| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

A. Dirk Moses, editor. Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History. (Studies on War and Genocide, number 6.) New York: Berghahn Books. 2004. Pp. xiv, 325. $40.00.
The destruction of the way of life of the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania is often cited as a "classical" case of genocide. Thus in a 1995 article in the New York Review of Books, Bernard Bailyn stated that in Tasmania there was a "goal of extermination" and that Australian "ranchers" treated remnant indigenous populations "like vermin." In 1998, D. C. Watt described the Tasmania experience as one of the two greatest pre-twentieth-century examples of state-directed genocide.	1
The history of Tasmania, indeed of the Australian colonies, is, however, more complex than is acknowledged by scholars with little detailed knowledge of Australian history. The most highly credentialed contributor to this volume is Henry Reynolds, one of the pioneers of the new wave of research that transformed historical understanding from the 1970s. Reynolds observes that most international commentators "appear to be unaware" that in the critical period of conflict in Tasmania, the second half of the 1820s, the colony "was immersed in fierce guerrilla warfare." The depiction of the small population of Tasmanian Aborigines "as helpless but pathetic victims" is "entirely patronizing." Rather than a simple policy of extermination, the government was involved in a form of limited warfare to stabilize outlying regions. Reynolds concludes that "many settlers undoubtedly were extirpationists at heart, but it is not clear if this was true of the officials and military officers" (pp. 146–47).	2
If this collection does nothing else than draw attention to the complexity of the Australian experience, then it has perhaps merited publication for an international market. Commissioned and edited by A. Dirk Moses, a specialist in German intellectual history and the comparative study of genocide, the book includes twelve chapters and an epilogue. It is the second Australian collection in the last four years to interrogate the genocide concept, following the 2001 special edition of the journal Aboriginal History.	3
The collection of essays is grouped in three categories: conceptual and historical determinants; frontier violence, with particular focus on the nineteenth century; and the policy of removal of Aboriginal children, concerned primarily with the twentieth century. One odd feature is the inclusion of two chapters dealing with aspects of Nazi policy, the "colonisation" of the east, and the policy of child removal. These chapters were included at the suggestion of the series editor, Omer Bartov, "because of the enduring and massive presence of the Holocaust in debates on genocide in Australia and elsewhere" (p. xiii). Moses comments that it has been left to readers to "judge for themselves how relevant these cases are for Australia" (p. xiii)—a strange observation when the Australian contributors themselves conspicuously fail to engage with the German material.	. . .

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