The Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs (JSCATSIA) is due to report soon on its inquiry into racism against First Nations people.
Defending Country provided a submission to the inquiry, as did the Australian War Memorial and more than 600 other individuals, groups and government departments.
Defending Country appeared at a hearing of the committee and has now provided answers to Questions on Notice from Senator Thorpe (IND, Vic.), a member of the committee.
The Senator's questions covered whether the Frontier Wars in Australia were an act of genocide, popular understanding of the impacts of Frontier Wars and colonisation, acknowledgement of First Nations military service, recent increase in racist behaviour.
The questions and Defending Country's answers appear on the committee website (number 22). Note particularly Defending Country’s answer to Senator Thorpe’s first question:
1. Killing members of a group is an Act of Genocide. Do you agree that the Frontier Wars were an act of genocide on First Peoples here?
The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as 'any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'. The five acts are: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. There are Australian cases of each of those acts, though the degree of 'intent to destroy' would need to be established in each case, using written and oral evidence.
That is part of Truth-telling. There is plenty of evidence in contemporary documentation of 'intent to destroy'.
Picture credit: WL Walton, 'Slaughterhouse Creek Massacre, 1838', frontispiece to GC Mundy, Our Antipodes: or, Residence and Rambles in the Australasian colonies, with a Glimpse of the Goldfields (London, 1852) (Australian War Memorial). This lithograph was the sole Australian (Frontier) Wars item in the Memorial's Colonial Conflict gallery from 1986 until the area was gutted around 2020 as part of the Memorial redevelopment.
