How the students of Darwin justified taking land from Aborigines and murdering them in Australia

By Jani Roberts

Many Australians prefer to bury their heads rather than remember the horror inflicted on Australian Aborigines.

The theories that Adolf Hitler was later to use to justify murdering Jews and Gypsies in Europe, were first put to use in Australia to justify not making any treaties with Aborigines but instead to murder them en masse and take their land.

Max Muller in 1870, in the Anthropological Review, London, classified the human race into seven catagories on an ascending scale - with the Aborigines on the lowest rung and the "Aryan" type supreme.

The Social Evolutionist, H. K. Rusden, explained in 1876: "The survival of the fittest means that might is right. And we thus invoke and remorselessly fulfil the inexorable law of natural selection when exterminating the inferior Australian and Maori races... and we appropriate their patrimony cooly"

James Barnard, the Vice-President of the Royal Society of Tasmania, wrote in 1890: "the process of extermination is an axiom of the law of evolution and survival of the fittest." There was therefore, he concluded, no reason to suppose that "there had been any culpable neglect" in the murder and dispossession of the Aboriginal Australian.

A well-known explorer and historian of northern Australia, Logan Jack, wrote in 1922: " This northern land is thinly peopled by a feeble folk inevitably doomed to vanish from the face of the earth within the current century...To any stud-master or student of eugenics, the idea of leaving the future of the North to a breed tainted at its foundation-head is in the last degree repugnant and politically it is full of danger."

The horrific massacres that these theories either caused or justified have never been properly acknowledged. No public monuments mark where they happened. Australians have buried the memory of them in shame.

Hostorians record that over 50 Aborigines were killed for every sheep station established - often by the younger sons of English arisocrats. Aboriginal heads were nailed over station doors. Poisoned bread was given to Aboriginal families.

This 1885 account from Queensland is typical of what happened in throughout Australia: "The niggers [were given]... something really startling to keep them quiet... the rations contained about as much strychnine as anything else and not one of the mob escaped... more than one hundred blacks were stretched out by this ruse of the owner of Long Lagoon.'

Aboriginal resistance in many parts of Australia was fierce and lasted over 50 years. The Cooktown Courier reported: "the struggle has been obstinate and fierce. Although an unusually large and costly body of police has been for years engaged in exterminating the Aborigines, and few whites miss a chance of shooting any they may encounter, the strength of the tribes has not been broken. No doubt their numbers have been greatly thinned but they have not been cowed.... consequently prospecting for minerals can only be carried out by well-armed and equipped parties. Evidently settlement must be delayed until the work of extermination is completed - a consumption of which there is no present prospect - or until some more rational and humane methods of dealing with the blacks are adopted." While there were cries of outrage from some humane settlers calling the police "the barbarous corps of exterminators", the government covered up these dreadful crimes stating "no illegal acts were occuring."

Australia was the practice ground for the Nazi pogroms. The lack of effective protest by the international community against these Australian attrocities and the theories used to justify them led to the eventual deaths of millions in Europe.

To the Account by an Eyewitness of one of the last massacres in the 1930s.

 

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