ray gibbons
Ray worked as a senior consultant for several international IT companies - including the IBM consulting division, SE Asia practice manager for a UK-based company, and his own consultancy business - and has been involved in significant research projects around the world. He became interested in Australian post-contact history as landscape, and the juridical process of Australian settler sovereignty (from de facto to de jure), after investigating the now silent voices of Aboriginal bora rings, each equivalent to a European Church, a raised circle of stones and earth perhaps 12m to 16m in diameter, many now desecrated since the rise of settlerism, and within which important cultural ceremonies were performed for entire regional gatherings.
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We will briefly focus on one particular language group (the Kabi Kabi of the Sunshine Coast) through discrete phases of Lemkinian repression from 1840 to 1971:
pastoral invasion > displacement > dispersal > deportation > detention in Barambah
Australia was born in a crucible of mass violence, of systemic discrimination, of racial persecution, of species extinction, of environmental despoliation.
We occupied Australia and taught it to cower. We now think we can beat Nature into submission. The behaviours that got us here will be the behaviours that destroy us.
Democracy thrives in an expanding economy, but ever rising GDP is a key part of our problem for as long as we exclude the cost of our actions, for which the past is a reasonable predictor of the future within a behavioural envelope: Indigenous displacement for capital gain, rising per capita carbon footprint, increasingly unliveable cities, disruptive AI causing job losses, dying biosystems. The problem? All these damaging disruptors are associated with an increase in GDP, so why would we modify our behaviour?
The question then is, can we learn from our history, can we change, can we pull back from the precipice, the irrecoverable collective tipping point beyond which sustainability and dynamic equilibrium are lost, a tipping point inflexion induced by mass violence - ecocide, inexorable global warming, erosion of human rights, and greed-driven collapse of living standards, except for a few - or is it already too late?
To change, first we must care. To care, we must have insight. But with 30% of living Australians born overseas, we are a people without history, migrants who have washed onto our shores with little understanding of indigenous dispossession and how the land was wrested from Aboriginal hands. The other 70% have largely forgotten, what Stanner called the great Australian silence, a silence amplified by the 2023 referendum on allowing Aboriginal people a voice on matters affecting them, a voice rejected by over 60% of us.
With Aboriginal society now little more than 3% of our total population, do we care enough to hold out a hand, or will we let them slip away as we grapple with bread and butter issues that resolve as, what about me, until even the me is lost in burgeoning inequality and disequilibrium.
The future is now us.
We will use post contact Australia (1788 and beyond) as a protagonist test subject, and the progenerative drama of Aboriginal dispossession in Tasmania as a contextual referent for our collective agency over time, where political and economic priorities consistently outweigh humanitarian and environmental concerns, especially for those who are voiceless and lack the power of self-determination, something recently demonstrated by the right wing destruction of the Voice proposal to allow Aboriginal people a voice on matters affecting them.
Our analysis will deconstruct persistent myths such as terra nullius and Australia Day and the problems induced by the way in which we write about history, where our conclusions can be destabilised by errant logic and confirmation bias.
What we do about the trajectory of our behaviour will be challenging. Humans do not handle disequilibrium well, whether it is climate change or inequitable social policy. We seem destined for the Hardinian tragedy of the commons, locked into a behavioural carapace of self-interest, where sustainability is an ever receding mirage, and despoliation is the handmaiden of economic development, carried as a social cost.
It involved a criminal cover-up that extended to the highest reaches of Perth society, including the Police Commissioner.
The massacre took place in 1916, barely a century ago, around fifteen years after Federation, what Sir Henry Parkes called ‘a great national government for all Australians’. ‘All’, except for Aboriginal people who continued to be persecuted. No one was charged.
There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina Elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manager, George ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute.
It was not the first massacre in Kimberley, and it would not be the last.
The killings began when pastoralists first streamed into the area from the early eighties, forming a pattern of violent behaviour that found its allegiance in racism and greed.
More indiscriminate state-sanctioned killings in northern Australia were to follow that at Mowla Bluff, at least up to 1928, when the last officially condoned massacre took place at Coniston in what was then called Central Australia under similar circumstances to Mowla Bluff. There were no convictions. But that was normal for a racist justice system.
We consider the question, was the Mowla Bluff massacre an instance of Lemkinian extermination throughout the Kimberley, what we now call crimes against humanity under the 1998 Rome Statute? We conclude, yes.
There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina Elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manager, George ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute.
It was not the first massacre in the Kimberley; they began when pastoralists first streamed into the area from the early eighties, forming a pattern of violent behaviour that found its allegiance in racism.
