Talk:Australian history wars/Archive 2

message: Do the History Wars really break down into the dichotomies of the political right and left, as this article implies?
--Our Bold Hero 04:51, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Divisions

message: I'm planning to extend this article over the next several months to incorporate more detailed information on Windschuttle's major arguments and the responses to his works by members of the academic left.  I will be using The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Whitewash, Washout and the compilation of Windschuttle articles at sydneyline.com as the primary sources of information.  Any suggestions for additional sources of information would be most appreciated. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 220.245.91.117 (talk • contribs) 04:26, 12 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Windschuttle

message: Unless I'm missing something big, the History Wars of Australia have no particular similarity to the American Culture war. I'd recomend removing the comparison.Rbl 05:09, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The History wars appear to be the main Australian expression of the left/right stuggle for cultural dominance in Australia, I see a clear parralel to the US Culture war. Paul foord 05:41, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Relationship with US culture war

message: Very little information in Black armband view of history is not already covered in the broader article History Wars, and the former is really inseparable from the latter. I would suggest that the articles be merged.Edelmand 12:23, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Comment - do you mean duplicity or duplication? :-) --Golden Wattle  talk 20:54, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge article

message: The first paragraph states:
:... the nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with some commentators questioning the findings contained in the report and asserting that the Stolen Generation has been exaggerated. Some commentators have questioned the conduct of the Commission which produced the report...
"Some commentators" are weasel words. I think that this paragraph needs citations and the name the most prominent of the commentators. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:31, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Stolen Generations debate

message: I suppose the title would be fine as-is, if this was the Australopedia. But since WP has worldwide coverage and readership, the title really needs to specify that it's about Australia. I'm perfectly happy to leave it up to the regular editors to settle on a name (perhaps "History wars of Australia" or "Australian history wars") -- but please don't just leave it as it is, mates. Cgingold 12:11, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I would leave it as it is. "History Wars" is a term and phenomenon specific to Australia. If ever there's another nation where there's a debate frequently referred to as the "History Wars", then we can create a disambiguation page. Until then, it seems unnecessary. Aridd (talk) 18:38, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Title of article 

message: I've deleted some material inserted as rebuttal in the middle of a description of the position of one side in the debate. Please read policy on this. Finding research and using it to develop an argument of your own is illegitimate synthesis, when it isn't Original Research. If a participant in the debate has advanced these points, then include it in the summary of their position, not as a rebuttal to someone else's. If (as in the case of smallpox) the researchers drew the conclusion that their research refuted, say, Reynolds, quote them saying so. If, on the other hand, they didn't say this, and you are "putting two and two together", read WP:SYN and see why this is explicitly prohibited.JQ (talk) 11:21, 19 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Avoid OR/SYN

message: In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :) 
* "Australian-debate-on-genocide" :
** Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Ringwood, Viking, 2001, p. 2.
** Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training
DumZiBoT (talk) 22:29, 10 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bot report : Found duplicate references ! 

message: An anon editor has asserted that Henry Reynolds arguments are false, however they have provided no references for this claim. They also attacked other editors in the article. I have reverted twice. If reliable sources arguing against Reynolds are found and cited the article can be developed further, however unreferenced assertions of error and attacks on other editors are inappropriate. Paul foord (talk) 11:39, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opposition to Henry Reynolds 

message: There is a section on the relation to the American culture war. This link seems to be a little stretched. Perhaps the parallel to Neo-Nazi holocaust denial is more appropriate.Likebox (talk) 08:59, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: No, it's not appropriate, because the neo-nazis are not mainstream within Germany. On second thought, the right parallel is to modern Turkish denial of the Armenian genocide.Likebox (talk) 19:16, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relation to Holocaust denial 

