Write a history of the Australian aborigine in white Australia. Be as concrete as you can, giving places and dates. Be as comprehensive as you can, from Tasmania to the the Torres Straight.
I’m starting to realise that each latitude has a different history.
Did you know about the University of Newcastle map of massacres?
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-05/new-map-plots-massacres-of-aboriginal-people-in-frontier-wars/8678466
buffy said:
Did you know about the University of Newcastle map of massacres?https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
Academia.com has been sending me a stack of links to documents on Aboriginal massacres.
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
Did you know about the University of Newcastle map of massacres?https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
Academia.com has been sending me a stack of links to documents on Aboriginal massacres.
Oh brilliant. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
None in Western Australia? Perhaps a slight oversight.
It’s the massacres north of the Topic of Capricorn, and in Tasmania that interest me most.
Particularly the map of Tasmania is of value, because when I went looking for massacres in Tasmania I could only find records of colonists massacred by Aborigines, never the other way around. But I knew that there had to be some – the number of Aborigines in Tasmania was dropping far too fast for any other explanation, and there was no plague at the time. The map is the exact reverse, missing all the massacres of colonists, but I can fill that in.
mollwollfumble said:
Don’t know if this link will work without membership.
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
Did you know about the University of Newcastle map of massacres?https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
Academia.com has been sending me a stack of links to documents on Aboriginal massacres.
Oh brilliant. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
None in Western Australia? Perhaps a slight oversight.
It’s the massacres north of the Topic of Capricorn, and in Tasmania that interest me most.
Particularly the map of Tasmania is of value, because when I went looking for massacres in Tasmania I could only find records of colonists massacred by Aborigines, never the other way around. But I knew that there had to be some – the number of Aborigines in Tasmania was dropping far too fast for any other explanation, and there was no plague at the time. The map is the exact reverse, missing all the massacres of colonists, but I can fill that in.
https://www.academia.edu/keypass/MllVdkF0R3ZYWGRtM3p0TGw4alFoVFVZamZVWGFMQlRPa1lFNE5CL2s0QT0tLXdrWmJHZU12dVNJRmRubW5VODMyeHc9PQ==—de993688ffff97b160fe78cb248d1c977a8e7ff6/t/eG0nA-NmS3P7W-qhfEh/resource/work/28754959/Massacre_in_the_Black_War_in_Tasmania_1823_34_a_case_study_of_the_Meander_River_Region_June_1827?auto=download
mollwollfumble said:
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
Did you know about the University of Newcastle map of massacres?https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php
Academia.com has been sending me a stack of links to documents on Aboriginal massacres.
Oh brilliant. That’s exactly what I was looking for.
None in Western Australia? Perhaps a slight oversight.
It’s the massacres north of the Topic of Capricorn, and in Tasmania that interest me most.
Particularly the map of Tasmania is of value, because when I went looking for massacres in Tasmania I could only find records of colonists massacred by Aborigines, never the other way around. But I knew that there had to be some – the number of Aborigines in Tasmania was dropping far too fast for any other explanation, and there was no plague at the time. The map is the exact reverse, missing all the massacres of colonists, but I can fill that in.
Other topics of the history that I want to find out and put dates and places to are:
Primary sources. This is an interesting read, specific to the Western District of Victoria. Dawson was one of the early settlers, but became known as a friend of the Aboriginal people. His daughter learnt the local language. It is likely much of the book is her work.
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-52770478/view?partId=nla.obj-129741670#page/n0/mode/1up
I bought a facsimile copy quite a few years ago. It was not cheap. I sat down and just read it cover to cover. It’s a very interesting read.
Other information about my area here is available in books by Jan Critchett. “A Distant Field of Murder” is also a good read, although not comfortable reading. There is also Ian Clark’s “Scars in the Landscape. A register of massacre sites in Western Victoria 1803 – 1859”. I don’t have stuff for other areas, I concentrated on reading about the place I live in. I know some of the descendents of some of the families who went out to “hunt” after dinner. I get the impression such things are not actually discussed in the families these days.
For more reading, I can suggest:
“Convincing Ground. Learning to fall in love with your country” by Bruce Pascoe.
“Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination. Race Relations in Colonial Queensland” by Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin
“Who Killed the Koories?” by Michael Cannon
They seem to be the most pertinent ones on my bookshelf.
And one more, a historical reference, so if you read it you have to take account of the language of the day:
“The Native Tribes of South-East Australia” by A.W. Howitt. (First published in 1904)
buffy said:
And one more, a historical reference, so if you read it you have to take account of the language of the day:“The Native Tribes of South-East Australia” by A.W. Howitt. (First published in 1904)
Thanks buffy. I love that book, I’ve read it twice but have never owned a copy, and it’s been about 20 years since I last read it. I’ll see if I can find a copy.
I hadn’t realised it was a far back as 1904, that’s perfect timing. Too early to be corrupted by aboriginal activism (1940 and after in NSW). Early enough to be before the worst of the breakdown of the old tribal system (1905 to 1935 in NSW). And too recent (and written too sensitively) to be corrupted by gold-rush era European racism (1855 to 1895 in Vic).
buffy said:
Primary sources. This is an interesting read, specific to the Western District of Victoria. Dawson was one of the early settlers, but became known as a friend of the Aboriginal people. His daughter learnt the local language. It is likely much of the book is her work.
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-52770478/view?partId=nla.obj-129741670#page/n0/mode/1up
I bought a facsimile copy quite a few years ago. It was not cheap. I sat down and just read it cover to cover. It’s a very interesting read.
Other information about my area here is available in books by Jan Critchett. “A Distant Field of Murder” is also a good read, although not comfortable reading. There is also Ian Clark’s “Scars in the Landscape. A register of massacre sites in Western Victoria 1803 – 1859”. I don’t have stuff for other areas, I concentrated on reading about the place I live in. I know some of the descendents of some of the families who went out to “hunt” after dinner. I get the impression such things are not actually discussed in the families these days.
For more reading, I can suggest:
“Convincing Ground. Learning to fall in love with your country” by Bruce Pascoe.
“Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination. Race Relations in Colonial Queensland” by Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin
“Who Killed the Koories?” by Michael Cannon
They seem to be the most pertinent ones on my bookshelf.
Can I have a look at your bookshelf some time? For a quick browse?
mollwollfumble said:
buffy said:
And one more, a historical reference, so if you read it you have to take account of the language of the day:“The Native Tribes of South-East Australia” by A.W. Howitt. (First published in 1904)
Thanks buffy. I love that book, I’ve read it twice but have never owned a copy, and it’s been about 20 years since I last read it. I’ll see if I can find a copy.
I hadn’t realised it was a far back as 1904, that’s perfect timing. Too early to be corrupted by aboriginal activism (1940 and after in NSW). Early enough to be before the worst of the breakdown of the old tribal system (1905 to 1935 in NSW). And too recent (and written too sensitively) to be corrupted by gold-rush era European racism (1855 to 1895 in Vic).
buffy said:
Primary sources. This is an interesting read, specific to the Western District of Victoria. Dawson was one of the early settlers, but became known as a friend of the Aboriginal people. His daughter learnt the local language. It is likely much of the book is her work.
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-52770478/view?partId=nla.obj-129741670#page/n0/mode/1up
I bought a facsimile copy quite a few years ago. It was not cheap. I sat down and just read it cover to cover. It’s a very interesting read.
Other information about my area here is available in books by Jan Critchett. “A Distant Field of Murder” is also a good read, although not comfortable reading. There is also Ian Clark’s “Scars in the Landscape. A register of massacre sites in Western Victoria 1803 – 1859”. I don’t have stuff for other areas, I concentrated on reading about the place I live in. I know some of the descendents of some of the families who went out to “hunt” after dinner. I get the impression such things are not actually discussed in the families these days.
For more reading, I can suggest:
“Convincing Ground. Learning to fall in love with your country” by Bruce Pascoe.
“Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination. Race Relations in Colonial Queensland” by Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin
“Who Killed the Koories?” by Michael Cannon
They seem to be the most pertinent ones on my bookshelf.
Can I have a look at your bookshelf some time? For a quick browse?
>>The first century and a half of British-Aboriginal relations in Australia can be characterised as a period of dispossession, physical ill-treatment, social disruption, population decline, economic exploitation, discrimination, and cultural devastation. The notional citizenship ascribed to the Aboriginal people at the beginning of British settlement in Australia was all but gone by the end of it, and as if to illustrate this point, in every State, the law specifically sanctioned the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. For the Aboriginal people, this was a period of dispossession from their homelands followed by dispossession from family, culture and life as they knew it.<<
>>On 1 January 1901, the Australian Constitution came into effect, establishing the Commonwealth of Australia.
The Constitution sets the rules by which our nation is governed and describes the make-up, role and powers of the federal Parliament. It sets out how federal and state parliaments share the power to make laws. It is also describes the role of the executive government and Australia’s High Court and defines certain rights for Australian citizens.
There were two references to Aboriginal people contained in the Australian Constitution of 1901.
Firstly, section 51 of the Constitution outlined the law-making powers of the Commonwealth of Australia. Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws.’
Secondly, section 127 of the Constitution provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’.
The states remained responsible for the welfare of Aboriginal people. <<
https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted
Yeah a great time to understand the plight of Aborigines.
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:
buffy said:
And one more, a historical reference, so if you read it you have to take account of the language of the day:“The Native Tribes of South-East Australia” by A.W. Howitt. (First published in 1904)
Thanks buffy. I love that book, I’ve read it twice but have never owned a copy, and it’s been about 20 years since I last read it. I’ll see if I can find a copy.
I hadn’t realised it was a far back as 1904, that’s perfect timing. Too early to be corrupted by aboriginal activism (1940 and after in NSW). Early enough to be before the worst of the breakdown of the old tribal system (1905 to 1935 in NSW). And too recent (and written too sensitively) to be corrupted by gold-rush era European racism (1855 to 1895 in Vic).
buffy said:
Primary sources. This is an interesting read, specific to the Western District of Victoria. Dawson was one of the early settlers, but became known as a friend of the Aboriginal people. His daughter learnt the local language. It is likely much of the book is her work.
https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-52770478/view?partId=nla.obj-129741670#page/n0/mode/1up
I bought a facsimile copy quite a few years ago. It was not cheap. I sat down and just read it cover to cover. It’s a very interesting read.
Other information about my area here is available in books by Jan Critchett. “A Distant Field of Murder” is also a good read, although not comfortable reading. There is also Ian Clark’s “Scars in the Landscape. A register of massacre sites in Western Victoria 1803 – 1859”. I don’t have stuff for other areas, I concentrated on reading about the place I live in. I know some of the descendents of some of the families who went out to “hunt” after dinner. I get the impression such things are not actually discussed in the families these days.
For more reading, I can suggest:
“Convincing Ground. Learning to fall in love with your country” by Bruce Pascoe.
“Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination. Race Relations in Colonial Queensland” by Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin
“Who Killed the Koories?” by Michael Cannon
They seem to be the most pertinent ones on my bookshelf.
Can I have a look at your bookshelf some time? For a quick browse?
>>The first century and a half of British-Aboriginal relations in Australia can be characterised as a period of dispossession, physical ill-treatment, social disruption, population decline, economic exploitation, discrimination, and cultural devastation. The notional citizenship ascribed to the Aboriginal people at the beginning of British settlement in Australia was all but gone by the end of it, and as if to illustrate this point, in every State, the law specifically sanctioned the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. For the Aboriginal people, this was a period of dispossession from their homelands followed by dispossession from family, culture and life as they knew it.<<
>>On 1 January 1901, the Australian Constitution came into effect, establishing the Commonwealth of Australia.
The Constitution sets the rules by which our nation is governed and describes the make-up, role and powers of the federal Parliament. It sets out how federal and state parliaments share the power to make laws. It is also describes the role of the executive government and Australia’s High Court and defines certain rights for Australian citizens.
There were two references to Aboriginal people contained in the Australian Constitution of 1901.
Firstly, section 51 of the Constitution outlined the law-making powers of the Commonwealth of Australia. Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws.’
Secondly, section 127 of the Constitution provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’.
The states remained responsible for the welfare of Aboriginal people. <<
https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted
Yeah a great time to understand the plight of Aborigines.
Agree,
mollwollfumble said:
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:Can I have a look at your bookshelf some time? For a quick browse?
>>The first century and a half of British-Aboriginal relations in Australia can be characterised as a period of dispossession, physical ill-treatment, social disruption, population decline, economic exploitation, discrimination, and cultural devastation. The notional citizenship ascribed to the Aboriginal people at the beginning of British settlement in Australia was all but gone by the end of it, and as if to illustrate this point, in every State, the law specifically sanctioned the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. For the Aboriginal people, this was a period of dispossession from their homelands followed by dispossession from family, culture and life as they knew it.<<
>>On 1 January 1901, the Australian Constitution came into effect, establishing the Commonwealth of Australia.
The Constitution sets the rules by which our nation is governed and describes the make-up, role and powers of the federal Parliament. It sets out how federal and state parliaments share the power to make laws. It is also describes the role of the executive government and Australia’s High Court and defines certain rights for Australian citizens.
There were two references to Aboriginal people contained in the Australian Constitution of 1901.
Firstly, section 51 of the Constitution outlined the law-making powers of the Commonwealth of Australia. Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws.’
Secondly, section 127 of the Constitution provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’.
The states remained responsible for the welfare of Aboriginal people. <<
https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted
Yeah a great time to understand the plight of Aborigines.
Agree,
I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
Permeate’s post reminded me…if you haven’t already found it, this is a very interesting and time consuming site.
https://aiatsis.gov.au/
And for your purposes, particularly:
https://aiatsis.gov.au/collection
I’ve bought quite a few books from them.
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:
PermeateFree said:>>The first century and a half of British-Aboriginal relations in Australia can be characterised as a period of dispossession, physical ill-treatment, social disruption, population decline, economic exploitation, discrimination, and cultural devastation. The notional citizenship ascribed to the Aboriginal people at the beginning of British settlement in Australia was all but gone by the end of it, and as if to illustrate this point, in every State, the law specifically sanctioned the removal of Aboriginal children from their parents. For the Aboriginal people, this was a period of dispossession from their homelands followed by dispossession from family, culture and life as they knew it.<<
>>On 1 January 1901, the Australian Constitution came into effect, establishing the Commonwealth of Australia.
The Constitution sets the rules by which our nation is governed and describes the make-up, role and powers of the federal Parliament. It sets out how federal and state parliaments share the power to make laws. It is also describes the role of the executive government and Australia’s High Court and defines certain rights for Australian citizens.
There were two references to Aboriginal people contained in the Australian Constitution of 1901.
Firstly, section 51 of the Constitution outlined the law-making powers of the Commonwealth of Australia. Section 51 (xxvi) gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws.’
Secondly, section 127 of the Constitution provided that ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted’.
The states remained responsible for the welfare of Aboriginal people. <<
https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/aboriginal-natives-shall-not-be-counted
Yeah a great time to understand the plight of Aborigines.
Agree,
I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
Here you go moll – the relevent part of the bookshelf. Aboriginal history and writing on top shelf, general Australian history on the bottom. Those two are ten of thirty shelves like that, then there are another two bookshelves in that room and a couple more in other parts of the house. And yes, the books are sorted into topics. And the novels are shelved in alphabetical order of author…
>>Those two are ten of thirty shelves like that,<<
No idea why I wrote that gibberish – of course that should say that they are two of thirty similar sized shelves in the library/sewing room.
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:Agree,
I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
Test your own morality. I would have failed. Put yourself in this situation.
You live on a farm, and the dinner for everybody is due to be brought up by a quarter caste aboriginal teenager. The teenager arrives, and announces that she dumped everybody’s dinner on the Chinese cook. Burning the cook, obviously. What do you do?
buffy said:
Here you go moll – the relevent part of the bookshelf. Aboriginal history and writing on top shelf, general Australian history on the bottom. Those two are ten of thirty shelves like that, then there are another two bookshelves in that room and a couple more in other parts of the house. And yes, the books are sorted into topics. And the novels are shelved in alphabetical order of author…
Wow. Difficult to tell from Titles alone. I’d be inclined to read earlier books before later ones, and thicker books before thinner ones.
I see Howitt, that I’d very much like to reread.
How good are “The Australians”, “The Story of Australian People”, “History of NSW”, “Among the barbarians”, “Western Victoria”, the book by Lindsey Ashley, the book by Marney, and the old hardback book who’s title I can’t read 13th from the left on the top shelf – as sources of information on the Aborigines.
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
Test your own morality. I would have failed. Put yourself in this situation.
You live on a farm, and the dinner for everybody is due to be brought up by a quarter caste aboriginal teenager. The teenager arrives, and announces that she dumped everybody’s dinner on the Chinese cook. Burning the cook, obviously. What do you do?
No takers? What, are you all too frightened of being labelled racist?
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
Test your own morality. I would have failed. Put yourself in this situation.
You live on a farm, and the dinner for everybody is due to be brought up by a quarter caste aboriginal teenager. The teenager arrives, and announces that she dumped everybody’s dinner on the Chinese cook. Burning the cook, obviously. What do you do?
No takers? What, are you all too frightened of being labelled racist?
What does miscrient household staff have to do with institutionalised racism?
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:Agree,
I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
I am referring to the ‘closing of the gap’ that I believe isn’t being closed at all and is willfully being prised open wherever possible.
In recent Indue discussions I mentioned a group of aborigines that denied permission to travel. I asked why we are still denying aborigines the right to travel.
I think I will butt out of this discussion. Being told that I should only be despondent about the treatment of Tasmanian aborigines is probably a clue that I shouldn’t be here.
Witty Rejoinder said:
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:Test your own morality. I would have failed. Put yourself in this situation.
You live on a farm, and the dinner for everybody is due to be brought up by a quarter caste aboriginal teenager. The teenager arrives, and announces that she dumped everybody’s dinner on the Chinese cook. Burning the cook, obviously. What do you do?
No takers? What, are you all too frightened of being labelled racist?
What does miscrient household staff have to do with institutionalised racism?
Are they slaves or actual paid employees, neither scenario is nice but if they are slaves then one repressed person picks on another (being human nature, the bullied bully someone weaker)) still assault though and if paid then WTF why assault the non guilty
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
I am referring to the ‘closing of the gap’ that I believe isn’t being closed at all and is willfully being prised open wherever possible.
In recent Indue discussions I mentioned a group of aborigines that denied permission to travel. I asked why we are still denying aborigines the right to travel.
I think I will butt out of this discussion. Being told that I should only be despondent about the treatment of Tasmanian aborigines is probably a clue that I shouldn’t be here.
What reason did they give for travel permission denied ?
Cymek said:
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
I am referring to the ‘closing of the gap’ that I believe isn’t being closed at all and is willfully being prised open wherever possible.
In recent Indue discussions I mentioned a group of aborigines that denied permission to travel. I asked why we are still denying aborigines the right to travel.
I think I will butt out of this discussion. Being told that I should only be despondent about the treatment of Tasmanian aborigines is probably a clue that I shouldn’t be here.
What reason did they give for travel permission denied ?
That was my question.
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:Agree,
I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
You should be, and we all should be despondent. But also push for change.
The treatment of our First Nation people everywhere was and is appalling. While massacres are not now happening, they are still being denied, covered up, but worse still, there are still people who are proud of how their wealth is a product of not only stealing land and resources, but also labour. And proud of the brutality that was been meted out, and continues to be meted out. Proud of the dispossession that is still happening. For the most part it is being done more covertly, but most people are happily living in their privileged little bubbles.
My daughter is friends with an aboriginal fellow, and he now tells people that he is Indian, so that he will be treated less awfully. My son in law and consequently two of my grandkids are part aboriginal (western NSW), and the family don’t wish to talk about it because of the awful racism and beliefs about them. What a bloody shame not to be able to be proud of the oldest living culture in the world. But when you have people who like to continue to propagate the propaganda that justified dispossession and worse, what do you expect?
I am in contact with a fellow in Queensland who says he is trying to follow up on local land owners diaries and written accounts as they cheerfully documented the realities of dispossession and all that it entailed….he says that he has heard some hair raising accounts of people proudly talking of quite horrific things….. not just the 1800s, but continuing events. The stuff that you have read from Ion Idriess is very much a tiny part of our previous and ongoing history, and is very much written with an agenda.