More indiscriminate state-sanctioned killings in northern Australia were to follow that at Mowla Bluff, at least up to 1928, when the last officially condoned massacre took place at Coniston in what was then called Central Australia under similar circumstances to Mowla Bluff. There were no convictions. But that was normal for a racist justice system.
So, this is the story of Mowla Bluff, with all its racist violence and self-deception, the myth of settler sovereignty and pastoral supremacy, a story for our times, should we listen, where leading political figures of the day, people such as John Forrest, the ‘father’ of Western Australia, drove Aboriginal injustice because they could, because pastoralism and economic development carried more weight than imposed Aboriginal suffering.
Today, we don’t kill with Lemkinian menace, but we do persecute, with Aboriginal deaths in custody, high per capita rates of incarceration, and disparities in health, education, and housing.
We confront our future, hobbled by our past. Unless we change. Unless our values change. Unless we recognize that authority does not confer legitimacy.
We should not deny our history of a violent pastoral frontier as it swept across the continent, following militarised invasion beachheads, seeking supremacy, suppressing opposition, killing, subjugating, predating.
We conclude that telling the truth of the past is the way to reconciliation, to move from denial to acknowledgment, from trauma to healing.
The future is now us.
We hypothesize that if we can identify the process mechanics, if we can become aware of our behavioural consequences, we can choose to shape the outcome in an adaptive feedback process.
In Australia, at least up to 1930, racially targeted mass violence – an intentional violent criminal act that results in physical, emotional, or psychological injury to a large number of people, including the criminal act of murder - occurred bottom-up and top-down in a codeterminate structural embrace, a coercive process of Aboriginal dispossession that involved cumulative, rolling murder and family destruction.
We hypothesize that such mass violence had a shape and that the shape was Lemkinian across all colonies as they emerged into self-government.
After Australian Federation in 1901, mass violence became increasingly bureaucratised, where racial inequality was fomented with stolen children, stolen wages, stolen lives, forced eugenics, and labour racketeering through an administrative process - depersonalised, underbudgeted, and clinical - where carpet baggers thrived. It was the way we civilized.
After 1930, mass killing, or more legally correct, mass murder, as a criminogenic set of acts, became indirect and more insidious; Aboriginal people died from the effects of incarceration, or managed detention, or impoverished segregation, or unhealthy housing, or systemic health issues, or structural poverty, or harshly imposed inequality.
It’s a destructive process from which Australia is yet to emerge, where Aboriginal people still struggle, in the noise of multiculturalism, to find a voice amidst the traumatising politics of suffering.
The destruction of Tasmanian Aboriginal people – now called the Palawa – is an encapsulated instantiation or extended use case or contextual referent for this horrific and damaging dispossessory process across Australia, where, once it was lives and families that were forfeit, now, it is hope that hangs in abeyance for as long as cultural reconstruction is arduous and country reclamation is parsimoniously dispensed.
We render a 4D geospatial map of Plomley's data from 1804 to 1829, which the reader can resolve by clicking the link in the endnote or the MP4 object embedded in the text. The years 1830 to 1831 inclusive are yet to be added, but the basic pattern will be evident.
Did the clashes have a pattern that will allow us to understand the shape of Tasmanian genocide? The answer is: yes. The geospatial temporal ‘clash’ pattern correlates directly with the rate of geospatial Aboriginal dispossession over time, much of it legalized through edicts, proclamations and Acts, a juridical evolution from de facto to de jure, all giving tacit support to the law of the bush where ‘settlers’ rights including protecting their ‘property’.
It is this time-lapsed geospatial conflict pattern that will form the basis for a more extensive research project that investigates the displacive geometry of Lemkinian invasion and repression across Australia, for which the racial collision maps are an important dimension.
We will conclude that Tasmanian genocide did occur, it had a shape or phenotype, the British Government and its cohort knew what they were doing but placed political and economic considerations above humanitarian (and environmental) concerns. it is a shape we can recognize today, in both genocide and ecocide, the targeted destruction – in whole or part – of a group.
We will assert that a mass killing event can apply to a series of single homicides bound together by common purpose over prescribed time, scaling to the destruction of Aboriginal society across the continent, a testable hypothesis.
We conclude that mass killing as a normalised pathological behaviour is not limited to homicide, but also includes ecocide. Australia’s unarticulated values – we don’t have a Bill Of Rights – are determined by collective behaviour and their motivations, giving rise to what we call our spaghettified rule-based order, a fragile bulwark against existential uncertainty.
Should we be honouring our First People in the way we write history? With recognition comes identity and authenticity, the capacity for self-awareness, the hope of validation, of falsifiable precepts that, in their consideration, allow us to see more clearly as a society, as for corrective glasses to address myopia.
