Genocide in Australia: By accident or design?

"My first lengthy foray into 'Genocide in Australia' was published by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) as a Research Discussion Paper (Tatz 1999) and revised in part, and with differing emphases, for later publications (Tatz 2001, 2003, 2011, 2012). This essay revisits, reconsiders and expands earlier themes. It now incorporates some important material from the general and the Australian literature published in the past decade; explores intentionality or inadvertence in actions taken for and against Aborigines; addresses the concepts of 'worthy' and 'unworthy' victims, as well as the matter of 'hostile indifference' towards Aborigines; distinguishes between motive and intent in genocide; analyses the continuing denialism of both the physical killing era and the forcible child removal practices; looks at the positive and negative aftermath of the Bringing Them Home report (HREOC 1997); examines the federal, state and territory politics of apology; considers briefly the question of reparations and evaluates the 'vision' of reconciliation; provides, for reader consideration, a good number of extracts from published eyewitness accounts of the massacres and the child removals; touches on the role and place of the many Aboriginal survivor memoirs that have appeared since 1997; probes the problem of scholarship that uses the word genocide without studying genocide; places the Australian case in the context of international genocide studies; and makes some judgements about what, if anything, we have learned from this dimension of Australian history" [taken from p. 17]