial Law; that bloodshed be checked, as much as possible; that any Tribes which may surrender themselves up, shall be treated with every degree of humanity; and that defenceless women and children be invariably spared.-AND, all Officers, Civil and Military, and other persons whatsoever, are hereby required to take notice of this, my Proclamation and Order, and to render obedience and assistance herein accordingly.”

That was there, in the orders, from day 1 of Martial Law in VDL, but apparently you want it excluded.

Never mind, I’m fully aware that it is pointless debating with someone with irrevocably fixed views. I’ll leave it up to other people viewing these pages to compare and contrast your statements with what has been cited from the words of real historians like Blainey, Moses, Connor and Reynolds and from original documents and decide if the evidence supports your simplistic views. There should be enough about the evidence and the arguments involved shown on these pages for people to realize that things aren’t as black and white as you claim. So far, I don’t see too many other editors rushing in to back you. 121.208.165.117 (talk) 04:30, 20 June 2009 (UTC) Didn't realise I'd been logged out when I made this comment. Webley442 (talk) 04:48, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

If other editors don't come now, they will come later. I have no objection to putting in the order in a way that complies with undue weight. That means you say that after this declaration, the natives were massacred.
To put it in without this is like saying "A large fraction of those arriving at Auschwitz were selected for special treatment", without saying that special treatment meant you were gassed.Likebox (talk) 15:10, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Responding to AWNB request

On the AWNB, it was said that "There is a basic problem in that it does not mention the consensus view about the 19th century mass killings on Tasmania.". Is there a concern that there are parts of the consensus view that aren't being mentioned in the article, or is there a concern that a certain view isn't being labelled as the consensus? Also, looking at the talk page, a little more civility would be helpful. Andjam (talk) 01:59, 14 June 2009 (UTC)

AWNB = Wikipedia:Australian Wikipedians' notice board. I put something up there trying to get more editors here.Likebox (talk) 15:18, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
Since even Wikipedia doesn't seem to know what an AWNB is, perhaps my ignorance can be excused. If it is not too much trouble, could you please enlighten me? As to civility, we need to be aware that this is a discussion of a "History War" - not a very polite one - about a real "War" in Tasmania where a newspaper editorial of the time, said, on 1 December 1826: "We make no pompous display of Philanthropy -- we say unequivocally, SELF DEFENCE IS THE FIRST LAW OF NATURE. THE GOVERNMENT MUST REMOVE THE NATIVES -- IF NOT, THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS, AND DESTROYED!" (capitalisation in orginal) [1] It was predicting what Likebox and many historians claims happened,and it also said, from a more NPOV:
It would be worse than useless, to shew how different things might have been -- it is enough to state things as they are ; and we find by every day's experience, that the natives are no longer afraid of a white man -- that they know, how (sic, probably whould be "when") a gun is fired off, it is useless. From attacking stock-keepers, they now attack huts, and in many instances, the fight has lasted for hours, until by dint of numbers, they have compelled the whites to retreat. They have tasted the sweets of civilized life, but they have no inclination for the labour of it. They have ceased to fear, and learn to abhor. They look upon the white men, as robbing them of their land, depriving them of their subsistence, and in too many instances, violating their persons. To discuss a question of this nature, it is necessary tb look at naked truths. It is too late to discuss the question, whether they might not have been civilized -- they have unfortunately seen nothing but pernicious examples. What intercourse has taken place, has produced only hatred, and revenge, and nothing, but a removal, can protect us from incursions, similar to the Caffrees in Africa, or the back-woodmen, in North America."
Some recent Australian historians want to argue that Aboriginal people in Tasmania had no concept of "land", so they could not be offended by what the contemporary editor of the Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, Andrew Bent[2] calls "robbing them of their land", that they died off by disease, or perhaps because settlers were "depriving them of their subsistence", rather than violence, for which they only accept written documentation. But is seems clear enough that the problem during the co-called Black War during the period from about 1824 is that Aboriginal people were becoming more effective in defending their land, and the rest follows. It is not surprising, therefore, that revisions of this history generate heated debate, and perhaps they should, since it is not a small matter. "To discuss a question of this nature, it is necessary tb look at naked truths." regards, Keepitshort (talk) 09:41, 14 June 2009 (UTC)
  1. ^ [Editorial in Colonial Times and Tasmanian Advertiser, 1 December 1826 http://ndpbeta.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/2448994]
  2. ^ Online Biography of Andrew bent http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010085b.htm


And that removes the need for civility on this talk page? Andjam (talk) 12:37, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

The idea that nomadic (or semi-nomadic) hunter-gatherer societies (NHGs) like that of the Tasmanian Aborigines did not have the same sort of relationship to 'land' as have other societies where the main source of food is farming is not new and it wasn't 'invented' by a historian; it's just a relatively new concept for (some) historians. Anthropologists have known this for a long time. It's just recently that historians have started to take the real motivations of NHGs into consideration when assessing the nature of their interactions with colonising societies.

"Land", the possession of particular pieces of land with defined boundaries, is important to farm-based societies because (a) you need land to farm and (b) population growth in settled farm-based societies is a lot higher than in NHGs so the available arable land (i.e. your source of food) in an area tends to be taken up in a relatively short time. If you don't have some sort of ownership of a particular piece of land, with the right to exclude others who may want to use it, how do you survive? You have to be able to plant your crops and that means some sort of ownership rights to the land to do it on, otherwise you starve.

NHGs are firstly: nomadic. They wander across the land following or looking for sources of food. Everything else is incidental to finding enough food (except in arid areas where water is a big issue, too). If there is a better source a distance away, they move to it and if they locate another source a little further away they move to that. While they may stay in a particular area for long periods of time, doing small migratory circuits from one food source to another, over generations NHGs could and did migrate thousands of miles. How does anyone think the Tasmanian Aborigines got to Tasmania in the first place? Left behind by a bus tour? Tasmania represented the end of the road, there was nothing beyond it to go to; and when the land bridge to the mainland went underwater thousands of years ago, they were stuck there; though it's possible that some groups had already migrated back onto the mainland by then.

The only other real influence on their movements aside from geography is the relative strength of the `competition', i.e. other tribal groups. A strong tribe can force a weaker one away from the good sources of food so that the weaker tribe ends up either moving some distance to better sources with less competition or subsisting in the less fertile areas which generally means a smaller tribal group or splitting up into bands and having to trek over a much larger area in order to harvest enough natural food sources to survive.

Put simply, the primary concern of NHGs is survival. Life for them tends to be tough and uncertain. They never know at the start of a day whether they are going to be able to hunt and kill enough to feed everyone or not. Their main interest is in the wild game they hunt. As Bill Stanner said: “Time and again the hunters fail, and the search for vegetable food can be just as patchy.……….The small, secondary foodstuffs—the roots, honey, grubs, ants, and the like, of which far too much has been made in the literature—are relished tidbits, not staples.” Whether they went hungry or not, whether they starved or not, depended on how successful the hunting was.

"Land' as something to possess simply doesn't come into the equation for HGs, it is the resources of the land that they are concerned about.