We have inherited many of our behaviours from the past, among them, racism, and a tendency to exploit beyond sustainability, and with them, our displacive values. Is it time to accommodate our failures in a rethinking of our priorities?
The early history of Australia since 1788 is caught up in the tension between invasion, resistance, and racially targeted extermination, us, and them, a typology for genocidal land acquisition. Why have we written out Aboriginal society from colonial history? Is it guilt? The guilt of Stanner’s ‘great Australian silence’?
What we are is broadly determined by what we were, forged through behavioural epigenetics. Our emergent reality is circumscribed by the choices we make and have made, as a group. The question is: can we accept our past errors and change? Can our mutating rule-based order absorb the lessons of truth-telling and embrace inclusion, the rights of otherness, the rights of the biosphere? What is the role of our agreed values in a more compassionate, sustainable future? Is the concept of landscape a metaphor for our failure as a civil society, or our hope for renewal?
Does Australia post-contact history therefore have a definable momentum and shape, one that preconfigures our collective values and agency in a codeterminate embrace?
We will argue, yes, that the evolution of our juridical rule-based order – from de facto to de jure – has predominantly shaped who we are as a transplanted culture, with collectively expressed phenotypical behaviours from genocide to ecocide, a dispossessory behavioural topology.
In recognizing that societal shape, actus reus, the set of normative physical acts, criminogenic, intentional, we may have some ability to direct out future, one more equal and inclusive, one that abjures blind neoliberal economic determinism and allows us to understand that our war with Nature – another misguided race war of sorts - is a war that this time we cannot win.
We will briefly focus on one particular language group (the Kabi Kabi of the Sunshine Coast) through discrete phases of Lemkinian repression from 1840 to 1971:
pastoral invasion > displacement > dispersal > deportation > detention in Barambah
Australia was born in a crucible of mass violence, of systemic discrimination, of racial persecution, of species extinction, of environmental despoliation.
We occupied Australia and taught it to cower. We now think we can beat Nature into submission. The behaviours that got us here will be the behaviours that destroy us.
Democracy thrives in an expanding economy, but ever rising GDP is a key part of our problem for as long as we exclude the cost of our actions, for which the past is a reasonable predictor of the future within a behavioural envelope: Indigenous displacement for capital gain, rising per capita carbon footprint, increasingly unliveable cities, disruptive AI causing job losses, dying biosystems. The problem? All these damaging disruptors are associated with an increase in GDP, so why would we modify our behaviour?
The question then is, can we learn from our history, can we change, can we pull back from the precipice, the irrecoverable collective tipping point beyond which sustainability and dynamic equilibrium are lost, a tipping point inflexion induced by mass violence - ecocide, inexorable global warming, erosion of human rights, and greed-driven collapse of living standards, except for a few - or is it already too late?
To change, first we must care. To care, we must have insight. But with 30% of living Australians born overseas, we are a people without history, migrants who have washed onto our shores with little understanding of indigenous dispossession and how the land was wrested from Aboriginal hands. The other 70% have largely forgotten, what Stanner called the great Australian silence, a silence amplified by the 2023 referendum on allowing Aboriginal people a voice on matters affecting them, a voice rejected by over 60% of us.
With Aboriginal society now little more than 3% of our total population, do we care enough to hold out a hand, or will we let them slip away as we grapple with bread and butter issues that resolve as, what about me, until even the me is lost in burgeoning inequality and disequilibrium.
The future is now us.
We will use post contact Australia (1788 and beyond) as a protagonist test subject, and the progenerative drama of Aboriginal dispossession in Tasmania as a contextual referent for our collective agency over time, where political and economic priorities consistently outweigh humanitarian and environmental concerns, especially for those who are voiceless and lack the power of self-determination, something recently demonstrated by the right wing destruction of the Voice proposal to allow Aboriginal people a voice on matters affecting them.
Our analysis will deconstruct persistent myths such as terra nullius and Australia Day and the problems induced by the way in which we write about history, where our conclusions can be destabilised by errant logic and confirmation bias.
What we do about the trajectory of our behaviour will be challenging. Humans do not handle disequilibrium well, whether it is climate change or inequitable social policy. We seem destined for the Hardinian tragedy of the commons, locked into a behavioural carapace of self-interest, where sustainability is an ever receding mirage, and despoliation is the handmaiden of economic development, carried as a social cost.
It involved a criminal cover-up that extended to the highest reaches of Perth society, including the Police Commissioner.
The massacre took place in 1916, barely a century ago, around fifteen years after Federation, what Sir Henry Parkes called ‘a great national government for all Australians’. ‘All’, except for Aboriginal people who continued to be persecuted. No one was charged.
