Settler-colonial ethos is our least worthy export

Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. It was easy, but unfair.

Author Helen Dale at her book launch novel Kingdom of the Wicked in Sydney.

Despite a great efflorescence of literature and especially film about the mafia, it’s a truism to say that it isn’t very good for Sicily. It also hasn’t been very good when exported to other countries, either, spreading violence, corruption, and lawlessness. Well, Australia is to settler-colonial ideology as ­Sicily is to mafia, and our poisonous gift to the world is, like Sicily’s mafia, one of those things about us that really isn’t for export.

“Settler-colonial ideology” seems a mouthful, but if I describe bits of it to you, you’ll recognise it. Heard Australia Day called “Invasion Day”? You’ve encountered settler-colonial ideology. Been called racist for voting No in the 2023 voice referendum? You’ve encountered settler-colonial ideology. Noticed Aboriginal academics get hired with obviously ­inadequate qualifications? You’ve encountered settler-colonial ideology.

Many Australians – including me – first encountered settler-colonial ideology at university. Back then, it was a theoretical and foreign concern, and largely in languages other than English (mainly French and Arabic). I do remember one of the “post-colonial literatures” (note the s, the s is important) obsessives trying to convince me that Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country wasn’t a “legitimate book” because its ­author was white, but back then this was still a niche view.

Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. Australians aren’t noted for their theoretical acumen, which made this easier. Critical race theory and affirmative action are all-American, while US academics have often executed hostile takeovers of French nonsense like postmodernism or queer theory early on in proceedings. It gets easy to blame America and France.

Easy, but unfair.

I realised how mistaken I’d been when, in October last year, I returned to Australia for a stint. While I was there, I read Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice. I did so in part because October 2024 was the one-year anniversary of two important events. Both concerned what Kirsch calls “the ideology of settler-colonialism”.

Kirsch documents a process whereby the French- and Arabic-speaking theorists of post-World War II decolonial conflicts – particularly Frantz Fanon – had their ideas grafted (very, very awkwardly) on to dissimilar Australian history and conditions by Australian intellectuals. These were then exported throughout the English-speaking world, likely through academic conferences. This explains how cringeworthy Australian nonsense like land acknowledgments managed to spread first to Canada and then the US in a reversal of the usual process whereby America sneezes and so gives its Hat a cold.

By default I blamed the US and France for our literary failures, but I needn’t have looked any further than home, Dale writes.

Fanon was a Marxist and a Freudian. His writing seethes with angry bloodthirstiness and pseudoscientific psychodrama, but he was responding to a vicious war of independence and incipient civil conflict. Kirsch notices a pattern where Australian scholars borrow bits of Fanon to give a sanguinary rhetorical garnish to their writing. “Fanon’s praise of violence is a large part of his appeal for Western intellectuals,” Kirsch notes. “Many of the sentiments expressed in The Wretched of the Earth, coming from a European or American writer, would immediately be identified as fascistic.”

Australia’s intervention changed the ideology, in some ways making it more destructive. Fanon is shorn of most of his Marxism, for example (can’t have that, won’t be able to recruit rich minorities to the boss class otherwise). The key Australian shift coalesces around an oft-quoted aphorism from historian Patrick Wolfe: “Invasion is a structure, not an event.” That is, colonisation trauma is constantly renewed because “settler” is a heritable identity. “Every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population,” Kirsch points out, “is, and always will be, a settler.”

“Settler” here includes people transported to both America and Australia in chains – slaves and convicts. Once it became acceptable to construe one group of people conveyed against their will across thousands of miles of ocean in dreadful conditions as providentially lucky (and genocidal) settlers, it became possible to extend the reasoning to other, similar groups. After all, the only difference between a convict and a slave is the presence or absence of a criminal conviction. Kirsch’s attempt to explain how Australia was analogised with Fanon’s Algeria and then how Israel was analogised with Wolfe’s Australia is heroic, in part because the casuistry he seeks to unpick is so convoluted. However, filtering Fanon through Australian academia and its claim that “settler” is a heritable identity did have the effect of making Jewish Israelis look more like non-indigenous Australians or Americans, especially when attention was focussed on European Jewish immigrants to Israel.