And then I know Professor Lyndall Ryan, and get to hear what she says about her work with the massacre sites, what inspired it, where it is going, what can’t be said (for various reasons) but should be said. But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites. And the crap that she endured from the backlash about her work. About her feelings of the ongoing quite crude whitewashing and rewriting of our history.
sarahs mum said:
Cymek said:
sarahs mum said:I am referring to the ‘closing of the gap’ that I believe isn’t being closed at all and is willfully being prised open wherever possible.
In recent Indue discussions I mentioned a group of aborigines that denied permission to travel. I asked why we are still denying aborigines the right to travel.
I think I will butt out of this discussion. Being told that I should only be despondent about the treatment of Tasmanian aborigines is probably a clue that I shouldn’t be here.
What reason did they give for travel permission denied ?
That was my question.
The only thing I can think of is they are on a community order asked to travel interstate/overseas and were told permission not granted by community corrections, anything else would be quite strange and no ones business
Cymek said:
sarahs mum said:
Cymek said:What reason did they give for travel permission denied ?
That was my question.
The only thing I can think of is they are on a community order asked to travel interstate/overseas and were told permission not granted by community corrections, anything else would be quite strange and no ones business
I am thinking it is about work for the dole requirements.
sarahs mum said:
Cymek said:
sarahs mum said:That was my question.
The only thing I can think of is they are on a community order asked to travel interstate/overseas and were told permission not granted by community corrections, anything else would be quite strange and no ones business
I am thinking it is about work for the dole requirements.
I didn’t think of that, work for the dole is a load of nonsense, they are stricter on that than people on community work
> But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites.
Thanks, I missed it. The contemporary newspapers only talk about massacres of whites by aboriginals in Tasmania, being completely silent about the reverse. Finding detailed information about the massacres of aborigines that must have occurred must have been a very difficult task for Lyndall. There could easily have been many that even Lyndall wasn’t able to find. The only overt hint that I saw that they even occurred was the government legislation imposed to prevent killings of aboriginals by whites, because for the legislation to have been necessary the killings must have occurred. The bulk massacres of Tasmanian aboriginals must have occurred in order for the population to drop so precipitously. Nothing else, not alcohol, disease, plague, starvation, intertribal warfare or breakdown of the tribal system could account for such a sudden population drop.
mollwollfumble said:
> But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites.Thanks, I missed it. The contemporary newspapers only talk about massacres of whites by aboriginals in Tasmania, being completely silent about the reverse. Finding detailed information about the massacres of aborigines that must have occurred must have been a very difficult task for Lyndall. There could easily have been many that even Lyndall wasn’t able to find. The only overt hint that I saw that they even occurred was the government legislation imposed to prevent killings of aboriginals by whites, because for the legislation to have been necessary the killings must have occurred. The bulk massacres of Tasmanian aboriginals must have occurred in order for the population to drop so precipitously. Nothing else, not alcohol, disease, plague, starvation, intertribal warfare or breakdown of the tribal system could account for such a sudden population drop.
Lyndall’s research is meticulous. And what she found doing the book about Tasmania prompted an Australia wide effort, as the silence and cover up and making it the aboriginals fault was so incredibly pervasive.
The massacre site work only includes ones that can be backed up by written stuff, there is so much that she has been told of events handed down from the past that it would make the number of sites on the map huge. But she faced so much crap from her publication of the Tasmanian book that she resolved that everything on the site would be able to be verified.
I hope one day there will be a book on some of our history, the true version.
For me, what is told about the massacres is like what is in western movies, where every bullet kills cleanly and everyone dies instantly with little or no pain. That is not the reality of a gun fight, and the reality of the massacres would be horrific. I don;t want to imagine what the women went through.
Cymek said:
sarahs mum said:
Cymek said:The only thing I can think of is they are on a community order asked to travel interstate/overseas and were told permission not granted by community corrections, anything else would be quite strange and no ones business
I am thinking it is about work for the dole requirements.
I didn’t think of that, work for the dole is a load of nonsense, they are stricter on that than people on community work
When you have to perform more work for the dole hours than the standard hours across the country and you get an Indue card for it.
Witty Rejoinder said:
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:Test your own morality. I would have failed. Put yourself in this situation.
You live on a farm, and the dinner for everybody is due to be brought up by a quarter caste aboriginal teenager. The teenager arrives, and announces that she dumped everybody’s dinner on the Chinese cook. Burning the cook, obviously. What do you do?
No takers? What, are you all too frightened of being labelled racist?
What does miscrient household staff have to do with institutionalised racism?
Everything. Fully about 50% of complaints to the Aboriginal Welfare Board in NSW came from young aboriginal teenagers in household employment. Mostly because their employers stopped them from running off to get drunk and have sex in the local towns.
> You live on a farm, and the dinner for everybody is due to be brought up by a quarter caste aboriginal teenager. The teenager arrives, and announces that she dumped everybody’s dinner on the Chinese cook. Burning the cook, obviously. What do you do?
Well, if you either punished or berated the teenager then you are anti-aboriginal racist, I’m afraid.
What actually happened was that the whites whose dinner was spoiled had a good laugh, and then gathered together to help the cook.
The teenager involved, name of Pearl, went on to run the NSW government Aboriginal Welfare Board, becoming the NSW Government representative in charge of the welfare of all NSW Aborigines. She never stopped being violent, both physically and verbally, towards all non-aborigines.
I wouldn’t have let her babysit my cat.
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:
> But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites.Thanks, I missed it. The contemporary newspapers only talk about massacres of whites by aboriginals in Tasmania, being completely silent about the reverse. Finding detailed information about the massacres of aborigines that must have occurred must have been a very difficult task for Lyndall. There could easily have been many that even Lyndall wasn’t able to find. The only overt hint that I saw that they even occurred was the government legislation imposed to prevent killings of aboriginals by whites, because for the legislation to have been necessary the killings must have occurred. The bulk massacres of Tasmanian aboriginals must have occurred in order for the population to drop so precipitously. Nothing else, not alcohol, disease, plague, starvation, intertribal warfare or breakdown of the tribal system could account for such a sudden population drop.
Lyndall’s research is meticulous. And what she found doing the book about Tasmania prompted an Australia wide effort, as the silence and cover up and making it the aboriginals fault was so incredibly pervasive.
The massacre site work only includes ones that can be backed up by written stuff, there is so much that she has been told of events handed down from the past that it would make the number of sites on the map huge. But she faced so much crap from her publication of the Tasmanian book that she resolved that everything on the site would be able to be verified.
I hope one day there will be a book on some of our history, the true version.
For me, what is told about the massacres is like what is in western movies, where every bullet kills cleanly and everyone dies instantly with little or no pain. That is not the reality of a gun fight, and the reality of the massacres would be horrific. I don;t want to imagine what the women went through.
So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:
> But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites.Thanks, I missed it. The contemporary newspapers only talk about massacres of whites by aboriginals in Tasmania, being completely silent about the reverse. Finding detailed information about the massacres of aborigines that must have occurred must have been a very difficult task for Lyndall. There could easily have been many that even Lyndall wasn’t able to find. The only overt hint that I saw that they even occurred was the government legislation imposed to prevent killings of aboriginals by whites, because for the legislation to have been necessary the killings must have occurred. The bulk massacres of Tasmanian aboriginals must have occurred in order for the population to drop so precipitously. Nothing else, not alcohol, disease, plague, starvation, intertribal warfare or breakdown of the tribal system could account for such a sudden population drop.
Lyndall’s research is meticulous. And what she found doing the book about Tasmania prompted an Australia wide effort, as the silence and cover up and making it the aboriginals fault was so incredibly pervasive.
The massacre site work only includes ones that can be backed up by written stuff, there is so much that she has been told of events handed down from the past that it would make the number of sites on the map huge. But she faced so much crap from her publication of the Tasmanian book that she resolved that everything on the site would be able to be verified.
I hope one day there will be a book on some of our history, the true version.
For me, what is told about the massacres is like what is in western movies, where every bullet kills cleanly and everyone dies instantly with little or no pain. That is not the reality of a gun fight, and the reality of the massacres would be horrific. I don;t want to imagine what the women went through.
Sure, but tell me why?
Were there psychopathic whites out there killing?
Or was it the American style of massive overreaction to having your white relatives killed?
Or was it a humanist policy of protecting white settlers from attacks?
I suspect all three.
Michael V said:
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:
> But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites.Thanks, I missed it. The contemporary newspapers only talk about massacres of whites by aboriginals in Tasmania, being completely silent about the reverse. Finding detailed information about the massacres of aborigines that must have occurred must have been a very difficult task for Lyndall. There could easily have been many that even Lyndall wasn’t able to find. The only overt hint that I saw that they even occurred was the government legislation imposed to prevent killings of aboriginals by whites, because for the legislation to have been necessary the killings must have occurred. The bulk massacres of Tasmanian aboriginals must have occurred in order for the population to drop so precipitously. Nothing else, not alcohol, disease, plague, starvation, intertribal warfare or breakdown of the tribal system could account for such a sudden population drop.
Lyndall’s research is meticulous. And what she found doing the book about Tasmania prompted an Australia wide effort, as the silence and cover up and making it the aboriginals fault was so incredibly pervasive.
The massacre site work only includes ones that can be backed up by written stuff, there is so much that she has been told of events handed down from the past that it would make the number of sites on the map huge. But she faced so much crap from her publication of the Tasmanian book that she resolved that everything on the site would be able to be verified.
I hope one day there will be a book on some of our history, the true version.
For me, what is told about the massacres is like what is in western movies, where every bullet kills cleanly and everyone dies instantly with little or no pain. That is not the reality of a gun fight, and the reality of the massacres would be horrific. I don;t want to imagine what the women went through.
So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
Yes. And from these missions where they were taught good Christian ways, they were put to good useful work being the servants of the invaders. Unpaid. And very often abused. And cast out once they were no longer useful.
Michael V said:
So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
It’s NOT bullshit Moll.
mollwollfumble said:
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:
> But Moll, I have mentioned Lyndall’s work before, her book on Tasmanian aboriginals and her follow up work with the massacre sites.Thanks, I missed it. The contemporary newspapers only talk about massacres of whites by aboriginals in Tasmania, being completely silent about the reverse. Finding detailed information about the massacres of aborigines that must have occurred must have been a very difficult task for Lyndall. There could easily have been many that even Lyndall wasn’t able to find. The only overt hint that I saw that they even occurred was the government legislation imposed to prevent killings of aboriginals by whites, because for the legislation to have been necessary the killings must have occurred. The bulk massacres of Tasmanian aboriginals must have occurred in order for the population to drop so precipitously. Nothing else, not alcohol, disease, plague, starvation, intertribal warfare or breakdown of the tribal system could account for such a sudden population drop.
Lyndall’s research is meticulous. And what she found doing the book about Tasmania prompted an Australia wide effort, as the silence and cover up and making it the aboriginals fault was so incredibly pervasive.
The massacre site work only includes ones that can be backed up by written stuff, there is so much that she has been told of events handed down from the past that it would make the number of sites on the map huge. But she faced so much crap from her publication of the Tasmanian book that she resolved that everything on the site would be able to be verified.
I hope one day there will be a book on some of our history, the true version.
For me, what is told about the massacres is like what is in western movies, where every bullet kills cleanly and everyone dies instantly with little or no pain. That is not the reality of a gun fight, and the reality of the massacres would be horrific. I don;t want to imagine what the women went through.
Sure, but tell me why?
Were there psychopathic whites out there killing?
Or was it the American style of massive overreaction to having your white relatives killed?
Or was it a humanist policy of protecting white settlers from attacks?I suspect all three.
It is easy to kill when you make out a race is inferior or has deserved it in some way. You also feel so justified in then protecting your own.
The white settlers knew they were grabbing land from people who owned it. If you want to do more reading, get a hold of The Greatest Estate On Earth too. Many areas all around Australia looked like gentleman’s estates from back home, thanks to the way the original inhabitants managed the land. Imagine coming here and seeing how you could make it yours….free. And then imagine being dispossessed of what you had cared for and managed, and imagine watching it being used for a few people’s profit. Sydney Harbour, early days, when they caught tonnes of fish in one day, to the disgust of the inhabitants as they knew starvation would be ahead. Waterfowl being shot in their thousands from Melbourne waterways. Etc etc etc
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
History is written by the victors usually so it may have been whitewashed to make them see nicer than they were
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
Wrong about the missions.
Blackfellas from several nations were rounded up, put on cattle trucks and transported to Concentration Camps at Wilcannia, Bourke, Brewarrina, Walgett and Moree when there were good seasons, at least until the late 1920s. In Qld, at least until the mid 1950s.
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
It’s NOT bullshit Moll.
It is so common as to be predictable – every generation of aboriginal activists hates the previous generation of aboriginal activists. So they invent lies to discredit them.
It’s bullshit, Ruby, at least in NSW.
In other states it was different. I already know that Vic got it wrong. Badly wrong. Not wrong by putting aborigines in missions, wrong in keeping aborigines out of missions, who needed to be there. Take an example of a half-caste mother with a quarter-caste child. Because the child was only quarter-caste it wasn’t allowed to stay in an aboriginal mission, that was the law. That meant the mother couldn’t stay either. Wrong wrong wrong.
> The white settlers knew they were grabbing land from people who owned it.
Yes, they knew that. It was in all the newspapers.
But did that theft prompt the aboriginal massacres. No. Had nothing to do with them.
Cymek said:
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
History is written by the victors usually so it may have been whitewashed to make them see nicer than they were
That is what has motivated the massacre work by Lyndall and the people she works with on the project…….the amount of whitewashing is so extensive and pervasive. It is taking a hugs toll on the people working on it as they tease out the truth from so many sources. And this is not the whole truth. Imagine what has not been told, what people would not want to admit to.
The local facebook history page that puts up cute old photos of the area also has people giving their memories of the area. ‘Remember when you could fish a bucket of prawns from the lake in ten minutes’ type of stuff, how ‘Terrigal Lagoon used to be so deep the cedar cutters sailed up it and floated the logs down’…..one guy said an old fellah said that after the people died on the beaches of smallpox, the settlers rode around all the campsites and finished off whoever they could find. Recently someone put up a newspaper clipping of a Wyong farmer who proudly rode around with a shotgun on his saddle to shoot at the blacks.
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
It’s NOT bullshit Moll.
And the people being put on the Indue card are not all drinkers and druggies.
mollwollfumble said:
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
It’s NOT bullshit Moll.
It is so common as to be predictable – every generation of aboriginal activists hates the previous generation of aboriginal activists. So they invent lies to discredit them.
It’s bullshit, Ruby, at least in NSW.
In other states it was different. I already know that Vic got it wrong. Badly wrong. Not wrong by putting aborigines in missions, wrong in keeping aborigines out of missions, who needed to be there. Take an example of a half-caste mother with a quarter-caste child. Because the child was only quarter-caste it wasn’t allowed to stay in an aboriginal mission, that was the law. That meant the mother couldn’t stay either. Wrong wrong wrong.
Bloody hell Moll. NSW had heaps of missions. I read about them rounding them up and making a mission at Mosman. And then of course once land there was wanting, off you all go.
Cymek said:
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:So to stop all this dispute over land-stealing, the blackfellas were rounded up and put in concentration camps. The concentrations camps were give benign names. They were called “Missions”.
No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
History is written by the victors usually so it may have been whitewashed to make them see nicer than they were
I used to think so. Not true, though. The victors in the massacres didn’t write anything, they carefully hid everything they were doing.
It’s also the losers who write the histories, take the Bible for instance, it was the losers who wrote it.
sarahs mum said:
ruby said:
mollwollfumble said:No that’s bullshit. I’ve looked into this. The aboriginal people put in “Missions” were all, literally every one, was a person who had been rejected by their home tribe, was completely homeless, and starving.
Not a single aboriginal in NSW was ever put into a “mission” unless they were found starving. And every one of them was completely free to leave the “mission” at any time without giving a reason.
This differs from aboriginal “homes”. Those aboriginal people put into “homes” were all repeated victims of domestic violence, or young teens found living in houses of prostitution saved from child prostitution. They were not free to leave. A single incidence of domestic violence against an aborigine was never considered sufficient reason to move them to a home, it had to be repeated domestic violence. The saving of aborigines from child prostitution was a grey area, each case had to be examined in court on its own merits.
It’s NOT bullshit Moll.
And the people being put on the Indue card are not all drinkers and druggies.
Correct. But they probably have land that is needed for cattle or mining or something.
mollwollfumble said:
> The white settlers knew they were grabbing land from people who owned it.Yes, they knew that. It was in all the newspapers.
But did that theft prompt the aboriginal massacres. No. Had nothing to do with them.
Many massacres were responses to Blackfellas killing cattle or sheep. Big slow animals put on the land for food.
Michael V said:
mollwollfumble said:
> The white settlers knew they were grabbing land from people who owned it.Yes, they knew that. It was in all the newspapers.
But did that theft prompt the aboriginal massacres. No. Had nothing to do with them.
Many massacres were responses to Blackfellas killing cattle or sheep. Big slow animals put on the land for food.
The massacres were definitely illegal by the letter of the law, but the first few trials the jury always refused to convict, knowing that they might be sending a white man to hang for killing a black. A marked failure of the jury system in dispensing justice. These cases stopped even being resented to court knowing that a conviction would be impossible.
ruby said:
Bloody hell Moll. NSW had heaps of missions. I read about them rounding them up and making a mission at Mosman. And then of course once land there was wanting, off you all go.
Yes. NSW had nearly a thousand aborigines who were found starving and rejected by their tribes. So lots of missions.
Mosman mission – don’t know that one. What was it called?
As for “off you all go” – extremely common, but nothing to do with missions and everything to do with hygiene. The NSW government was always getting petitions from white townspeople who couldn’t stand the foetid stench from nearby aboriginal slums. These slums were not missions. In about 50% of cases the government moved the aborigines on, and about 50% of cases they told the white townspeople to go fuck themselves, or words to that effect.
There was quite a furore about the stench from a large aboriginal slum outside Wollongong. After a long battle with the government, the townspeople lost – the aboriginals were all allowed to stay.
Going by human history and current human activity, native populations are a nuisance to the invaders and wiping them out or exploiting them are the methods usually used, rarely would their rights be considered from the start.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
I just thought that should probably be in this thread.
Also, on European killings of Aboriginal people, Jan Critchett’s book “A Distant Field of Murder” has an appendix with a list for this area. It includes what source material was used. There is also an appendix of whites killed by Aborigines.
I’m trying to find the reference to something I have in the back of my mind. In Victoria, there were missions here in the West – Lake Condah and Framlingham and over in the East at Lake Tyers. I’m sure in my reading I read that people who got “difficult” in the West would be sent over to Lake Tyers and Lake Tyers “difficult” people were sent over here to the West. This was an effective “divide and conquer” strategy as moving through other peoples land uninvited was poor manners. Which is a mild way to put it.
https://aiatsis.gov.au/research/finding-your-family/family-history-sources/mission-and-reserve-records
You can chase mission records through aiatsis.
It’s a huge resource.
Worth reading-
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-17/curious-central-west-how-the-wiradjuri-survived-first-contact/10128822
I have just read the entire content of this thread and I can barely contain myself over the most stupid comments possible made by mollwollfumble. Where does he get this so called correct analysis of the Aboriginal situation? You might just as well ask the far right to give their evaluation of the far left…………it is imbecilic! I shall not get into any direct communication with this most ignorant of individuals that defies efforts of further description.
From past run-ins I often wondered due to his ridiculous comments that he was taking the piss out of me, but going on his response to others in this thread, it was obviously not the case. I have also wondered in light of his claimed qualifications, if he was autistic, or suffering from dementia, but am now beginning to think that he is just stupid.