One of the mistakes made by many people, including historians, is to `judge' the behaviour of NHGs in terms of their own concepts rather than try to understand those of the NHGs. A basic example: colonisers arrive; immediately the indigenous population threatens the colonists or initiates some type of attack; the conclusion of the Western mind is that the indigenous people are defending ownership of the land because that's what they'd do if someone came to take their land. An anthropologist will tell you that what they are concerned about is competition for game in the particular area they are currently located. This concern about competition can dissipate however if the indigenous population realise that the new arrivals have brought their own food supplies, particularly domestic animals which are readily recognisable as potential food, of course, to hunters even if they are unfamiliar species. Problems can arise when the colonisers start to hunt but on the other hand, indigenous people often treat the colonisers as another rich resource to be utilised in the most efficient way in order to survive. If they can get gifts of what they want from white settlers or trade for it, that is fine. But if they can’t get enough to satisfy their desires for exotic foods like flour, potatoes, tea, sugar etc, it is pretty much standard NHG practice to take what they want by raiding whoever has it. Windschuttle refers to this as ‘criminality’, which is a mistake on his part. As I said, it’s standard HG practice. The problem for many HGs was that they didn’t understand Western or European concepts just as the British or Americans or whoever didn’t understand theirs. Instead of just putting up with the occasional raid, the Western way of doing things was and is to do what was required to stop the raiding; either confine the HGs to reservations or wage war on them until they are totally defeated and desist.

Another quote from Bill Stanner; he wrote: “The blacks have grasped eagerly at any possibility of a regular and dependable food supply for a lesser effort than is involved in nomadic hunting and foraging. There is a sound calculus of cost and gain in preferring a belly regularly if only partly filled for an output of work which can be steadily scaled down. Hence the two most common characteristics of aboriginal adaptation to settlement by Europeans; a persistent and positive effort to make themselves dependent, and a squeeze-play to obtain a constant or increasing supply of food for a dwindling physical effort. I appreciated the good sense of the adaptation only after I had gone hungry from fruitless hunting with a rifle, gun, and spears in one of the best environments in Australia.” W.E.H. (Bill) Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming: Essays 1938–1973, Australian National University Press; Norwalk, Conn.: distributed by Books Australia, 1979.

So is it clear that the Tasmanian Aborigines were defending their land? I don’t think so. Webley442 (talk) 10:51, 15 June 2009 (UTC)


Why do we need this LONG WINDED diatribe? Do you think that there is a single person who doesn't know that hunter gatherers use land differently than farmers? The phrase "defending their land" means what you said when used for hunter gatherers. It really isn't all that different on a society level from farmers defending their land.
The issue when two different civilizations collide, one very ancient and the other very modern, is that they will have different norms. The killings of the Tasmanians was in part caused by these differences. SO WHAT? It's irrelevent for this page. For this page you only need to ask yourself the question
  1. What is the majority opinion?
  2. What is the minority opinion?
  3. What is a small minority opinion?
And treat each accordingly.Likebox (talk) 14:03, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

My point, Likebox, is to try to provide you and others with a little information that might possibly lead you and if not you (since you've already declared that you have a closed mind on this issue), at least some others, to understand that the position that you describe as the majority position isn’t the majority position TODAY. It may have been once but things change. Based on new understandings coming out of anthropological studies of how HGs interact with colonisers and the way that HGs viewed their world and on knowledge of how introduced diseases can devastate non-immune populations coming out of modern research on human immune systems plus re-examination of source documents, a lot of historians are re-evaluating the old, outdated positions on what happened in various colonised areas like the Americas and Australia.

There are a lot of scholars out there who accept that it is a lot more complex situation than the one you push so relentlessly. They understand that often the ‘warfare’ engaged in by indigenous people wasn’t to force ‘invaders’ off their land, that in a lot of places they were just continuing on with the kind of behaviours they’d always engaged in with other tribes in the area, i.e. raiding to get desired goods, like food. They also understand that, with certain exceptions, the colonisers weren’t genocidal; that in many instances, they genuinely believed that they were bringing the benefits of civilisation to ‘uncivilised’ peoples and that ultimately the people of areas they colonised would be better off for it. They also understand that, as one example, despite attempts to characterise the Black Line as an attempt to exterminate Aborigines, it was in fact a serious attempt to save 2 ‘hostile’ tribes by forcing them away from areas where they came into conflict with white settlers and onto a peninsula that ‘abounded’ with game. It may not have been the way we do things today but it was not an attempt at genocide.

Unfortunately, like a lot of issues in the academic world, we hear mostly from a high profile group who push their own agendas and claim that they represent the ‘majority’ or the ‘consensus’. So the general public don’t realise that many academics disagree with them but aren’t activist enough to push their views onto the public stage. Webley442 (talk) 23:55, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

Just a point of clarification here: I'm not arguing that the arguments of Windschuttle are now the majority opinion, not by a long way. The academic world is divided (over a lot of things). The mainstream opinion (if you ignore the political activists and zealots who won't alter their opinion) seems to be that this area "needs more work", i.e. it needs to be revisited in light of new information, new theories and the issues of the credibility of some/much of the evidence on which previous positions were based. "More research, less politics" is how one senior academic put it to me. Webley442 (talk) 09:46, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

I am aware that the goal of the revision is to change majority opinion. But it hasn't happened yet, and I am pretty confident that it won't happen in the near future, so please keep the article reflective of the majority opinion, flawed as you think it might be.Likebox (talk) 17:58, 16 June 2009 (UTC)
I would also like to say that the divisions in this case are not so big. Windschuttle hasn't even convinced a majority of Tasmanian historians, nor even a minority of genocide scholars.Likebox (talk) 18:00, 16 June 2009 (UTC)

An attempt to assemble the References to determine "Majority Opinion" - Abandoned

The discussions on this page are irrelevant, to what is in the article. There are a number of references both in the article and on the talk page that state the sources. (Mark Levene in the article, John Connor on this page and also the A. Dirk Moses/Anne Curthoys chapter). For us to try to do it by counting references is OR/SYN and WP:WEASEL. Keepitshort please remove the above as in my opinion it just bloats this page, without helping develop the article. --PBS (talk) 14:15, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Absolutely no problem - done. Yous will have to sort this page out yourselves. I'm out of here. Keepitshort (talk) 14:32, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
Please keepitshort, you are the only reasonable person here. I know it is annoying to sort this stuff out, but the reference count is as follows.
　Killing, Genocide -- Tatz, Madley + a ton of other articles in genocide journals
Killing, Not Genocide -- Reynolds, Campbell + a few other historians in Australia
Not killing, not Genocide -- Windschuttle alone (pretty much)
You can balance Windschuttle with "contra Windschuttle" (a compilation of many authors), and then give weight by numbers.Likebox (talk) 14:47, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually, Windschuttle's position is Some Killing, Not Genocide which would put him in with Reynolds (and I'd imagine that would make them both very uncomfortable). BTW he's not the only historian who considers the impact of disease to be important, read Geoffrey Blainey and N.J.B. Plomley for example, plus it's mentioned by James Bonwick in 1870. There are others but those will do. Unfortunately Ryan came along later, made an unsupported claim that disease wasn't a factor (more than unsupported, it was flat out contradicted by the evidence available to her) and for some reason, people just believed her.

