Australian violence : then and now

The title Australian Violence prompts the question: ‘Is there something distinctive about Australian violence?’ One answer to this question is to point to Australia’s violent history as a convict colony and settler nation from the late 1700s. For some commentators, this convict history made crime in Australia distinctive. For instance, Sturma (1983) notes the resilience of 19th century British commentary which denounced the colonies as marked by crime and depravity, features that were attributed to the assumed inherent failings of the convicts or ‘the dangerous classes’ from which they were drawn, and which were thought to be magnified due to contagion (Sturma 1983). However, preoccupation with the moral failings of convicts masks others distinctive features of Australian colonial history and deflects attention from the state violence sued to control convicts and dispossess Indigenous populations. Debate continues about the influence on the Australian national character, if there is such a thing, of ‘two great sources of national discomfit’: shame about the nation’s convict past, referred to as the ‘convict stain’, and the “Indelible stain” of Aboriginal dispossession (Roberts, 2012: 214, citing Henry Reynolds).