To what extent (if any) did European colonizers of Australia engage in conscious campaigns of genocide against Australia’s indigenous inhabitants? Camilla de Paula-Yarmohammadi – PO-256 In this essay I will be looking into the European colonisation of Australia and exploring whether or not these colonisers committed conscious campaigns of genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, with focus on the British colonisers of Australia. I will provide an account of the colonisation of Australia along with exploring the idea of cultural genocide and Australia’s Stolen Generations. In order to reach a conclusion to the question I will draw upon articles and journals and I will look into the definitions of genocide. Prior to my research, I strongly believed that the European colonisers of Australia did in fact engage in conscious campaigns of genocide against indigenous Australians. I believed that the conscious genocide committed by these colonisers was primarily cultural genocide, due to the Euro pean colonisers’ desire to forcibly remove indigenous children from their homes. Defining Genocide Genocide was a term coined in 1945 by Jewish-Polish Lawyer Raphael Lemkin following the Holocaust where only Lemkin and his brother survived and the rest of his family were murdered. He combined the words ‘genos’, that means race or tribe in Greek, and ‘cide’, which means ‘to kill’ in Latin. In 1948, following campaigning from Lemkin, the UN Convention of Genocide was adopted and came into effect in 1951. Under this convention, genocide is described as being ‘"any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such": Killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group
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