There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina Elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manager, George ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute.
It was not the first massacre in Kimberley, and it would not be the last.
The killings began when pastoralists first streamed into the area from the early eighties, forming a pattern of violent behaviour that found its allegiance in racism and greed.
More indiscriminate state-sanctioned killings in northern Australia were to follow that at Mowla Bluff, at least up to 1928, when the last officially condoned massacre took place at Coniston in what was then called Central Australia under similar circumstances to Mowla Bluff. There were no convictions. But that was normal for a racist justice system.
We consider the question, was the Mowla Bluff massacre an instance of Lemkinian extermination throughout the Kimberley, what we now call crimes against humanity under the 1998 Rome Statute? We conclude, yes.
There was another massacre at Geegully Creek, Mowla Bluff, in 1916. This, Nyikina Elder John Watson said, was a punitive expedition by police and other colonists that took place after a station manager, George ‘George’ Why, was assaulted by some Mangala people over a small dispute.
It was not the first massacre in the Kimberley; they began when pastoralists first streamed into the area from the early eighties, forming a pattern of violent behaviour that found its allegiance in racism.
More indiscriminate state-sanctioned killings in northern Australia were to follow that at Mowla Bluff, at least up to 1928, when the last officially condoned massacre took place at Coniston in what was then called Central Australia under similar circumstances to Mowla Bluff. There were no convictions. But that was normal for a racist justice system.
So, this is the story of Mowla Bluff, with all its racist violence and self-deception, the myth of settler sovereignty and pastoral supremacy, a story for our times, should we listen, where leading political figures of the day, people such as John Forrest, the ‘father’ of Western Australia, drove Aboriginal injustice because they could, because pastoralism and economic development carried more weight than imposed Aboriginal suffering.
Today, we don’t kill with Lemkinian menace, but we do persecute, with Aboriginal deaths in custody, high per capita rates of incarceration, and disparities in health, education, and housing.
We confront our future, hobbled by our past. Unless we change. Unless our values change. Unless we recognize that authority does not confer legitimacy.
We should not deny our history of a violent pastoral frontier as it swept across the continent, following militarised invasion beachheads, seeking supremacy, suppressing opposition, killing, subjugating, predating.
We conclude that telling the truth of the past is the way to reconciliation, to move from denial to acknowledgment, from trauma to healing.
The future is now us.
We hypothesize that if we can identify the process mechanics, if we can become aware of our behavioural consequences, we can choose to shape the outcome in an adaptive feedback process.
In Australia, at least up to 1930, racially targeted mass violence – an intentional violent criminal act that results in physical, emotional, or psychological injury to a large number of people, including the criminal act of murder - occurred bottom-up and top-down in a codeterminate structural embrace, a coercive process of Aboriginal dispossession that involved cumulative, rolling murder and family destruction.
We hypothesize that such mass violence had a shape and that the shape was Lemkinian across all colonies as they emerged into self-government.
After Australian Federation in 1901, mass violence became increasingly bureaucratised, where racial inequality was fomented with stolen children, stolen wages, stolen lives, forced eugenics, and labour racketeering through an administrative process - depersonalised, underbudgeted, and clinical - where carpet baggers thrived. It was the way we civilized.
After 1930, mass killing, or more legally correct, mass murder, as a criminogenic set of acts, became indirect and more insidious; Aboriginal people died from the effects of incarceration, or managed detention, or impoverished segregation, or unhealthy housing, or systemic health issues, or structural poverty, or harshly imposed inequality.
It’s a destructive process from which Australia is yet to emerge, where Aboriginal people still struggle, in the noise of multiculturalism, to find a voice amidst the traumatising politics of suffering.
The destruction of Tasmanian Aboriginal people – now called the Palawa – is an encapsulated instantiation or extended use case or contextual referent for this horrific and damaging dispossessory process across Australia, where, once it was lives and families that were forfeit, now, it is hope that hangs in abeyance for as long as cultural reconstruction is arduous and country reclamation is parsimoniously dispensed.
We render a 4D geospatial map of Plomley's data from 1804 to 1829, which the reader can resolve by clicking the link in the endnote or the MP4 object embedded in the text. The years 1830 to 1831 inclusive are yet to be added, but the basic pattern will be evident.
Did the clashes have a pattern that will allow us to understand the shape of Tasmanian genocide? The answer is: yes. The geospatial temporal ‘clash’ pattern correlates directly with the rate of geospatial Aboriginal dispossession over time, much of it legalized through edicts, proclamations and Acts, a juridical evolution from de facto to de jure, all giving tacit support to the law of the bush where ‘settlers’ rights including protecting their ‘property’.