message: I did as user:Likebox suggested on my talk page, and did a Google Book search on "Tasmanian Genocide"
Ben Kiernan Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Yale University Press, 2007. , 9780300100983 p 273 states most Tasmanian Aborigines perished in armed conflict. Not all of the chapter is available but of that which is, Kiernan does not seem to argue forcefully that it was a genocide, but reports details of the war between the British and the Aborigines which the Aborigines lost. However Kiernan is not a specialist in the events in Tasmania.
There are a number of books on the first page which are by people who are not specialise in the events that occurred in Tasmania during this period which state it was a genocide. For example: Kevin Reilly et al. Racism: A Global Reader, M.E. Sharpe, 2003 , 9780765610591. there is a chapter by Jared Diamond "In Black and White" pp. 23-26 is firmly of the view that it was a genocide. He states in conclusion "Today, the attitudes of white Australians towards their murderous history vary widely. While government policy and many whites' private views have become increasingly sympathetic to the Aborigines, other whites deny responsibility for genocide." 
Diamond suggests that the view in Australian society is split on the issue. But the split opinion of Australians are not necessarily those of experts in the field. Luckily the same page has two papers from historians who specialise in the events that occurred in Tasmania during this period.
A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, Berghahn Books, 2004 , 9781571814104. There is a chapter by Henry Reynolds "Genocide in Tasmania?" pp. 127-147. 
The last two pages 146,147 get to the heart of the problem. Clearly Reynolds recognises that whether or not genocide is a complicated question, and although he thinks that much of the settler population (many of whom he points out were still serving convicts) were "extirpationists" (a word meaning in favour of extinction) but that there is no conclusive evidence that the British Tasmanian authorities took the same view. In Reynolds opinion there is no simple answer to the question if the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines was a genocide. But don't take my word for it read please read it and see what you think.
In the Wikipedia text Reynols is described as a "progressive historians such as ... Henry Reynolds began to publish books and articles which they saw as a corrective to the narrow, selective historiography which had, in their view, hitherto misrepresented or simply ignored Indigenous Australian history." 
A. Dirk Moses  Empire, Colony, Genocide,: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, Berghahn Books, 2008 , 9781845454524 See the chapter entitled "Genocide in Tasmania" by Anne Curthoys pp. 229-247
Curthoys's conclusion is similar to that of Reynols "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania in the first half of the nineteenth century, how best to conceptualize it, and how to consider what that historical knowledge might mean for us now, morally and intellectually, in the present." 
Neither of these detailed essays by Australian historians suggest that this debate is concluded and the "it was a genocide" or it was "not a genocide" is settled. Quite the contrary, if anything there is more acceptance now that the explanations presented in the past are not the complete story and more research and deliberation is needed before a consensus can be arrived at.
So I suggest user:Likebox that unless you can come up with a detailed paper similar to the two above that argues that the view "it was not a genocide is a minority view by a few cranks", we should continue to present the argument as we do as it is supported by the Australian Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training paper Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, and the two detailed papers by Australian historians above. --PBS (talk) 22:53, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I see what you are saying, and it seems fair minded. If the article read like what you write above, I would have no complaint with it. I am not interested in quibbling about what the word "genocide" means, so long as it is made clear that the deaths in Tasmania were due to murder (murder of civilians, not armed conflict, not disease). The view that I say is espoused only by cranks is that the death of the Tasmanian aborigines was due to disease, or justifiable killing, and that the settlers were guilty only of crimes of omission, such as withholding aid.Likebox (talk) 23:48, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: If you read the two chapters by the two Australian historians above I think you will have a much better understanding of the finer points of the debate. You will also find paragraphs that you can cite in the article to add those points that you think are glossed over at the moment. Please read them (you can access the text by clicking on the page number links) and then discuss which paragraphs you think could be cited for additions to the article to bring a better balance to the Wikipedia article. I am sure that if you do that and present it in a fair tone in the narrative voice of the article there will be little opposition to such additions. --PBS (talk) 00:39, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Google Books on the Tasmanian Genocide

message: At the same time that user:Likebox altered this page (s)he also altered the section  "Australia" section in the article "genocides in history" to reflect what (s)he considered to be a more accurate reflection of the debate.
Using the information gleaned from the two articles by well known Australian historians (Henry Reynolds, and Anne Curthoys)which were presented above in #Google Books on the Tasmanian Genocide, I have re-written the "Australia" section in the article "genocides in history".  After discussing it on the talk page user:Likebox is satisfied with the re-write.
I think this shows good will by user:Likebox and so I hope we can come to a working accommodation on this page.
I would like to take the protection of this page, but user:Likebox to do so I have to have your agreement that you will not make changes for which there is no consensus, and User:Webley442 I need you to agree that providing user:Likebox provides reliable sources for the changes (s)he wishes to make that you will try to edit around the changes and not just revert them. If we can agree on this then I will unprotect the page. --PBS (talk) 10:48, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  No worries, you can remove protection--- I don't think I am widely read enough to fix this problem. The main problem is that the point of view that is being pushed here is both biased and absurd--- that the natives died of diseases, and the white settlers did not kill them. The (probably mainstream) genocide debate which PBS brings up is whether there was active government involvement, which is always a question, especially in a frontier with settlers and weak government, and if this is presented as a literature debate, I probably wouldn't be too worried. But the text of this article should stick to the agreed upon  historical facts, not to some rant by one historian with a chip on his shoulder. His views can be quarantined in a few paragraphs, considering that nearly all historians think he is dead wrong.Likebox (talk) 05:44, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  But please keep the POV tag in place, so someone else can do the edit.Likebox (talk) 16:08, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: As a compromise I'll leave it there for a month, and we can see if anyone else presents any new information, but you have yet to produce any reliable sources that supports you POV that this article is not balanced, while several have been presented that show that it is, so it is not reasonable for it remain there indefinitely without any evidence being presented that it is a biased article --PBS (talk) 23:03, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Look, the article explicitly makes the claim that the natives died mainly of disease and that the settlers were only guilty of "crimes of omission". If that's not a bias, I don't know what is.Likebox (talk) 23:06, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: End of protection in January?

