Journal of Genocide Research ISSN: 1462-3528 (Print) 1469-9494 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20 Command, Control, and Genocide: A Review of The Vandemonian War Benjamin Madley To cite this article: Benjamin Madley (2018) Command, Control, and Genocide: A Review of The�Vandemonian�War, Journal of Genocide Research, 20:3, 467-471, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2018.1486350 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2018.1486350 Published online: 27 Jul 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 106 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=cjgr20 JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 2018, VOL. 20, NO. 3, 467–471 BOOK FORUM: NICK BRODIE, THE VANDEMONIAN WAR: THE SECRET HISTORY OF BRITAIN’S TASMANIAN INVASION (SYDNEY: HARDIE GRANT, 2017) Command, Control, and Genocide: A Review of The Vandemonian War The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion, by Nick Brodie, Sydney, Hardie Grant, 2017, 422 pp., AUS$ 29.99, paperback, ISBN 9781743793114 Historian Nick Brodie’s book, The Vandemonian War, underscores the central role that British command structures played in the nineteenth-century genocide waged against Aboriginal Tasmanians. Focusing on April 1828 to January 1832, “this is a story of command chains and subordinates” (2). By mining what he calls an “under-appreciated volume” of Colonial Secretary’s Office records in the Tasmanian Archives (CSO1/1/320 (7578) as well as CSO41/1/1 (7878)), Brodie promises to expose “the command and control structure of the war,” to reveal “for the first time … the real Vandemonian War” (3, 2). Scholars have been citing 7578 since at least 1966.1 Nevertheless, The Vandemonian War provides a high-resolution narrative of command and control during a period of statesponsored Aborigine-hunting in Tasmania. Emphasizing official perspectives, Brodie argues that this was “an orchestrated invasion prosecuted by an empire” in which “[w]hole societies were deliberately obliterated” (2, 1). Lieutenant Governor George Arthur’s system of command and control is at the heart of this book. Brodie explores how Arthur established his “neat chain of command” and insists: “The chain of command during the Vandemonian War … always led to and from the one figure, Lieutenant Governor and Colonel Commanding” George Arthur (18, 174). Later, Brodie emphasizes “the precision of Arthur’s centralized command” (266). In reality, Arthur’s command was imperfect. Subordinates sometimes disobeyed and operations often failed. Nevertheless, Brodie details how Arthur planned, manned, supplied, armed, rhetorically camouflaged, legalized, and controlled operations against Aboriginal Tasmanians involving regular soldiers, policemen, convicts, and free civilians. Brodie thus reinforces the established argument that Arthur’s regime organized and supported genocidal violence carried out by a variety of state and non-state actors. Yet genocide is not the focus of Brodie’s book. Nor does he define his use of this contested term. In fact, the word “genocide” appears only a handful of times (1, 100, 381). Moreover, Brodie pays scant attention to the genocidal violence against Aboriginal Tasmanians that preceded April 1828 or to the genocidal violence and incarceration that they endured after January 1832. The Vandemonian War is a detailed military history of particular campaigns, told primarily from the perspectives in “an archive [that] was sanitized even as it was produced” (178). Still, details matter. Brodie’s research suggests at least six insights into Arthur’s genocidal command structure. First, by reporting a dozen instances in which whites killed Aboriginal Tasmanians’ dogs – slaying at least 114 of them in total – Brodie inadvertently suggests that someone ordered this systematic killing in order to weaken Aboriginal Tasmanians’ ability to protect and feed 1 N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834 (Kingsgrove: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1966). Brodie cites this book over sixty times. 468 BOOK FORUM themselves (15, 34, 67, 99, 105, 133–4, 160, 182, 183, 188, 204, 206). Second, his description of relentless sorties against Aboriginal Tasmanians – which often involved stealing or destroying blankets, weapons, food, and other property – indicates that constant harassment and attacks were an official policy aimed at undermining Aboriginal Tasmanians’ ability to feed, clothe, shelter, defend, and care for themselves (34, 44, 161, 204, 281, 306). Third, Brodie’s study of Arthur’s command structure provides insights into the close but sometimes conflicted relationships among and between the various men hunting Aboriginal Tasmanians. They did not always agree on goals or methods but managed to kill or capture hundreds. Fourth, Brodie emphasizes how the administration debated but sometimes used “Aboriginal auxiliaries” – particularly in capture operations – while seeking to explain why some Aborigines