The destructive effect of the Stolen Generations upon Indigenous Australians across the continent has been total. White colonial society, indisposed to interact with Aborigines on human terms, possessed by political fanaticism and ideation of universal dominance, compelled by religious ideology, could never have reached an understanding with Australia's Aborigines. Colonialists' heedless, arrogant violations of traditional Australian law, eventually culminating in the extreme assimilationist policies to which the Stolen Generations have been subjected, must be viewed through the victim's lens in order to appreciate to any degree the totality of destruction inflicted upon their culture.

We reexamine the fraught question of colonial genocide in Australia and conclude that the worst of Australia's values were formed in the crucible of racism, a sense of superiority deriving from Britain's class obsessed hierarchy, a sense that has now transferred to the environment, for which specism is the enabler and ecocide is the consequence. The impact of British power on Aboriginals was calibrated and ruthless, but we are now asked to question British 'intent', that there was no documented intention by Britain to commit genocide. This is a further example of 'reframing'. Mass killing almost never has a written order. It is unlikely, and highly self-incriminating, that a Government would issue instructions for carrying out deliberate murder. Nevertheless, ethnically targeted mass killing-racial destruction-is usually the expected result of some official policy or reactive social behaviour within a policy context. We are asked by some politicians and historians to absolve or reject Britain's role in colonial genocide because there is no evidence of written orders from the British Government that authorises mass killing. Others argue, if mistakes were made, that the past should remain in the past. We are further asked by some (such as Windschuttle and other denialists) to dismiss any allegations of mass killing because there is no body of legal evidence (that is, case histories) to support such a charge. Instead, we are exhorted to consider violence against Aboriginals, if we accept it at all, as the aberrational excesses of a few settlers at the lawless frontier; or if we reluctantly accept that targeted racial violence and Aboriginal antipathy did occur, we are encouraged to play it down as 'a black armband' view of history that is unhelpful in the myths we prefer to create for ourselves.

Despite the brutal history of colonisation in the continent now known as Australia - including the massacre, rape, forced displacement and child removal of Indigenous peoples - the term 'genocide' is still hotly disputed, and outright denied. This paper critically analyses the term 'genocide' in an Australian context, including the flawed development of the UN Genocide Convention, and discusses domestic attempts to bring the issue of Indigenous genocide to the courts of law. Ultimately, this paper concludes that an independent, international legal body is required to adjudicate on this important, contemporary issue in Australia.

In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have long been subjected to attempts at extermination, exclusion, and assimilation but continually resist these efforts. This history is woven through the social fabric of Australia. This paper is a single case study which looks at contemporary race relations in Townsville, Queensland, and describes current settler colonial settings in terms of structure and agency. We focus primarily on agency as a strengths-based approach but recognise the structural constraints Indigenous people face. Based on in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, we explore Indigenous perceptions of agency and constraints. Indigenous people have many ways to exercise agency, and our focus is on those who identify as activists and advocates. Participants expressed their capacity to undertake social action as high and varied in method, articulating agency as activism or advocacy. These agents view the state as both an enabler and a constraint, largely exclusionary of Indigeneity. The Settler-State only increases the capability for social action when it chooses to do so and has been and continues to be largely exclusionary of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Significant to agents is the local context of Townsville as a racist city distant from political decision-making. Participants describe experiences of continuing covert or implicit racism and ‘active apathy’ held by the wider non-Indigenous community of Townsville. Despite these constraints, Indigenous agents creatively adapt such structures in order to exercise their agency. Keywords: Settler-State; Structure; Agency; Activism; Social Change; Exclusion.

The implications of the European colonization of Australia, beginning in 1788, have affected nearly all socio-cultural patterns of Indigenous peoples’ lives. The colonial governments’ efforts at the westernization of Aboriginal groups yielded devastating consequences, including, inter alia, legal discrimination against and physical mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Although several Australian historians and anthropologists had sought to equate these practices to the acts of genocide in the past (Evans, 1988; Reynolds, 1981) it was not until the mid-1990s when the discourse of Aboriginal genocide started to gain momentum and elicit public interest.

Australia is populated with violent place names, a shadowland of myth. This is the story of toponymic Murdering Creek, on the southern side of Lake Weyba near Noosa in Queensland’s southeast. We will assess the alleged massacre at Murdering Creek as a potential type instance of the Australian genocidal process. In our forensic examination of the Murdering Creek massacre myth, we find that it is supported by an actual event that, on the balance of evidence, took place in 1864 on a 23,000 acre pastoral station called Yandina Run, between the Maroochy River and Lake Weyba. We determine that the massacre was carried out by local pastoral workers and at least one timbergetter. The motive seems to have been a belief in white supremacy, and a pathological desire to remove the Aboriginals, who objected to a homestead being built near a sacred bora in 1862. An unkown number of Aboriginals were murdered while in canoes at the mouth of the Creek and into the shallow foreshore of the lake, where they had been inveigled by a ruse. The massacre was enabled by the murderous and racist policies of the newly installed Herbert Government, the first Government of Queensland. Herbert assumed the office of Government in 1859, and was sworn into power in 1860. He took the title of premier and colonial secretary, which included Aboriginal affairs. He is considered the founder of Queensland. During Herbert’s long term, there is no legislative evidence that he considered the human rights of dispossessed Aboriginals. His priorities were economic, and Aboriginals were an encumbrance. Herbert’s Government introduced Aboriginal dispersal policies that legitimised extermination. Britain was a co-conspirator. Britain supplied the weaponry, strategic governance, immigrants and maritime mercantile support. In our findings, Murdering Creek therefore becomes a type instance of a violent State sponsored process that saw the destruction of Aboriginal society across a multiplicity of other Murdering Creek type events in Queensland and across Australia. Meticulous effort has been used to investigate this particular myth, because other researchers may be able to reuse the originating syncretic methods and investigative tools that can help them further decode Australia’s mythical past. Not the largely confected, triumphal past of heroic pastoralism, as it tamed the land for economic gain. No, it is the violent and defiantly racist past that many of us choose to forget, including that at Murdering Creek. It is the invasive pattern of armed dispossession, the process of occupation that formed the political uses of Australian genocide, where economic imperatives outweighed humanitarian considerations. We ignore the past to our cost.

Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?

Whenever the subject of Australian genocide arises, so does the question of State intentionality: did Britain, its administrative functionaries (bureaucrats, police, military) and its settlers intend to exterminate the Aboriginal population as the necessary price for confiscating the land? Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all. We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst. It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Should it be accountable? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?