message: I've restored the previous wording on the Judy Campbell paragraph regarding smallpox. It seems to me that the shorter version proposed by the previous editor misses the whole point of this article which is about the History Wars. The article can't report on the History Wars if it doesn't mention the opposing claims involved: in this case the claim by Henry Reynolds and other historians that the smallpox was introduced by the British and Judy Campbell's work which argues that the evidence they rely upon is pretty tenuous and that there is better evidence of epidemics spreading from contact with fisherman in the far north of Australia. The Schoolteacher.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.202.43.53 (talk) 06:35, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Judy Campbell paragraph revisited 

message: I would like to thank all contributors for achieving a balance on this article, and add some commentary (but only that) on Judy Campbell's e-book, which I have just purchased and read. The case she makes for the source of smallpox in Australia being Maccassan trepang fishermen who had contacts in the Northern Territory and the North coast of Western Australia depends on a combination of medical evidence about smallpox itself, gained during the WHO smallpox eradication campaign, and historical evidence about the dates of three epidemics that occurred in different parts of Australia in the 1780s, 1820s/30s, and 1860s. In relation to the WHO data, she thanks Professor Frank Fenner,a virologist from the Australian National University who worked on the smallpox eradication campaign.  The essential information she uses from this is the epidemiology of smallpox, in particular the rapid incubation and short duration of the infectious period; the (short) survival time of the virus in hot and humid conditions; and the validity of pock-marks on survivors as a good indication of when an epidemic occurred.  It is also relevant that in small sparse populations, a disease such as smallpox does not become "endemic" and thus occurs as "epidemics" when a new source of infection spreads through a population of those born to the (partially) immunised survivors of a previous one.
There is no need to attribute the belief that smallpox was introduced by the British to "Henry Reynolds and other historians", since it was a possibility considered by Captain-Lieutenant Watkin Tench in 1791 when he was writing about the 1789-90 epidemic, and you can find most of the contemporary accounts at Project Gutenberg.  Tench lists the options thus:
Is it a disease indigenous to the country? Did the French ships under Monsieur de Peyrouse introduce it? let it be remembered that they had now been departed more than a year; and we had never heard of its existence on board of them.—Had it travelled across the continent from its western shore, where Dampier and other European voyagers had formerly landed?—Was it introduced by Mr Cook?—Did we give birth to it here? No person among us had been afflicted with the disorder since we had quitted the Cape of Good Hope, seventeen months before. It is true, that our surgeons had brought out variolous matter in bottles; but to infer that it was produced from this cause were a supposition so wild as to be unworthy of consideration. ' '
The medical evidence about smallpox gathered during the eradication campaign makes the worst case possibility of deliberate infection with "variolous matter" (probably scabs to be used for inoculation - the procedure using live virus that was replaced a few years later by Jenner's vaccination with cowpox) or other means (eg, infected clothes) very unworthy of consideration, simply because the virus does not survive very long without a living human host (and there is no other host) in hot or humid conditions.  At a minimum (that is, if the variolous matter had been bottled from a live case in Cape Town and /or clothes or bedding had been infected from a case there) and most of the trip from Cape Town to Botany Bay was in reasonably cold conditions, there is still the period from January 1788 until the first cases were seen amongst Aboriginal people in April 1789 to be explained, which covers two hot and humid summers in Australia, whereas:
... investigations during the eradication campaign showed that even virus protected in scabs retained infectivity for only three weeks at temperatures of 35°C (95°F) and relative humidity of 65–68 per cent, and for very ittle longer even when temperatures and humidity were lower. 
Thus even if the British had been intending genocide by smallpox from Day #1 (18th January, 1788) they would have lacked the means to infect anyone. [Note: now qualified by additional material from WHO book on smaallpox eradication, below.] This leaves the ships of La Perouse, which arrived on the same day, nearly, and had just come from the Kamchatka Peninsula,where an epidemic of smallpox had killed more than 4,000 of the indigenous people and more than 300 of the Russian settlers only 17 years earlier (1769-70),and prior to that La Perouse's ships had visited the western coast of the United States and Alaska, where the indigenous populations had been devastated by smallpox around 1775-8, introduced by traders from Siberia, or a Spanish exploring vessel from Mexico, or overland from the epidemics on the east coast, or some other means - no-one knows. Judy Campbell's book does not discuss La Perouse at all, but they were at Botany Bay until 10th March 1788, and a possible source of infection - if there had been a live person with smallpox on board, since they had travelled by way of Samoa and Tonga in summer - that is, through the hot and humid tropics.  The only other possibility would be if a very obvious and familiar illness had somehow been transmitted live through the First Fleet and one of the convicts who absconded early and vanished had transmitted it and none of the medical staff were aware.  This is possible, but does not seem likely.
Judy Campbell presents the evidence that trepang fishers from Macassar (where smallpox was endemic) began to visit the north coast of Australia from the mid 1700s, that the voyage was short enough for infectious people to survive the trip, and that some did in fact die of smallpox.  In the case of the epidemic from the late 1820s through the early 1830's, she presents quite strong evidence that the earliest dates were in the North, and became progresively later in the south, and - a critical point - occurred in inland NSW before they reached the coast - and then there was smallpox in Victoria and later again in South Australia. These dates are estimated from either direct observations of (probably) active illness at the time, or pockmarked survivors who later gave the dates in various ways.  She presents  evidence for a similar sequence of dates for an epidemic in the 1860s that did not seem to reach the south, and (probably) a separate one from the 1860s that began in the north of Western Australia and was transmitted south. The evidence for the 1789-90 epidemic in Sydney is weaker, since it is based on pockmarked people judged to be in their 50s and 60s when observed many years later, and their oral accounts of when they were infected.   The uncertainty around the few dates of this kind doesn't establish a very strong north-south sequence prior to the epidemic in Sydney in 1789-90.  However, in the absence of any evidence of a live infected person on either the ships of the First Fleet or those of La Perouse and the strong evidence against the survival of the virus in the absence of such a living host, it is more plausible to suppose that what (probably) happened in the 1830s also happened 40 years earlier.  It is certainly more plausible than any other theory, even if the case is not as strong as the way the author expresses it in the book - in my opinion.
None of this alters the fact that the Aboriginal populations would have recovered but for the fact that the British brought other diseases, and dispossessed the owners of the land by force of arms, and all the rest.  However, the evidence of the effects of smallpox on naive  populations is clear, with death rates of 30-70% on the first exposure, and with much higher rates in pregnant women and women in general and young children,and much higher infection rates wherever the populations were most concentrated.  Thus there is every reason to believe that this one disease had a devastating effect on Aboriginal people all down the east coast of Australia and across to the coast of South Australia in two main waves, in the late 1780's and late 1820's-early 1830's, leaving the survivors with even less chance to resist, and that probably the source of infection was from the north. 
Thus the wikipedia summary is accurate enough, whether in the long or short version, so long as it contains the reference to the book in which the evidence is presented in detail.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 123.3.98.39 (talk) 00:51, 25 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Judy Campbell's evidence explained in more detail

