Should King Charles apologise for the genocide of First Nations people when he visits Australia?
- Written by: Rebe Taylor, Associate Professor of History, University of Tasmania
King Charles and Queen Camilla will visit Australia from Friday on a five-day tour of Canberra and Sydney.
The king will be the second ruling British monarch to visit Australia, after Queen Elizabeth II’s 16 visits over 57 years.
These visits showcase Australians’ evolving relationship with the monarchy and our colonial past.
Changing attitudes
An estimated 75% of Australians greeted Elizabeth on her first tour in 1954, at events that celebrated Australia’s growth as a prosperous nation.
Historical milestones remained central to the queen’s subsequent visits.
In 1970, she attended the re-enactment of Captain Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay. This included depictions of shooting at First Nations actors.
The queen’s 1986 visit included signing the Australia Act that severed Britain’s formal powers over Australia.
Her 1988 visit coincided with the Australian bicentenary of the arrival of the First Fleet carrying convicts and officials from Britain. But by this time, many Australians had lost their royal fervour.
Her final tour, in 2011, came 12 years after Australia had attempted to become a republic by referendum.
The queen’s death in 2022 not only reignited questions over the future of the monarchy in Australia, it instigated a public discussion over the monarchy’s role in imperial colonialism.
Genocide in Australia?
On the eve of Charles’ coronation in 2023, Indigenous leaders from 12 settler states including Australia and New Zealand cosigned a letter calling on the new monarch to apologise for the genocides that British colonisation brought to their territories.
Australia was settled in the name of the Kingdom of Great Britain. Did that settlement result in genocide?
Recent research led by Ben Kiernan for The Cambridge World History of Genocide has investigated this question using the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as a framework.
The convention defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
The term “genocide” itself is modern; coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. The colonisation of Tasmania by the British provided Lemkin with one of the clearest examples.
The prosecution of crimes before 1951 is not permissible under the convention, which provides a definitional framework to evaluate past events as constituent acts of genocide.
The Cambridge World History of Genocide Volume II and Volume III demonstrate how settlers and government agents committed acts of genocide against First Nations Australians from the beginning of settlement to the late 20th centuries.
All parts of Australia are considered. Acts conforming to the convention’s clauses include killing, forcibly removing children and inflicting destructive conditions.
Australian historian Lyndall Ryan’s chapter, Frontier Massacres in Australia, draws on her research for a Massacre Map showing how British troops and settlers committed more than 290 massacres across Australia between 1794 and 1928.
These massacres killed more than 7,500 Aboriginal people.
Ryan found the massacres were not sporadic and isolated – they were planned and sanctioned killings, integral to the aims of the Australian colonial project.
Rebe Taylor’s chapter on genocide in Tasmania details a pattern of government-sanctioned mass killings in a colony where an estimated 6,000 Palawa (Tasmanian Aboriginal) people were reduced to about 120 by 1835.
Raymond Evans shows how as colonisation moved northward in Australia, massacres increased in size.
Evans documents killings that persisted into the 1940s, postdating the 1928 Coniston massacre widely regarded as the last frontier slaughter.
These findings are underscored by Tony Barta’s insight that colonists’ destructive actions constitute a record of genocidal intent “more powerful than any documented plot to destroy a people”.
Research by Anna Haebich documents the taking of Indigenous children during the 19th century.
Joanna Cruikshank and Crystal Mckinnon explain how these state-sanctioned removals in the 20th century were intended to eliminate First Nations people from Australia’s national life.
The 1997 Bringing Them Home report, commissioned by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, concluded the “Australian practice of Indigenous child removal involved […] genocide as defined by international law”.
A significant moment of resistance
The colonial governor of Tasmania began to exile Palawa people from their land in 1829.
More than 200 survivors of the “Black War” were removed to Flinders Island and subjected to life-threateningly harsh conditions. High death rates were caused by ill-treatment, disease and insufficient care.
In 1846, the Palawa petitioned Queen Victoria to honour the agreement made when they were removed: that in exchange for temporarily leaving their country, they would regain their freedom.
In this bold petition, Tasmanian Aboriginal people initiated a historic appeal to the British monarchy.
Aware of Queen Victoria’s sovereign authority across the vast British Empire, this action marked a significant moment in their continued resistance to genocide.
An acknowledgement of wrongs
British sovereignty over Australia was imposed without the required consent of its First Nations. The result has been continued dispossession and suffering.
Despite the Crown’s deferral of power to its parliament, the call for an apology from the king has immense symbolic importance.
It is rooted in the desire for acknowledgement of wrongs. These include genocide and the continuing destructive effects of colonisation across Australia.
Authors: Rebe Taylor, Associate Professor of History, University of Tasmania
