21 - Genocide in Northern Australia, 1824–1928

Summary

This chapter provides an integrated history of territorial seizure and annihilative measures across three distinct colonial regions - Queensland, the Northern Territory and the northern reaches of Western Australia. The vast arc of Tropical Australia is examined within a single narrative frame, bound by several consistent, over-arching themes: escalating land theft with all its accompanying violences in the latter nineteenth century, into the twentieth; the enhanced capacity in remote regions to mask multiple colonial atrocities and promote intense cultural denialism; and the dramatic intensity of Western expansion, first throughout the vast territory of Queensland, then pushing westward from that base across the remaining tropical zones. Thus, the seemingly independent colonial stories are conjoined into a singular narrative of advance, dispossession and the brutal destruction of lives, societies and cultures, underscoring the environmental theft and transformation of land and nature. This destructive process is here termed ‘indigenocide’ – the inter-connection of mass homicide, ethnocide and ecocide, simultaneously imposed in one sustained, three-pronged attack. Indigenous military resistance continually contests the invasive thrust, demonstrating how, in situations of asymmetrical struggle, warfare can rapidly morph into relentless massacre; as colonialism, in its fundamental practices, becomes virtually synonymous with all the attributes of racial genocide.