My point being that Windschuttle's position isn't new or unique; all he's done is put what was once broadly accepted in academia back on public view and stirred up a hornets' nest by criticising those who created the mass killings/genocide position for misrepresenting the evidence and false footnoting. Webley442 (talk) 23:42, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Windschuttle's position was never accepted anywhere.
The historical consensus, in case there's someone new here, is and always was that the natives were hunted down with the intent to kill, killed by the thousands with the intent to exterminate, until the government organized a line of human beings to scour the entire Island from one end to the other to get rid of them all, and after that the natives gave up. The hundred or so survivors were rounded up into a camp on Flinder's Island, where they continued to die of disease and neglect until they were all dead. Thier languages, their culture, and their very ancient way of life died with them.
This is the story that has been passed down, the main outlines went without challenge from anybody for a very long time. A few people say a few natives got sick here and there, some say that they were fighting amongst themselves, some say that it was 6000 murdered, others 3000 murdered. Some say it was mostly tribe 1 and not tribe 2 that was exterminated, and some point out that a fraction of the women were left alive so they could be made to serve the mostly male colonists sexually. But all of them agree on the general picture--- extermination by willful action.
It has been called a premeditated genocide by most genocide scholars, and by most non-Australian historians. Within Australia, many don't like to call it genocide. Some of them aren't sure that the mass murder was authorized by the government (although the black line certainly was), others are just uncomfortable applying the word "genocide" to events in their own backyard.
Windschuttle says that the "population decline" was mostly due to more or less natural factors, like disease. He claims that the number of unpunished murders is approximately equal to the number of murders in the newspapers, about one hundred. He disregards the testimonies about casual killing sprees, the widely acknowledged fact that there were thousands of unpunished socially sanctioned murders, and he downplays the virulent dehumanizing exterminationalist racism. This makes his tract little more than a personal screed by a clown, whose only claim to fame is that he was able to attract a former conservative prime minister to his loony ideas.
Whether Ryan or anyone else made a mistake or two footnoting is immaterial. Historians make mistakes like that all the time. The point is that the story in Ryan is the standard story, and a standard story is vastly more accurate than any individual historian. Consensus is very difficult to change. In order to change it, you need to persuade people that the historical consensus process which produced the history in the first place was somehow flawed. Maybe the historians excluded a certain point of view, or maybe they didn't think of it in terms of a class struggle of some kind, or maybe they didn't take Freudian psychology into account, or whatever. You don't change it by chasing footnotes.Likebox (talk) 03:23, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
I think you are completely ignorant of what was taught in high-schools and Unis in Oz prior to the 70’s and yet you pretend that you know everything just like you pretend that you know what the majority believes in the here and now. It was taught that it was mainly sickness “that took them off”. That was what was in the standard history texts and if you’d ever read any of the older history books you’d know that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.202.43.53 (talk • contribs) 05:11, 18 June 2009
And if you look at Israeli high school history books, you'll find that the Arabs just decided to leave their homes in 1948. If you look at Japanese textbooks, you'll find out that many women just decided they wanted to become prostitutes for the Japanese army. This is not about the content of secondary school books, which are always biased by politics. It is about the content of the professional literature.Likebox (talk) 13:20, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

"As historians, we all make errors from time to time. While reading the long recital of these failings, I felt an initial sympathy towards the Australian and overseas historians who were under such intense scrutiny. But many of their errors, made on crucial matters, beggared belief. Moreover their exaggeration, gullibility, and what this book calls "fabrication" went on and on. Admittedly, if sometimes the historians' errors had chanced to favor the Aborigines, and sometimes they had happened to favor British settlers, a reader might sympathetically conclude that there was no bias amongst the historians but simply an infectious dose of inaccuracy. Most of the inaccuracies, however, are used to bolster the case for the deliberate destruction of the Aborigines. This case has now been glibly accepted as gospel in many educational and political circles and in some high legal circles.

Professor Lyndall Ryan's influential book Aboriginal Tasmanians is dissected in more than sixty pages. A magnifying glass is focused on her crucial claim that in the two years to November 1830 the British "roving parties captured about twenty Aborigines and killed about sixty." Windschuttle concludes that "none of Ryan's footnotes support her assertion." As for her claim that at the Eastern Marshes a party of whites killed five Aborigines, his research convinces him that this is "another piece of invention."

Ryan replied at length in The Australian newspaper on December 17, 2002. Her sole attempt to meet specific factual criticisms of her work is the following quarter-confession: "Windschuttle points to some factual errors in the footnoting of my original work. There are indeed a few minor errors that can easily be rectified." But he is not primarily criticizing the footnoting and a few minor errors. He is criticizing the main thrust of her narrative and what he sees as a wide array of major errors and omissions.

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History sometimes moves slowly. Windschuttle admits that he pays "so much attention to footnotes, citations and archival references" that some readers will be deterred from pressing on. He argues, however, that this was the only way of testing the worth of rival historians: "there was no choice but to address the fabric of their scholarship in order to unpick their work and to establish what really happened." In fact his book offers so many examples of the misuse of the original records that it would require many pages for a reviewer even to summarize the case laid out against the various historians involved."

Native fiction: A review of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. The New Criterion, Volume 21 April 2003, page 79, by Geoffrey Blainey Webley442 (talk) 14:11, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Keepitshort in the section that you link to in the next section you wrote on your talk page "So it seems to me that OUR job here, or rather in the article, is just to say so, and assemble (not "count" as PBS seems to think) verifiable references for the POV's expressed by the "warriors", as neutrally as possible."[31]. Perhaps I have not made myself clear. Yes we should attempt to give a balanced view, but what we can not do is quantify the numbers (such as "some", "most", "all" minority/majority view) unless we have sources such as Mark Levene who does that for us. --PBS (talk) 18:06, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

An appeal to chill out

Folks, I've noticed that this debate does not appear to show signs of slowing. And it doesn't look like new people are getting involved very much. Might I suggest you all take a breather (keeping WP:DEADLINE in mind), and try to come at this fresh and restate your positions concisely. I, and I have no doubt many other editors, simply cannot comprehend this debate- it's a case of TL; DR. —/Mendaliv/2¢/Δ's/ 15:13, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Agreed User Talk:Keepitshort#Saved Non-talk from History Wars Keepitshort (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:14, 18 June 2009 (UTC).
I also agree. Unfortunately, the Windschuttle supporters are very long-winded, and one needs to keep up. I repeated myself a lot, as did everyone else, so a quick skim should be enough.Likebox (talk) 19:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
I agree as well. Nick-D (talk) 02:56, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

To New Editors: Don't be intimidated By Excessive Length

At least one editor here writes incredibly verbose summaries, but they can be understood very easily.

