Raphaël Lemkin's ‘Tasmania’: an introduction1

Abstract

Raphaël Lemkin's book on the history of genocide was never completed. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he planned over forty chapters, each about a particular historical case of genocide, from ancient times to the present, and researched and wrote many of them. Here we publish, for the first time, one chapter of that book from the original typescript in the New York Public Library. Chapter 38, ‘Tasmania’, discusses the virtual disappearance of the Aboriginal Tasmanians after several decades of British colonization and settlement in 1803. Despite its limitations as a work still in progress, the chapter demonstrates the subtlety of Lemkin's understanding of genocide. His historical method was to rely largely on secondary sources but also to use primary sources whenever possible; for this chapter his main source was James Bonwick's The Last of the Tasmanians (1870). Lemkin's ‘Tasmania’ considers the British authorities’ and settlers’ intentions and the experiences of Aboriginal people: loss of land and life, loss of children, the effects of liquor and disease, and the decline in their reproductive capacity. It concludes with a discussion of contemporary public opinion. Lemkin's chapter has, of course, been superseded by extensive historical research published since the mid-1970s. Yet it remains a thoughtful and thought-provoking text.