ABSTRACT
Citizens and governments of settler colonial states have struggled to come to terms with the violence on which their states were founded and have also sought to evade any real sense of responsibility for such violence and its consequences. In this chapter I draw on the concept of “the modern social imaginary” to explore how genocidal violence toward Australia’s Indigenous populations was made possible, how it was rationalized, and how the reality of violence has long been obfuscated and denied. While there was no single policy of extermination applied across Australia, exterminatory discourse can be found in different areas at different times and practices that were known to be destructive of both individuals and groups were pursued, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the overwhelming logic in play was “a logic of elimination.” The chapter investigates the nature of the social imaginary that was imported into Australia in the late 18th century, a social imaginary which had no place for Indigenous Australians. This “logic of elimination” allowed white Australia to accept social structures of violence and exclusion that destroyed lives, livelihoods, and communities and has had a powerful impact on Indigenous peoples, the wider Australian society, and the relationship between them in the formation of the Australian nation-state.
