Is genocide confined to totalitarian despots? Or can good colonists and decent democrats commit the crime? Historian Sir Keith Hancock once wrote that Australian democratic state has been ‘genuinely benevolent’, shedding but an ‘economical tear’ about Aboriginal dispossession. We need to discuss not mere ‘dispossession’ but the physical killings, the child removals and the incarceration on settlements and missions. And then address the ensuing amnesia and paucity of tears about these matters.

 

Colin Tatz researches, teaches and writes in the fields of comparative race politics, Holocaust and genocide studies, Aboriginal affairs, youth suicide, migration, and sports history. He is currently visiting professor in the School of Politics at ANU. In 2016, Praeger in the USA published The Magnitude of Genocide by Colin Tatz and Winton Higgins.