message: I've removed a recently inserted paragraph about the Howard Government policies regarding ATSIC, etc. The History wars article should be kept to the specific issue of the History wars and not broadened to all things Aboriginal. If someone wants to create a separate article on such policies feel free. But first consider the Wikipedia policy regarding NPOV. Wikipedia articles aren't the forum for deciding whether government policies are appropriate or not. You can state that commentator X or politician Y said that the Howard Government policies were to the detriment of the Aboriginal community but the article shouldn't be written as though that particular position was proven fact. For example the removed paragraph effectively stated that the abolition of ATSIC was the destruction of a 'gain' made by Aboriginal people. There is a position that is diametrically opposed to that, arguing that ATSIC was a failure in its intended purpose, as a means of improving the lives of Aboriginal people in that it took in vast amounts of public money intended to improve conditions for Aboriginal people and that much of this funding 'disappeared' in ways that have never been properly explained, with very little 'trickling down' to those it was intended to benefit. So it's arguable that the abolition of ATSIC was a 'gain' for Aboriginal people as the removal of an organisation that had effectively functioned as a barrier to them receiving the funding that they were supposed to get. Webley442 (talk) 10:16, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Political commentary on Howard Government policies. 

message: The two acts considered in this section are:
# The annihilation by mass murder of the Tasmanian population
# The introduction, perhaps deliberate, of Smallpox into mainland Australia
This is mass murder, not withholding aid. So it is self-serving and ridiculous to frame the debate as "does genocide encompasses crimes of omission...", because these accusations are not of crimes of omission. They are crimes of mass-murder.Likebox (talk) 23:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I see no point in debating what you or I or any other editor of Wikipedia thinks is or is not genocide. If you read the genocide article, the genocide definitions article, and the Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, there are a number of different opinions as to what is or is not genocide. Possibly the clearest indication of that was given in the Bosnian Genocide Case when the court president said the case dealt "exclusively with genocide in a limited legal sense and not in the broader sense sometimes given to this term." It is quite possible for experts on the destruction of the Aboriginal populations of Australia to agree that destruction took place without agreeing that it was a genocide, because of the "mens rea" aspect of the crime of genocide (see Momčilo Krajišnik). One interesting development in this area of the killing of indigenous peoples, is the use by Brazilian courts of laws derived from the the Genocide Convention to convict people for genocidal attacks on members of tribes such as the Yanomami (see Genocides in history#Brazil), as it implies that while there is no agreement that the destruction of the native populations of America at the macro level was a genocide, it is quite possible that the destruction of parts of that general population at the micro level can be considered so. -- PBS (talk) 06:45, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Genocide Debate 1

message: I don't feel like digging up the same sources again and again, so for future reference, here is what I think the section should look like:
===Genocide debate 2===
 	