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
PermeateFree said:
I have just read the entire content of this thread and I can barely contain myself over the most stupid comments possible made by mollwollfumble. Where does he get this so called correct analysis of the Aboriginal situation? You might just as well ask the far right to give their evaluation of the far left…………it is imbecilic! I shall not get into any direct communication with this most ignorant of individuals that defies efforts of further description.From past run-ins I often wondered due to his ridiculous comments that he was taking the piss out of me, but going on his response to others in this thread, it was obviously not the case. I have also wondered in light of his claimed qualifications, if he was autistic, or suffering from dementia, but am now beginning to think that he is just stupid.
um. I think I am agreeing with a lot of that.
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
You often hear the conversation in Tasmania about what a difference there might have been if it were the French that had settled Tasmania. The French explorers at Recerche Bay got on well with the natives. They even stripped down and danced naked with them on one occasion.
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
I’ve read a lot of explorer journals but never heard of them doing that.
Peak Warming Man said:
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
I’ve read a lot of explorer journals but never heard of them doing that.
Stanley was a bit of an arse but he stood out for that amongst the others as an exception.
AwesomeO said:
Peak Warming Man said:
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
I’ve read a lot of explorer journals but never heard of them doing that.
Stanley was a bit of an arse but he stood out for that amongst the others as an exception.
I am making an assumption and perhaps the first explorers were just excited to be in a new land and didn’t do anything untoward and it was a few generations later things got less pleasant.
Peak Warming Man said:
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
I’ve read a lot of explorer journals but never heard of them doing that.
I hadn’t either, until today, when I read of Cook’s arrival in Tahiti. OK, it was only a canoe-load of them, and the rest of them seemed to be friendly after that. But still, hitting a canoe with so much grapeshot that it was cut in two, sinking, does not seem like a moral first move.
mollwollfumble said:
Peak Warming Man said:
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
I’ve read a lot of explorer journals but never heard of them doing that.
I hadn’t either, until today, when I read of Cook’s arrival in Tahiti. OK, it was only a canoe-load of them, and the rest of them seemed to be friendly after that. But still, hitting a canoe with so much grapeshot that it was cut in two, sinking, does not seem like a moral first move.
Cook by flitting around the southernmost seas incited all sorts of civil wars in his wake.
As Andrew Bolt attempts to start a culture war over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, a search of primary documents affirms the book’s accuracy. By Rick Morton.
Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars
There is one particular question Andrew Bolt does not wish to answer.
In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling history of Aboriginal Australia, Dark Emu. Each time, he evaded the question.
It is useful, then, to start an examination of his attacks on the author with this in mind.
A more inconvenient truth is that Bolt’s dislike of Pascoe began at least two years before the publication of the book, which has now become the focus of a minor culture war led by Bolt and others.
Bolt’s efforts to “fact-check” Pascoe’s book are based largely around a website called Dark Emu Exposed.
The site’s contributors cast doubt on Pascoe’s account of an Indigenous history different from the one allowed by colonial interpretation. They also doubt his Aboriginal heritage.
As one prominent Indigenous leader tells The Saturday Paper, on the condition of anonymity, the argument against Pascoe’s work is an extension of “19th-century race theory”, which once espoused the view that race is the major indicator of a person’s character and behaviour.
“Any suggestion that Aborigines are anything other than furtive rock apes has to be destroyed by these people,” the leader says.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”
Pascoe’s book is based on close reading of the original journals of Australia’s explorers. In these journals, he has found new evidence of Indigenous agriculture and development. As the Indigenous leader notes: “He’s gone to the records and said, ‘Hang on, what does this really mean?’ While some historians with their PhDs have gone to the same original documents and came to the conclusion that we were all backward.”
In Dark Emu, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, Pascoe mounts a convincing argument that Aboriginal people actively managed and cultivated the landscape, harvested seeds for milling into cakes at an astonishing scale, took part in complex aquaculture and built “towns” of up to 1000 people.
That word, by the way – “town” – is not Pascoe’s. That is how one such settlement was referred to by a man in the exploration party of Thomas Mitchell in the mid-1800s.
What some have found so astonishing about Pascoe’s claimed developments is not that they happened – they are right there in Charles Sturt’s and Mitchell’s journals, among many others – but that we, as a nation, could have been so ignorant to their existence.
As Pascoe wrote last year in Meanjin: “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years.
“Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it.”
It is Pascoe’s attempt to shout down this conspiracy of silence that has primed the culture war machine. But why should a successful race of First Nations peoples be such a threat to modern Australians?
The most compelling answer to this question is that it removes a psychological shunt in the mind of European settlers and their descendants that this occupation, this invasion of land unceded, was to save Indigenous people from themselves, to bring civilisation to them.
Of course, it is uncomfortable to later ask: What if this race of First Australians were civilised all along? Maybe we were the barbarians?
Pascoe achieves this questioning with a somewhat controversial manoeuvre. He takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, and applies them, through the primary evidence, to Indigenous Australians.
Asked why he is offended by Pascoe’s assertion of complex farming and settlements built by First Nations peoples, Bolt said he is not.
“So, to answer your insult: I am not ‘offended’ by the thought of Aborigines being ‘well-adapted’ or ‘sophisticated’. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty,” he said in a lengthy correspondence with The Saturday Paper.
“I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods … If I’m ‘offended’ by anything it is frauds.
“Or let me put this in the same sneering (again) tone that you used: What is it about Aborigines being hunter-gatherers that so offends you? Where is the shame in how so many Aborigines lived, which makes you feel compelled to imagine them instead as just like good old white farmers – only black? Isn’t this refusal to accept the truth a little, er, racist?”
Bolt has purported to catch Pascoe in the act of faking his Aboriginal identity, as if to cast doubt on the book itself through the use of a skin-tone chart. But Pascoe has long grappled with the necessarily murky past of his own identity. This murkiness speaks to how such relationships on this continent progressed for so long – disguised by violence, shame, lost records and stolen children.
In 2012, Pascoe wrote a response to a column in which Bolt alleged that Pascoe “decided” to be black. This followed a 2011 Federal Court of Australia ruling that found Bolt racially vilified other “light-skinned” Aboriginal people under section 18 of the Race Discrimination Act.
“I can see Bolt’s point, and the frustration of many Australians when pale people identify with an Aboriginal heritage,” Pascoe wrote in the Griffith Review at the time.
“The people he attacked for this crime, however, had an unfortunate thing in common: their credentials were impeccable. Any good reporter could pick up the phone and talk to their mothers about their Aboriginality until the chooks go to roost.
“If I had been part of the group who took Bolt to court for impugning their heritage, he would have had a field day.”
Pascoe tells of the struggle to find his Aboriginal ancestor, which was sketched by family members not so much through what they said but through what they didn’t say. It was an absence that provided clues. But is this so extraordinary? As Pascoe says, the circumstance “mirrors the turbulence of postcolonial Australia and explains why so many Australian families have a black connection”.
The senior Indigenous leader who spoke to The Saturday Paper excoriated those who pressed this line of attack.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if this person’s family was dispersed during the frontier wars? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”
The agitation surrounding Dark Emu, renewed by the announcement of an ABC documentary, has quickly driven a stake through the recently formed advisory group on the co-design for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The group is chaired by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, a defender of Pascoe’s, and counts Chris Kenny as a member.
Last week, Ken Wyatt, who established the group as minister for Indigenous Australians, backed Pascoe against the conservative onslaught and noted that Australians tend to “question if you are Indigenous”.
“If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous,” Wyatt told Kenny on Sky News.
This week, Wyatt told ABC’s Radio National that his office has been receiving calls where staff have been threatened and called “cunts” because he dared defend Pascoe.
“I’ve had one of my staff resign because she can’t cope with being abused over the issue,” he said.
Another of the co-design group’s members, Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman, has publicly questioned Pascoe’s ancestry. On Twitter, she stated that her former partner is a Yuin man who says he has never heard of Pascoe. Other Yuin people responded on Twitter, cautioning Cashman for relying on a single man’s testimony.
A week ago, Kenny wrote in The Australian: “Many claims in Dark Emu have been debunked by forensic reference to primary sources.”
But this week The Saturday Paper spent two days at the National Library of Australia reviewing the original documents and explorer accounts in question. They are – at every instance – quoted verbatim and cited accordingly in an extensive bibliography at the end of Pascoe’s book.
Bolt alleges: “They even overlooked the fact that his big hit – Dark Emu – included incredible misquotations of its sources.
“How else could Pascoe have argued that the historians had been wrong. Aborigines had not been hunter-gatherers but sophisticated farmers, living in ‘towns’ of up to 1000 people, in ‘houses’ with ‘pens’ for animals. (Koalas, perhaps?)”
It would take many thousands of words to address all of Bolt’s claims, but it is useful to highlight a few of them. The Saturday Paper put these claims to Bolt.
For example, he says that Pascoe tells the story of Sturt stumbling onto a town of 1000 people on the edge of the Cooper Creek. Dark Emu does not claim this; it instead quotes Sturt correctly on this front, when his party is taken in by “3 or 400 natives” in the area. Bolt says he was referring to a speech Pascoe made where he said there were 1000 people in the town.
Thomas Mitchell also noted a town of 1000 people in his journals, and the quote is attributed to Mitchell in Dark Emu at the bottom of page 15.
Bolt, when he does reference Mitchell, gets the date of that quotation wrong, too. He says it is from Mitchell’s 1848 journal when, in fact, the quote is from his 1839 journal. This, too, is recorded faithfully in Dark Emu.
Bolt has twice scoffed at the idea of animal yards being found by these explorers.
But Dark Emu records the firsthand account of David Lindsay on his 1883 survey of Arnhem Land, where he says he “came on the site of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive … This camp must have contained quite 500 natives.”
In reply, Bolt says: “Maybe they were animal pens, who knows?
“Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?”
Again, Bolt says he is not so much quoting from Pascoe’s book as from his lectures, of which the author has done hundreds since Dark Emu’s 2014 release.
However, Bolt frequently conflates the two.
While Bolt mocks Pascoe for speaking at a lecture about a well that was made by Indigenous people and was “70 feet deep”, there are, in fact, a litany of accounts of incredibly sophisticated wells in the journals. Of one, Sturt writes: “… we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.”
In his rebuttal, the Herald Sun columnist has been forced to accept there were incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed-milling operations, and that Aboriginal people really did give cake and honey and roast ducks to Sturt and his party. The debate has now been reduced to minutiae – questioning how many mills were going and the different depth of various wells.
Bolt responds: “Trust you to attempt to make this about me and not his incredible claims.”
But Pascoe is not alone in his assessments.
Writing in Inside Story this week, Australian National University professor of history Tom Griffiths lauded the book and its addition to a long trajectory of scholarly work.
“My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now,” he says.
“It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university 50 years ago.”
Edie Wright, the chair of Magabala Books, which published Dark Emu, told The Saturday Paper: “We unequivocally support our outstanding author Bruce Pascoe, and celebrate the contribution that Dark Emu has made to bringing a fuller understanding of our history to so many Australians of all ages.”
On Wednesday, Marcia Langton replied to Josephine Cashman on Twitter. The two were previously close.
“The critique of Dark Emu is a job for actual historians not Andrew Bolt & others who benefit financially from tearing apart the lives of people looking for family,” she said.
Looking for family has taken on a mournful quality this week, as Pascoe’s kin went to libraries around the country to find the name of their Aboriginal ancestor. But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of a people has been destroyed to protect the last excuse for colonisation?
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/media/2019/11/30/bolt-pascoe-and-the-culture-wars/15750324009163
Damn, I wrote a reply to this but I got an error when I posted it. I need to go to work, but thanks sm, this article explains a lot.
ruby said:
Damn, I wrote a reply to this but I got an error when I posted it. I need to go to work, but thanks sm, this article explains a lot.
Use the back button in your browser. Your unposted comment should still be there.
sarahs mum said:
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
You often hear the conversation in Tasmania about what a difference there might have been if it were the French that had settled Tasmania. The French explorers at Recerche Bay got on well with the natives. They even stripped down and danced naked with them on one occasion.
The history of French and other colonies elsewhere suggests that events would have been much the same no matter where the colonisers came from.
The Rev Dodgson said:
sarahs mum said:
Cymek said:
It also makes you wonder if the various explorers who discovered various lands are worthy of the adulation they receive if they got somewhere and immediately decided to start killing off the natives
You often hear the conversation in Tasmania about what a difference there might have been if it were the French that had settled Tasmania. The French explorers at Recerche Bay got on well with the natives. They even stripped down and danced naked with them on one occasion.
The history of French and other colonies elsewhere suggests that events would have been much the same no matter where the colonisers came from.
Very possibly. But still when the English first turned up the native population might have expected them to be like the French who they had been on good terms with.
sarahs mum said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
sarahs mum said:You often hear the conversation in Tasmania about what a difference there might have been if it were the French that had settled Tasmania. The French explorers at Recerche Bay got on well with the natives. They even stripped down and danced naked with them on one occasion.
The history of French and other colonies elsewhere suggests that events would have been much the same no matter where the colonisers came from.
Very possibly. But still when the English first turned up the native population might have expected them to be like the French who they had been on good terms with.
> You often hear the conversation in Tasmania about what a difference there might have been if it were the French that had settled Tasmania. The French explorers at Recerche Bay got on well with the natives. They even stripped down and danced naked with them on one occasion.
It’s true. I just read that today in Chronicles of Australia.
There was an even earlier instance where a British person had to strip off in order for the group to be accepted by the natives. Phillip’s group at Port Jackson perhaps. Only one of the British stripped in that instance.
sarahs mum said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
sarahs mum said:You often hear the conversation in Tasmania about what a difference there might have been if it were the French that had settled Tasmania. The French explorers at Recerche Bay got on well with the natives. They even stripped down and danced naked with them on one occasion.
The history of French and other colonies elsewhere suggests that events would have been much the same no matter where the colonisers came from.
Very possibly. But still when the English first turned up the native population might have expected them to be like the French who they had been on good terms with.
They might have expected the British to soon leave and not out-stay their welcome. I wonder if the French introduced any diseases in their short stay.
Witty Rejoinder said:
sarahs mum said:
The Rev Dodgson said:The history of French and other colonies elsewhere suggests that events would have been much the same no matter where the colonisers came from.
Very possibly. But still when the English first turned up the native population might have expected them to be like the French who they had been on good terms with.
They might have expected the British to soon leave and not out-stay their welcome. I wonder if the French introduced any diseases in their short stay.
Yeah, that possibility was floated by Chronicles of Australia. Shortly after the First Fleet arrived, a lot of nearby aborigines were discovered to have died of smallpox, but no-one on the First Fleet had smallpox. So one possibility floated was that the disease had arrived earlier.
sarahs mum said:
As Andrew Bolt attempts to start a culture war over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, a search of primary documents affirms the book’s accuracy. By Rick Morton.Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars
There is one particular question Andrew Bolt does not wish to answer.
In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling history of Aboriginal Australia, Dark Emu. Each time, he evaded the question.
It is useful, then, to start an examination of his attacks on the author with this in mind.
A more inconvenient truth is that Bolt’s dislike of Pascoe began at least two years before the publication of the book, which has now become the focus of a minor culture war led by Bolt and others.
Bolt’s efforts to “fact-check” Pascoe’s book are based largely around a website called Dark Emu Exposed.
The site’s contributors cast doubt on Pascoe’s account of an Indigenous history different from the one allowed by colonial interpretation. They also doubt his Aboriginal heritage.
As one prominent Indigenous leader tells The Saturday Paper, on the condition of anonymity, the argument against Pascoe’s work is an extension of “19th-century race theory”, which once espoused the view that race is the major indicator of a person’s character and behaviour.
“Any suggestion that Aborigines are anything other than furtive rock apes has to be destroyed by these people,” the leader says.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”Pascoe’s book is based on close reading of the original journals of Australia’s explorers. In these journals, he has found new evidence of Indigenous agriculture and development. As the Indigenous leader notes: “He’s gone to the records and said, ‘Hang on, what does this really mean?’ While some historians with their PhDs have gone to the same original documents and came to the conclusion that we were all backward.”
In Dark Emu, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, Pascoe mounts a convincing argument that Aboriginal people actively managed and cultivated the landscape, harvested seeds for milling into cakes at an astonishing scale, took part in complex aquaculture and built “towns” of up to 1000 people.
That word, by the way – “town” – is not Pascoe’s. That is how one such settlement was referred to by a man in the exploration party of Thomas Mitchell in the mid-1800s.
What some have found so astonishing about Pascoe’s claimed developments is not that they happened – they are right there in Charles Sturt’s and Mitchell’s journals, among many others – but that we, as a nation, could have been so ignorant to their existence.
As Pascoe wrote last year in Meanjin: “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years.
“Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it.”
It is Pascoe’s attempt to shout down this conspiracy of silence that has primed the culture war machine. But why should a successful race of First Nations peoples be such a threat to modern Australians?
The most compelling answer to this question is that it removes a psychological shunt in the mind of European settlers and their descendants that this occupation, this invasion of land unceded, was to save Indigenous people from themselves, to bring civilisation to them.
Of course, it is uncomfortable to later ask: What if this race of First Australians were civilised all along? Maybe we were the barbarians?
Pascoe achieves this questioning with a somewhat controversial manoeuvre. He takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, and applies them, through the primary evidence, to Indigenous Australians.
Asked why he is offended by Pascoe’s assertion of complex farming and settlements built by First Nations peoples, Bolt said he is not.
“So, to answer your insult: I am not ‘offended’ by the thought of Aborigines being ‘well-adapted’ or ‘sophisticated’. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty,” he said in a lengthy correspondence with The Saturday Paper.
“I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods … If I’m ‘offended’ by anything it is frauds.
“Or let me put this in the same sneering (again) tone that you used: What is it about Aborigines being hunter-gatherers that so offends you? Where is the shame in how so many Aborigines lived, which makes you feel compelled to imagine them instead as just like good old white farmers – only black? Isn’t this refusal to accept the truth a little, er, racist?”
Bolt has purported to catch Pascoe in the act of faking his Aboriginal identity, as if to cast doubt on the book itself through the use of a skin-tone chart. But Pascoe has long grappled with the necessarily murky past of his own identity. This murkiness speaks to how such relationships on this continent progressed for so long – disguised by violence, shame, lost records and stolen children.
In 2012, Pascoe wrote a response to a column in which Bolt alleged that Pascoe “decided” to be black. This followed a 2011 Federal Court of Australia ruling that found Bolt racially vilified other “light-skinned” Aboriginal people under section 18 of the Race Discrimination Act.
“I can see Bolt’s point, and the frustration of many Australians when pale people identify with an Aboriginal heritage,” Pascoe wrote in the Griffith Review at the time.
“The people he attacked for this crime, however, had an unfortunate thing in common: their credentials were impeccable. Any good reporter could pick up the phone and talk to their mothers about their Aboriginality until the chooks go to roost.
“If I had been part of the group who took Bolt to court for impugning their heritage, he would have had a field day.”
Pascoe tells of the struggle to find his Aboriginal ancestor, which was sketched by family members not so much through what they said but through what they didn’t say. It was an absence that provided clues. But is this so extraordinary? As Pascoe says, the circumstance “mirrors the turbulence of postcolonial Australia and explains why so many Australian families have a black connection”.
The senior Indigenous leader who spoke to The Saturday Paper excoriated those who pressed this line of attack.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if this person’s family was dispersed during the frontier wars? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”
The agitation surrounding Dark Emu, renewed by the announcement of an ABC documentary, has quickly driven a stake through the recently formed advisory group on the co-design for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The group is chaired by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, a defender of Pascoe’s, and counts Chris Kenny as a member.
Last week, Ken Wyatt, who established the group as minister for Indigenous Australians, backed Pascoe against the conservative onslaught and noted that Australians tend to “question if you are Indigenous”.
“If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous,” Wyatt told Kenny on Sky News.
This week, Wyatt told ABC’s Radio National that his office has been receiving calls where staff have been threatened and called “cunts” because he dared defend Pascoe.
“I’ve had one of my staff resign because she can’t cope with being abused over the issue,” he said.
Another of the co-design group’s members, Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman, has publicly questioned Pascoe’s ancestry. On Twitter, she stated that her former partner is a Yuin man who says he has never heard of Pascoe. Other Yuin people responded on Twitter, cautioning Cashman for relying on a single man’s testimony.