Webley agrees with Windschuttle

That's it, that's his only source. One total dipshit. The rest, Moses, Reynolds, and the lady that said "It is time for a more robust exchange ...", all support the majority position that the natives were wiped out by settlers. This is a majority position, so there are currently at least 6 sources on the other side, and an unlimited supply of others can be googled up at will. So undue weight considerations are really very simple. There's a majority opinion that is being buried under mountains of irrelevant gibberish. Please skim this page quickly, and help out.Likebox (talk) 15:22, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually, my main sources are the original primary documents: i.e. what was actually written in Arthur's proclamations and orders (which Likebox kept trying to edit out), in GA Robinson's journal (which makes very enlightening reading), in the newspapers of the day, and so forth. Windschuttle is useful as a reference guide though, as he has dug out a lot of the original primary sources and cited, quoted from extensively, and summarised them accurately. Saves me a lot of time, rather than having to dig through boxes of books, decades old photocopies of documents, really old scribbled notes (even I have trouble reading my handwriting at times) and so forth. I do have to admit though that I also rely on the work and judgment of top quality historians like Geoffrey Blainey. With regard to Windschuttle, I don't think he is right on every detail, he has some flaws such as his argument that the raids by aboriginal tribesmen during the Black War constituted 'criminality' but there is a lot to be gained by a study of his comparisons of what previous historians have written, the sources they cite and what the sources really said. Very enlightening! My main concern with regard to this article has been to see that the arguments on both sides are portrayed fully and accurately which is difficult at times as over the time I've been aware of it there have been determined efforts made to misrepresent, oversimplify and caricature, in particular, the evidence and arguments of Windschuttle, eg portraying him as saying something silly like "it was all disease, the colonists had nothing to do with it". Sorry to all you out there but this particular subject does involve a lot of reading to get it right. If you aren't willing to do the 'required reading', pick an easier topic to edit, otherwise you just wind up looking like you don't know what you are talking about. Webley442 (talk) 08:23, 21 June 2009 (UTC)

Editors' own interpretation of primary sources should not be included in Wikipedia articles - please see Wikipedia:No original research and, in particular, WP:PRIMARY. Nick-D (talk) 08:30, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
I think you forgot the "not" in that. WP:PRIMARY says "All interpretive claims, analyses, or synthetic claims about primary sources must be referenced to a secondary source, rather than original analysis of the primary-source material by Wikipedia editors." I read this to mean that where there is an extreme difference in secondary-source interpretation of primary sources - which is what the "history wars" are all about, including even a debate over what constitutes a legitimate primary source - then we should cite the differences in the secondary sources and maybe pick the odd primary record (if available) so readers can look at the original and the interpretations together to see how esch POV uses them. What we should NOT do is provide "Editor's own interpretation of primary sources", since that is Original research. Though I admit it's a bit trickier than usual when the topic is to describe a "war" about biased use of primary sources. regards Keepitshort (talk) 10:06, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, I did forget the 'not' - I just added it. In this instance, there doesn't seem to be any need to refer to primary sources such as old files/records given that the topic of the article is a debate between historians on which entire books as well as hundreds of newspaper and journal articles have been written. Nick-D (talk) 10:13, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
I assume you mean: Editors' own interpretation of primary sources should NOT be included in Wikipedia articles". You misunderstand me. I am well aware of the rules regarding original research. Whatever I put in the article is based on citations from appropriate sources. I extract from and paraphrase what they say, I don't put my own personal interpretations in the article (& it isn't necessary - I can always use the interpretations of good professional historians those whose arguments are soundly based) but for the purposes of discussion pages I often go to my own copies of original documents or notes rather than wade through a secondary source to find where they've quoted from the same document. Webley442 (talk) 10:14, 21 June 2009 (UTC)
I am sure that there is no OR in what Webley442 writes. It's not original, it's just fringe. The policy to consider is undue weight. When you have a minority position it should be identified as such. There is no need for censorship--- just a prominent statement of the majority position with a mainstream source, and a prominent mainstream commentary alongside the minority position. Since this page is devoted to revisionist nonsense, the nonsense can get more space overall. But it should not be given the false authority of nonexistent consensus.Likebox (talk) 19:19, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
This really should be an open-and-shut case. If it was sickness that carried the natives off, then why did the Tasman authorities find it "necessary" to set a bounty on the heads of the natives? --Michael C. Price talk 22:00, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

What bounty, when? Please give us full details of the bounty offer. Was it for bringing Aborigines in alive or for killing them? And please state your source for the claim. Webley442 (talk) 00:23, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Source is Runoko Rashidi, Black War: the destruction of the Tasmanian aboriginals, 1997. In 1826 the Tasmanian Colonial Times had declared that "The Government must remove the natives -- if not they will be hunted down and like wild beasts and destroyed." The Government duly declared martial law in November 1828 and "Whites were authorized to kill Blacks on sight" (which was why no white settler was ever convicted of the murder of an aboriginal). A bounty was set of £5 per adult, £2 per child. Apparently this only covered full-blooded aboriginals -- mixed race people were not slaughtered. --Michael C. Price talk 06:19, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Original source, for those who are curious: Colonial Times, and Tasmanian Advertiser, Friday 1 December 1826. cygnis insignis 09:19, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Thanks. --Michael C. Price talk 10:25, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

OK, I thought so. We are talking about the bounty offered by Arthur in February 1830 for the CAPTURE of LIVE Aborigines, the one where he issued a subsequent public notice to make it very, very clear that his reward offer was only for Aborigines CAPTURED while committing attacks on settlers IN the settled districts and that settlers or convicts who went out and captured “inoffensive Natives in the remote of the remote and unsettled parts of the territory” not only wouldn’t get a reward but: “If, after the promulgation of this Notice, any wanton attack or aggression against the Natives becomes known to the Government, the offenders will be immediately brought to justice and punished.” (Government Notice, No 161, 20 August 1830, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies, Australia, 4, p233-234)

If you are going to cite a history book, please see if you can find one better that that junk, I mean, come on, next you'll be citing Phillip Knightley.

And for those unfamiliar with it, here's the text of the original Martial Law Proclamation -

By His Excellency Colonel George Arthur, Lieutenant Governor of the Island of Van Diemen's Land and its Dependencies.

A PROCLAMATION.

WHEREAS the Black or Aboriginal Natives of this Island have for a considerable time past, carried on a series of indiscriminate attacks upon the persons and property of divers of His Majesty's subjects: and have especially of late perpetrated most cruel and sanguinary acts of violence and outrage; evincing an evident disposition systematically to kill and destroy the white inhabitants indiscriminately whenever an opportunity of doing so is presented: - AND whereas, notwithstanding the Proclamation made and issued by me on the Fifteenth day of April, last past, - and that every practicable measure has from time to time been resorted to, under that Proclamation, and otherwise, for the purpose of removing the Aboriginals from the settled districts of the Colony, and for putting a stop to the repetition of such atrocities, - repeated inroads are daily made by the Natives into the said settled Districts, and acts of hostility and barbarity there committed by them, as well as at the more distant stock runs, and in some instances upon unoffending and defenceless women and children. - AND whereas also, it seems, at present, impossible to conciliate the several tribes of that people; and the ordinary Civil Powers of the Magistrates, and the means afforded by the Common Law, are found by experience to be wholly insufficient for the general safety; and it hath therefore become at length unavoidably necessary, for the effectual suppression of similar enormities, to proclaim and keep in force Martial Law, in the manner hereinafter proclaimed and directed: -

NOW THEREFORE, by virtue of the Powers and Authorities in me, in this behalf vested, I, the said Lieutenant Governor, do by these presents, Declare and Proclaim, that from and after the date of this, my Proclamation, and until the cessation of hostilities shall be by me hereafter Proclaimed and directed MARTIAL LAW is and shall continue to be in force against the several Black or Aboriginal Natives, within the several Districts of this Island; excepting always the places and portions of this Island, next mentioned, (that is to say)

1st - All the country extending southward of Mount Wellington to the Ocean,, including Brune Island;

2nd - Tasman’s Peninsula;

3rd -The whole of the North-Eastern part of this Island which is bounded on the North and East by the Ocean, and in the South-West by a line, drawn from Pipers River to Saint Patrick's Head;

4th - And the whole of the Western and South Western part of this Island, which is bounded on the East by the River Huon, and by a line drawn from that River over Tenerife Peak to the extreme Western Bluff; on the North by an East and West line from the said extreme Western Bluff to the Ocean, and on the West and South by the Ocean.