When Israel is compared with Algeria directly, by contrast, the analogy falls because Jews in Israel most resemble Algeria’s indigenous Berber population, not its later Arab settlers. Arabs in modern Israel, meanwhile – as well as in neighbouring territories once inhabited not only by Jews but by other peoples – are also settlers according to this benighted ideology, and for the same reason: they once had great historic empires. This is something even some opponents of Zionism – Maxime Rodinson was one – realised, warning the Palestine Liberation Organisation that modelling itself on Algeria’s anti-colonial National Liberation Front would undermine the movement for Palestinian nationhood. Yasser Arafat didn’t like it either, disdaining Wolfe’s professional victimology. “We are not Red Indians,” he said in 2004, tartly, just ­before he died.

A second aspect of Australia’s contribution to this intellectual morass is the deliberate attempt to define genocide down. This was made easier because the definition used in the 1948 Genocide Convention reflects Soviet lobbying: the USSR was anxious to have mass killings like the Holocaust included, but not mass killings like the Holodomor (the Ukrainian Famine). Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian lawyer who came up with the concept, was alert to this, although his influence was limited by post-war geopolitical exigencies.

Lemkin’s shadow still hangs over the UN, which is why – as mad as International Court of Justice jurisprudence often is, and yes, it’s an argument for firing the UN and all its works out of the Solar System in yet another job for Elon Musk and DOGE – when South Africa took Israel to it alleging genocide, the ICJ wasn’t having any.

That said, the UN Convention with its built-in lawyerly legerdemain has had perverse effects. In an intellectual pattern widespread on the progressive left, common vocabulary is used, but not a common dictionary. This is how, as Kirsch points out, genocide “no longer means what it is ordinarily taken to mean”.

People (I am one) are criticised and even stigmatised for comparing the Holocaust to the Holodomor or Rwanda or Cambodia on the basis that the Holocaust was uniquely horrible. Meanwhile, “in contrast to the Holocaust”, Australian settler-colonial academic Patrick Wolfe tells us, “settler colonialism is relatively impervious to regime change”.

When the ability to compare like cases with like is so attenuated and misconceived, genocide can mean anything. Various Australian academics say so. Genocide may include “romantic stereotyping”, “native citizenship”, “child abduction”, “reconciliation” (because it means “the extinction of otherwise irreducible forms of indigenous alterity”) and, ahem, national parks. Yes, national parks are part of a “genocide machine” because they “maintain control over land that once belonged to ­indigenous peoples”.

Righto then.

Within Australia, redefining genocide so sweepingly means anyone who sits on the fence or disagrees – even mildly – gets “called out” in a way that’s become depressingly familiar. I’m no great fan of Robert Manne for obvious historical reasons but following Kirsch’s footnotes to see where they would lead turned up a coruscating 2008 Wolfe essay tearing into Manne for failing to climb as far up the “Australia was founded in genocide” tree as Wolfe had done. “Manne’s article fails to see his own silence on the Stolen Generations as contributing to a more general silence in Australian public life,” he intones, pointing a histrionic finger like the Donald Sutherland character in Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

The sheer nastiness of settler-colonial ideology – exposed globally following October 7 and in Australia before and after the referendum – suggests the once widespread left-progressive view that it may be true for Australia and the US but false for Israel has not survived. The same complex of views was also decisively rejected by the Australian electorate, while support for Australia Day’s current date is now entrenched.

Adam Kirsch has documented patterns of ideological transmission where Australia sneezes and America catches the flu. Israel and Gaza, meanwhile, get pneumonia.

Given significant Australian involvement in the ideology behind what now threatens to become a wider conflict, we should listen to him.

Helen Dale is senior writer at Law & Liberty, a publication of Liberty Fund. She won the Miles Franklin Award for her first novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, and read law at Oxford. She toured Australia in October 2024 as a guest of the Centre for Independent Studies. She lives in London.