A week ago, Kenny wrote in The Australian: “Many claims in Dark Emu have been debunked by forensic reference to primary sources.”
But this week The Saturday Paper spent two days at the National Library of Australia reviewing the original documents and explorer accounts in question. They are – at every instance – quoted verbatim and cited accordingly in an extensive bibliography at the end of Pascoe’s book.
Bolt alleges: “They even overlooked the fact that his big hit – Dark Emu – included incredible misquotations of its sources.
“How else could Pascoe have argued that the historians had been wrong. Aborigines had not been hunter-gatherers but sophisticated farmers, living in ‘towns’ of up to 1000 people, in ‘houses’ with ‘pens’ for animals. (Koalas, perhaps?)”
It would take many thousands of words to address all of Bolt’s claims, but it is useful to highlight a few of them. The Saturday Paper put these claims to Bolt.
For example, he says that Pascoe tells the story of Sturt stumbling onto a town of 1000 people on the edge of the Cooper Creek. Dark Emu does not claim this; it instead quotes Sturt correctly on this front, when his party is taken in by “3 or 400 natives” in the area. Bolt says he was referring to a speech Pascoe made where he said there were 1000 people in the town.
Thomas Mitchell also noted a town of 1000 people in his journals, and the quote is attributed to Mitchell in Dark Emu at the bottom of page 15.
Bolt, when he does reference Mitchell, gets the date of that quotation wrong, too. He says it is from Mitchell’s 1848 journal when, in fact, the quote is from his 1839 journal. This, too, is recorded faithfully in Dark Emu.
Bolt has twice scoffed at the idea of animal yards being found by these explorers.
But Dark Emu records the firsthand account of David Lindsay on his 1883 survey of Arnhem Land, where he says he “came on the site of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive … This camp must have contained quite 500 natives.”
In reply, Bolt says: “Maybe they were animal pens, who knows?
“Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?”
Again, Bolt says he is not so much quoting from Pascoe’s book as from his lectures, of which the author has done hundreds since Dark Emu’s 2014 release.
However, Bolt frequently conflates the two.
While Bolt mocks Pascoe for speaking at a lecture about a well that was made by Indigenous people and was “70 feet deep”, there are, in fact, a litany of accounts of incredibly sophisticated wells in the journals. Of one, Sturt writes: “… we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.”
In his rebuttal, the Herald Sun columnist has been forced to accept there were incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed-milling operations, and that Aboriginal people really did give cake and honey and roast ducks to Sturt and his party. The debate has now been reduced to minutiae – questioning how many mills were going and the different depth of various wells.
Bolt responds: “Trust you to attempt to make this about me and not his incredible claims.”
But Pascoe is not alone in his assessments.
Writing in Inside Story this week, Australian National University professor of history Tom Griffiths lauded the book and its addition to a long trajectory of scholarly work.
“My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now,” he says.
“It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university 50 years ago.”
Edie Wright, the chair of Magabala Books, which published Dark Emu, told The Saturday Paper: “We unequivocally support our outstanding author Bruce Pascoe, and celebrate the contribution that Dark Emu has made to bringing a fuller understanding of our history to so many Australians of all ages.”
On Wednesday, Marcia Langton replied to Josephine Cashman on Twitter. The two were previously close.
“The critique of Dark Emu is a job for actual historians not Andrew Bolt & others who benefit financially from tearing apart the lives of people looking for family,” she said.
Looking for family has taken on a mournful quality this week, as Pascoe’s kin went to libraries around the country to find the name of their Aboriginal ancestor. But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of a people has been destroyed to protect the last excuse for colonisation?
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/media/2019/11/30/bolt-pascoe-and-the-culture-wars/15750324009163
Sm, you are moving into Aboriginal politics where activists dominate and usually have their own agendas and are currently laying the groundwork to achieve their bigger objectives. These villages of 1000 people, permanent occupation with substantial housing, plus extensive cultivation of the soil is highly distorted. Do you know why there is not a small army of experts denouncing this? It is because they need Aboriginal cooperation to do their research and to publicly contradict the Aboriginal agenda will likely result in that cooperation being withdrawn and with it, years of research down the drain.
>>What is novel about Pascoe’s work — and also surprisingly old-fashioned — is his explicit, analytical emphasis on the idea of agriculture. Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers and bakers, the world’s first; they accumulated surpluses and lived in villages; they gathered seeds and harvested crops. Pascoe is consciously using the proud words the invaders used about themselves, words that justified dispossession — farming, villages, crops — and here he finds them in colonial descriptions of the original inhabitants of Australia, who he is keen to show were not “mere hunter-gatherers.” This is meant to be provocative and it is. With these words Pascoe detonates a primary European rationale for the conquest of Australia. The myth of “nomadism” was blown away by an earlier generation of scholars, as was the idea of “terra nullius”; then terms such as “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturist” came to be seen as simplifying. But Pascoe wants to revive those categories triumphantly: Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers.
This argument really matters in the history of Australia. It mattered from the moment the newcomers arrived and it still matters today — witness the recent conservative attacks on Pascoe and the critique of his work by those behind the website “Dark Emu Exposed,” who, significantly, self-identify as “a collective of Quiet Australians.” Agriculture is at the front line of the ideological war about the British colonisation of Australia. As literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has argued, “agriculture in Australia is a religion — it is as much a religion as it is an industry.” That’s why Pascoe has taken it on, digging out mentions of Aboriginal hayricks and stooks, crops and villages from the journals and diaries of explorers and colonists, no less, the very “sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based,” as he puts it. Pascoe thus draws his evidence from the words of the legendary “firsts” in white history-making and shows how they saw more than we knew and sometimes more than they knew themselves.<<
Tom Griffiths
https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/
PermeateFree said:
sarahs mum said:As Andrew Bolt attempts to start a culture war over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, a search of primary documents affirms the book’s accuracy. By Rick Morton.Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars
There is one particular question Andrew Bolt does not wish to answer.
In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling history of Aboriginal Australia, Dark Emu. Each time, he evaded the question.
It is useful, then, to start an examination of his attacks on the author with this in mind.
A more inconvenient truth is that Bolt’s dislike of Pascoe began at least two years before the publication of the book, which has now become the focus of a minor culture war led by Bolt and others.
Bolt’s efforts to “fact-check” Pascoe’s book are based largely around a website called Dark Emu Exposed.
The site’s contributors cast doubt on Pascoe’s account of an Indigenous history different from the one allowed by colonial interpretation. They also doubt his Aboriginal heritage.
As one prominent Indigenous leader tells The Saturday Paper, on the condition of anonymity, the argument against Pascoe’s work is an extension of “19th-century race theory”, which once espoused the view that race is the major indicator of a person’s character and behaviour.
“Any suggestion that Aborigines are anything other than furtive rock apes has to be destroyed by these people,” the leader says.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”Pascoe’s book is based on close reading of the original journals of Australia’s explorers. In these journals, he has found new evidence of Indigenous agriculture and development. As the Indigenous leader notes: “He’s gone to the records and said, ‘Hang on, what does this really mean?’ While some historians with their PhDs have gone to the same original documents and came to the conclusion that we were all backward.”
In Dark Emu, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, Pascoe mounts a convincing argument that Aboriginal people actively managed and cultivated the landscape, harvested seeds for milling into cakes at an astonishing scale, took part in complex aquaculture and built “towns” of up to 1000 people.
That word, by the way – “town” – is not Pascoe’s. That is how one such settlement was referred to by a man in the exploration party of Thomas Mitchell in the mid-1800s.
What some have found so astonishing about Pascoe’s claimed developments is not that they happened – they are right there in Charles Sturt’s and Mitchell’s journals, among many others – but that we, as a nation, could have been so ignorant to their existence.
As Pascoe wrote last year in Meanjin: “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years.
“Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it.”
It is Pascoe’s attempt to shout down this conspiracy of silence that has primed the culture war machine. But why should a successful race of First Nations peoples be such a threat to modern Australians?
The most compelling answer to this question is that it removes a psychological shunt in the mind of European settlers and their descendants that this occupation, this invasion of land unceded, was to save Indigenous people from themselves, to bring civilisation to them.
Of course, it is uncomfortable to later ask: What if this race of First Australians were civilised all along? Maybe we were the barbarians?
Pascoe achieves this questioning with a somewhat controversial manoeuvre. He takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, and applies them, through the primary evidence, to Indigenous Australians.
Asked why he is offended by Pascoe’s assertion of complex farming and settlements built by First Nations peoples, Bolt said he is not.
“So, to answer your insult: I am not ‘offended’ by the thought of Aborigines being ‘well-adapted’ or ‘sophisticated’. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty,” he said in a lengthy correspondence with The Saturday Paper.
“I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods … If I’m ‘offended’ by anything it is frauds.
“Or let me put this in the same sneering (again) tone that you used: What is it about Aborigines being hunter-gatherers that so offends you? Where is the shame in how so many Aborigines lived, which makes you feel compelled to imagine them instead as just like good old white farmers – only black? Isn’t this refusal to accept the truth a little, er, racist?”
Bolt has purported to catch Pascoe in the act of faking his Aboriginal identity, as if to cast doubt on the book itself through the use of a skin-tone chart. But Pascoe has long grappled with the necessarily murky past of his own identity. This murkiness speaks to how such relationships on this continent progressed for so long – disguised by violence, shame, lost records and stolen children.
In 2012, Pascoe wrote a response to a column in which Bolt alleged that Pascoe “decided” to be black. This followed a 2011 Federal Court of Australia ruling that found Bolt racially vilified other “light-skinned” Aboriginal people under section 18 of the Race Discrimination Act.
“I can see Bolt’s point, and the frustration of many Australians when pale people identify with an Aboriginal heritage,” Pascoe wrote in the Griffith Review at the time.
“The people he attacked for this crime, however, had an unfortunate thing in common: their credentials were impeccable. Any good reporter could pick up the phone and talk to their mothers about their Aboriginality until the chooks go to roost.
“If I had been part of the group who took Bolt to court for impugning their heritage, he would have had a field day.”
Pascoe tells of the struggle to find his Aboriginal ancestor, which was sketched by family members not so much through what they said but through what they didn’t say. It was an absence that provided clues. But is this so extraordinary? As Pascoe says, the circumstance “mirrors the turbulence of postcolonial Australia and explains why so many Australian families have a black connection”.
The senior Indigenous leader who spoke to The Saturday Paper excoriated those who pressed this line of attack.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if this person’s family was dispersed during the frontier wars? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”
The agitation surrounding Dark Emu, renewed by the announcement of an ABC documentary, has quickly driven a stake through the recently formed advisory group on the co-design for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The group is chaired by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, a defender of Pascoe’s, and counts Chris Kenny as a member.
Last week, Ken Wyatt, who established the group as minister for Indigenous Australians, backed Pascoe against the conservative onslaught and noted that Australians tend to “question if you are Indigenous”.
“If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous,” Wyatt told Kenny on Sky News.
This week, Wyatt told ABC’s Radio National that his office has been receiving calls where staff have been threatened and called “cunts” because he dared defend Pascoe.
“I’ve had one of my staff resign because she can’t cope with being abused over the issue,” he said.
Another of the co-design group’s members, Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman, has publicly questioned Pascoe’s ancestry. On Twitter, she stated that her former partner is a Yuin man who says he has never heard of Pascoe. Other Yuin people responded on Twitter, cautioning Cashman for relying on a single man’s testimony.
A week ago, Kenny wrote in The Australian: “Many claims in Dark Emu have been debunked by forensic reference to primary sources.”
But this week The Saturday Paper spent two days at the National Library of Australia reviewing the original documents and explorer accounts in question. They are – at every instance – quoted verbatim and cited accordingly in an extensive bibliography at the end of Pascoe’s book.
Bolt alleges: “They even overlooked the fact that his big hit – Dark Emu – included incredible misquotations of its sources.
“How else could Pascoe have argued that the historians had been wrong. Aborigines had not been hunter-gatherers but sophisticated farmers, living in ‘towns’ of up to 1000 people, in ‘houses’ with ‘pens’ for animals. (Koalas, perhaps?)”
It would take many thousands of words to address all of Bolt’s claims, but it is useful to highlight a few of them. The Saturday Paper put these claims to Bolt.
For example, he says that Pascoe tells the story of Sturt stumbling onto a town of 1000 people on the edge of the Cooper Creek. Dark Emu does not claim this; it instead quotes Sturt correctly on this front, when his party is taken in by “3 or 400 natives” in the area. Bolt says he was referring to a speech Pascoe made where he said there were 1000 people in the town.
Thomas Mitchell also noted a town of 1000 people in his journals, and the quote is attributed to Mitchell in Dark Emu at the bottom of page 15.
Bolt, when he does reference Mitchell, gets the date of that quotation wrong, too. He says it is from Mitchell’s 1848 journal when, in fact, the quote is from his 1839 journal. This, too, is recorded faithfully in Dark Emu.
Bolt has twice scoffed at the idea of animal yards being found by these explorers.
But Dark Emu records the firsthand account of David Lindsay on his 1883 survey of Arnhem Land, where he says he “came on the site of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive … This camp must have contained quite 500 natives.”
In reply, Bolt says: “Maybe they were animal pens, who knows?
“Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?”
Again, Bolt says he is not so much quoting from Pascoe’s book as from his lectures, of which the author has done hundreds since Dark Emu’s 2014 release.
However, Bolt frequently conflates the two.
While Bolt mocks Pascoe for speaking at a lecture about a well that was made by Indigenous people and was “70 feet deep”, there are, in fact, a litany of accounts of incredibly sophisticated wells in the journals. Of one, Sturt writes: “… we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.”
In his rebuttal, the Herald Sun columnist has been forced to accept there were incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed-milling operations, and that Aboriginal people really did give cake and honey and roast ducks to Sturt and his party. The debate has now been reduced to minutiae – questioning how many mills were going and the different depth of various wells.
Bolt responds: “Trust you to attempt to make this about me and not his incredible claims.”
But Pascoe is not alone in his assessments.
Writing in Inside Story this week, Australian National University professor of history Tom Griffiths lauded the book and its addition to a long trajectory of scholarly work.
“My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now,” he says.
“It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university 50 years ago.”
Edie Wright, the chair of Magabala Books, which published Dark Emu, told The Saturday Paper: “We unequivocally support our outstanding author Bruce Pascoe, and celebrate the contribution that Dark Emu has made to bringing a fuller understanding of our history to so many Australians of all ages.”
On Wednesday, Marcia Langton replied to Josephine Cashman on Twitter. The two were previously close.
“The critique of Dark Emu is a job for actual historians not Andrew Bolt & others who benefit financially from tearing apart the lives of people looking for family,” she said.
Looking for family has taken on a mournful quality this week, as Pascoe’s kin went to libraries around the country to find the name of their Aboriginal ancestor. But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of a people has been destroyed to protect the last excuse for colonisation?
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/media/2019/11/30/bolt-pascoe-and-the-culture-wars/15750324009163
Sm, you are moving into Aboriginal politics where activists dominate and usually have their own agendas and are currently laying the groundwork to achieve their bigger objectives. These villages of 1000 people, permanent occupation with substantial housing, plus extensive cultivation of the soil is highly distorted. Do you know why there is not a small army of experts denouncing this? It is because they need Aboriginal cooperation to do their research and to publicly contradict the Aboriginal agenda will likely result in that cooperation being withdrawn and with it, years of research down the drain.
>>What is novel about Pascoe’s work — and also surprisingly old-fashioned — is his explicit, analytical emphasis on the idea of agriculture. Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers and bakers, the world’s first; they accumulated surpluses and lived in villages; they gathered seeds and harvested crops. Pascoe is consciously using the proud words the invaders used about themselves, words that justified dispossession — farming, villages, crops — and here he finds them in colonial descriptions of the original inhabitants of Australia, who he is keen to show were not “mere hunter-gatherers.” This is meant to be provocative and it is. With these words Pascoe detonates a primary European rationale for the conquest of Australia. The myth of “nomadism” was blown away by an earlier generation of scholars, as was the idea of “terra nullius”; then terms such as “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturist” came to be seen as simplifying. But Pascoe wants to revive those categories triumphantly: Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers.
This argument really matters in the history of Australia. It mattered from the moment the newcomers arrived and it still matters today — witness the recent conservative attacks on Pascoe and the critique of his work by those behind the website “Dark Emu Exposed,” who, significantly, self-identify as “a collective of Quiet Australians.” Agriculture is at the front line of the ideological war about the British colonisation of Australia. As literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has argued, “agriculture in Australia is a religion — it is as much a religion as it is an industry.” That’s why Pascoe has taken it on, digging out mentions of Aboriginal hayricks and stooks, crops and villages from the journals and diaries of explorers and colonists, no less, the very “sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based,” as he puts it. Pascoe thus draws his evidence from the words of the legendary “firsts” in white history-making and shows how they saw more than we knew and sometimes more than they knew themselves.<<
Tom Griffiths
https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/
To continue:
>>This revisionary work is, I think, vital. We don’t understand enough about how Aboriginal peoples used and honoured this land for millennia. In spite of half a century of eloquent activism and scholarship, most Australians still grossly underestimate the sophistication of Indigenous culture, technology and governance. The popular embrace of Pascoe’s work suggests that many are keen to learn.
And these early witness accounts of how Aboriginal peoples managed the land are precious and fascinating. They invite a subtle reading, a cultural history that is attentive to both sides of the frontier. When Thomas Mitchell or Charles Sturt identified “hayricks” and “stooks,” their imperial eyes were observing features that they did not expect to see in the land of the “savage” — and they were also using the language of their own English rural culture to evoke the landscape of home, which they missed and hoped one day to remake in this strange land. There is prejudice, surprise and nostalgia distilled in these words. They deserve our close attention and open-minded analysis.
I understand why Pascoe has deployed the template of agriculture. He is turning a political tool of oppression and disdain into a case for dignity and respect. Archaeologist Rhys Jones did the same thing in 1969 when he coined the term “fire-stick farming.” It was a brilliant provocation and remains a foundational insight. But I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems.
Pascoe often over-reads the sources — and for what purpose? To prove that Aboriginal peoples were like Europeans? Dark Emu is too much in thrall to a discredited evolutionary view of economic stages, a danger that Pascoe himself acknowledges in the book: “We have to be careful that we are not deciding on markers of civilisation simply because that is the historical path followed by Western civilisations.” Not only does this risk simplifying the surprising ingenuity and flexibility of Aboriginal economies; it also plays into the hands of conservative critics who are always ready to mobilise centuries of stereotypes about “Stone Age nomads.”<<
PermeateFree said:
PermeateFree said:
sarahs mum said:As Andrew Bolt attempts to start a culture war over Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, a search of primary documents affirms the book’s accuracy. By Rick Morton.Bolt, Pascoe and the culture wars
There is one particular question Andrew Bolt does not wish to answer.
In correspondence with The Saturday Paper, the News Corp columnist was asked three times whether he has read Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling history of Aboriginal Australia, Dark Emu. Each time, he evaded the question.
It is useful, then, to start an examination of his attacks on the author with this in mind.
A more inconvenient truth is that Bolt’s dislike of Pascoe began at least two years before the publication of the book, which has now become the focus of a minor culture war led by Bolt and others.
Bolt’s efforts to “fact-check” Pascoe’s book are based largely around a website called Dark Emu Exposed.
The site’s contributors cast doubt on Pascoe’s account of an Indigenous history different from the one allowed by colonial interpretation. They also doubt his Aboriginal heritage.
As one prominent Indigenous leader tells The Saturday Paper, on the condition of anonymity, the argument against Pascoe’s work is an extension of “19th-century race theory”, which once espoused the view that race is the major indicator of a person’s character and behaviour.
“Any suggestion that Aborigines are anything other than furtive rock apes has to be destroyed by these people,” the leader says.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”Pascoe’s book is based on close reading of the original journals of Australia’s explorers. In these journals, he has found new evidence of Indigenous agriculture and development. As the Indigenous leader notes: “He’s gone to the records and said, ‘Hang on, what does this really mean?’ While some historians with their PhDs have gone to the same original documents and came to the conclusion that we were all backward.”
