?Black Armband? versus ?White Blindfold? History in Australia

Abstract

n The Australian for 18 September 2003, Greg Sheridan writes that cause of Aboriginal welfare and the quality of Australian political culture have been seriously damaged by the moral and linguistic overkill of those left-wing historians who claim that is an accurate term for what happened during the European colonization of that continent (11). He is seconding the current prime minister, John Howard, who has publicly declared that he wishes the historians would stop using outrageous words like (qtd. in Reynolds, Indelible Stain 2). Sheridan says that past mistreatment of Aborigines is the most serious moral failing in our history, but that it approached genocide or had any relationship to genocide. He knows this is the case because all dictionaries give [it] the same meaning, which according to his Penguin dictionary is mass murder of a racial, national or religious group (qtd. in Sheridan 11). This, Sheridan believes, never occurred in Australia, even though he also believes that substantial numbers of Aborigines were killed by white settlers and British authorities in Tasmania and in Australia