It is this time-lapsed geospatial conflict pattern that will form the basis for a more extensive research project that investigates the displacive geometry of Lemkinian invasion and repression across Australia, for which the racial collision maps are an important dimension.
We will conclude that Tasmanian genocide did occur, it had a shape or phenotype, the British Government and its cohort knew what they were doing but placed political and economic considerations above humanitarian (and environmental) concerns. it is a shape we can recognize today, in both genocide and ecocide, the targeted destruction – in whole or part – of a group.
We will assert that a mass killing event can apply to a series of single homicides bound together by common purpose over prescribed time, scaling to the destruction of Aboriginal society across the continent, a testable hypothesis.
We conclude that mass killing as a normalised pathological behaviour is not limited to homicide, but also includes ecocide. Australia’s unarticulated values – we don’t have a Bill Of Rights – are determined by collective behaviour and their motivations, giving rise to what we call our spaghettified rule-based order, a fragile bulwark against existential uncertainty.
Should we be honouring our First People in the way we write history? With recognition comes identity and authenticity, the capacity for self-awareness, the hope of validation, of falsifiable precepts that, in their consideration, allow us to see more clearly as a society, as for corrective glasses to address myopia.
We have inherited many of our behaviours from the past, among them, racism, and a tendency to exploit beyond sustainability, and with them, our displacive values. Is it time to accommodate our failures in a rethinking of our priorities?
The early history of Australia since 1788 is caught up in the tension between invasion, resistance, and racially targeted extermination, us, and them, a typology for genocidal land acquisition. Why have we written out Aboriginal society from colonial history? Is it guilt? The guilt of Stanner’s ‘great Australian silence’?
What we are is broadly determined by what we were, forged through behavioural epigenetics. Our emergent reality is circumscribed by the choices we make and have made, as a group. The question is: can we accept our past errors and change? Can our mutating rule-based order absorb the lessons of truth-telling and embrace inclusion, the rights of otherness, the rights of the biosphere? What is the role of our agreed values in a more compassionate, sustainable future? Is the concept of landscape a metaphor for our failure as a civil society, or our hope for renewal?
Does Australia post-contact history therefore have a definable momentum and shape, one that preconfigures our collective values and agency in a codeterminate embrace?
We will argue, yes, that the evolution of our juridical rule-based order – from de facto to de jure – has predominantly shaped who we are as a transplanted culture, with collectively expressed phenotypical behaviours from genocide to ecocide, a dispossessory behavioural topology.
In recognizing that societal shape, actus reus, the set of normative physical acts, criminogenic, intentional, we may have some ability to direct out future, one more equal and inclusive, one that abjures blind neoliberal economic determinism and allows us to understand that our war with Nature – another misguided race war of sorts - is a war that this time we cannot win.
Much has been written about the contested space of Tasmania, a small island off the southern coast of Australia that Britain first invaded in 1803. Surely we know the story comprehensively by now, what happened, why, and by whom? Perhaps not, as our thesis will show.
The pure blood Aboriginal people of Tasmania were effectively destroyed within a generation, around thirty years or so, by the policies of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur and other British administrators; only mixed-race survivors remain, those whose ancestors cohabited – willingly or unwillingly - with sealers in Bass Strait, and a small number from elsewhere. Palawa repression was a Lemkinian process, exhibiting the type characteristics of the UN Convention as we will show.
These descendants now struggle for their rights. We exist, they say, we weren’t exterminated, don’t make us invisible. They try to reclaim some of their ancestral land through tortuous litigation. They try to reclaim their history and culture by reading wordlists from George Augustus Robinson, Jorgen Jorgenson, and others, the mercenaries and agents of death, complex individuals who claimed to be humanitarian but drove ethnic cleansing - and more - for personal profit.
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.
Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all.
We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst.
It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Should it be accountable? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?
Many argue: there is no set of official policies or instructions that ordered and encouraged the categorial behaviour and indictable actions of genocide; and therefore that Aboriginal extermination may have been an ‘unintended consequence’ of forcible land dispossession, if they acknowledge retrospective culpability at all.
We will show that there were key Government documents and policies that placed genocidal intention (mens rea) in clear view, along with official orders to act (actus rea). These documents shaped and directed Aboriginal dispossession and extermination. We will further show that arguments against Australian genocide are misconceived at best or reflexive at worst.
It raises troubling questions: If Australian history has been manipulated, then why and by whom? And can we change? Can we acknowledge the past? Or are we forever to perpetuate more palatable myths of heroic settler triumphalism in benignly ‘taming’ the land?