AND, for the purposes aforesaid, all Soldiers are hereby required and commanded to obey mid assist their lawful superiors; and all other. His Majesty's subjects are required and commanded to obey and assist the Magistrates in the execution of such measures as shall by any one or more of such Magistrates be directed to be taken for those purposes, by such ways and means as shall by him or them be considered expedient, so long as Martial Law shall continue to exist.-

BUT, I DO, nevertheless, hereby strictly order, enjoin, and command, that the actual use of arms be in no case resorted to, if the Natives can by other means be induced or compelled to retire into the pieces and portions of this Island hereinbefore excepted from the operation of Martial Law; that bloodshed be checked, as much as possible; that any Tribes which may surrender themselves up, shall be treated with every degree of humanity; and that defenceless women and children be invariably spared.-AND, all Officers, Civil and Military, and other persons whatsoever, are hereby required to take notice of this, my Proclamation and Order, and to render obedience and assistance herein accordingly.

PROVIDED nevertheless, and it is hereby notified and proclaimed, that nothing here-in contained, shall, or doth extend to interrupt or interfere with the ordinary exercise of the Civil Power, or the regular course of the Common Law, any further or otherwise than as such interruption shall, for the purpose of carrying on military operations against the Natives, he rendered necessary. GIVEN under my Hand and Seal at Arms, at the Government House, Hobart-town, this first day of November, One thousand eight hundred and twenty-eight. GEORGE ARTHUR By Command of His Excellency, J. BURNETT.

I don't see "Whites were authorized to kill Blacks on sight" in there anywhere. Webley442 (talk) 10:55, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

You may be right, Webley442, and I must thank you for posting the full proclamation -- it was most informative (to me, anyway) and I hope some of the information ends up in the Black War article. However if there was no blanket authorisation for the settlers to kill the abo's, why was no one ever convicted of murder (as opposed to cruelty, which Rashidi accepts did occur)? Or are the stories of abo-hunts complete fiction? If the judiciary stood by and allowed the extermination to occur then that would make the government complicit in genocide, would it not? --Michael C. Price talk 22:09, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Quick heads up: abo has become something of a racial slur in Australia, best to use "aboriginal" but "aborigine" is also acceptable (I didn't know about this either)
Another quick heads up: The governor of the island, and the British authorities in England were worried that the annihilation of the Tasmanians would be a black mark on British colonial rule. So they phrase all proclamations about the natives in the language of isolation and deportation, and all killings in the language of self-defense. This is parallel to other genocides. The Jews of Europe were deported to Auschwitz (and the treatment they were to recieve there was couched in euphamisms), the Aremenians were likewise "deported" to various installations where they were to be executed.
This is one reason that the Australian debate on the label "genocide" has been so persistent. The government documents are not at all clear about the purpose of the declarations, nor of their effects on the settlers themselves. This allows denial movements to claim that the settlers were killing without government approval.
The consensus on genocide is based not only on the official government documents, but on the population data, and on the transmitted accounts of eyewitnesses and on the attitudes of settlers as recorded in the newspapers. This, along with the documented murders, the bounty, the black line, and the unpunished murders, has made it absolutely clear to all reasonable historians that what was going on was massive extermination campaign.
In addition to this consensus, the documents, and Arthur's hand wringing in general give credence to the mainstream idea that the extermination was not intended to be complete. It was just to clear out the island, and leave a few survivors who would be quaranteened on Flinders Island. Darwin recorded the situation in the 1850s or so. The natives were in the isolated camp, where they were not talked about. In the camp, they continued to die out from disease, perhaps starvation, general neglect, I don't know the details.
The feeble amount of plausible deniability in the authorization declarations do not constitute an excuse to depart from undue weight. They are exactly parallel to the plausible deniability in holocaust documents, or Armenian genocide documents. They are not evidence against genocide to anybody except for Windschuttle. Rather they are evidence for.
Please be advised that Webley has a great familiarity with the primary literature. Still the selection of documents that he produces is incredibly biased, it is calculated to support the denialist position that there was no extermination campaign. Keepitshort has started to read the primary literature, and does not come to the same conclusion. Needless to say, thousands of historians have read this primary literature too, and the consensus on genocide has not changed (although the extent of government design is debated).
About the bounty itself--- I don't know who it was paid to. Was it paid for capture? Doubtful--- I don't think there were many captures at all except for taking slaves. If you could find out in the source you gave, it would be good.
But I generally agree that the wording of the declarations is very informative, and if properly balanced with mainstream secondary sources, it would make a great addition to this article and the Black War article. If it is presented as is, it is yet another biased selection of primary literature to support the denialist cause.Likebox (talk) 23:44, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Good point -- you would hardly expect the government sources to admit to genocide (based on parallel examples such as the Nazis). You have to look at their actions. And the action here is, was anyone ever convicted of murdering a native? --Michael C. Price talk 08:24, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Not quite as simple as that. Aside from the usual difficulties in a murder case, i.e. first discover that a murder has been committed, then identify who did it, then find and capture them, then take it to court, there were particular difficulties relating to justice in colonial Tasmania including the fact that the Aborigines didn’t report murders to the British authorities. Their response was revenge killings often of someone unconnected with the ‘original’ crime, which just made matters worse.

As mentioned above, there is a manslaughter conviction but as far as I know no murder convictions on record. But getting a murder conviction with regard to the killing of an Aborigine there faced certain problems. It was more a matter of a legal system with ancient (& usually beneficial) rules that raised impossible hurdles in the local context: e.g. the evidence required to prove murder beyond reasonable doubt. There was nothing much resembling forensic evidence used in court as proof of an individual's guilt. Hearsay was not evidence. The main evidence in a murder case back then was usually personal testimony, i.e. "I saw the defendant kill the victim!" In order to testify in a British court under the laws of the day, witnesses had to be able to take the oath. This worked fine where virtually everyone believed in (the Judeo-Christian) God or pretended to. Even if they'd understood what a ‘court’ was and had been reporting crimes against them to the British authorities, early 1800's Tasmanian Aborigines couldn't have been administered the required oath (as it was to/before a God they didn't worship) so they wouldn't have been allowed to testify in a British court. Since many of the ‘white’ ‘witnesses’ to alleged violent incidents were themselves convicts or ex-convicts; their testimony wouldn't have carried a lot of weight either. So unless you were stupid enough to commit murder in full view of someone who COULD take an oath & WOULD testify against you and was what could be considered a credible witness; your chances of being convicted were zero.

But the colonial authorities could take all kinds of other disciplinary action against soldiers and convicts who disobeyed Arthur's orders and free settlers wouldn't have been wise to ignore them either, not if they were dependent on assigned convict labour and the prompt protection of the military.

The British Crown developed a pretty good reputation for looking after their indigenous subjects especially from the early 1800's on (post-Enlightenment) so perhaps there should always have been more questioning of the claims of genocide in Tasmania. Why would it be such an exception? Arthur was appointed by the Crown and had to take far more regard of his orders from London (orders that the Aborigines were to be protected) than of settlers' and newspaper editors' opinion. But he also had to protect the settlers.

