A question on Australian history

Yes, there is history of slavery. The Aboriginal people, the indigenous people of the land, inhabited Australia more than 40,000 years ago. As a kid growing up in Australia, we were taught all about our short national history and the attrocities committed against the original inhabitants.

This is an excerpt taken from The Public I:

The Australian desire for progress, for egalitarianism, for a better life and "a fair go" for all did not extend to one important group, the original inhabitants of Australia, the Aboriginals. Defeated in the Aboriginal Wars of the 19th century, they had become a forgotten race -- reviled, murdered, harassed, discriminated against, and subjected to cruel and unusual punishments. It remains one of the mysteries of history that Australia was able to get away with a racist policy that included segregation and dispossession and bordered on slavery and genocide, practices unknown in the civilized world in the first half of the twentieth century until Nazi Germany turned on the Jews in the 1930s.