participated (344). However, he does not link these findings to prior scholarship on this topic. Fifth, Brodie’s recounting of dozens of failed attempts to capture or kill Aboriginal Tasmanians supports prior scholarship emphasizing Aboriginal Tasmanians’ outstanding bushcraft and survival against tremendous odds. Finally, his narration of Aboriginal Tasmanian resistance likewise reinforces the existing thesis arguing that Arthur’s regime responded to resistance by escalating its campaigns against surviving Aboriginal Tasmanians.2 Still, Brodie fails to capture the full genocidal impact of Arthur’s command. Arthur’s strategy of relentlessly hunting Aboriginal Tasmanians, and deputizing civilians to do so, served as a widely publicized state endorsement of such killing, communicating an unofficial grant of legal impunity to potential killers, thus presumably inspiring both state and non-state actors to murder Aboriginal Tasmanians. Indeed, many killed without official orders, but with Arthur’s unofficial grant of legal impunity. Arthur’s regime executed both Europeans and Aboriginal Tasmanians for killing Europeans but never a European for murdering an Aboriginal Tasmanian, despite the fact that whites frequently shot Aboriginal Tasmanians on sight. More troubling, Brodie’s 382 detail-packed pages document surprisingly little of the known lethal violence against Aboriginal Tasmanians. In the revised 2012 edition of her book Tasmanian Aborigines, Australian historian Lyndall Ryan enumerated the killing of 878 Aboriginal Tasmanians, some 350 of them between November 1828 and January 1832 (roughly the period that Brodie narrates).3 In contrast, he presents the killing of fewer than seventy Aboriginal Tasmanians (34, 35, 49, 51, 99–101, 133–4, 210, 216, 286, 311, 313, 316, 352). Also missing from his book are many of the massacres – documented by prior scholarship – that stain this period of Tasmanian history. Some readers, not least twenty-first-century Aboriginal Tasmanians, will find these omissions profoundly misleading and offensive. A central problem with The Vandemonian War is Brodie’s minimal interest in or engagement with prior discussion of the Tasmanian genocide. Brodie calls his book “a secret history,” asserting, “Genocide was naturalized as extinction” (2). He insists: “Here for the first time is the story of the Vandemonian War as fought by the British empire and its representatives.” He predicts, “Everyone will be shocked” (2). This may be true for many readers. But few genocide studies scholars, historians of Tasmania, or Aboriginal Tasmanians will be “shocked.” Journalists, scholars, and others have been discussing the state’s role in the nineteenth-century mass killing of Aboriginal Tasmanians for over 180 years. Yet Brodie barely mentions any of them. In 1836, Tasmania’s Colonial Times editor Henry Melville proclaimed, in his History of Van Diemen’s Land, that “few events have tarnished the history of any Colony more than in the manner in which the civilized portions of society conducted themselves towards [Aboriginal 2 3 See, for example, Benjamin Madley, “From Terror to Genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian Penal Colony and Australia’s History Wars,” Journal of British Studies 47, no. 1 (2008): 77–106. Lyndall Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803, rev. ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012), 143. JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 469 Tasmanians].” In addition, authorities’ conduct towards them was “disgraceful.”4 Six years later, Oxford political economist Herman Merivale insisted, “The nation of Van Diemen’s Land [was] reduced to a few families by long maltreatment … settlers … shot them down in the woods, or laid poisoned food within their reach.” Moreover, “The history of the European settlements in … Australia, presents … a wide and sweeping destruction of native races by the uncontrolled violence of individuals and colonial authorities.”5 Later nineteenth-century authors, including John West, James Bonwick, and J. E. Calder, added additional details and interpretations of the near-annihilation of Tasmania’s indigenous peoples, including books on wars waged against them.6 The Holocaust, Jewish jurist Raphaël Lemkin’s genocide concept, and the United Nations Genocide Convention then recalibrated the discussion.7 In 1948, Australian journalist Clive Turnbull compared the “extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines” to the Holocaust in Black War: The Extermination of Tasmanian Aborigines.8 Meanwhile, in an unfinished chapter, Lemkin called colonial Tasmania a site of genocide.9 In 1975, the conservative Australian periodical Quadrant agreed and three years later the documentary film “The Last Tasmanian” billed itself as “THE STORY OF THE SWIFTEST AND MOST DESTRUCTIVE GENOCIDE ON RECORD.”10 During the 1980s, an increasingly international and interdisciplinary group addressed the genocide. Ryan described “War in the Settled