As for all the ‘unpunished murders’, if you look at the primary sources, there is some sort of documentary record of a relatively small number of killings of Aborigines by settlers/convicts/troops in Tasmania. There were an unknown number of undocumented killings, claims of killings for which there is no or highly questionable support in the primary sources and some `estimates' based on supposition, opinion & guesswork. About half of the documented killings can be classified as legitimate or reasonably legitimate cases of self-defence or defence of others, such as Aborigines killed attacking settlers or by pursuers after having done so. Some were killed in authorised actions by the military; again prosecution would be unlikely. Some are only known of through unconfirmed reports, rumours & hearsay. There doesn't seem to be any cases mentioned in the primary literature where there would have been sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction under the laws of the day.

A lot of the atrocity stories you find repeated over and over in various Aboriginal history books, exist only in the `history' books; evidence to support the stories does not exist in primary sources. See Poisoned Flour above. Webley442 (talk) 10:39, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

A couple of further points: in a number of the (somewhat) documented cases of killings of Tasmanian Aborigines, the actual identity of the 'white' killer(s) remained unknown; in others the killers were themselves killed by Aborigines (like William Russell, convict) or by troops (as in the case of Richard Lemon, escaped convict). Of course, you can't prosecute or convict a dead man even if you do have enough evidence to make the case. Webley442 (talk) 13:08, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

It is pointless to argue with Webley, but here is where he is in agreement with majority opinion:
  • The British back home did not want to see the Tasmanians annihilated.
  • The settlers did
  • There were some revenge killings of whites by natives.
  • When killing the natives, the settlers felt they were acting in self defense.
The settlers argued with Arther, and wanted authorization to proceed with the slaughter, but they didn't get it until the violence escalated. When they did act, they wiped out nearly all the natives. By killing them one by one. They quarenteened the survivors on Flinders Island.
One or two settlers (I heard, not sure) were prosecuted, not for murder, but for keeping grisly mementos of the murder. I heard that one of them used a finger he had cut off a native to tamp tobacco into his pipe. This type of thing was not acceptable, even if the killing itself was.
The documents that Webley pulls up to support his cause are always settler reports, and he only fesses up to the murders in the newspapers. Reasonable historians also work with demographics and eyewitness reports in cases where murders are not likely to be reported. But it doesn't matter. This is a minority opinion, and should be given minority treatment by undue weight. Webleys speculations on the lack of murder convictions are particularly laughable.
Let's be clear about one thing. Just because the settlers thought they were acting in self defense, their slaughter still consitutes genocide. When the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw ghetto, they were acting in what they considered to be self defense. Generally, since many Nazi era Germans viewed the Jews as responsible for WWI/hyperinflation/Communism, they viewed wiping them out as "self defense". The same holds true in other cases. When one people decides to wipe out another people, it is never self defense. It is genocide.Likebox (talk) 15:37, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Actually the relatively small number of 'documented' killings I was referring to are not just the ones in the newspapers, it is EVERY killing for which there is some kind of record. That includes, yes, newspaper reports but also letters, private diaries like those of Reverend Knopwood and especially the journal of GA Robinson in which he recorded killings that had been 'reported' to him by Aborigines whom he met as well as with others 'reported' to him by various convicts, ex-convicts and other white settlers plus memoranda and reports from the colonial administration and the VDL Company. These records include not just the only existing eyewitness reports but also all the second-hand reports, the rumours and the gossip. Of course, all these documents were written by white settlers, the Aborigines left no written records.

By "These records include not just the only existing eyewitness reports but also all the second-hand reports, the rumours and the gossip." I meant all that there are a record of still in existence, obviously there would have been other second-hand reports, rumours and gossip of which there are no surviving records. Webley442 (talk) 01:46, 27 June 2009 (UTC)

Likebox, if you have some mysterious cache of records of killings of Tasmania Aborigines that no historian in Australia has been able to find and report on before, please, let's see them.

As for the use of demographics, it all depends on how you use them. If the person working with demographics ignores the evidence of the Tasmanian Aborigines exceptional susceptibility to introduced disease with the deaths and infertility that resulted or doesn't adequately incorporate the effects of such factors into the calculations, then that skews the results towards a conclusion of more violence than there actually was.

One of the problems with this particular topic has been that some people want to expand the definition of genocide far beyond the currently accepted legal definition. Now it seems that Likebox also wants to dramatically reduce the accepted definition of self-defence. If a settler was attacked by spear-wielding Tasmanian Aborigines whilst peacefully going about his business and fought back killing one or more of the Aborigines who were trying to kill him, apparently by Likebox's definition, that was an act of genocide, not self-defence. Unfortunately, there are people out there silly enough to agree with this. Webley442 (talk) 23:57, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Even more unfortunately (at least for you) is that we SILLY PEOPLE are in the majority. That means that your retarded bullshit position does not deserve too much space.Likebox (talk) 03:21, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
AFAICT Likebox does not wish to use anything other the the Genocide Convention as the definition of what constitutes genocide, although it is not clear to me if he is using the vague definition as it was in 1989, before the cases in front of the ICTY, the ICTR and ICJ started to clarify that definition. The problem I have with this is that AFAICT some scholars do not use the Genocide Convention definition --(see Kurt Jonassohn comments why this is so here), but use other defintions, which would allow the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines to be classified as a genocide (see my comments in the sections on colonisation and genocide, above and below). --PBS (talk) 11:23, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
There is no dispute on definitions. If you were talking about stolen generations, yes, but in this case you are talking about a premeditated slaughter which is like a small scale version of the Rwandan genocide. Nobody disagrees that what happened in Rwanda was genocide. What happened in Tasmania is the same thing, at 1/100 the scale.Likebox (talk) 18:27, 26 June 2009 (UTC)
I have no problem with the Genocide Convention definition; on the contrary as far as I’m concerned it’s the definition that should be applied. I do have a problem with those (and I'm not referring to Likebox here) pushing to expand the definition of genocide to include unintended consequences of colonisation such as unintentionally introduced disease, the gradual assimilation of an indigenous population or deaths due to alcoholism in 'dispossessed' original inhabitants.
Likebox seems to be advancing an argument either that there were no defensive killings of Aborigines in Tasmania i.e. that Aborigines never attacked settlers; it was always the settlers making unprovoked attacks on Aborigines; or he’s arguing that the was no such thing as legitimate self-defence for a settler; if you were a coloniser you had no right to fight back if attacked by the indigenous inhabitants and if you did then that was genocide. It’s hard to tell which argument he’s making. He’s a great one for brevity, unfortunately at the expense of a coherent argument. Webley442 (talk) 02:04, 27 June 2009 (UTC)


I agree with Nick-D, and the recent postings this page since he made his posting are a good illustration of this.
User:Likebox it is no use saying "all support the majority position that the natives were wiped out by settlers. This is a majority position, so there are currently at least 6 sources on the other side, and an unlimited supply of others can be googled up at will." most is OR as I have pointed out before you have to find sources which make such a claim. Which is what I did and included it in the first sentence of the paragraph that starts "After the introduction of the word genocide ... most other comparative genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide, however the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect,"
No-one disputes that there was an "extinction of Tasmanian Aborigines" (note the difference between those words and "natives were wiped out by settlers" which are imprecise, and, I think, carry connotation of a deliberate policy/conspiracy to murder them along the lines of Jews sent to the death camps in Germany). The dispute/debate is over how they died, and whether the actions surrounding the extinction qualify as a genocide. Which of course leads to the definition of what is a genocide,(as the paragraph in the article that starts "Much of the debate on whether European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide ..." describes). --PBS (talk) 11:49, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Yes, the article is meant to describe the debate between historians, not continue it by arguing over primary sources and the like. Please note that Wikipedia is not a soapbox. Nick-D (talk) 11:56, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

