Californian Indian societies, land is life. The affirmation of the aforementioned statement is based on the premise that land is necessary for their livelihood. A commonality that can be identified out of the three societies mentioned above is that they all lived off the land by means of hunting and eventually gathering. Faith to a great degree for natives all over the world, is inextricably bound to the use of the land. The San believed that there was no life without the land due to the spiritual enactment of it; Aboriginal people of Australia had a spiritual, physical and cultural connection to their land and Californian natives had a perception of the land as being sacred and a living being (Brady, 1998). Therefore, a contest for land can also be regarded as a contest for life. The most evident commonalties that is shared by all of the societies mentioned above is that they were virtually whipped out. Dr Mohamed Adhikari suggests that the main agents for the destruction of the Cape San societies was owing to the Dutch-speaking pastoralists whose homicidal form of acquiring land and the ecological damage caused from their farming exploits, virtually certified the

Did frontier conflict in Australia amount to genocide? Answers to this question have revolved around topics such as contemporary understandings of the conflict, intent, the applicability of the term to Australian history and considerations of Indigenous agency. In this historiographical article, we argue that ‘genocide’ is a useful framework with which to understand the frontier experience in the Australian colonies. From that perspective, we provide a critical review of the literature up to the present.

ohamed Adhikari’s book The Anatomy of a South African Genocide is a synthesis of the research on the extermination of the San peoples of South Africa and aims to establish that such extermination must be considered genocide. Unfortunately, the book is based exclusively on published sources, and especially with regard to the nineteenth century, fails to consider archival and other sources that throw much light on the fate of the San, most notably the corpus of documents on the mission that the resident magistrate and civil commissioner of Namaqualand, Louis Anthing, undertook in 1862 to investigate reports of massacres of San bands in Bushmanland. Adhikari’s book also suffers from the fact that he refers to “the San”, while it is methodologically more correct to distinguish clearly between the different San populations and to address the history of specific groups in specific areas of southern Africa. Another major weakness is his placement of almost exclusive blame for the extermination of the San on “Dutch-speaking pastoralists”, downplaying sources that point to the heavy involvement of Baster, Griqua and Khoi groups in the destruction of the hunter-gatherer bands. The case study of Louis Anthing’s mission to Bushmanland, which proves that there was indeed genocide in Bushmanland in the second half of the nineteenth century, is presented in detail to show that an engagement with archival sources is essential to grasp the tragedy of the San in all its complexity.

Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. So they took it. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People. Volume 3, Lemkinian Genocide as a Process, establishes the conceptual and analytical framework for examining any genocide.

Britain wanted the Australian Aboriginals’ land. So they took it. If Aboriginals resisted, or often if they did not, they were shot, poisoned or cleared out like vermin. In racist Australia, being Aboriginal was a crime. Any scattered Aboriginal survivors endured the politics of suffering, of introduced diseases, of stolen children, of forced detention, of harassment, of sexual predation, of alienation and mental despair. The Palawa were one of the first, but they would not be the last to see the targeted destruction of their society and culture, as the process of Lemkinian genocide spread across the continent over the 19th century in the longest war in our history, a ‘civil’ war of oppression and dispossession that the Australian War Memorial defiantly refuses to acknowledge. For this reason, we will use Britain’s destruction of the Tasmanian Palawa as a type instantiation of violent Aboriginal dispossession across Australia. We still see the lingering evidence of this genocidal process today, with excessive rates of illness and incarceration, systemic early deaths, continuing racism and third world conditions for many of our First People. Volume 1, Introduction examines the insidious effect of creeping revisionism and whitewash into the Tasmanian genocide debate, where the role of the British Government can be lost.