In Dark Emu, which has sold more than 100,000 copies, Pascoe mounts a convincing argument that Aboriginal people actively managed and cultivated the landscape, harvested seeds for milling into cakes at an astonishing scale, took part in complex aquaculture and built “towns” of up to 1000 people.
That word, by the way – “town” – is not Pascoe’s. That is how one such settlement was referred to by a man in the exploration party of Thomas Mitchell in the mid-1800s.
What some have found so astonishing about Pascoe’s claimed developments is not that they happened – they are right there in Charles Sturt’s and Mitchell’s journals, among many others – but that we, as a nation, could have been so ignorant to their existence.
As Pascoe wrote last year in Meanjin: “Almost no Australians know anything about the Aboriginal civilisation because our educators, emboldened by historians, politicians and the clergy, have refused to mention it for 230 years.
“Think for a moment about the extent of that fraud. Imagine the excellence of the advocacy required to get our most intelligent people today to believe it.”
It is Pascoe’s attempt to shout down this conspiracy of silence that has primed the culture war machine. But why should a successful race of First Nations peoples be such a threat to modern Australians?
The most compelling answer to this question is that it removes a psychological shunt in the mind of European settlers and their descendants that this occupation, this invasion of land unceded, was to save Indigenous people from themselves, to bring civilisation to them.
Of course, it is uncomfortable to later ask: What if this race of First Australians were civilised all along? Maybe we were the barbarians?
Pascoe achieves this questioning with a somewhat controversial manoeuvre. He takes the European ideal of farming and architecture, and thoroughly white notions of success, and applies them, through the primary evidence, to Indigenous Australians.
Asked why he is offended by Pascoe’s assertion of complex farming and settlements built by First Nations peoples, Bolt said he is not.
“So, to answer your insult: I am not ‘offended’ by the thought of Aborigines being ‘well-adapted’ or ‘sophisticated’. How on earth would that be offensive to me? I in fact am determined to change policies and thinking that hold back so many Aboriginal communities that are now in poverty,” he said in a lengthy correspondence with The Saturday Paper.
“I am simply interested in the truth, and opposed to falsehoods … If I’m ‘offended’ by anything it is frauds.
“Or let me put this in the same sneering (again) tone that you used: What is it about Aborigines being hunter-gatherers that so offends you? Where is the shame in how so many Aborigines lived, which makes you feel compelled to imagine them instead as just like good old white farmers – only black? Isn’t this refusal to accept the truth a little, er, racist?”
Bolt has purported to catch Pascoe in the act of faking his Aboriginal identity, as if to cast doubt on the book itself through the use of a skin-tone chart. But Pascoe has long grappled with the necessarily murky past of his own identity. This murkiness speaks to how such relationships on this continent progressed for so long – disguised by violence, shame, lost records and stolen children.
In 2012, Pascoe wrote a response to a column in which Bolt alleged that Pascoe “decided” to be black. This followed a 2011 Federal Court of Australia ruling that found Bolt racially vilified other “light-skinned” Aboriginal people under section 18 of the Race Discrimination Act.
“I can see Bolt’s point, and the frustration of many Australians when pale people identify with an Aboriginal heritage,” Pascoe wrote in the Griffith Review at the time.
“The people he attacked for this crime, however, had an unfortunate thing in common: their credentials were impeccable. Any good reporter could pick up the phone and talk to their mothers about their Aboriginality until the chooks go to roost.
“If I had been part of the group who took Bolt to court for impugning their heritage, he would have had a field day.”
Pascoe tells of the struggle to find his Aboriginal ancestor, which was sketched by family members not so much through what they said but through what they didn’t say. It was an absence that provided clues. But is this so extraordinary? As Pascoe says, the circumstance “mirrors the turbulence of postcolonial Australia and explains why so many Australian families have a black connection”.
The senior Indigenous leader who spoke to The Saturday Paper excoriated those who pressed this line of attack.
“When they insist on this inquiry, do they wonder if this person had family members stolen from the missions? Do they wonder if this person’s family was dispersed during the frontier wars? Do they wonder if they were hiding truths because of a concerted effort to shame or humiliate Aboriginal ancestry?”
The agitation surrounding Dark Emu, renewed by the announcement of an ABC documentary, has quickly driven a stake through the recently formed advisory group on the co-design for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. The group is chaired by Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, a defender of Pascoe’s, and counts Chris Kenny as a member.
Last week, Ken Wyatt, who established the group as minister for Indigenous Australians, backed Pascoe against the conservative onslaught and noted that Australians tend to “question if you are Indigenous”.
“If Bruce tells me he’s Indigenous, then I know that he’s Indigenous,” Wyatt told Kenny on Sky News.
This week, Wyatt told ABC’s Radio National that his office has been receiving calls where staff have been threatened and called “cunts” because he dared defend Pascoe.
“I’ve had one of my staff resign because she can’t cope with being abused over the issue,” he said.
Another of the co-design group’s members, Indigenous lawyer Josephine Cashman, has publicly questioned Pascoe’s ancestry. On Twitter, she stated that her former partner is a Yuin man who says he has never heard of Pascoe. Other Yuin people responded on Twitter, cautioning Cashman for relying on a single man’s testimony.
A week ago, Kenny wrote in The Australian: “Many claims in Dark Emu have been debunked by forensic reference to primary sources.”
But this week The Saturday Paper spent two days at the National Library of Australia reviewing the original documents and explorer accounts in question. They are – at every instance – quoted verbatim and cited accordingly in an extensive bibliography at the end of Pascoe’s book.
Bolt alleges: “They even overlooked the fact that his big hit – Dark Emu – included incredible misquotations of its sources.
“How else could Pascoe have argued that the historians had been wrong. Aborigines had not been hunter-gatherers but sophisticated farmers, living in ‘towns’ of up to 1000 people, in ‘houses’ with ‘pens’ for animals. (Koalas, perhaps?)”
It would take many thousands of words to address all of Bolt’s claims, but it is useful to highlight a few of them. The Saturday Paper put these claims to Bolt.
For example, he says that Pascoe tells the story of Sturt stumbling onto a town of 1000 people on the edge of the Cooper Creek. Dark Emu does not claim this; it instead quotes Sturt correctly on this front, when his party is taken in by “3 or 400 natives” in the area. Bolt says he was referring to a speech Pascoe made where he said there were 1000 people in the town.
Thomas Mitchell also noted a town of 1000 people in his journals, and the quote is attributed to Mitchell in Dark Emu at the bottom of page 15.
Bolt, when he does reference Mitchell, gets the date of that quotation wrong, too. He says it is from Mitchell’s 1848 journal when, in fact, the quote is from his 1839 journal. This, too, is recorded faithfully in Dark Emu.
Bolt has twice scoffed at the idea of animal yards being found by these explorers.
But Dark Emu records the firsthand account of David Lindsay on his 1883 survey of Arnhem Land, where he says he “came on the site of a large native encampment, quite a quarter of a mile across. Framework of several large humpies, one having been 12ft high: small enclosures as if some small game had been yarded and kept alive … This camp must have contained quite 500 natives.”
In reply, Bolt says: “Maybe they were animal pens, who knows?
“Arnhem Land has, after all, more game than Cooper Creek that might at a stretch be kept in a pen, although it is difficult to imagine what animals might have been kept. Wallabies?”
Again, Bolt says he is not so much quoting from Pascoe’s book as from his lectures, of which the author has done hundreds since Dark Emu’s 2014 release.
However, Bolt frequently conflates the two.
While Bolt mocks Pascoe for speaking at a lecture about a well that was made by Indigenous people and was “70 feet deep”, there are, in fact, a litany of accounts of incredibly sophisticated wells in the journals. Of one, Sturt writes: “… we arrived at a native well of unusual dimensions. It was about eight feet wide at the top and 22ft deep, and it was a work that must have taken the joint strength of a powerful tribe to perform.”
In his rebuttal, the Herald Sun columnist has been forced to accept there were incredibly sophisticated settlements and seed-milling operations, and that Aboriginal people really did give cake and honey and roast ducks to Sturt and his party. The debate has now been reduced to minutiae – questioning how many mills were going and the different depth of various wells.
Bolt responds: “Trust you to attempt to make this about me and not his incredible claims.”
But Pascoe is not alone in his assessments.
Writing in Inside Story this week, Australian National University professor of history Tom Griffiths lauded the book and its addition to a long trajectory of scholarly work.
“My point is that the blindnesses and complacencies that Pascoe rails against are the same silences and lies that Australian historians have been collaboratively challenging for decades now,” he says.
“It’s a job that will never finish. Pascoe is primarily bridling at an older form of history, the history he learnt at school and university 50 years ago.”
Edie Wright, the chair of Magabala Books, which published Dark Emu, told The Saturday Paper: “We unequivocally support our outstanding author Bruce Pascoe, and celebrate the contribution that Dark Emu has made to bringing a fuller understanding of our history to so many Australians of all ages.”
On Wednesday, Marcia Langton replied to Josephine Cashman on Twitter. The two were previously close.
“The critique of Dark Emu is a job for actual historians not Andrew Bolt & others who benefit financially from tearing apart the lives of people looking for family,” she said.
Looking for family has taken on a mournful quality this week, as Pascoe’s kin went to libraries around the country to find the name of their Aboriginal ancestor. But how to proceed, one must ask, when so much of their story and the story of a people has been destroyed to protect the last excuse for colonisation?
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/media/2019/11/30/bolt-pascoe-and-the-culture-wars/15750324009163
Sm, you are moving into Aboriginal politics where activists dominate and usually have their own agendas and are currently laying the groundwork to achieve their bigger objectives. These villages of 1000 people, permanent occupation with substantial housing, plus extensive cultivation of the soil is highly distorted. Do you know why there is not a small army of experts denouncing this? It is because they need Aboriginal cooperation to do their research and to publicly contradict the Aboriginal agenda will likely result in that cooperation being withdrawn and with it, years of research down the drain.
>>What is novel about Pascoe’s work — and also surprisingly old-fashioned — is his explicit, analytical emphasis on the idea of agriculture. Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers and bakers, the world’s first; they accumulated surpluses and lived in villages; they gathered seeds and harvested crops. Pascoe is consciously using the proud words the invaders used about themselves, words that justified dispossession — farming, villages, crops — and here he finds them in colonial descriptions of the original inhabitants of Australia, who he is keen to show were not “mere hunter-gatherers.” This is meant to be provocative and it is. With these words Pascoe detonates a primary European rationale for the conquest of Australia. The myth of “nomadism” was blown away by an earlier generation of scholars, as was the idea of “terra nullius”; then terms such as “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturist” came to be seen as simplifying. But Pascoe wants to revive those categories triumphantly: Aboriginal peoples, he argues, were farmers.
This argument really matters in the history of Australia. It mattered from the moment the newcomers arrived and it still matters today — witness the recent conservative attacks on Pascoe and the critique of his work by those behind the website “Dark Emu Exposed,” who, significantly, self-identify as “a collective of Quiet Australians.” Agriculture is at the front line of the ideological war about the British colonisation of Australia. As literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has argued, “agriculture in Australia is a religion — it is as much a religion as it is an industry.” That’s why Pascoe has taken it on, digging out mentions of Aboriginal hayricks and stooks, crops and villages from the journals and diaries of explorers and colonists, no less, the very “sources upon which Australia’s idea of history is based,” as he puts it. Pascoe thus draws his evidence from the words of the legendary “firsts” in white history-making and shows how they saw more than we knew and sometimes more than they knew themselves.<<
Tom Griffiths
https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/
To continue:
>>This revisionary work is, I think, vital. We don’t understand enough about how Aboriginal peoples used and honoured this land for millennia. In spite of half a century of eloquent activism and scholarship, most Australians still grossly underestimate the sophistication of Indigenous culture, technology and governance. The popular embrace of Pascoe’s work suggests that many are keen to learn.
And these early witness accounts of how Aboriginal peoples managed the land are precious and fascinating. They invite a subtle reading, a cultural history that is attentive to both sides of the frontier. When Thomas Mitchell or Charles Sturt identified “hayricks” and “stooks,” their imperial eyes were observing features that they did not expect to see in the land of the “savage” — and they were also using the language of their own English rural culture to evoke the landscape of home, which they missed and hoped one day to remake in this strange land. There is prejudice, surprise and nostalgia distilled in these words. They deserve our close attention and open-minded analysis.
I understand why Pascoe has deployed the template of agriculture. He is turning a political tool of oppression and disdain into a case for dignity and respect. Archaeologist Rhys Jones did the same thing in 1969 when he coined the term “fire-stick farming.” It was a brilliant provocation and remains a foundational insight. But I think it’s a mistake to treat the concept of agriculture as a timeless, stable, universal and preordained template, to apply a European hierarchical metaphor, an imperial measure of civilisation, to societies that defy imported classifications. One of the great insights delivered by that half-century of scholarship is that Aboriginal societies produced a civilisation quite unlike any other, one uniquely adapted to Australian elements and ecosystems.
Pascoe often over-reads the sources — and for what purpose? To prove that Aboriginal peoples were like Europeans? Dark Emu is too much in thrall to a discredited evolutionary view of economic stages, a danger that Pascoe himself acknowledges in the book: “We have to be careful that we are not deciding on markers of civilisation simply because that is the historical path followed by Western civilisations.” Not only does this risk simplifying the surprising ingenuity and flexibility of Aboriginal economies; it also plays into the hands of conservative critics who are always ready to mobilise centuries of stereotypes about “Stone Age nomads.”<<
>>Two scholars are especially acknowledged by Pascoe in making his argument about agriculture. One is Rupert Gerritsen, whose book Australia and the Origins of Agriculture was published in 2008, and the other is Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia, a bestselling history of Aboriginal land management published in 2011. Gerritsen’s work, richly referenced, reminds us how long the debate about foragers or farmers has been going on in the scholarly literature, and he often draws on the same evidence as Pascoe (as Bruce acknowledges). Gammage’s book won wide acclaim and a popular readership but also drew criticism, especially from ecologists and archaeologists.
Pascoe and Gammage are often cited as making a similar argument, and they do both tend to homogenise the diversity of Aboriginal societies, ecologies and histories in their quest for a national saga. But their books are distinct in important and interesting ways. For example, Gammage argues that Aboriginal peoples “farmed in 1788, but were not farmers. These are not the same: one is an activity, the other a lifestyle.” He persists with careful distinctions: “Many people did live in villages, but most only when harvesting”; “they did not stay in their houses or by their crops”; “they lived comfortably where white Australians cannot.” Different Aboriginal societies used a range of practices throughout Australia, cultivating a wide variety of ecologies. And when Europeans brought their version of agriculture to Australian shores, it often didn’t work — and it’s in retreat in many regions today. The Indigenous alternative — in all its many forms — was grounded in a knowledge of Country. A strong dimension of Dark Emu’s popular appeal is the practical inspiration it offers for caring for the land and cultivating native perennial plants; Pascoe has himself invested in the bush foods industry.<<
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:
mollwollfumble said:Agree,
I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
That statement is complete and utter twaddle, Moll. Aboriginal people in NSW were hunted, rounded up, placed on the back of cattle trucks to be taken off country and finally placed in concentration camps usually with people from other mobs. (Some of the mobs had already been in dispute over various things, leading to significant conflict within the concentration camps).
Those concentration camps placed severe restrictions on movement and friendships of individuals. The superintendents in charge of the concentration camps had almost 100% power over the treatment of those people interred. Severe food rationing, violent “discipline” and unpaid servitude were the preferred methods of most superintendents to enforce restrictions.
As for the Aborigines Protection Board being stacked with activists, I think you’ll find that 2 positions (a minority) on the board were set aside for Aboriginal “appointees”.
Michael V said:
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:I’m increasingly despondent about our treatment of aborigines.
You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
That statement is complete and utter twaddle, Moll. Aboriginal people in NSW were hunted, rounded up, placed on the back of cattle trucks to be taken off country and finally placed in concentration camps usually with people from other mobs. (Some of the mobs had already been in dispute over various things, leading to significant conflict within the concentration camps).
Those concentration camps placed severe restrictions on movement and friendships of individuals. The superintendents in charge of the concentration camps had almost 100% power over the treatment of those people interred. Severe food rationing, violent “discipline” and unpaid servitude were the preferred methods of most superintendents to enforce restrictions.
As for the Aborigines Protection Board being stacked with activists, I think you’ll find that 2 positions (a minority) on the board were set aside for Aboriginal “appointees”.
Of course a minority. The most important position on the Aboriginal Protection Board in NSW was the Board of Works, responsible for constructing free aboriginal housing. The rest of the positions were filled with pro-aboriginal whites. Take the Aboriginal Welfare Board of 1940 in NSW. Two of the positions were filled by a surveyor called Evans who had already written long detailed articles about the deplorable conditions of the blacks throughout NSW, and by a white whose pro-aboriginal activism had kick-started the aboriginal activist movement in NSW in the first place. That in addition to the aboriginal leader of the aboriginal activists, another top member of the aboriginal activists, and a full-black to represent full-black interests. Three aborigines and two white aboriginal activists. 5 was still a minority on the board, but the members of the board acted independently, with each person on it having a different assigned role.
I’m reading “Chronicles of Australia”, some real gems here. eg.
Hobart is on the Derwent, and when sailing on the Derwent it is advisable to keep to the edges of the bay to avoid hitting whales.
Tasmania’s worst bushranger was Michael Howe. He was known to torture victims before killing them. When he died, his diary was found – written on kangaroo hide in blood. You’ll never guess what he wrote in his diary – the names of the English flowers that he wanted to plant in his garden.,
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:
mollwollfumble said:You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
That statement is complete and utter twaddle, Moll. Aboriginal people in NSW were hunted, rounded up, placed on the back of cattle trucks to be taken off country and finally placed in concentration camps usually with people from other mobs. (Some of the mobs had already been in dispute over various things, leading to significant conflict within the concentration camps).
Those concentration camps placed severe restrictions on movement and friendships of individuals. The superintendents in charge of the concentration camps had almost 100% power over the treatment of those people interred. Severe food rationing, violent “discipline” and unpaid servitude were the preferred methods of most superintendents to enforce restrictions.
As for the Aborigines Protection Board being stacked with activists, I think you’ll find that 2 positions (a minority) on the board were set aside for Aboriginal “appointees”.
Of course a minority. The most important position on the Aboriginal Protection Board in NSW was the Board of Works, responsible for constructing free aboriginal housing. The rest of the positions were filled with pro-aboriginal whites. Take the Aboriginal Welfare Board of 1940 in NSW. Two of the positions were filled by a surveyor called Evans who had already written long detailed articles about the deplorable conditions of the blacks throughout NSW, and by a white whose pro-aboriginal activism had kick-started the aboriginal activist movement in NSW in the first place. That in addition to the aboriginal leader of the aboriginal activists, another top member of the aboriginal activists, and a full-black to represent full-black interests. Three aborigines and two white aboriginal activists. 5 was still a minority on the board, but the members of the board acted independently, with each person on it having a different assigned role.
I’m reading “Chronicles of Australia”, some real gems here. eg.
Hobart is on the Derwent, and when sailing on the Derwent it is advisable to keep to the edges of the bay to avoid hitting whales.
Tasmania’s worst bushranger was Michael Howe. He was known to torture victims before killing them. When he died, his diary was found – written on kangaroo hide in blood. You’ll never guess what he wrote in his diary – the names of the English flowers that he wanted to plant in his garden.,
Why would we not guess that?
Strange thing for anyone to say.
Every body else brought their home country here with them and completely farked the place up with their homesickness. So why would he have been any different?
Every body else brought their home country here with them and completely farked the place up with their homesickness. So why would he have been any different?
Off topic but this is what most of my last decade or so of art is about. Picturing the landscape past my Rowan tree. Thistles and gum trees.
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:
mollwollfumble said:You shouldn’t be. You should only be despondent about our treatment of aborigines in Tasmania. The treatment of Aborigines in NSW was startlingly good after the year 1910. Look up the Trove newspaper reports. By “startlingly good”, I mean so good that the treatment was far better than I would have approved – showing up my lack of morality :-(. For example, the Aboriginal activists in NSW actually ran the State Government’s control over aborigines from the early 1940s onward, and these activists were people I wouldn’t trust to babysit my cat.
