Raphaël Lemkin's ‘Tasmania’: an introduction

Abstract

Raphaël Lemkin's book on the history of genocide was never completed. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he planned over forty chapters, each about a particular historical case of genocide, from ancient times to the present, and researched and wrote many of them. Here we publish, for the first time, one chapter of that book from the original typescript in the New York Public Library. Chapter 38, ‘Tasmania’, discusses the virtual disappearance of the Aboriginal Tasmanians after several decades of British colonization and settlement in 1803. Despite its limitations as a work still in progress, the chapter demonstrates the subtlety of Lemkin's understanding of genocide. His historical method was to rely largely on secondary sources but also to use primary sources whenever possible; for this chapter his main source was James Bonwick's The Last of the Tasmanians (1870). Lemkin's ‘Tasmania’ considers the British authorities’ and settlers’ intentions and the experiences of Aboriginal people: loss of land and life, loss of children, the effects of liquor and disease, and the decline in their reproductive capacity. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary public opinion. Lemkin's chapter has, of course, been superseded by extensive historical research published since the mid-1970s. Yet it remains a thoughtful and thought-provoking text.

Keywords:

• Aborigines
• colonialism
• genocide
• James Bonwick
• Rafaël Lemkin
• Tasmania

Notes

My thanks to the following for their assistance: James Fussell, Dirk Moses, John Docker, Steven L. Jacobs, the American Jewish Historical Society, the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress.

Ann Curthoys is Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University, Canberra.

The Raphaël Lemkin Papers are held in the Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library; the entire collection has been microfilmed.

Raphael Lemkin Collection P-154, American Jewish Historical Society, Newton Centre, MA and New York, NY. A description of the collection is available online at http://www.cjh.org/academic/findingaids/AJHS/nhprc/Lemkinf.html (viewed 29 January 2005).

A complete inventory of the Raphaël Lemkin Papers in the American Jewish Archive is available online at http://www.americanjewisharchives.org/aja/collections/01_l.html (viewed 29 January 2005).

Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage Publications 1993), 11.

Henry Reynolds, The Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia's History (Ringwood, Victoria and Harmondsworth: Viking 2001), 50.

Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1: Van Diemen's Land, 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press 2002), 14. Windschuttle is mistaken in assuming that Lemkin attributed some kind of parity to different cases of genocide; indeed, one of his aims in the unpublished studies is to investigate the variety of genocides.

These materials at the AJHS are included in Series III: History of Genocide, n.d., Boxes 7–9.

Amherst's original memorandum is in the British Library (Add. MS 21634, f. 243); a copy is among Lemkin's papers in the AJHS (Box 7, Folder 10 ‘Miscellaneous’).

James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians; or, The Black War of Van Diemen's Land (London: Sampson Low 1870).

J. E. Calder, ‘Some account of the wars, extirpation, habits etc. of the native tribes of Tasmania’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 3, 1874, 7–29.

James Fenton, A History of Tasmania from Its Discovery in 1642 to the Present Time (Hobart: J. Walch 1884); James Backhouse Walker, Early Tasmania: Papers Read before the Royal Society of Tasmania during the Years 1888 to 1899 (Hobart: J. Vail 1902); R. W. Giblin, The Early History of Tasmania, vol. 2 (1804–28) (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1939). Lemkin also refers to the work of Henry Melville, cited in a footnote to ‘Tasmania’ (see note 47 to Lemkin's ‘Tasmania’) as ‘Henry Melville—Australasia and Immigration, London 1857’ but probably meant to be Henry Melville, Australasia and Prison Discipline (London: Charles Cox 1851).

Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne and London: F. W. Cheshire 1948).

Copies of All Correspondence between Lieutenant-Governor Arthur and His Majesty's Secretary of Stae for the Colonies, British Parliamentary Papers, 1831 (259), XIX, 56.

Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements;) Together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, British Parliamentary Papers 1836 (538), VII; Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements); With the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, British Parliamentary Papers 1837 (425), VII.

Francis Russell Nixon, The Cruise of the Beacon: A Narrative of a Visit to the Islands in Bass's Straits (London: Bell and Daldy 1857).

Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, Delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green and Longmans 1841).

Some of the key works on this aspect of Tasmanian history are: Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians [1981], 2nd edn (Sydney: Allen and Unwin 1996); L. L. Robson, A History of Tasmania, vol. 1 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1983); N. J. B. Plomley, The Aboriginal/ Settler Clash in Van Diemen's Land, 1803–1831 (Launceston: Queens Victoria Museum and Art Gallery 1992); Henry Reynolds, The Fate of a Free People (Melbourne: Penguin 1995); Windschuttle, Fabrication of Aboriginal History; and Robert Manne, Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda 2003).