Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Healing

Chapter 2
native people in western and central Honduras died within one-half of a century; and ninety-nine per
cent were killed in western Nicaragua, from more than one million to 10,000 people within sixty years
(Stannard, 1992).
In another tragic example of genocidal destruction, the Beothuk, the Indigenous inhabitants of
Newfoundland, were actively hunted and killed by British farmers, fishers and trappers who settled on
the bays that had been the Beothuk’s summer camps. From the time of the island’s discovery in 1497,
the Beothuk had been repeatedly pushed further inland and away from their own resources. Weakened
by hunger and diseases, such as smallpox, measles, influenza and tuberculosis, the population decreased
from approximately 345 in 1768 to 72 in 1811. The last Beothuk, Shanadithit, was captured and
brought to St. John’s in 1823 where she died of tuberculosis in 1829 (Price, 1979; Marshall, 1996).
In Australia the colonists treated the Aborigines with equally terrifying genocidal ambitions. It is now
well-documented that the settlers’ treatment of the Indigenous people was unjust and often murderous
(Critchett, 1990) and the genocide, which took place in many parts of the land, was matched by
herbicide and domination over the natural environment. Taken to an extreme, this attitude called for
the annihilation of Aboriginal people (Thorne, 1990). In Tasmania, for example, where the settlers
arrived in 1803, the killing of the Indigenous people began just three years later. As Tatz says:
In retaliation for the spearing of livestock, Aboriginal children were abducted for use in
forced labour, women were raped, tortured, and given poisoned flour, and the men
were shot … In 1824, settlers were authorized to shoot Aborigines. In 1828, the Governor
declared martial law. Soldiers and settlers arrested, or shot, any blacks found in settled
districts. Vigilante groups avenged Aboriginal retaliation by wholesale slaughter of men,
women and children. Between 1829 and 1834, an appointed conciliator, George
Robinson, collected the surviving remnants: 123 people, who were then settled on
Flinders Island. By 1835, between 3000 and 4000 Aborigines were dead. This wasn’t
simply a murderous outbreak of racial hatred. They were killed, with intent, not solely
because of their spearing of cattle or their “nuisance” value, but rather because they were
Aborigines. The Genocide Convention is very specific on this point: “the victim group
must be at risk because they are that group (1999:14-15).
Between 1824 and 1908, white settlers killed approximately 10,000 Aborigines in Queensland. In
Western Australia, there were hundreds of massacres during early settlement and the 1920s, and with
the last of them, the Forrest River killings, happening as late as 1926. In South Australia at the start of
the nineteenth century, the early whalers and sealers were equally brutal. “There was a massive population
loss in central Australia” (Tatz, 1999:15). About 20 per cent may have died from influenza, typhoid
and other introduced diseases. Approximately 40 per cent of the Aboriginal populations were eventually
shot in what was euphemistically called “dispersal.”
In establishing sovereignty over Australia, England relied upon the doctrine of terra nullius, which was
a denial of the long presence of Aboriginal Australians and came to symbolize the contempt that the
settlers had for Aboriginal people. The Aborigines were seen as savages and as lawless, hostile and
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