In recent years, there has been a debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the genocide of groups of Aborigines, in particular the Tasmanian Aborigines. Many mainstream figures, including Raphael Lemkin, consider the events on Tasmania as a defining instance of genocide. The entire native population of Tasmania was wiped out by settlers, many of whom were extirpationists, which means that killing the native population was their aim. Henry Reynolds, from Genocide and settler society By A. Dirk Moses, p 128-148
The mainstream debate on the issue of genocide is to what extent the governing body of the settler outposts had a goal of extermination in mindhttp://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html. What is known is that Governor George Arthurhttp://[George Arthur biography adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010034b.htm] declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered any soldier to shoot any Aboriginal on sight. Journalist and publisher Henry Melville[Henry Melville biography: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm], described the results in 1835: "This murderous warfare, in the course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score of the European population were sacrificed” Melville, 1835, p 33, requoted from Madleyhttp://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf
Kenneth Minogue, an Australian political scientist, and Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian, believe that no genocide took place on Tasmania. Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History. Australian Government Department of Education Science and TrainingWindschuttle, Keith. Minogue believes that Australians fabricated the genocide out of white guilt, while Windschuttle believes that diseases were responsible for the deaths of the Tasmanians. Disease is not believed by other historians to have played any major role in Tasmania before 1829.http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/tasmania.htm
On mainland Australia, there have been occasional accusations of genocide, but no clear consensus. Many of the deaths on the mainland were due to smallpox, which is commonly believed to have come from Europe with the settlers. Many historians, like Craig Mear, support the thesis that the settlers introduced smallpox either intentionally or accidentally. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34755365_ITM
Historian Judy Campbell argues that in addition to the well documented smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1829-32, there were earlier undocumented smaller epidemics in the 1860s. She believes that the smallpox  was not a result of contact with British settlers, but instead spread south from the far North of Australia, and was due to contact between Aborigines and visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia. Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 - 1880, by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press, pp 55, 61 This view has not met with widespread acceptence However, in separating European presence and Aboriginal disease, Invisible Invaders is not entirely convincing. Untying Aboriginal disaster from European activity ... becomes a mantra almost uncritically repeating official documents and settlers' and explorers' memoirs. Here Campbell's examination moves from scientific to somewhat naïve' from from this API review by Lorenzo Veracini, and has been specifically challenged by historian Craig Mear.[Craig Mear The origin of the smallpox outbreak in Sydney in 1789. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, June 2008;Vol.94, Part 1: 1-22 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2557307.htm] Mear writes:
They had been coming to this coast for hundreds of years, yet this was the first time that they had brought the deadly virus with them.
He also argues that the scientific model that Campbell uses to make her case is flawed, because it modelled the smallpox at significantly higher teperatures than those recorded at the time.
Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victims, it makes little difference if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated by European smallpox, or starve to death because of the introduction of European farming, the result is in his opinion genocide.Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Tony Barta, Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Isidor Wallimann & Michael N. Dobkowski (eds.), New York, Westport, Connecticut, London, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 237-251.
In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly, David Day wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names." These questions of definition are important for the stolen generations debate, which did not involve mass murder.
:: I will copy and paste from this from now on. I will discuss the recent changes one by one, and explain why they are inappropriate.Likebox (talk) 15:14, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section keeps getting changed 

message: In recent years, there has been a debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the genocide of groups of Aborigines, in particular the Tasmanian Aborigines. Many mainstream figures, including Raphael Lemkin, consider the events on Tasmania as a defining instance of genocide. The entire native population of Tasmania was wiped out by settlers, many of whom were extirpationists, which means that killing the native population was their aim. Henry Reynolds, from Genocide and settler society By A. Dirk Moses, p 128-148
The mainstream debate on the issue of genocide is to what extent the governing body of the settler outposts had a goal of extermination in mindhttp://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html. What is known is that Governor George Arthurhttp://[George Arthur biography adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A010034b.htm] declared martial law in November 1828, and empowered any soldier to shoot any Aboriginal on sight. Journalist and publisher Henry Melville[Henry Melville biography: http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/A020188b.htm], described the results in 1835: "This murderous warfare, in the course of a few years destroyed thousands of aborigines, whilst only a few score of the European population were sacrificed” Melville, 1835, p 33, requoted from Madleyhttp://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/Madley.pdf
Kenneth Minogue, an Australian political scientist, and Keith Windschuttle, an Australian historian, believe that no genocide took place on Tasmania. Debates on Genocide - Part Two Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History. Australian Government Department of Education Science and TrainingWindschuttle, Keith. Minogue believes that Australians fabricated the genocide out of white guilt, while Windschuttle believes that diseases were responsible for the deaths of the Tasmanians. Disease is not believed by other historians to have played any major role in Tasmania before 1829.http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/tasmania.htm
On mainland Australia, there have been occasional accusations of genocide, but no clear consensus. Many of the deaths on the mainland were due to smallpox, which is commonly believed to have come from Europe with the settlers. Many historians, like Craig Mear, support the thesis that the settlers introduced smallpox either intentionally or accidentally. http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-34755365_ITM
Historian Judy Campbell argues that in addition to the well documented smallpox epidemics of 1789-90, 1829-32, there were earlier undocumented smaller epidemics in the 1860s. She believes that the smallpox  was not a result of contact with British settlers, but instead spread south from the far North of Australia, and was due to contact between Aborigines and visiting fishermen from what is now Indonesia. Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 - 1880, by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press, pp 55, 61 This view has not met with widespread acceptence However, in separating European presence and Aboriginal disease, Invisible Invaders is not entirely convincing. Untying Aboriginal disaster from European activity ... becomes a mantra almost uncritically repeating official documents and settlers' and explorers' memoirs. Here Campbell's examination moves from scientific to somewhat naïve' from from this API review by Lorenzo Veracini, and has been specifically challenged by historian Craig Mear.[Craig Mear The origin of the smallpox outbreak in Sydney in 1789. Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, June 2008;Vol.94, Part 1: 1-22 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2557307.htm] Mear writes:
They had been coming to this coast for hundreds of years, yet this was the first time that they had brought the deadly virus with them.
He also argues that the scientific model that Campbell uses to make her case is flawed, because it modelled the smallpox at significantly higher teperatures than those recorded at the time.
Historians such as Tony Barta argue that for the victims, it makes little difference if they were wiped out as part of a planned attack. If a group is decimated by European smallpox, or starve to death because of the introduction of European farming, the result is in his opinion genocide.Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Tony Barta, Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia, in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, Isidor Wallimann & Michael N. Dobkowski (eds.), New York, Westport, Connecticut, London, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 237-251.
In the April 2008 edition of The Monthly, David Day wrote that Lemkin considered genocide to encompass more than mass killings but also acts like "driv[ing] the original inhabitants off the land... confin[ing] them in reserves, where policies of deliberate neglect may be used to reduce their numbers... Tak[ing] indigenous children to absorb them within their own midst... assimilation to detach the people from their culture, language and religion, and often their names." These questions of definition are important for the stolen generations debate, which did not involve mass murder.
:: I will copy and paste from this from now on. I will discuss the recent changes one by one, and explain why they are inappropriate.Likebox (talk) 15:14, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Genocide debate 2