As entertaining as I find this 'debate' over what is in the primary sources as opposed to what is in the public's understanding of the history, Nick-D and PBS are right. Wiki policy is to cite the secondary sources in the articles which in this particular case is somewhat ironic as the History wars are about what the secondary sources (the work of Ryan, Reynolds, Mcintyre, Windschuttle and so on) say is evidenced by the primary sources. The text proposed by PBS meets the requirements of Wiki policy and any 'improvements' anyone wants to make need to do the same. Webley442 (talk) 12:43, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

This article is not meant to describe a debate between historians. It is designed to give the mainstream consensus view, and report on the literature. There is no use arguing with PBS or Webley442, so this article just needs to be bludgeoned into shape by force of numbers.Likebox (talk) 14:38, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

First Attempt to Fix this Article

Since we have had some new editors and sources (thanks to Michael Price and Cygnis Insignis), I will put in a new version. Hopefully this article will settle into a decent shape. If not, I will ask more editors to help here, until it is fixed.Likebox (talk) 14:42, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

My source is useless for this article; perhaps I should not have added to the noise, but I was curious about the source and thought others might be too. I think Nick-D defined the scope of this article pretty well, and keepitshort outlined the problems with sources. Perhaps Webley also made the comment somewhere (his or her musings are tl:dr), the secondary sources become primary for the scope and context of this article. We need secondary sources on the supposed debate, and to keep the same out of the article and off this talk page. cygnis insignis 15:53, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
(see below for discussion)

I removed this nonsense:

Australian virologist Frank Fenner, an authority on smallpox and principal author of the 1988 World Health Organisation report, Smallpox and its Eradication, stated that it is not possible for live smallpox to have survived the long voyage out from England or the next fifteen months before the first cases were seen amongst Aborigines near the settlement and that the variolous material in bottles brought from England for inoculation purposes could not have infected people with smallpox. Smallpox spread by the inhalation of airborne droplets of virus in situations of personal contact or by contact with blankets that an infected person had recently used. [1]
Medical scientists Sir Edward Stirling and Sir John Cleland published a number of books and articles between 1911 and 1966 suggesting that smallpox arrived in Northern Australia from an Asian source. (ref) Flood, Dr Josephine, The Original Australians, p126(/ref)

This is not worth inclusion, because it is believed to be patently false by everyone else. If you want to include this, you need a big warning that these are fringe opinions. The settlers are known to have had live smallpox on hand.Likebox (talk) 15:29, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Likebox. I have reverted you edits because you have no consensus for such large changes, please try making small incremental changes and see if we can agree on them. Creating section headings liked "Tasmanian genocide" are unacceptable because they frame the debate and are a rhetoric trick, to show you what I mean suppose someone was to alter the title to "False Tasmanian genocide claims". --PBS (talk) 17:01, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
I am going to revet our changes again as statements such as "Most Australian historians don't dispute the historical events," is not sourced. As I said please discuss the changes before making them. --PBS (talk) 17:04, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
The numbers are sourced by reference counting, and reading, not by looking for another place that counts references for you. This is undue weight. I have explained this to you before, and you don't listen.Likebox (talk) 17:09, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
To PBS, please be mindful of WP:3RR.Likebox (talk) 17:12, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Likebox, thank you for the reminder. You can not count references, and draw conclusions from it that is Original Research.
  • "Ever since the introduction of the modern term in the 1940s, Raphael Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars have considered the events of the Black War on Tasmania as a defining example of a genocide." What is your source for this statement. Why is it superior and more accurate than the sentence it replaces "After the introduction of the word genocide in the 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars, basing their analysis on previously published histories, present the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines as a text book example of a genocide, however the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect,"?
  • "During the Black War, European colonists in Tasmania nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines." That is not what Tatz says, You were asked above to quote the passage on this talk page that supports this assertion and you have not done so.
  • "From a population of approximately 5,000 individuals, they were hunted down and killed until only a few hundred individuals were left." What is your source for this sentence?
  • "Most Australian historians don't dispute the historical events," what is your source for this assertion particularly given the sentences that proceed it.
I could go on sentence by sentence, but I think that is enough to be going on with and explains why I have reverted your changes. I think you might find the essay WP:Writing for the enemy interesting. --PBS (talk) 17:39, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
You say: "You can not count references, and draw conclusions from it that is Original Research."
This is completely wrong. Counting references is exactly how consensus for what constitutes minority positions and majority positions are established. For example, if there is one source that says "Earth is flat" and a thousand that say "Earth is round", you say "Earth is round, but there is a fringe position of such and so that says it is flat". Reference counting is how it's always been done, and that's how it will always be done.
Responding to your points:
  • Tatz does say this. I gave you the page number.
  • Academic source is Tatz/Madley and the new reference introduced by Michael Price. Not counting cultural references, which are many.
  • Most Australian historians don't dispute.... is pure WP:Undue_Weight. It is determined by reference counting, as always.
I expect that if you have problems, then you will state them sentence by sentence, not say "and so on". I will defend it, and if it is incorrect, I can fix it. But the new text now has four new references, and the number of new references can grow indefinitely.
Also, your three reverts have just served to remove the new references introduced, and do not improve this badly broken article.Likebox (talk) 17:53, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Please rearrange your response so that it interlaces my questions as I can not tell which reply goes with which point and if I try to answerer them in this format there is a good chance there will be transcription errors. -- PBS (talk) 18:01, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I missed your first point. The bullets I have respond to points 2,3,4. I will respond to point 1 below (again).
The sentence that it replaces says "After Lemkin... based on previously published histories... most Australians .... more circumspect" is not mindful of undue weight. "Ever since Lemkin... this is consensus within genocide scholarship...Some Australians dispute the genocide label" is a more accurate summary. The dispute about the events on Tasmania is entirely limited to Windschuttle and quadrant.Likebox (talk) 18:52, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

<--We have two sources that state what is the position of most Australian experts/historian: John Connor "Windschuttle's argument that genocide was not committed in Van Diemen's land should be directed towards popular historians and journalists who hold this idea rather than those in academia who generally do not." and Levene (which is used as a source in the article) "The debate about whether the term genocides is applicable to the broad Australian context... However it is notable that while comparative genocide scholars assume the specifically Tasmanian case to be on of unmitigated genocide, the majority of Australian experts are considerably more circumspect." both are already cited on this talk page, so I will not repeat the citations. The sentence states exactly what the two sources say and quotes a third source Anne Curthoys, who holds a similar opinion is also quoted later in the paragraph. So how is it that a sentence that give the relative weights according to three sources we have should be replaced with a sentence "Some Australians dispute the genocide label" that does not have a source?