That statement is complete and utter twaddle, Moll. Aboriginal people in NSW were hunted, rounded up, placed on the back of cattle trucks to be taken off country and finally placed in concentration camps usually with people from other mobs. (Some of the mobs had already been in dispute over various things, leading to significant conflict within the concentration camps).
Those concentration camps placed severe restrictions on movement and friendships of individuals. The superintendents in charge of the concentration camps had almost 100% power over the treatment of those people interred. Severe food rationing, violent “discipline” and unpaid servitude were the preferred methods of most superintendents to enforce restrictions.
As for the Aborigines Protection Board being stacked with activists, I think you’ll find that 2 positions (a minority) on the board were set aside for Aboriginal “appointees”.
Of course a minority. The most important position on the Aboriginal Protection Board in NSW was the Board of Works, responsible for constructing free aboriginal housing. The rest of the positions were filled with pro-aboriginal whites. Take the Aboriginal Welfare Board of 1940 in NSW. Two of the positions were filled by a surveyor called Evans who had already written long detailed articles about the deplorable conditions of the blacks throughout NSW, and by a white whose pro-aboriginal activism had kick-started the aboriginal activist movement in NSW in the first place. That in addition to the aboriginal leader of the aboriginal activists, another top member of the aboriginal activists, and a full-black to represent full-black interests. Three aborigines and two white aboriginal activists. 5 was still a minority on the board, but the members of the board acted independently, with each person on it having a different assigned role.
I’m reading “Chronicles of Australia”, some real gems here. eg.
Hobart is on the Derwent, and when sailing on the Derwent it is advisable to keep to the edges of the bay to avoid hitting whales.
Tasmania’s worst bushranger was Michael Howe. He was known to torture victims before killing them. When he died, his diary was found – written on kangaroo hide in blood. You’ll never guess what he wrote in his diary – the names of the English flowers that he wanted to plant in his garden.,
>>The Aborigines Welfare Board of NSW consisted of 11 members, and by 1943, two positions were designated for Aboriginal people, one ‘full-blood’ and one having ‘a mixture of Aboriginal blood’. An amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act in 1911 established Kinchela Boys Home and Cootamundra Girls Home for Aboriginal children removed from their families. In these homes, Aboriginal children were taught farm labouring and domestic work, many of them ending up as servants in the houses of wealthy Sydney residents.
While espousing the benefits of assimilation to Aboriginal people, the assimilation policy still denied their basic rights, even in the 1960s. It stopped them from raising their own children, stopped freedom of movement, having access to education, receiving award wages, marrying without permission, eating in restaurants, entering a pub, swimming in a public pool or having the right to vote.
The Aborigines Act of 1969 abolished the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board and Aboriginal children then became wards of the state. The welfare board’s functions in thus area were transferred to the Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare. This later became the Department of Youth and Community Services, which created the NSW Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare. In 1975, the Commonwealth Government took over many of the functions and records of the Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare, which then became the Aboriginal Services Branch. The department’s name was changed in 1988 to Family and Community Services and in 1995 to Community Services.<<
https://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/government-policy-in-relation-to-aboriginal-people/
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:That statement is complete and utter twaddle, Moll. Aboriginal people in NSW were hunted, rounded up, placed on the back of cattle trucks to be taken off country and finally placed in concentration camps usually with people from other mobs. (Some of the mobs had already been in dispute over various things, leading to significant conflict within the concentration camps).
Those concentration camps placed severe restrictions on movement and friendships of individuals. The superintendents in charge of the concentration camps had almost 100% power over the treatment of those people interred. Severe food rationing, violent “discipline” and unpaid servitude were the preferred methods of most superintendents to enforce restrictions.
As for the Aborigines Protection Board being stacked with activists, I think you’ll find that 2 positions (a minority) on the board were set aside for Aboriginal “appointees”.
Of course a minority. The most important position on the Aboriginal Protection Board in NSW was the Board of Works, responsible for constructing free aboriginal housing. The rest of the positions were filled with pro-aboriginal whites. Take the Aboriginal Welfare Board of 1940 in NSW. Two of the positions were filled by a surveyor called Evans who had already written long detailed articles about the deplorable conditions of the blacks throughout NSW, and by a white whose pro-aboriginal activism had kick-started the aboriginal activist movement in NSW in the first place. That in addition to the aboriginal leader of the aboriginal activists, another top member of the aboriginal activists, and a full-black to represent full-black interests. Three aborigines and two white aboriginal activists. 5 was still a minority on the board, but the members of the board acted independently, with each person on it having a different assigned role.
I’m reading “Chronicles of Australia”, some real gems here. eg.
Hobart is on the Derwent, and when sailing on the Derwent it is advisable to keep to the edges of the bay to avoid hitting whales.
Tasmania’s worst bushranger was Michael Howe. He was known to torture victims before killing them. When he died, his diary was found – written on kangaroo hide in blood. You’ll never guess what he wrote in his diary – the names of the English flowers that he wanted to plant in his garden.,
>>The Aborigines Welfare Board of NSW consisted of 11 members, and by 1943, two positions were designated for Aboriginal people, one ‘full-blood’ and one having ‘a mixture of Aboriginal blood’. An amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act in 1911 established Kinchela Boys Home and Cootamundra Girls Home for Aboriginal children removed from their families. In these homes, Aboriginal children were taught farm labouring and domestic work, many of them ending up as servants in the houses of wealthy Sydney residents.
While espousing the benefits of assimilation to Aboriginal people, the assimilation policy still denied their basic rights, even in the 1960s. It stopped them from raising their own children, stopped freedom of movement, having access to education, receiving award wages, marrying without permission, eating in restaurants, entering a pub, swimming in a public pool or having the right to vote.
The Aborigines Act of 1969 abolished the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board and Aboriginal children then became wards of the state. The welfare board’s functions in thus area were transferred to the Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare. This later became the Department of Youth and Community Services, which created the NSW Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare. In 1975, the Commonwealth Government took over many of the functions and records of the Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare, which then became the Aboriginal Services Branch. The department’s name was changed in 1988 to Family and Community Services and in 1995 to Community Services.<<
https://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/government-policy-in-relation-to-aboriginal-people/
The following claim needs looking into, article from “Chronicle of Australia”. “The select committee on aborigines in the British settlements”. From the year 1937.
On the web? Doesn’t seem to be. Only short commentaries on it. I wonder where I can find a verbatim copy of the original.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that “aborigines” includes far more than just Australia. It would be useful to compare across different British-owned countries at the same epoch.
Available through the State Library of Victoria, probably other state libraries as well. Must be a member. Takes 7 days or a visit to the Library to become a member.
Book.
“Report from the Select Committee on Aborigines (British settlements;) together with the minutes of evidence, appendix and index.” .
Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons
London : House of Commons .
And another copy from 1837.
mollwollfumble said:
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:Of course a minority. The most important position on the Aboriginal Protection Board in NSW was the Board of Works, responsible for constructing free aboriginal housing. The rest of the positions were filled with pro-aboriginal whites. Take the Aboriginal Welfare Board of 1940 in NSW. Two of the positions were filled by a surveyor called Evans who had already written long detailed articles about the deplorable conditions of the blacks throughout NSW, and by a white whose pro-aboriginal activism had kick-started the aboriginal activist movement in NSW in the first place. That in addition to the aboriginal leader of the aboriginal activists, another top member of the aboriginal activists, and a full-black to represent full-black interests. Three aborigines and two white aboriginal activists. 5 was still a minority on the board, but the members of the board acted independently, with each person on it having a different assigned role.
I’m reading “Chronicles of Australia”, some real gems here. eg.
Hobart is on the Derwent, and when sailing on the Derwent it is advisable to keep to the edges of the bay to avoid hitting whales.
Tasmania’s worst bushranger was Michael Howe. He was known to torture victims before killing them. When he died, his diary was found – written on kangaroo hide in blood. You’ll never guess what he wrote in his diary – the names of the English flowers that he wanted to plant in his garden.,
>>The Aborigines Welfare Board of NSW consisted of 11 members, and by 1943, two positions were designated for Aboriginal people, one ‘full-blood’ and one having ‘a mixture of Aboriginal blood’. An amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act in 1911 established Kinchela Boys Home and Cootamundra Girls Home for Aboriginal children removed from their families. In these homes, Aboriginal children were taught farm labouring and domestic work, many of them ending up as servants in the houses of wealthy Sydney residents.
While espousing the benefits of assimilation to Aboriginal people, the assimilation policy still denied their basic rights, even in the 1960s. It stopped them from raising their own children, stopped freedom of movement, having access to education, receiving award wages, marrying without permission, eating in restaurants, entering a pub, swimming in a public pool or having the right to vote.
The Aborigines Act of 1969 abolished the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board and Aboriginal children then became wards of the state. The welfare board’s functions in thus area were transferred to the Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare. This later became the Department of Youth and Community Services, which created the NSW Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare. In 1975, the Commonwealth Government took over many of the functions and records of the Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare, which then became the Aboriginal Services Branch. The department’s name was changed in 1988 to Family and Community Services and in 1995 to Community Services.<<
https://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/government-policy-in-relation-to-aboriginal-people/
The following claim needs looking into, article from “Chronicle of Australia”. “The select committee on aborigines in the British settlements”. From the year 1937.
On the web? Doesn’t seem to be. Only short commentaries on it. I wonder where I can find a verbatim copy of the original.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that “aborigines” includes far more than just Australia. It would be useful to compare across different British-owned countries at the same epoch.
They mention kangaroos, so presumably it applies to Australia. However, in all lands invaded by the British and most other Europeans with an indigenous population, their treatment has been very similar. Needless to say, the illustrated text sums up the overall picture quite well.
mollwollfumble said:
“It doesn’t matter if we took their lands and killed anyone who tried to resist, as long as we told them the good news about Jesus that makes up for all of the bad things we did”.
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:
PermeateFree said:>>The Aborigines Welfare Board of NSW consisted of 11 members, and by 1943, two positions were designated for Aboriginal people, one ‘full-blood’ and one having ‘a mixture of Aboriginal blood’. An amendment to the Aborigines Protection Act in 1911 established Kinchela Boys Home and Cootamundra Girls Home for Aboriginal children removed from their families. In these homes, Aboriginal children were taught farm labouring and domestic work, many of them ending up as servants in the houses of wealthy Sydney residents.
While espousing the benefits of assimilation to Aboriginal people, the assimilation policy still denied their basic rights, even in the 1960s. It stopped them from raising their own children, stopped freedom of movement, having access to education, receiving award wages, marrying without permission, eating in restaurants, entering a pub, swimming in a public pool or having the right to vote.
The Aborigines Act of 1969 abolished the NSW Aborigines Welfare Board and Aboriginal children then became wards of the state. The welfare board’s functions in thus area were transferred to the Department of Child Welfare and Social Welfare. This later became the Department of Youth and Community Services, which created the NSW Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare. In 1975, the Commonwealth Government took over many of the functions and records of the Directorate of Aboriginal Welfare, which then became the Aboriginal Services Branch. The department’s name was changed in 1988 to Family and Community Services and in 1995 to Community Services.<<
https://www.sydneybarani.com.au/sites/government-policy-in-relation-to-aboriginal-people/
The following claim needs looking into, article from “Chronicle of Australia”. “The select committee on aborigines in the British settlements”. From the year 1937.
On the web? Doesn’t seem to be. Only short commentaries on it. I wonder where I can find a verbatim copy of the original.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that “aborigines” includes far more than just Australia. It would be useful to compare across different British-owned countries at the same epoch.
They mention kangaroos, so presumably it applies to Australia. However, in all lands invaded by the British and most other Europeans with an indigenous population, their treatment has been very similar. Needless to say, the illustrated text sums up the overall picture quite well.
going back, the poms had a highly stratified society, and to some extent as the more brutal aspects of it were tamed at home there were the frontiers elsewhere, so you know the civilization or civilizing influences can get relaxed, and even more so as you go outback
it could part of the appeal, for colonizers
which might raise the possibility of powerful social (and political) stratification being related expansion/ism
transition said:
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:The following claim needs looking into, article from “Chronicle of Australia”. “The select committee on aborigines in the British settlements”. From the year 1937.
On the web? Doesn’t seem to be. Only short commentaries on it. I wonder where I can find a verbatim copy of the original.
Reading between the lines, I suspect that “aborigines” includes far more than just Australia. It would be useful to compare across different British-owned countries at the same epoch.
They mention kangaroos, so presumably it applies to Australia. However, in all lands invaded by the British and most other Europeans with an indigenous population, their treatment has been very similar. Needless to say, the illustrated text sums up the overall picture quite well.
going back, the poms had a highly stratified society, and to some extent as the more brutal aspects of it were tamed at home there were the frontiers elsewhere, so you know the civilization or civilizing influences can get relaxed, and even more so as you go outback
it could part of the appeal, for colonizers
However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.
>>However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.<<
Apparently this is a myth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
buffy said:
>>However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.<<Apparently this is a myth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
The pastoral lease was brought in long before.
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
>>However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.<<Apparently this is a myth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
The pastoral lease was brought in long before.
What? How is that relevent to the 1901 Flora and Fauna Act which is where the myth supposedly comes from?
buffy said:
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
>>However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.<<Apparently this is a myth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
The pastoral lease was brought in long before.
What? How is that relevent to the 1901 Flora and Fauna Act which is where the myth supposedly comes from?
Basically that it meant that aborigines were recognised as humans. Before the myth was created?
buffy said:
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
>>However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.<<Apparently this is a myth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
The pastoral lease was brought in long before.
What? How is that relevent to the 1901 Flora and Fauna Act which is where the myth supposedly comes from?
Following in from the extremely critical report from 1837 in the House of Commons.
Like the extremely critical report from Roth (1905), the 1837 report also spawned some pro-aboriginal legislation.
1. Stopping the practice of assigning new convicts to work on farms – specifically to stop the possibility of new convicts in contact with aborigines abusing them. 1837.
2. A protector of aborigines and deputies appointed, based at Port Phillip, in 1838. With four assistants, each located in one of the four districts.
4. Equal rights for aborigines to the protection of the laws of England in 1839.
5. I’m old enough to remember swearing in a witness as “… so help me, God”, and even remembering a time when those who did not believe in God were unable to be sworn in as witnesses. New legislation allowed aborigines to be sworn in as competent witnesses in criminal cases despite having no belief in God. New law in 1839.
6. Following on from 1, stopping the acceptance of new convicts at all in 1840.
roughbarked said:
buffy said:
roughbarked said:The pastoral lease was brought in long before.
What? How is that relevent to the 1901 Flora and Fauna Act which is where the myth supposedly comes from?
Basically that it meant that aborigines were recognised as humans. Before the myth was created?
I thought the Flora and Fauna act was a few years later then that, was it 1911, the year after the Protection of Aborigines Act of 1910 in three states? The coincidence of dates would have spawned the myth. I’ll check. Yes. Here it is circa March 25, 1911. Oh, wait on, this was the Federal legislation and specifically dealt with protection of birds, the state legislation for protection of fauna would have been earlier. As you were.
mollwollfumble said:
5. I’m old enough to remember swearing in a witness as “… so help me, God”, and even remembering a time when those who did not believe in God were unable to be sworn in as witnesses.
Really?
Doesn’t that contravene Section 116 of the constitution?
When did it change?
The Rev Dodgson said:
mollwollfumble said:
5. I’m old enough to remember swearing in a witness as “… so help me, God”, and even remembering a time when those who did not believe in God were unable to be sworn in as witnesses.
Really?
Doesn’t that contravene Section 116 of the constitution?
When did it change?
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
mollwollfumble said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
mollwollfumble said:
5. I’m old enough to remember swearing in a witness as “… so help me, God”, and even remembering a time when those who did not believe in God were unable to be sworn in as witnesses.
Really?
Doesn’t that contravene Section 116 of the constitution?
When did it change?
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
roughbarked said:
mollwollfumble said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Really?
Doesn’t that contravene Section 116 of the constitution?
When did it change?
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
A friend’s 11 year old son was raped in the 90s here in Tassie. The case was thrown out of court because the 11 year old had never been to Sunday school. The law was changed a year or so after.
roughbarked said:
mollwollfumble said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Really?
Doesn’t that contravene Section 116 of the constitution?
When did it change?
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
that link doesn’t support your point.
roughbarked said:
mollwollfumble said:
The Rev Dodgson said:Really?
Doesn’t that contravene Section 116 of the constitution?
When did it change?
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
Isn’t that about swearing in for Parliament, rather than for the courts?
buffy said:
roughbarked said:
mollwollfumble said:Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
Isn’t that about swearing in for Parliament, rather than for the courts?
https://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news82682.html
Looks like it is still a thing for the courts, this article says reform is needed – ‘If this recommendation is adopted, South Australia would become the first legal jurisdiction in the nation to have a single, non-religious witness promise’
roughbarked said:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
There were at least 10 failed British colonial settlements in Australia. I can count them up if you want. In the top end there were so many failed settlements that for a while there was a government ban on attempting any settlement at all there.
sarahs mum said:
roughbarked said:
mollwollfumble said:Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
A friend’s 11 year old son was raped in the 90s here in Tassie. The case was thrown out of court because the 11 year old had never been to Sunday school. The law was changed a year or so after.
That’s terrible.
In the 90’s and it never hit the news.
The Rev Dodgson said:
sarahs mum said:
roughbarked said:https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
A friend’s 11 year old son was raped in the 90s here in Tassie. The case was thrown out of court because the 11 year old had never been to Sunday school. The law was changed a year or so after.
That’s terrible.
In the 90’s and it never hit the news.
it hit the news down here. And it was in a small community so the kid went through shit and the perp got away with it and every one knew. But the kid at least got kudos for getting the law changed.
buffy said:
roughbarked said:
mollwollfumble said:Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/House_of_Representatives/Powers_practice_and_procedure/Practice7/HTML/Chapter5/Swearing-in
Isn’t that about swearing in for Parliament, rather than for the courts?
I think people are getting confused between having to swear on the bible and being challenged if you don’t.
buffy said:
>>However the Aborigines were classified as Wildlife, plus treated much the same.<<Apparently this is a myth.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/fact-check-flora-and-fauna-1967-referendum/9550650
I didn’t believe it ever to be so, though I was aware of the informal sentiments same, so assumed permeate meant that
I wouldn’t mind being classified as fauna, today, though just ten years ago that could have come close to an invitation to be shot
anyway, the social construction of reality has a brutal history, and it’s still with us today
everyone’s being recruited into the army to fight the undermanaged reality, done through money and deprivations mostly these days, strategically, so the strata, divined, appear as if an accident at worst
mollwollfumble said:
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
The first time I gave evidence in a court I was handed a bible and asked to swear on it. I told the judge I was an atheist and that the book meant nothing to me, so they had me swear an affirmation. They said it still meant any false evidence I gave was perjury and carried the same penalties. This was in the 1990s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGkjIWQ757w&feature=youtu.be
:(
sibeen said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGkjIWQ757w&feature=youtu.be:(
Sorry, wrong thread. It was btm’s fault. Bloody electronics engineer.
On the matter of aborigines, religion and the law. 1805 “Judge-Advocate Richard Atkins … The difficult question of the legal standing … of Aborigines not bound by any moral or religious code”. Although the real problem of Aborigines in courts was acknowledged as one of translation difficulties.
mollwollfumble said:
roughbarked said:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
There were at least 10 failed British colonial settlements in Australia. I can count them up if you want. In the top end there were so many failed settlements that for a while there was a government ban on attempting any settlement at all there.
Port Essington was discovered in 1818. The French visited there in 1839, the same year that Port Darwin was discovered.
Let’s see how many I can count. Failed settlements, date of abandonment.
Botany Bay – 1788
Newcastle – 1802 – re-established 1804.
Port Phillip – 1803 – re-established 1835.
Risdon Cove – 1804
Norfolk Island – 1814 – re-established 1825.
Red Cliff – 1825
Western Port – 1828
Fort Dundas on Melville Island – 1829
Fort Wellington on Raffles Bay – 1829
I think those are the only significant settlements that were abandoned prior to 1840.
