Abstract

“We are a moral people” and the very notion that Australians could have anything to do with genocide is unthinkable—so claimed parliamentarians when Australia was asked to ratify the UN’s Genocide Convention in 1949. The reality is that even decent democrats and people who consider themselves good colonists are capable of doing just that—killing people because of who they were, forcibly removing their children in order to assimilate them and erase them from the landscape, and then, in the name of their protection, incarcerated them on reserves in a manner that caused them serious physical and mental harm. This confronting book addresses the whole issue of what happens to an indigenous minority who were considered other than human, an unworthy order of beings destined to die out.