The following 3 paragraphs is why appending text on the end is verbose and messy, and why it is better to interlace such comments:

I asked ""During the Black War, European colonists in Tasmania nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines." That is not what Tatz says, You were asked above to quote the passage on this talk page that supports this assertion and you have not done so." you replied "Tatz does say this. I gave you the page number." here is the page where does Tatz say this? Please quote the sentence.

I asked ""From a population of approximately 5,000 individuals, they were hunted down and killed until only a few hundred individuals were left." What is your source for this sentence?" You replied "Academic source is Tatz/Madley and the new reference introduced by Michael Price. Not counting cultural references, which are many." please quote the specific passages in the sources that you think support this statement.

I asked ""Most Australian historians don't dispute the historical events," what is your source for this assertion particularly given the sentences that proceed it." You replied " Most Australian historians don't dispute.... is pure WP:Undue_Weight. It is determined by reference counting, 'as always'." As the previous statements are a summary created by you how can one possible count what Australian historians think of your summary? The sentence is pure SYN/OR.

--PBS (talk) 19:51, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

The page number in Tatz is 78 (extending to 79). Here is enough to identify the passage (can't cut and paste):
In 1824 Settlers were authorized to shoot Aborigines.... by 1835 between 3000 and 4000 Aborigines had been killed... murderous outbreak of racial hatred...
Similar passages in Madley, and in all the other mainstream sources.Likebox (talk) 00:04, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
With the Tatz source you are synthesising your own interpretation, because first of all you ignore the first paragraph of the section (the one that starts "While it is true that the diseases ... and although he states that between 3,000 and 4,000 were killed he does not give the initial total so you can not extrapolate from this source that "During the Black War, European colonists in Tasmania nearly completely annihilated the Tasmanian Aborigines" or that "From a population of approximately 5,000 individuals, they were hunted down and killed until only a few hundred individuals were left." There is a further problem with Tatz as he does not cite his source (primary or secondary), the best that can be said is that "Tatz states ..." --PBS (talk) 09:12, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
It's not just Tatz. It's every single source. 3,000-4,000 killed is approximately right. If you say that, I would be ok. Even if you say disease killed a thousand (which is not in any source I read, and is speculative OR).Likebox (talk) 13:51, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Primary/Secondary

(copied from above)

My source is useless for this article; perhaps I should not have added to the noise, but I was curious about the source and thought others might be too. I think Nick-D defined the scope of this article pretty well, and keepitshort outlined the problems with sources. Perhaps Webley also made the comment somewhere (his or her musings are tl:dr), the secondary sources become primary for the scope and context of this article. We need secondary sources on the supposed debate, and to keep the same out of the article and off this talk page. cygnis insignis 15:53, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

I understand your position, and NickD, that this should be about secondary sources. But there are certain things that are hard to sort out without primary sources. For example, the exact wording of declarations and such. So it must be a balance. Unfortunately there is no formula for this sort of thing. It must be worked out by knowing what is the consensus, etc.
A lot of this could be fixed by writing a proper black war article, and redirecting Australian genocide to that.Likebox (talk) 16:03, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Cygnis, I do not think your source is useless, just as I think Webley442's posting of the full proclamation was useful, and I see no reason why a factual summary of both should not appear in the Black War article. Newspaper reports are admissible, if only because they to show the strength of settler feeling against the aboriginals. When it comes to interpreting the data (e.g. was it genocide?), there we have to stick with the secondary sources. --Michael C. Price talk 16:43, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Large Changes/Incremental Changes

When a page has awful, offensive material on it, it is difficult to make small edits. A small edit will tend to imply that the editor agrees with the rest of the material on the page. When the rest of the material is a racist fiasco, this is very discouraging. So we need a big edit, and it needs to stick.

The same mechanism prevents well meaning readers from adding new things, like the massacres on the mainland, because to do so would be to implicitly support the rest of the nonsense on the page. This means we need to have a big change, and go on from there. I have made an attempt at a big change. I will do so periodically until it sticks.Likebox (talk) 17:15, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Did European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide 2

See above #Did European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide


Should we add footnotes to the paragraph or add text on the view of Moss's distinction between "Intentionalists" (intentional genocide like the Holocaust) and "structuralists" (structural genocide which "averts the issue of perpetrator agency and intention by highlighting anonymous 'genocidal processes' of cultural and physical destruction."). Also should we mention Madley's term "frontier genocide" in the text or note it? Or should we not expand the paragraph at all? --PBS (talk) 18:52, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

Or perhaps we should place the mainstream consensus on events, and list deviations from this consensus one by one.Likebox (talk) 18:58, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Likebox this paragraph is to do with the different definitions of what constitutes genocide used in the history wars, it is not about the events that the history wars are debating. Last time I bought up this issue the section wandered off onto all sorts of other issues, can we please keep it focused on the specific issue of what different people involved in the history wars mean when they say genocide. --PBS (talk) 19:06, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
The reason I am bringing this up here is because they all mostly mean the same thing when they are talking about Tasmania. The issues of definition are just not relevant to events there. When you are talking about definition disputes, you're getting into stolen generations.Likebox (talk) 19:11, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Your source for "they all mostly mean the same thing when they are talking about Tasmania" because Ann Curthoys draws a completely different conclusion as shown by the quote of her words in the article. BTW I would really like it if you would start to put in arguments based on what experts in the field say rather than generalities like the sentence I have quoted. E.G. "X says they all mostly mean the same thing when they are talking about Tasmania" --PBS (talk) 19:57, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

(deindent) This is not something that needs a source. If I have a book that says "electrons have negative charge", and another book that says "electrons weigh 511 KeV" I don't need another source to convince myself that they are talking about the same thing.

If another book is saying, "in this scenario, the electron would be massless" when talking about string theory, I have enough common sense to know that they are talking about something different than the usual electron.

What Anne Curthroys is saying, you have misinterpreted. She is not saying that the definition of genocide is different between Tasmanian historians and Genocide scholars, rather she is pointing out that genocide scholars have settled on a massive consensus that what happened on Tasmania was genocide, while Tasmanian historians (mostly working within Australia) agree on the events, but not on the label "genocide". The reason for dispute is not over the precise definition of "genocide", but on the precise intent of the government.

The wider meaning of genocide is only applicable to other cases.Likebox (talk) 13:56, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Undue Weight

How does one deal with undue weight? One can count sources. One can point to consensus opinions. One can know the obvious fact that the Tasmanian genocide is well accepted. But how to convince the genocide skeptic that he is in a minority? Perhaps ask him to take a poll?Likebox (talk) 00:06, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

Maaka: The indigenous experience

While looking for something completely different I came across this reference, which may be of use in this article:

  • Roger Maaka, Chris Andersen, The indigenous experience: global perspectives Canadian Scholars' Press, 2006, ISBN 1551303000.

Chapter 8, Colin Tatz "Confronting Australian Genocide" pp. 125–140,, is specifically relevant to this article but other chapters, such as the introduction to the section that Tatz's chapter resides Part II "Colonialism, genocide and the problem of intention" pp. 111–113 (Both chapter heading give a clear indication of their POV). --PBS (talk) 08:52, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

It is not a "POV" to call the Tasmanian genocide a genocide. It is a well accepted historical fact. It is a fringe lunatic minority that questions what happened.Likebox (talk) 13:06, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
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  1. ^ Flood, Dr Josephine, The Original Australians, pp125-126.
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