Many Australians prefer to bury their heads
rather than remember the horror inflicted on Australian
Aborigines.
The theories that Adolf Hitler was later to use to justify murdering Jews
and Gypsies in Europe, were first put to use in Australia to justify not
making any treaties with Aborigines but instead to murder them en masse and
take their land.
Max Muller in 1870, in the Anthropological Review, London, classified the
human race into seven catagories on an ascending scale - with the
Aborigines on the lowest rung and the "Aryan" type supreme.
The Social Evolutionist, H. K. Rusden, explained in 1876: "The survival of
the fittest means that might is right. And we thus invoke and remorselessly
fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the
inferior Australian and Maori races... and we appropriate their patrimony
cooly"
James Barnard, the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Tasmania, wrote
in 1890: "the process of extermination is an axiom of the law of evolution
and survival of the fittest." There was therefore, he concluded, no reason
to suppose that "there had been any culpable neglect" in the murder and
dispossession of the Aboriginal Australian.
A well-known explorer and historian of northern Australia, Logan Jack,
wrote in 1922: " This northern land is thinly peopled by a feeble folk
inevitably doomed to vanish from the face of the earth within the current
century...To any stud-master or student of eugenics, the idea of leaving
the future of the North to a breed tainted at its foundation-head is in the
last degree repugnant and politically it is full of danger."
The horrific massacres that these theories either caused or justified have
never been properly acknowledged. No public monuments mark where they
happened. Australians have buried the memory of them in shame.
Hostorians record that over 50 Aborigines were killed for every sheep
station established - often by the younger sons of English arisocrats.
Aboriginal heads were nailed over station doors. Poisoned bread was given
to Aboriginal families.
This 1885 account from Queensland is typical of what happened in throughout
Australia: "The niggers [were given]... something really startling to keep
them quiet... the rations contained about as much strychnine as anything
else and not one of the mob escaped... more than one hundred blacks were
stretched out by this ruse of the owner of Long Lagoon.'
Aboriginal resistance in many parts of Australia was fierce and lasted over
50 years. The Cooktown Courier reported: "the struggle has been obstinate
and fierce. Although an unusually large and costly body of police has been
for years engaged in exterminating the Aborigines, and few whites miss a
chance of shooting any they may encounter, the strength of the tribes has
not been broken. No doubt their numbers have been greatly thinned but they
have not been cowed.... consequently prospecting for minerals can only be
carried out by well-armed and equipped parties. Evidently settlement must
be delayed until the work of extermination is completed - a consumption of
which there is no present prospect - or until some more rational and humane
methods of dealing with the blacks are adopted." While there were cries of
outrage from some humane settlers calling the police "the barbarous corps
of exterminators", the government covered up these dreadful crimes stating
"no illegal acts were occuring."
Australia was the practice ground for the Nazi pogroms. The lack of
effective protest by the international community against these Australian
attrocities and the theories used to justify them led to the eventual
deaths of millions in Europe.
To the Account by an Eyewitness of one of the last
massacres in the 1930s.
To return to the origins of Western Sexism
Back to the Aboriginal Australia Room
Click to return to the Library Entrance.