Clendinnen (John) is mistaken, however, when he says that I believe that the wrongs committed against the stolen generations are trivialised unless one takes seriously that they might constitute genocide. The wrongs done to the children and their parents are evident and serious whether or not one calls any of them genocide. Does it matter, then, to how one understands those wrongs (morally) whether one calls (some of) them genocide?

I think it does. The concept of genocide gives a certain moral reading to what it means to intend the extinguishment of a people when (though I don’t say only when) that intention goes together with a racist contempt for them, and when it is enacted in policies that express that contempt. One can, of course, describe the morally salient elements of genocide without using the word. But once one has described them, noted their salience, and revealed what they mean morally, then one will have described what struck many people when, after the Holocaust (and so after Lemkin), they believed that we needed a new concept to capture that meaning. The felt need for a new concept was taken by some people to mean that the crimes that fell under the concept had not been committed before. More plausibly, others felt that though the crimes were old, our moral response to them was new.

It is probably true, as Inga Clendinnen has said, that some (perhaps many) people have failed fully to appreciate the degree and extent of the wrongs done to the stolen generations because they were offended by the claim that some of the wrongs amount to genocide, or that they have genocidal elements, or, as Robert Manne put it, that they were informed by ‘genocidal thoughts’. I have repeatedly expressed sympathy for the reasons why some people take offence partly because I once took it myself. But I and others have argued there is no need to take offence, not, at any rate, if the reason for taking it is that our paradigms of genocide all involve mass murder.

Inga Clendinnen entered the argument by doing no more than declaring her belief (in The Australian’s Review of Books, June 2001) that without murder the concept of genocide is vacuous. This view is common enough, but it is not so common and it is certainly not so authoritative that the author of Reading the Holocaust should be excused from the obligation to argue for it when she criticises those who dissent from it.

Raimond Gaita, St Kilda, Vic.

Snide about the past

Dear Editor,

Robin Gerster’s review of Garry Disher’s novel, Past the Headlands (ABR, July 2001), was unnecessarily snide. First, Gerster implies that fiction writers have a duty to the present, not the past. Disher, who’s written several ‘historical’ novels, and many other novelists have argued (echoing William Faulkner) that the past isn’t past yet, that it’s inescapable, part of and informing the present.

Gerster seems to take the novel literally as colonialist writing. As such, he seems unable to ‘read against the grain’ and therefore can’t appreciate the novel’s implicit anticolonial critique.

Gerster’s snideness is exemplified by his response to Disher’s description of the smell of Singapore: ‘Why is it that only the Asian characters in Western fiction set in “the East” do number twos?’ Did Gerster read the novel attentively? There are several scenes in the novel of Europeans getting caught short, including one in which a handful of servicemen use letters from home in lieu of toilet paper. Moreover, Asian cities have not had a monopoly on odoriferousness.

Finally, Gerster completely misses the theme of the book: the search for a true home – in this case, complicated by exile and displacement as a result of war. The theme is exemplified clearly in the experiences of the minor characters, but it is expanded with great subtlety in the story of the main character, Quiller.

Gerster speculates that Disher’s novel may rank with two ‘great’ novels of Australia and war, A Town Like Alice and My Brother Jack, which might be expected to hearten Disher, but then he immediately undercuts the remark by saying that he looks forward to the mini-series, as though to say that only pap is turned into film. I say hooray if anyone wishes to turn this book into film, though let’s hope it’s tastefully done without all those Orientalising tendencies that are so popular. Perhaps it will make up for the loss of readership through thoughtless reviewing.

Lucy Healey, Bittern, Vic.