The Sir Elihu Lauterpacht International Law Lecture 2018: The development of humanity as a constraint on the conduct of war

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people as the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we meet. I pay my respects to their elders, past, present and emerging. I deeply respect and admire the ability of the Ngunnawal, and of many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, to have survived invasion and violent dispossession of their land and to have maintained the richness of their cultural, linguistic, legal and spiritual traditions. On the subject matter of my lecture, humanity as a constraint on the conduct of war, I acknowledge that many of our Aboriginal peoples were extended little, if any, humanity in the colonial violence to which they were subjected. This is certainly true of the frontier wars in my own State of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land) in the 1820s and 1830s which resulted in the near annihilation of Aboriginality in the colony. Social Darwinism influenced the justificatory view that the Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land were not only an obstacle to the settlement enterprise but that in their ‘savage’ state they were sub-human and doomed to extinction.