Districts, 1829–1831,” emphasized survival against great odds, and wrote of “an existing [twentieth-century] community of Aborigines who are victims of a conscious policy of genocide.”11 South African-born sociologist Leo Kuper wrote of Aboriginal Tasmanians’ “systematic [nineteenth-century] annihilation.”12 Yale historian Robin Winks described a “war of genocide” against them and Australian historian Tony Barta insisted that it “[brushed the] classical mode of genocide, the direct sanctioning of violence by the state.”13 Even the US biologist Jared Diamond addressed the Tasmanian genocide in the pages of the journal Natural History.14 Discussion of Tasmania’s genocide and the state’s role in it then continued. In his 1995 book, Fate of a Free People, Australian historian Henry Reynolds asserted that, “losses sustained in the Black War,” rather than genocide, were the primary cause of the “demographic 4 Henry Melville, The History of Van Diemen’s Land, From the Year 1824 to 1835, ed. George Mackaness (1836; repr., Hobart: Horwitz-Grahme, 1965), 30, 56–7. 5 Herman Merivale, Lectures on Colonization and Colonies, Delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, & 1841, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1842), 2: 150, 153. 6 John West, The History of Tasmania, 2 vols. (Launceston: H. Dowling, 1852), 2: 18; James Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians; or, The Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London: Sampson, Low & Marston, 1870); J. E. Calder, Some Account of the Wars, Extirpation, Habits, &c., of the Native Tribes of Tasmania (Hobart: Henn and Company, 1875); James Bonwick, The Lost Tasmanian Race (London: S. Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1884). 7 Raphaël Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment, 1944), xi–xii, chap. 9; United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, United Nations—Treaty Series, vol. 78, no. 1021, 280. 8 Clive Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1948). 9 Raphaël Lemkin, “Tasmania,” edited and with commentary by Ann Curthoys, Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 170– 96. 10 See Ben Kiernan, “Cover-up and Denial of Genocide,” Critical Asian Studies 34, no. 2 (2002): 163–92; “The Last Tasmanian” film poster, https://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/808/last-tasmanian.html (accessed 26 January 2018). 11 Lyndall Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981), 101, 255. 12 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 40. 13 Robin Winks, “A System of Commands: The Infrastructure of Race Contact,” in Studies in British Imperial History, ed. Gordon Martel (London: Macmillan, 1986), 24; Tony Barta, “Relations of Genocide: Land and Lives in the Colonization of Australia,” in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. Isidor Walliman and Michael N. Dobkowski (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 238. 14 Jared Diamond, “In Black and White,” Natural History 97, no. 10 (1988): 8–14. 470 BOOK FORUM disaster.”15 In 2004, Reynolds added, “Whether Governor Arthur strayed over the unmarked border between warfare [and] genocide cannot be answered with any certainty.”16 That same year, I compared state-sponsored genocide in Tasmania to genocides in California and German South West Africa.17 Meanwhile, Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon called the colonialera Wybalenna prison camp, where scores of Aboriginal Tasmanians died, “a site of genocide.”18 Australian journalist Keith Windschuttle’s 2002 book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847, focused new attention on genocide in colonial Tasmania.19 Windschuttle’s insistence that “Van Diemen’s Land was host to nothing that resembled genocide or any attempt at it” made the island’s colonial history the central battleground in the Australian History Wars.20 Australian-born Yale historian Ben Kiernan quickly responded to Windschuttle’s claims and the following year nineteen Australians published a collection of essays refuting many of Windschuttle’s assertions by pointing out his selective use of evidence and discrepancies between his claims and evidence.21 In 2008, I responded that “Tasmania under British rule was clearly a site of genocide,” emphasizing that the killing campaigns of 1828 to 1835 constituted “STATE-SANCTIONED MASS MURDER.”22 Meanwhile, Australian historian Ann Curthoys provided a historiography of the Tasmanian genocide discussion while her fellow Australian historian James Boyce’s Van Diemen’s Land shed new light on the genocide, especially in his long appendix titled “Towards Genocide: Government Policy on the Aborigines, 1827–1838.”23 In 2012, the revised edition of Ryan’s classic, Tasmanian Aborigines, substantially increased her tally of the genocide’s death toll.24 That same year, I described the unwritten doctrine of Tasmanian massacre tactics and how the colonial regime encouraged and supported such tactics.25 Others then continued studying this genocide. The last four years alone have seen the publication of three new monographs on the cataclysm. These include historian Tom Lawson’s The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania, historian Nicholas Clements’ The Black War, Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania, and scholar Jesse Shipway’s The Memory of Genocide in Tasmania, 1803–2013: Scars on the Archive.26 Arthur’s genocidal campaign against Aboriginal Tasmanians is not, as Brodie claims, a “secret war.”27 In fact, 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Henry Reynolds, Fate of a Free People (Ringwood: Penguin Books Australia, 1995), 52. Henry Reynolds, “Genocide in Tasmania?” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 147. Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide Research 6, no. 2 (2004): 167–92. Quoted in ibid., 175. Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002). Ibid., 399. Kiernan, “Cover-up and Denial of Genocide” ; Robert Manne, ed., Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2003). Madley, “From Terror to Genocide,” 106, 94. Capitalization in the original. Anne Curthoys, “Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 229–52; James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008), 259–313. Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, 143. Benjamin Madley, “Tactics of Nineteenth Century Colonial Massacre: Tasmania, California, and Beyond,” in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing and Atrocity throughout History, ed. Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 110–25. Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014); Nicholas Clements, The Black War, Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014); Jesse Shipway, The Memory of Genocide in Tasmania, 1803–2013: Scars on the Archive (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). See also Rebe Taylor, “Genocide, Extinction and Aboriginal Self-determination in Tasmanian Historiography,” History Compass 11, no. 6 (2013): 405– 18; Murray Johnson and Ian McFarlane, Van Diemen’s Land: An Aboriginal History (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2015). This is an incomplete Tasmanian genocide historiography. JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH 471 many have written about the state’s role in this annihilationist war against Aboriginal Tasmanians. We cannot right the terrible wrongs of the Tasmanian genocide. We cannot bring back the dead. Still, we can accurately tell the story. Brodie’s book, so rich in detail, sheds light on the command structure that facilitated the near-annihilation of Tasmania’s indigenous people as well as their defiance against overwhelming odds. The Vandemonian War also suggests the importance of studying genocidal command structures in world history. The analysis of command structures is a critical component of genocide studies. At the case study level, such analyses can reveal not only evidence of genocidal intent and genocidal crimes, but also who ordered the killing, who equipped and paid the killers, who did the killing, what motivated them, how people targeted for annihilation resisted, and other elements of what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once called “a crime without a name.”28 At the level of seeking to understand genocide in world history, the comparative study of genocidal command structures can reveal important patterns in how they tend to function, thus shedding light on genocide as a global phenomenon. Understanding such patterns can, in turn, suggest solutions for policymakers and activists seeking to detect potentially genocidal situations, stop such situations from becoming genocidal, halt genocide in progress, or find some measure of justice and healing in genocide’s aftermath. Indeed, the mapping of command structures is a central part of many genocide trials. Command structures are also frequently a subject of truth and reconciliation projects. Ultimately, the study of command structures is crucial to both understanding and responding to genocide. Notes on contributor Benjamin Madley teaches History and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He writes about colonialism and indigenous peoples in Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America. His essays have appeared in The American Historical Review, Journal of Genocide Research, other periodicals, and four edited volumes. In 2016, Yale University Press published his first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846– 1873. It received seven prizes, including the Raphael Lemkin Book Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide. Benjamin Madley University of California, Los Angeles, USA madley@ucla.edu © 2018 Benjamin Madley https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2018.1486350 28 Quoted in James T. Fussel, “A Crime without a Name,” www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/crimewithoutaname.htm (accessed 31 January 2018).