message: The major changes (with comments):
:: This is inappropriate. The debate is not, and never was, about what the exact definition of genocide is.
 	
In recent years, there has been a debate among certain Australian historians as to whether the European colonisation of Australia resulted in the genocide of groups of Aborigines, in particular the Tasmanian Aborigines. Henry Reynolds points out that Raphael Lemkin, an expert on the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, considered the events in Tasmania as a defining instance of genocide. Reynolds also points out that European colonists and their descendants frequently use expressions that included "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" when discussing the treatment of Aborigines during the colonial period, and as in his opinion genocide "can take many forms, not all of them violent"Debates on Genocide - Part One Debates on 'Genocide' in Australian History, Australian Government Department of Education Science and Training. citing Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, Ringwood, Viking, 2001, p. 2. and that he regards this as an indicator of genocide.
:: Too much attribution. "Reynolds says that Lemkin says" is redundant. Just say Lemkin says. Nobody disputes that Lemkin said it. Also, Lemkin was not an expert on the Holocaust when he talked about Genocide, he coined the term in 1943. He was referring to the Armenian Genocide, and to Tasmania. 
Historian Keith Windschuttle argues that, in order to advance the ‘deliberate genocide’ argument, Reynolds has misused source documentation, including that from British colonist sources, by quoting out of context. In particular, he accuses Reynolds of selectively quoting from responses to an 1830 survey in Tasmania in that Reynolds quoted only from those responses that could be construed as advocating "extermination", "extinction", and "extirpation" and failed to mention other responses to the survey, which indicated that a majority of respondents rejected genocide, were sympathetic to the plight of the Aborigines, feared that conflict arising from Aboriginal attacks upon settlers would result in the extinction of the Tasmanian Aborigines and advocated the adoption of courses of action to prevent this happening. Windschuttle, pp. 326-350.
:: Windschuttle's rebuttal does not deserve this much space, nor should it be placed in this section. He is writing for a minority position, which means he gets less space than the mainstream Lemkin and Churchill and everybody else.
The debate on the issue of genocide has also incorporated to what extent, if any, the Colonial Administration had a goal of extermination in mindhttp://www.history.ac.uk/ihr/Focus/Migration/reviews/atkinson.html. Lieutenant-Governor George ArthurGeorge Arthur biography declared martial law in November 1828, and created what he called 'roving parties' to rove the settled districts, to capture Aborigines there and to shoot any Aboriginal who resisted. He instructed the military officers and magistrates in the area that the use of arms was to be a last resort, with the policy of conciliation that he had instituted to continue. At the same time, he informed London that his aim was to force the Aborigines out of the settled districts rather than kill them.Arthur to Murray, 4 November 1828, British Parliamentary Papers, Colonies Australia, 4, p 181 During the period of martial law, on 19 August 1930, Arthur issued a notice:
"His Excellency earnestly requests that all settlers and others will strictly enjoin their servants cautiously to abstain from acts of aggression against these benighted beings, and that they will themselves personally endeavour to conciliate them wherever it may be practicable; and whenever the Aborigines appear without evincing a hostile feeling, that no attempt shall be made either to capture or restrain them, but, on the contrary, after being fed and kindly treated, that they shall be suffered to depart whenever they desire it." Colonial Times, 16 July 1830, p 3
:: This rewriting is not neutral--- the martial law declaration meant that murder of natives would not be prosecuted. Whether you think that was genocide or not. It is inappropriate to list government statements which contradict the consensus of historians about the events without revealing the historical consensus.
:: I don't have major complaints with the rewrite in the next parts, except for verbosity and style. The exception is the last sentence:
These arguments and dfinitions are also relevant to the issue of the stolen generations.
:: That's not appropriate. These arguments and definitions are only relevant to the issue of the stolen generations. They are not relevant at all for the events in Tasmania, which are exactly parallel to all other known genocides, except on a smaller scale. Likebox (talk) 15:28, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  First revision 