On a different topic, in the year 1812 a white man was found who had been living in Tasmania for 23 years. Somewhat startling given that the first settlement in Tasmania was in 1803, but true.
btm said:
mollwollfumble said:
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
The first time I gave evidence in a court I was handed a bible and asked to swear on it. I told the judge I was an atheist and that the book meant nothing to me, so they had me swear an affirmation. They said it still meant any false evidence I gave was perjury and carried the same penalties. This was in the 1990s.
What were you on trial for?
Witty Rejoinder said:
btm said:
mollwollfumble said:
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
The first time I gave evidence in a court I was handed a bible and asked to swear on it. I told the judge I was an atheist and that the book meant nothing to me, so they had me swear an affirmation. They said it still meant any false evidence I gave was perjury and carried the same penalties. This was in the 1990s.
What were you on trial for?
Being an unbeliever.
Witty Rejoinder said:
btm said:
mollwollfumble said:
Good question. During the Whitlam era I think. I could be wrong. Before then all witnesses had to be sworn in with their hand on the Bible saying “… so help me, God”.
The first time I gave evidence in a court I was handed a bible and asked to swear on it. I told the judge I was an atheist and that the book meant nothing to me, so they had me swear an affirmation. They said it still meant any false evidence I gave was perjury and carried the same penalties. This was in the 1990s.
What were you on trial for?
I’d been charged with impersonating a polititian. I really don’t understand it: I was just sitting around doing nothing.
sibeen said:
sibeen said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGkjIWQ757w&feature=youtu.be:(
Sorry, wrong thread. It was btm’s fault. Bloody electronics engineer.
Pfft. You’re just jealous ‘cause you couldn’t get into the electronics course.
btm said:
sibeen said:
sibeen said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGkjIWQ757w&feature=youtu.be:(
Sorry, wrong thread. It was btm’s fault. Bloody electronics engineer.
Pfft. You’re just jealous ‘cause you couldn’t get into the electronics course.
Yes, that’s where the major differentiation occurred.
Electoral milestones for Indigenous Australians.
https://www.aec.gov.au/indigenous/milestones.htm
Michael V said:
Electoral milestones for Indigenous Australians.https://www.aec.gov.au/indigenous/milestones.htm
Book review “The lamb enters the dreaming” by Robert Kenny (2007).
This is a history book, but it’s written like no other history book, it more closely resembles a painting. This is deliberate. It presents history as “an endless network of changing relationships, without any great ruptures or peripheries”. There are relationships between person and person, person and place, person and idea, idea and idea, idea and place.
On the smallest scale, the book is about the conversion to Christianity of a Victorian aborigine, Nathaniel Pepper, in 1860. On a larger scale, it’s about the history of aboriginal missions in Western Victoria from 1840 to 1870. On an even larger scale, it stretches from Noah to Nietzsche, from T.S. Elliot to the source of Scotland’s clan history.
From a history point of view, I find it slightly annoying that the text will happily jump backwards and forwards 150 years in a single page. On the positive side, my BS detector didn’t kneejerk even once (OK, slightly with the mention of Noah, but even that was a significant part of the Christian mythology behind the setting up of aboriginal missions). And if you look closely enough, there is some really profound philosophy in there and some firm conclusions that, while undoubtedly true, you will find uncomfortable.
This isn’t a book that can be summarised, the best I can do is give you a flavour, using random quotes.
“This limestone rise is high enough to offer protection from the river’s occasional floods, and in 1858 Moravian missionaries from Saxony chose it as the site of their mission, Ebenezer”.
“By 1860, frontier violence was a haunting ghost, rare in practice – at least in Victoria. But disease, always more ruthless than the gun, still killed with alacrity. And despair … killed the will”.
“Pessimism over the future of the Aboriginal race had been, before (Pepper’s conversion), the most prominent sense among those who cared”.
“in 1858, for most European colonists the … books of the Old Testament supposedly written by Moses, were accepted like air … Geology had challenged the biblical view of the time”.
“Boosted by the Abolition Act of 1833, leaders of the anti-slavery movement centred their hearts on the issue they saw deeply connected to slavery: the fate of aboriginal peoples in British colonies … Parliamentary Select Committee on the Aboriginal Tribes in British Settlements”
(Note by mollwollfumble, startlingly, I was just discussing this document in my previous post in this thread!)
“At Lake Boga … the Moravian Church knew what it undertook. ‘It might indeed be presumption in us to attempt anything for the spiritual benefit of the race, on whom, not a few of our Christian Brethren of other Societies have already appeared to spend their labour and their strength in vain’.”
“You can trace the death of interest in (the Lake Boga Mission) in the pages of the Melbourne Church of England Messenger through the 1850s. (Concern over) the moral and social conditions on the Ballarat goldfields grew through 1852 and, as it did,” the interest in Aboriginal Missions evaporated.
“Christianity has always been the religion of translation and adaptation … The failure of translation in south-east Australia stifled accommodation”.
(Note by mollwollfumble, this seems to be at the core of the failure of aboriginal schooling in early Australia – the unwillingness of whites to teach in the correct Aboriginal language).
“Horatio Ellerman in 1846 shot and killed an aboriginal woman who had a young child with her. Ellerman took the child, Willie Wimmera, back to his homestead and adopted him”. The author, Kenny, shows that this statement, which “has achieved the status of historical certainty in both researched histories and public knowledge”, has no contemporary support. It seems to have been a fabrication that first appears in 1970.
“The stories of the various Aboriginal Australians may have a sense of timelessness to them, but … we do not know how old they are”.
“Growing up, we children of settlers were taught that the Aboriginal Australians had died off from disease. This was gradual, inevitable, inexorable. … The childhood story was not only wrong because of its blind eye to violence; it was wrong because … disease hit with sudden devastation”.
“We can sense the turmoil. Pepper was countered on every front: the missionaries refusing his need for the healer; the Wotjobaluk elders blocking his marriage to Kitty. What use was this new faith? … Marriage became the ground where the traditional fought the mission hardest”.
“While the 1886 Half Caste Act is often spoken of as the watershed of Aboriginal affairs in Victoria, the 1869 Act destroyed any attempt, however flawed, to recognise Aboriginal equality and choice”.
“Levi-Strauss thought the paintings of Albert Namatjira … thus betraying a triple bigotry: Parisian-modernist, sexist, and ageist.”
The conversion of the aborigine Nathaniel Pepper to Christianity was not imposed from without, but came from within. He was then able to talk about Christianity to other blacks in their own language, something the missionaries could not do.
“Far from being agents of the flag, the evangelicals were the main European voice of concern. It was not enlightened science that exclaimed the unity of humanity, … usually the opposite”. In Biblical mythology, aborigines were the children of Ham. Evangelicals “used their scripture to prove” that aborigines and Europeans are cousins and need to be treated alike.
In no sense can what I quoted above be considered a summary of the book “The lamb enters the dreaming” or even a summary of highlights. All I can do is give you some examples of the flavour.
mollwollfumble said:
Michael V said:
Electoral milestones for Indigenous Australians.https://www.aec.gov.au/indigenous/milestones.htm
Book review “The lamb enters the dreaming” by Robert Kenny (2007).
This is a history book, but it’s written like no other history book, it more closely resembles a painting. This is deliberate. It presents history as “an endless network of changing relationships, without any great ruptures or peripheries”. There are relationships between person and person, person and place, person and idea, idea and idea, idea and place.
On the smallest scale, the book is about the conversion to Christianity of a Victorian aborigine, Nathaniel Pepper, in 1860. On a larger scale, it’s about the history of aboriginal missions in Western Victoria from 1840 to 1870. On an even larger scale, it stretches from Noah to Nietzsche, from T.S. Elliot to the source of Scotland’s clan history.
From a history point of view, I find it slightly annoying that the text will happily jump backwards and forwards 150 years in a single page. On the positive side, my BS detector didn’t kneejerk even once (OK, slightly with the mention of Noah, but even that was a significant part of the Christian mythology behind the setting up of aboriginal missions). And if you look closely enough, there is some really profound philosophy in there and some firm conclusions that, while undoubtedly true, you will find uncomfortable.
This isn’t a book that can be summarised, the best I can do is give you a flavour, using random quotes.
“This limestone rise is high enough to offer protection from the river’s occasional floods, and in 1858 Moravian missionaries from Saxony chose it as the site of their mission, Ebenezer”.
“By 1860, frontier violence was a haunting ghost, rare in practice – at least in Victoria. But disease, always more ruthless than the gun, still killed with alacrity. And despair … killed the will”.
“Pessimism over the future of the Aboriginal race had been, before (Pepper’s conversion), the most prominent sense among those who cared”.
“in 1858, for most European colonists the … books of the Old Testament supposedly written by Moses, were accepted like air … Geology had challenged the biblical view of the time”.
“Boosted by the Abolition Act of 1833, leaders of the anti-slavery movement centred their hearts on the issue they saw deeply connected to slavery: the fate of aboriginal peoples in British colonies … Parliamentary Select Committee on the Aboriginal Tribes in British Settlements”
(Note by mollwollfumble, startlingly, I was just discussing this document in my previous post in this thread!)“At Lake Boga … the Moravian Church knew what it undertook. ‘It might indeed be presumption in us to attempt anything for the spiritual benefit of the race, on whom, not a few of our Christian Brethren of other Societies have already appeared to spend their labour and their strength in vain’.”
“You can trace the death of interest in (the Lake Boga Mission) in the pages of the Melbourne Church of England Messenger through the 1850s. (Concern over) the moral and social conditions on the Ballarat goldfields grew through 1852 and, as it did,” the interest in Aboriginal Missions evaporated.
“Christianity has always been the religion of translation and adaptation … The failure of translation in south-east Australia stifled accommodation”.
(Note by mollwollfumble, this seems to be at the core of the failure of aboriginal schooling in early Australia – the unwillingness of whites to teach in the correct Aboriginal language).“Horatio Ellerman in 1846 shot and killed an aboriginal woman who had a young child with her. Ellerman took the child, Willie Wimmera, back to his homestead and adopted him”. The author, Kenny, shows that this statement, which “has achieved the status of historical certainty in both researched histories and public knowledge”, has no contemporary support. It seems to have been a fabrication that first appears in 1970.
“The stories of the various Aboriginal Australians may have a sense of timelessness to them, but … we do not know how old they are”.
“Growing up, we children of settlers were taught that the Aboriginal Australians had died off from disease. This was gradual, inevitable, inexorable. … The childhood story was not only wrong because of its blind eye to violence; it was wrong because … disease hit with sudden devastation”.
“We can sense the turmoil. Pepper was countered on every front: the missionaries refusing his need for the healer; the Wotjobaluk elders blocking his marriage to Kitty. What use was this new faith? … Marriage became the ground where the traditional fought the mission hardest”.
“While the 1886 Half Caste Act is often spoken of as the watershed of Aboriginal affairs in Victoria, the 1869 Act destroyed any attempt, however flawed, to recognise Aboriginal equality and choice”.
“Levi-Strauss thought the paintings of Albert Namatjira … thus betraying a triple bigotry: Parisian-modernist, sexist, and ageist.”
The conversion of the aborigine Nathaniel Pepper to Christianity was not imposed from without, but came from within. He was then able to talk about Christianity to other blacks in their own language, something the missionaries could not do.
“Far from being agents of the flag, the evangelicals were the main European voice of concern. It was not enlightened science that exclaimed the unity of humanity, … usually the opposite”. In Biblical mythology, aborigines were the children of Ham. Evangelicals “used their scripture to prove” that aborigines and Europeans are cousins and need to be treated alike.
In no sense can what I quoted above be considered a summary of the book “The lamb enters the dreaming” or even a summary of highlights. All I can do is give you some examples of the flavour.
Starting to read “Girt” by Hunt (2013).
Book is totally LOL.
Definition of satire “the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.” This book is definitely satire. I don’t have a problem with that, except when the ridicule element degenerates into a blatant lie. It doesn’t happen all that often in the book, but sometimes.
A nice quote from Girt:
“All Australian historians must wear either a black of white armband so that their views on Australian history and British settlers/invaders can be readily identified. Members of the Black Armband School … use words like “genocide”, “Stolen Generations” and “sorry”. Members of the White Armband School … use words like “natural attrition”, “vulnerable children in need of care and protection” and “Windschuttle”; they can be identified by their rose-coloured glasses or their white-coloured canes”.
Although pure satire, brilliant and hilarious, this isn’t always true. It applies to propagandists and activists more than to genuine historians. None of the three of Manning Clark, Kenny’s “The lamb enters the dreaming” and “Chronicle of Australia” wear either a black or white armband. Lyndall Ryan is a white who wears a black armband in 1981/1995 but has bleached that to grey by 2102. Ryan uses the word “Windschuttle” quite a lot in 2012.
And what oif “Girt”? Does author David Hunt wear a black or white armband?
At World’s End
In 1838, the British came to colonise northern Australia. Doomed to fail, they sailed home 11 years later. And as they left, the local Indigenous people didn’t celebrate — they wept.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
sarahs mum said:
At World’s EndIn 1838, the British came to colonise northern Australia. Doomed to fail, they sailed home 11 years later. And as they left, the local Indigenous people didn’t celebrate — they wept.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
One thing from “Girt” that sparked my BS detector is this:
“Cook ran a better ship than most. The lash was used sparingly, principally on sailors who refused to eat their pickled cabbage”.
Very funny, but not true.
Cook was smarter than that. Only the officers were given a ration of pickled cabbage, for the other crew it was optional. But the other crew, seeing the officers eat pickled cabbage, thought it must therefore be good and started eating so much that Cook was forced to place an upper limit on how much pickled cabbage they were allowed.
The lash was used principally for those who stole food and booze, especially when everyone was on 2/3 rations (starvation rations). Stealing booze was a major problem because put a bottle of rum before a sailor in the evening and you’ll have a dead sailor by morning. More than a few of Cook’s crew died in just that way.
The British Admiralty was dumber. After Cook, they changed their source of pickled cabbage to one that was cheaper, but contained no vitamin C, reintroducing scurvy onto all their ships.
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:
At World’s EndIn 1838, the British came to colonise northern Australia. Doomed to fail, they sailed home 11 years later. And as they left, the local Indigenous people didn’t celebrate — they wept.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
One thing from “Girt” that sparked my BS detector is this:
“Cook ran a better ship than most. The lash was used sparingly, principally on sailors who refused to eat their pickled cabbage”.
Very funny, but not true.
Cook was smarter than that. Only the officers were given a ration of pickled cabbage, for the other crew it was optional. But the other crew, seeing the officers eat pickled cabbage, thought it must therefore be good and started eating so much that Cook was forced to place an upper limit on how much pickled cabbage they were allowed.
The lash was used principally for those who stole food and booze, especially when everyone was on 2/3 rations (starvation rations). Stealing booze was a major problem because put a bottle of rum before a sailor in the evening and you’ll have a dead sailor by morning. More than a few of Cook’s crew died in just that way.
The British Admiralty was dumber. After Cook, they changed their source of pickled cabbage to one that was cheaper, but contained no vitamin C, reintroducing scurvy onto all their ships.
Now here’s a quote from “Girt” that I can agree with.
Governor “Phillip had invented the socialist state six decades before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles threw their first Communist Party”.
Yep. If it wasn’t for the fact that Grose’s takeover from Phillip was totally legal, I would have called it a military coup. Capitalism at its worst, usury at 1200% profit for starters.
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:
sarahs mum said:
At World’s EndIn 1838, the British came to colonise northern Australia. Doomed to fail, they sailed home 11 years later. And as they left, the local Indigenous people didn’t celebrate — they wept.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-03/port-essington-worlds-end-failed-british-colonial-settlement/11730570
One thing from “Girt” that sparked my BS detector is this:
“Cook ran a better ship than most. The lash was used sparingly, principally on sailors who refused to eat their pickled cabbage”.
Very funny, but not true.
Cook was smarter than that. Only the officers were given a ration of pickled cabbage, for the other crew it was optional. But the other crew, seeing the officers eat pickled cabbage, thought it must therefore be good and started eating so much that Cook was forced to place an upper limit on how much pickled cabbage they were allowed.
The lash was used principally for those who stole food and booze, especially when everyone was on 2/3 rations (starvation rations). Stealing booze was a major problem because put a bottle of rum before a sailor in the evening and you’ll have a dead sailor by morning. More than a few of Cook’s crew died in just that way.
The British Admiralty was dumber. After Cook, they changed their source of pickled cabbage to one that was cheaper, but contained no vitamin C, reintroducing scurvy onto all their ships.
Now here’s a quote from “Girt” that I can agree with.
Governor “Phillip had invented the socialist state six decades before Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles threw their first Communist Party”.
Yep. If it wasn’t for the fact that Grose’s takeover from Phillip was totally legal, I would have called it a military coup. Capitalism at its worst, usury at 1200% profit for starters.
Why is string replying to my post when it has nought to do with my post?
I began reading Jack Charles autobiography last night. It’s not academic history, it’s his personal account of his own life. It’s very easy reading, but the subject matter is not easy. He was taken from his mother in Shepparton at the age of 4 months which would have been in 1944. He says she had 11 children, he was the first, and they were all taken. He spent his childhood at the Box Hill Boys Home (Salvos), quite close to where I grew up. I remember knowing the home was there, but as it was Salvos, we didn’t have anything to do with it. We were also aware of Allambie, the babies’ home a bit further down the road. I remember my mother commenting on the Right to Life people (she particularly disliked Margaret Tighe), that she didn’t notice them lining up at Allambie to look after the babies born because abortion was not available. You might find Jack’s book interesting.
https://www.booktopia.com.au/jack-charles-a-born-again-blakfella-jack-charles/book/9780143792222.html
buffy said:
I began reading Jack Charles autobiography last night. It’s not academic history, it’s his personal account of his own life. It’s very easy reading, but the subject matter is not easy. He was taken from his mother in Shepparton at the age of 4 months which would have been in 1944. He says she had 11 children, he was the first, and they were all taken. He spent his childhood at the Box Hill Boys Home (Salvos), quite close to where I grew up. I remember knowing the home was there, but as it was Salvos, we didn’t have anything to do with it. We were also aware of Allambie, the babies’ home a bit further down the road. I remember my mother commenting on the Right to Life people (she particularly disliked Margaret Tighe), that she didn’t notice them lining up at Allambie to look after the babies born because abortion was not available. You might find Jack’s book interesting.https://www.booktopia.com.au/jack-charles-a-born-again-blakfella-jack-charles/book/9780143792222.html
I’m still making my way through the metre high pile of books beside me.
I’ve finished “Girt”, not much relevant stuff in the last few chapters. Or to put it another way, the later stuff is better covered by “Chronicle of Australia”.
I’ve read through “A concise companion to aboriginal history” by Prentis (2008), which consists solely of a timeline and dictionary. Not good scholarship, you wouldn’t expect a dictionary to contradict itself, but it does in several places. It’s great if you want to know the difference between the “Aboriginal Advancement League”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Council”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Association” and the scores of other organisations with similar names.
It also ties in with both of the two previous books I read, the Pepper family and the Ebenezer Mission from the book “The lamb enters the dreaming” and the “black armband vs white armband” view of history from “Girt”. Prentis is the sort of book to keep back and read last, to see if there’s anything in there that isn’t covered elsewhere.
I’m now reading Reynolds (1981) “The other side of the Frontier”. Superb book, it looks at aboriginal history (as opposed to pre-history) from the side of the aborigines. I’m only up to the end of chapter 2 so far, page 66, about to embark into the murky waters of Aboriginal “Resistance: motives and objectives”. Let’s hope I don’t end up capsizing.
mollwollfumble said:
buffy said:
I began reading Jack Charles autobiography last night. It’s not academic history, it’s his personal account of his own life. It’s very easy reading, but the subject matter is not easy. He was taken from his mother in Shepparton at the age of 4 months which would have been in 1944. He says she had 11 children, he was the first, and they were all taken. He spent his childhood at the Box Hill Boys Home (Salvos), quite close to where I grew up. I remember knowing the home was there, but as it was Salvos, we didn’t have anything to do with it. We were also aware of Allambie, the babies’ home a bit further down the road. I remember my mother commenting on the Right to Life people (she particularly disliked Margaret Tighe), that she didn’t notice them lining up at Allambie to look after the babies born because abortion was not available. You might find Jack’s book interesting.https://www.booktopia.com.au/jack-charles-a-born-again-blakfella-jack-charles/book/9780143792222.html
I’m still making my way through the metre high pile of books beside me.