message: Keepitshort: Let me state the reasons that I object to the way this paragraph is being edited, yet again.
This article is not “Genocide in Tasmania” or “Genocide in Australia” article. It is on the History Wars. By editing out all mention of the fact that, years before Mear made his comments, Reynolds and other historians had claimed that the British introduced smallpox, you are divorcing this paragraph from what it is actually about, the debate between 2 opposing sides in the History Wars. In terms of being a part of the History Wars, Mear made a pretty brief, very late and not very impressive appearance.
Why the insistence of removing all reference to EVIDENCE in this paragraph, in particular evidence that those who argue that the British introduced smallpox ignored although it was there in the historical records? As I said above: “what purpose does this revision serve? Judy Campbell assembled an impressive body of evidence to support her position in her book ‘Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 – 1880’. It appears that the only purpose of such a revision is to change a reference to a position supported by EVIDENCE to a mere suggestion, someone’s “wacky” idea.” That isn’t creating a 'neutral presentation'. It is neutering one side of the argument, as Schoolteacher said above: reducing its IMPACT as an argument by removing any mention of the existence of evidence to support the argument, evidence that the opposing side had overlooked.
Don’t have time to edit the article myself right now, maybe later. Webley442 (talk) 04:17, 4 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have already stated my view of what should happen here - ie the debate and evidence should be moved to the the main article on the topic.  This would leave the debate here to be about over the history of Tasmania, not genocide per se.  After all, Windshuttle's book is about the so-called "Fabrication" of history there, and about the degree of deliberate killing, but also other things. For the world at large, the issue is whether what hapened in Tasmania qualifies as a type example of genocide. The mainland smallpox debate is a separate one, in relation to the possibility of DELIBERATE smallpox introduction in 1789-90 and at no other time. However, when checking the strength of Campbell's dataig in detail, guess what?  There were variolators - ie people using live smallpox - in action around Bathurst in the 1830 outbreak.  They variolated some aboriginal people when vaccination failed - Campbell says so. And wiradjuri people were troublesome to settlers at the time.  So.  You do no-one any favours by putting "Dr" in front of the tertiary source of DR Flood's low-grade popularisation of Campbell's work and her claims that Fenner said thus and thus. Read the article on Frank Fenner himself, which I have made more  comprehensive so it could be linked when you and Likebox had finished reverting one another's work, and his particular role in the certification of eradication.  In that book both the Northern and Sydney routes for infection were drawn, with a query on each. His foreword to Campbell emphasises the historical work in dating a spread from the North for the 1830 epidemic - but she just mentions the variolators in the middle of it as if that's irrelevant!! The evidence for a northern route in 1789-90 is weaker than Campbell says, and Mear makes some valid points (though he fails to mention Caampbell's reported (but unreferenced) temperatures well into the 90's F in Sydney in the period.  And so on.  Likebox has a case, and it isn't as clear-cut as you seem to think.  let's archive and start over. Keepitshort (talk) 15:50, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

text: Just pointing out that the most mainstream reference, which is Tatz, supports Webley442 on this issue. Tatz says that the thesis that smallpox was introduced deliberately doesn't really make sense to him, because the settlers were afraid of smallpox themselves. But that doesn't mean that the smallpox came from the north. That's Campbell's minority opinion.Likebox (talk) 17:21, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

text: Sorry, I didn't read the whole thing. The refrigeration business is not in the sources I read. They say that the virus was carried live to Australia, but it isn't clear that it was deliberately introduced to the natives.Likebox (talk) 17:26, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  While yous have been chatting amongst yourselves I have been at the digital newspaper beta site of National Library of Australia helping out the national effort to clean up OCR text of old Australian newspapers (1803-1954)to see what they had to say.  And in a debate over compulsory vaccination in Queensland in 1881 I found this: "The public journals are threatened with an epidemic of variola literature scarcely less objectionable than the fell disease itself. Certain correspondents are even trying to improve the occasion by propounding smallpox conundrums such as the following :-" If I am vaccinated with lymph direct from the calf, shall I not be liable to foot and mouth disease ?" Really this kind of question is embarrassing. In such a case much would depend upon the calf, but probably more upon the imaginative receptivity of the subject. Cacoethes loquendi is popularly believed to be a mouth disease, and cacoethes scribendi is understood to be developed through the hand. Its relation to the foot it is not our province to determine."  I will get back to yous when I have sorted out what was happening in the "war" with Wiradjuri people around Bathurst around 1824-1830, and what the variolator (not vaccinator) was doing, apart from acquiring lots of land and going bankrupt later. It is not OR, since I will eventually have newspapers to cite, except that some of the letters about exterminating people need a lot of cleanup for their charming thoughts to be fully legible. And yes, there are some people back in 1824 arguing the other way too. Feel free to help out.  regards Keepitshort (talk) 17:54, 6 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Judy Campbell paragraph, yet again 

message: I think I have found a source that we might be able to use, that quantifies the situation -- something I was asking for in the previous section: "The debate about whether the term genocides is applicable to the broad Australian context... However it is notable that while comparative genocide scholars assume the specifically Tasmanian case to be on of unmitigated genocide, the majority of Australian experts are considerably more circumspect." (Mark Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The rise of the West and the coming of genocide, I.B.Tauris, 2005 , 9781845110574 p. 344 footnote 105)
I want to add a sentence based on this source to the first paragraph of the section. --PBS (talk) 13:07, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's a fantastic source. Thank you.Likebox (talk) 15:58, 7 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  This is only a fanatastic source if you summarize it properly. This does not mean that the majority of Australian experts question that the Tasmanians died by being killed by settlers. Only Windschuttle questions that. It means that the majority of Australian experts don't like calling these killings a genocide, because they don't think it was top-down.Likebox (talk) 23:48, 8 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Relative size of the parties to the genocide debate

message: Removed to user's talk page to save space Keepitshort (talk) 14:49, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Perhaps you can make a user-space section called User:Keepitshort/TasmanianMartialLaw, and then put a short summary here, with a link to the longer reference? You can make the user-space page by clicking on the red link here.Likebox (talk) 15:43, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. I aim to assemble the various Martial Law declarations (eg Castle Hill 1804, Bathurst 1824), for an "Australia" sub-section in Martial Law, and maybe check out some other colonies.  There's nothing there at present.  Thx for the advice on how to set up a user-space page.  Now tidy up those scattered refs, huh?  regards, Keepitshort (talk) 16:49, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Your primary research is appreciated, and these declarations would make a great addition to the Black War page, which is currently empty. I am afraid to touch it, because I am afraid that if I did, it would get filled up with Windschuttle rubbish.Likebox (talk) 17:55, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Martial and other Law(s) in Tasmania, 1804-1876

message: Folks, I've noticed that this debate does not appear to show signs of slowing. And it doesn't look like new people are getting involved very much. Might I suggest you all take a breather (keeping WP:DEADLINE in mind), and try to come at this fresh and restate your positions concisely. I, and I have no doubt many other editors, simply cannot comprehend this debate- it's a case of TL; DR. —/Mendaliv/2¢/Δ's/ 15:13, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed User Talk:Keepitshort#Saved Non-talk from History Wars Keepitshort (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 17:14, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I also agree. Unfortunately, the Windschuttle supporters are very long-winded, and one needs to keep up. I repeated myself a lot, as did everyone else, so a quick skim should be enough.Likebox (talk) 19:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

text: I agree as well. Nick-D (talk) 02:56, 20 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  An appeal to chill out 

message: When a page has awful, offensive material on it, it is difficult to make small edits. A small edit will tend to imply that the editor agrees with the rest of the material on the page. When the rest of the material is a racist fiasco, this is very discouraging. So we need a big edit, and it needs to stick.
The same mechanism prevents well meaning readers from adding new things, like the massacres on the mainland, because to do so would be to implicitly support the rest of the nonsense on the page. This means we need to have a big change, and go on from there. I have made an attempt at a big change. I will do so periodically until it sticks.Likebox (talk) 17:15, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Large Changes/Incremental Changes 

message: :See above #Did European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide
Should we add footnotes to the paragraph or add text on the view of Moss's distinction between "Intentionalists" (intentional genocide like the Holocaust) and "structuralists" (structural genocide which "averts the issue of perpetrator agency and intention by highlighting anonymous 'genocidal processes' of cultural and physical destruction."). Also should we mention Madley's term "frontier genocide" in the text or note it? Or should we not expand the paragraph at all? --PBS (talk) 18:52, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Or perhaps we should place the mainstream consensus on events, and list deviations from this consensus one by one.Likebox (talk) 18:58, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Likebox this paragraph is to do with the different definitions of what constitutes genocide used in the history wars, it is not about the events that the history wars are debating. Last time I bought up this issue the section wandered off onto all sorts of other issues, can we please keep it focused on the specific issue of what different people involved in the history wars mean when they say genocide. --PBS (talk) 19:06, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  The reason I am bringing this up here is because they all mostly mean the same thing when they are talking about Tasmania. The issues of definition are just not relevant to events there. When you are talking about definition disputes, you're getting into stolen generations.Likebox (talk) 19:11, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Your source for "they all mostly mean the same thing when they are talking about Tasmania" because Ann Curthoys draws a completely different conclusion as shown by the quote of her words in the article. BTW I would really like it if you would start to put in arguments based on what experts in the field say rather than generalities like the sentence I have quoted. E.G. "X says they all mostly mean the same thing when they are talking about Tasmania" --PBS (talk) 19:57, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Did European colonisation of Australia resulted in genocide 2 

message: How does one deal with undue weight? One can count sources. One can point to consensus opinions. One can know the obvious fact that the Tasmanian genocide is well accepted. But how to convince the genocide skeptic that he is in a minority? Perhaps ask him to take a poll?Likebox (talk) 00:06, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Undue Weight 

message: While looking for something completely different I came across this reference, which may be of use in this article:
*Roger Maaka, Chris Andersen, The indigenous experience: global perspectives Canadian Scholars' Press, 2006, .
Chapter 8, Colin Tatz "Confronting Australian Genocide" pp. 125–140,, is specifically relevant to this article but other chapters, such as the introduction to the section that Tatz's chapter resides Part II "Colonialism, genocide and the problem of intention" pp. 111–113   (Both chapter heading give a clear indication of their POV). --PBS (talk) 08:52, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: It is not a "POV" to call the Tasmanian genocide a genocide. It is a well accepted historical fact. It is a fringe lunatic minority that questions what happened.Likebox (talk) 13:06, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Maaka: The indigenous experience