I’ve finished “Girt”, not much relevant stuff in the last few chapters. Or to put it another way, the later stuff is better covered by “Chronicle of Australia”.
I’ve read through “A concise companion to aboriginal history” by Prentis (2008), which consists solely of a timeline and dictionary. Not good scholarship, you wouldn’t expect a dictionary to contradict itself, but it does in several places. It’s great if you want to know the difference between the “Aboriginal Advancement League”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Council”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Association” and the scores of other organisations with similar names.
It also ties in with both of the two previous books I read, the Pepper family and the Ebenezer Mission from the book “The lamb enters the dreaming” and the “black armband vs white armband” view of history from “Girt”. Prentis is the sort of book to keep back and read last, to see if there’s anything in there that isn’t covered elsewhere.
I’m now reading Reynolds (1981) “The other side of the Frontier”. Superb book, it looks at aboriginal history (as opposed to pre-history) from the side of the aborigines. I’m only up to the end of chapter 2 so far, page 66, about to embark into the murky waters of Aboriginal “Resistance: motives and objectives”. Let’s hope I don’t end up capsizing.
Reading Reynolds (1981) some more, got capsized by the text more times than I could count. Now I’m just clinging to a life raft. Some really deep scholarship there, but also flights of fancy unsupported by data. A “perceptive observer of Aboriginal society” on one page becomes a “much of the evidence … must be regarded with great suspicion” two pages later. Reynolds suffers from Windschuttle’s fault of criticising contemporary evidence, together with Ryan’s fault of leaving out the best sources, together with “The lamb enters the Dreaming” fault of jumping all over the place with dates and places, and mollwollfumble’s fault of assuming that all blacks are the same. The ups and downs where Reynolds switches armbands from black to grey are confusing, too. All in all it gives the impression that random pebbles of information have been tossed in the air and on landing Reynolds tries to call it a mosaic by adding opinions to connect the dots.
No way can I make sense of it on first reading, it’s much too random. When I’ve finished I’ll have a go at reading it again, wearing a bungee cord to cope with the ups and downs. There’s a heck of a lot of good stuff in there. But topics like competition for food, and deadly diseases, don’t get a fair treatment.
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:
buffy said:
I began reading Jack Charles autobiography last night. It’s not academic history, it’s his personal account of his own life. It’s very easy reading, but the subject matter is not easy. He was taken from his mother in Shepparton at the age of 4 months which would have been in 1944. He says she had 11 children, he was the first, and they were all taken. He spent his childhood at the Box Hill Boys Home (Salvos), quite close to where I grew up. I remember knowing the home was there, but as it was Salvos, we didn’t have anything to do with it. We were also aware of Allambie, the babies’ home a bit further down the road. I remember my mother commenting on the Right to Life people (she particularly disliked Margaret Tighe), that she didn’t notice them lining up at Allambie to look after the babies born because abortion was not available. You might find Jack’s book interesting.https://www.booktopia.com.au/jack-charles-a-born-again-blakfella-jack-charles/book/9780143792222.html
I’m still making my way through the metre high pile of books beside me.
I’ve finished “Girt”, not much relevant stuff in the last few chapters. Or to put it another way, the later stuff is better covered by “Chronicle of Australia”.
I’ve read through “A concise companion to aboriginal history” by Prentis (2008), which consists solely of a timeline and dictionary. Not good scholarship, you wouldn’t expect a dictionary to contradict itself, but it does in several places. It’s great if you want to know the difference between the “Aboriginal Advancement League”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Council”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Association” and the scores of other organisations with similar names.
It also ties in with both of the two previous books I read, the Pepper family and the Ebenezer Mission from the book “The lamb enters the dreaming” and the “black armband vs white armband” view of history from “Girt”. Prentis is the sort of book to keep back and read last, to see if there’s anything in there that isn’t covered elsewhere.
I’m now reading Reynolds (1981) “The other side of the Frontier”. Superb book, it looks at aboriginal history (as opposed to pre-history) from the side of the aborigines. I’m only up to the end of chapter 2 so far, page 66, about to embark into the murky waters of Aboriginal “Resistance: motives and objectives”. Let’s hope I don’t end up capsizing.
Reading Reynolds (1981) some more, got capsized by the text more times than I could count. Now I’m just clinging to a life raft. Some really deep scholarship there, but also flights of fancy unsupported by data. A “perceptive observer of Aboriginal society” on one page becomes a “much of the evidence … must be regarded with great suspicion” two pages later. Reynolds suffers from Windschuttle’s fault of criticising contemporary evidence, together with Ryan’s fault of leaving out the best sources, together with “The lamb enters the Dreaming” fault of jumping all over the place with dates and places, and mollwollfumble’s fault of assuming that all blacks are the same. The ups and downs where Reynolds switches armbands from black to grey are confusing, too. All in all it gives the impression that random pebbles of information have been tossed in the air and on landing Reynolds tries to call it a mosaic by adding opinions to connect the dots.
No way can I make sense of it on first reading, it’s much too random. When I’ve finished I’ll have a go at reading it again, wearing a bungee cord to cope with the ups and downs. There’s a heck of a lot of good stuff in there. But topics like competition for food, and deadly diseases, don’t get a fair treatment.
The topic of Australian Aborigines is exceptionally complex with many views, red herrings and misinformation. Some has been made by the whites to either cover their bad deeds, or a misunderstanding of intent, also the inability to interpret and express their observations realistically. Aborigines have also been involved in this misinformation, by those who wish to prove they are as good or better than the whites, or to play a very long legal game for recognition and compensation, also there are hundreds of Aboriginal groupings where a single simple explanation to sum them all up is not going to work.
To have any chance of gaining some understanding takes years of observation and study, plus the cooperation of Aborigines themselves, only then will you get any sort of clarity, although you are always going to get some that will vigorously disagree with you. So moll, if you are interested in reaching any understanding, read all the literature you have, then read the many books written by Aborigines themselves, plus the scientific studies on this subject. No one item or set of items will give you an in-depth understanding, but hopefully it will permit you to look through some of the rubbish this topic generates and to see what lies beneath.
>No one item or set of items will give you an in-depth understanding, but hopefully it will permit you to look through some of the rubbish this topic generates and to see what lies beneath
Imagine, a person could read a mountain of books on the subject, and not once venture the subject of mental states, to which mostly everything resolves, and it is the territory of such intangibles where the secrets of contempt do their good work
A force of culture, very selective about what it attributes the home in the head, and how you get it
Delivered, devices for and of the dyspsychologic, you’ll be deprived a first name, instead a grouping will be used, like aboriginal, which elsewhere in another time could have been jews, gays, or gypsies
And it prevails today, the dyspsychologic, force of culture, even deprives itself a name, stealthed
You can fairly safely say that every time a human has an idea (or view) it relegates or even displaces another idea/view, sure as native skippy is fortunate to have never learned English and been tempted by the bullshit
PermeateFree said:
mollwollfumble said:
mollwollfumble said:I’m still making my way through the metre high pile of books beside me.
I’ve finished “Girt”, not much relevant stuff in the last few chapters. Or to put it another way, the later stuff is better covered by “Chronicle of Australia”.
I’ve read through “A concise companion to aboriginal history” by Prentis (2008), which consists solely of a timeline and dictionary. Not good scholarship, you wouldn’t expect a dictionary to contradict itself, but it does in several places. It’s great if you want to know the difference between the “Aboriginal Advancement League”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Council”, the “Aboriginal Advancement Association” and the scores of other organisations with similar names.
It also ties in with both of the two previous books I read, the Pepper family and the Ebenezer Mission from the book “The lamb enters the dreaming” and the “black armband vs white armband” view of history from “Girt”. Prentis is the sort of book to keep back and read last, to see if there’s anything in there that isn’t covered elsewhere.
I’m now reading Reynolds (1981) “The other side of the Frontier”. Superb book, it looks at aboriginal history (as opposed to pre-history) from the side of the aborigines. I’m only up to the end of chapter 2 so far, page 66, about to embark into the murky waters of Aboriginal “Resistance: motives and objectives”. Let’s hope I don’t end up capsizing.
Reading Reynolds (1981) some more, got capsized by the text more times than I could count. Now I’m just clinging to a life raft. Some really deep scholarship there, but also flights of fancy unsupported by data. A “perceptive observer of Aboriginal society” on one page becomes a “much of the evidence … must be regarded with great suspicion” two pages later. Reynolds suffers from Windschuttle’s fault of criticising contemporary evidence, together with Ryan’s fault of leaving out the best sources, together with “The lamb enters the Dreaming” fault of jumping all over the place with dates and places, and mollwollfumble’s fault of assuming that all blacks are the same. The ups and downs where Reynolds switches armbands from black to grey are confusing, too. All in all it gives the impression that random pebbles of information have been tossed in the air and on landing Reynolds tries to call it a mosaic by adding opinions to connect the dots.
No way can I make sense of it on first reading, it’s much too random. When I’ve finished I’ll have a go at reading it again, wearing a bungee cord to cope with the ups and downs. There’s a heck of a lot of good stuff in there. But topics like competition for food, and deadly diseases, don’t get a fair treatment.
The topic of Australian Aborigines is exceptionally complex with many views, red herrings and misinformation. Some has been made by the whites to either cover their bad deeds, or a misunderstanding of intent, also the inability to interpret and express their observations realistically. Aborigines have also been involved in this misinformation, by those who wish to prove they are as good or better than the whites, or to play a very long legal game for recognition and compensation, also there are hundreds of Aboriginal groupings where a single simple explanation to sum them all up is not going to work.
To have any chance of gaining some understanding takes years of observation and study, plus the cooperation of Aborigines themselves, only then will you get any sort of clarity, although you are always going to get some that will vigorously disagree with you. So moll, if you are interested in reaching any understanding, read all the literature you have, then read the many books written by Aborigines themselves, plus the scientific studies on this subject. No one item or set of items will give you an in-depth understanding, but hopefully it will permit you to look through some of the rubbish this topic generates and to see what lies beneath.
Thank you. I’m trying to do that.
In understanding Henry Reynolds “The other side of the frontier”. I think I’ve found the key, it’s written back to front. LOL Both in terms of the individual chapter headings and within each chapter. Not exactly back to front, but close enough.
Most books are written presenting the facts first and the conclusions last. In “the other side of the frontier”, within each chapter, there’s a tendency to start with speculation and then transition to finish with the hard facts. With the overall layout of chapter topics, the first 2 chapters are introduction, then I need to read the remaining 5 chapters in reverse order, sort of.
Chapter 1 – Contact with white explorers
Chapter 2 – From ghosts to men, reaction to white man’s culture, disease
Chapter 7 – Interaction with seafaring whites
Chapter 6 – Interaction with white farmers
Chapter 5 – The escalation of conflict
Chapter 4 – Aboriginal tactics used against the whites
Chapter 3 – Reasons for aboriginal attacks on whites
There’s no hint of this apart from reading the book end to end, but almost all this book relates to a very tight historical period, 1840 to 1850, with relatively rare mentions of 1860 to 1870 and 1810 to 1820. The tightness of this historical period needs to be understood, what is said isn’t meant to apply to times after 1890, and this allows Reynolds to completely safely ignore the changes in culture that occurred over long periods of time. Particularly to safely ignore the slow transition from a full-blood aboriginal culture to a mixed-race aboriginal culture.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/14/aboriginal-bones-being-returned-australia
mollwollfumble said:
PermeateFree said:The topic of Australian Aborigines is exceptionally complex with many views, red herrings and misinformation. Some has been made by the whites to either cover their bad deeds, or a misunderstanding of intent, also the inability to interpret and express their observations realistically. Aborigines have also been involved in this misinformation, by those who wish to prove they are as good or better than the whites, or to play a very long legal game for recognition and compensation, also there are hundreds of Aboriginal groupings where a single simple explanation to sum them all up is not going to work.
To have any chance of gaining some understanding takes years of observation and study, plus the cooperation of Aborigines themselves, only then will you get any sort of clarity, although you are always going to get some that will vigorously disagree with you. So moll, if you are interested in reaching any understanding, read all the literature you have, then read the many books written by Aborigines themselves, plus the scientific studies on this subject. No one item or set of items will give you an in-depth understanding, but hopefully it will permit you to look through some of the rubbish this topic generates and to see what lies beneath.
Thank you. I’m trying to do that.
In understanding Henry Reynolds “The other side of the frontier”. I think I’ve found the key, it’s written back to front. LOL Both in terms of the individual chapter headings and within each chapter. Not exactly back to front, but close enough.
Most books are written presenting the facts first and the conclusions last. In “the other side of the frontier”, within each chapter, there’s a tendency to start with speculation and then transition to finish with the hard facts. With the overall layout of chapter topics, the first 2 chapters are introduction, then I need to read the remaining 5 chapters in reverse order, sort of.
Chapter 1 – Contact with white explorers
Chapter 2 – From ghosts to men, reaction to white man’s culture, disease
Chapter 7 – Interaction with seafaring whites
Chapter 6 – Interaction with white farmers
Chapter 5 – The escalation of conflict
Chapter 4 – Aboriginal tactics used against the whites
Chapter 3 – Reasons for aboriginal attacks on whites
roughbarked said:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/14/aboriginal-bones-being-returned-australia
I’ll discuss this later, when I get time to really start wondering about how mant different types of “sacred site” there are. Five? Ten? More?
Have read books since last post.
“The life of Bennelong” – a kids book, but good, has some things about Bennelong and his relatives that aren’t in “Chronicles of Australia” for instance. One thing that struck me was the number of times that Bennelong had been speared by blacks. Many times.
“The savage shore” – so far about the early Dutch explorers of Australia, often in considerable detail.
Reynolds, worth re-reading? Not yet. The bit where my BS detector went way off the scale was when Reynolds claimed that the cause of the fighting between Aborigines and Whites was the class struggle between communism and capitalism, but even there there were bits of Reynolds argument that twigged my interest.
Anyway, being more than half way through my metre-high pile of reading now, I’m starting, just starting, to get a picture of what really happened, what the Europeans did wrong, etc.
On first contact between Aborigines and whites, the reaction of the aborigines was always “fight or flight”. From what I read earlier of Howitt, and from more recent reading, this was always the response in two tribes meeting together as well. When a group of aborigines meets a different tribe, if the tribe reacts by flight, the correct response is patience. Stay there, don’t make eye contact, for over an hour, but be aware that flight can change to fight at any moment.
If the tribe reacts by fight, the correct response is to dodge. If someone is injured, flee and come back a short time later to start over from scratch. If someone is killed, flee and don’t come back. If no-one is injured, friendly relations can begin.
I always keep Maslow’s hierarchy of needs in mind. But it only occurred to me today that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is wrong for pre-European aboriginal society, and for probably a lot of other societies, both human and other animal, abound the world. The original version to top is heavily Eurocentric. In the bottom diagram, I’ve redrawn the triangle as the pre-European aboriginal society would see it, starting from bottom left, and ending between health (necessary) and clothing (unnecessary).
Personal security more important than air? Yes. Consider you are drinking at a waterhole when attacked by a crocodile, escaping being eaten has priority over taking a deep breath. “Property” here would be primarily food gathering tools, such as a bucket, bag or sharpened stick.
So what did the European first contacts do wrong?
the description of self-actualization to be the desire to be the most that one can be is quite simply ideological nonsense
transition said:
the description of self-actualization to be the desire to be the most that one can be is quite simply ideological nonsense
How would you describe “self-actualisation”?
The Rev Dodgson said:
transition said:
the description of self-actualization to be the desire to be the most that one can be is quite simply ideological nonsenseHow would you describe “self-actualisation”?
how would you describe most, as in the most one can be
and, I ask, could a person sleep properly if they were fully self-actualized
transition said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
transition said:
the description of self-actualization to be the desire to be the most that one can be is quite simply ideological nonsenseHow would you describe “self-actualisation”?
how would you describe most, as in the most one can be
and, I ask, could a person sleep properly if they were fully self-actualized
I would not use the words “self-actualisation” or “the desire to be the most that one can be”, because I don’t know what they mean, but I guess “most” in this context means using your innate and acquired abilities as effectively as possible.
Or something like that.
The Rev Dodgson said:
transition said:
The Rev Dodgson said:How would you describe “self-actualisation”?
how would you describe most, as in the most one can be
and, I ask, could a person sleep properly if they were fully self-actualized
I would not use the words “self-actualisation” or “the desire to be the most that one can be”, because I don’t know what they mean, but I guess “most” in this context means using your innate and acquired abilities as effectively as possible.
Or something like that.
my point was the hierarchy as stated is bullshit, essentially puts ideology top of the list, nicely hidden in the word most
transition said:
The Rev Dodgson said:
transition said:how would you describe most, as in the most one can be
and, I ask, could a person sleep properly if they were fully self-actualized
I would not use the words “self-actualisation” or “the desire to be the most that one can be”, because I don’t know what they mean, but I guess “most” in this context means using your innate and acquired abilities as effectively as possible.
Or something like that.
my point was the hierarchy as stated is bullshit, essentially puts ideology top of the list, nicely hidden in the word most
OK, that wasn’t clear from what you said.
I haven’t considered the hierarchy. It’s not clear to me what point the triangle thing was trying to make, or why it was described as euro-centric, or whatever words they used.
Does seem to be a bit of stereotyping involved.
The Rev Dodgson said:
transition said:
The Rev Dodgson said:I would not use the words “self-actualisation” or “the desire to be the most that one can be”, because I don’t know what they mean, but I guess “most” in this context means using your innate and acquired abilities as effectively as possible.
Or something like that.
my point was the hierarchy as stated is bullshit, essentially puts ideology top of the list, nicely hidden in the word most
OK, that wasn’t clear from what you said.
I haven’t considered the hierarchy. It’s not clear to me what point the triangle thing was trying to make, or why it was described as euro-centric, or whatever words they used.
Does seem to be a bit of stereotyping involved.
anyway probably only need consider most, the (comparative) notion or_ way_ doesn’t (ever) escape shared ideas about, other than for seriously committed recluses maybe, and you’d need be abandoned at birth and grow up among wolves or something, or imagine that to consider it
you could wonder what the extreme would be, which it seems to invite, my guess it’d be an insanity of sorts
imagine the idea taken into twilight states and sleep for example
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization
Self-actualization is a term that has been used in various Humanistic psychology theories, often in different ways. The term was originally introduced by the organismic theorist Kurt Goldstein for the motive to realize one’s full potential: “the tendency to actualize itself as fully as possible is the basic drive … the drive of self-actualization.” Carl Rogers similarly wrote of “the curative force in psychotherapy – man’s tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities … to express and activate all the capacities of the organism.”
The concept was brought most fully to prominence by Abraham Maslow as part of his hierarchy of needs theory. In this model, self-actualization represents the highest level of psychological development where the “actualization” of full personal potential is achieved. In Maslow’s theory, this occurs only after basic and mental needs have been fulfilled.
I’ve nearly finished reading the book “The savage shopre” now. As a summary of Australian coastal explorations up to an including Flinders it’s superb. For instance, everyone knows the story of the Batavia, but there are several other west coast Dutch shipwreck true stories that are equally rivetting.
Sometimes these stories continue to the present day as Dutch wrecks get properly identified and antiquities looted from said wrecks get tracked down. An expedition to follow the track of la Perouse was mounted as recently as 2008. We know where his two ships were wrecked and most of the crew killed, at Vanikoro, but some of the surviving crew built a ship from the wreckage and headed off to parts unknown.
On the topic of Aborigines, the book has a bit of old fashioned blackwashing, quite distinguishable from modern blackwashing. It’s annoying, but also a bit of fresh air. The old fashioned style is to say that none of the things that Europeans said about the natives is correct, by referring to every contemporary account as “dangerous stereotypes” by “biased eyes” created by “centuries of European myth and ignorance”. This differs totally from new style backwashing which emphasises newly created myths.
