Thank you, Squeers, your comments are vastly more honest and thoughtful than Pilger's, who seems to have grabbed onto every outrageous rumour and paranoid suspicion as gospel truth.

But I'm a bit worried by a way of thinking that goes: well, certain people may have wanted to commit vile acts, therefore if they had the chance, they would have, and since they probably had the chance, then they must have. Assert, and prove, Squeers.

Yes, people used to get run out of town, back in the days when it was legal: barely forty years ago in Queensland, a bit longer in other states. In one of Arthur Upfield's novels, set in the early fifties, an Aboriginal guy is jailed for being in town (Echuca) after 5 pm. Yes, that certainly happened all over Australia.

When I went to high school in Darwin in the fifties, the people from Bagot Reserve couldn't come to the pictures on any night, only on Wednesday nights, and then they had to come in a side door and sit on hard benches up the front, with a barrier between them and the 'others'. They werem't allowed in town otherwise.

Yes, that all happened. Discrimination and exclusion are dreadful, soul-destroying evils - and, in my view, they have now been tarted up and re-imposed in many parts of the remote north, sweetened by generous welfare and royalty payments, and remote area education allowances. They call it 'self-determination'.

Yes, I'm saying that the 'Stolen Generation' has not been shown to have happened. If you assert, then prove. But as you say, this principle doesn't bother Pilger.

[TBC]

Rupert Murdoch was a player during something known as the Warburton Range controversy in 1957.

After hiring his own aircraft and visiting the area,he wrote an article rejecting the findings of a Select Committee report outlining the appalling conditions of Aborigines in the central Australian desert, saying "these fine native people have never enjoyed better conditions." He also observed that, "great companies like International Nickel of Canada are watching for and have prospects of finding some of the world's most valuable mineral deposits in the world."

A background to the situation for Aboriginal people in the central desert at the time.
http://indigenousrights.net.au/subsection.asp?ssID=89

A party of anthropologists also visited and found that the committee's findings were exaggerated, yet a documentary was filmed called "Manslaughter" which depicted the indigenous people concerned in a very bad state.
Rupert Murdoch seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to depict things in glowing terms - even publishing a photo with his article showing a healthy and happy Aboriginal family that was apparently taken some four years before and was in effect misleading.
His accompanying upbeat assessment of mineral exploration on the land that had been usurped from its native owners might be one explanation.

http://indigenousrights.net.au/subsection.asp?ssID=50

[cont.]

Squeers, you ask:

" .... my implicit question above was, and still is, “why” do aborigines so disproportionately indulge unhealthy and anti-social lifestyles?"

I'm sure that the reasons are very complex, but the upshot is that they do: there is ample evidence every day, somewhere and in many places every day across Australia. And it is killing Aboriginal people: there is nothing glamorous, or remotely progressive, about it. So the contemptible silence of sections of the Left about it helps whom ? The complete absence of any solution to these massive problems as proposed by the Aboriginal elite benefits whom ?

You may be quite right about the pathology which long-term powerlessness generates, and the ways that it is turned back onto the people. When Maria was in charge of a network of Indigenous university study centres around SA, she desperately wanted to try to get one started up in her own community, so we went down there for six months in 2003, while she tried to persuade people there to move away from the same TAFE course year-after-year and try university, as hundreds of other Ngarrindjeri in the towns and Adelaide had done. Not a bite. She was devastated and it may have hastened her death.

Later we tried again in 2006, putting forward a step-by-step multi-year program of projects, beginning with vegetable garden, chook yard, orchards, etc. Not a bite. Instead, at its AGM, the council congratulated itself that it had maintained its CDEP numbers, that not a job had been created all year. Twelve thousand acres of beautiful land and people didn't actually want to do anything with it. The farming projects there - grain, beed cattle, a beautiful dairy and healthy herd, were either ignored by the people or downright rubbished. It crossed my mind continually that people's response to their own progress seemed to have a pathological side to it: nothing 'could' work, so nothing would be allowed to.

[TBC]

Squeers,

[contd.]

Yes, you are right on the button: how to motivate some of the men to take on their human responsibilities, cut down on their criminal activities (it has to be said! why are there ten times as many Indigenous men in prisons for their population ? Are they all being framed?) and do something productive and positive. Yes, to work for the Man if that's what it takes.

But, as you suggest, to stop using their Aboriginality as an excuse: Indigenous women are participating at universities at two-thirds of the rate of non-Indigenous women (with a third or so of the entire population immured in welfare: do the maths), so why can't men follow their example ?

There is a huge amount of work to be done at communities, ideally by Indigenous people, and almost all skilled and professional work. So there is - as you imply - an enormous task to be undertaken by university and TAFE student support programs, to publicise, recruit, prepare and support Indigenous students through a wide range of study programs, from basic English and literacy right up to post-graduate study. Not just for an elite but for the majority of Aboriginal people. I hope Larissa Behrendt makes some note of this in her Review of Indigenous higher education, but I'm not holding my breath.

Pilger's piffle is a massive step away from beginning those tasks: it disarms and disempowers people to be endlessly told what has been done to you, and how powerful (and evil) your enemies are, as if there is nothing people can do - except perhaps to wait for the proletariat, the white Anglo-proletariat of course, to liberate them.

But Indigenous people haven't waited - they have used their sense of agency to knock down the doors and seized the same opportunities as other Australians. Call it assimilation if you like, I call it equal rights and equal opportunities and I applaud it unreservedly. As Bess Price says, "I want for my kids what Larissa Behrendt has had." And that goes for all Aboriginal people.

Joe Lane

Joe,

Unfortunately, I don't have time to research the Stolen Generations, but I reckon there must be something to it.

There is no doubt in my mind, however, that what mainly prevents many indigenous men in particular from escaping their culture of self-destruction is an absolute poverty of self-worth. I agree education seems the only remedy, but such an education should begin with a severe critique of the Western culture that ruined theirs and so morally-eclipses them now with its false conceits. Indeed it would do the rednecks good to be educated in the worthlessness they take such pride in.
The situation seems hopeless so long as this nation goes on celebrating itself as if there are no grounds for self-recrimination. That's what countries like Australia, the US, Israel and South Africa do; they refuse to get down from their high horses and hang their heads in shame for what they've done to precipitate and institutionalise their respective State of affairs.
I don't think aborigines should be striving to be like us. They should see Western culture for what it is and reject and and go beyond it.
How about an indigenous capital; a new Australian city and culture to put the others in the shade? That would give indigenous people their own goal to strive for and resource of self-respect. Who knows, maybe one day they'd be the supercilious ones--though hopefully they'd be better than that!

Hi Squeers,

This 350-word 4-comments-in-24-hours can be inconvenient: in response to your post at 10.53 yesterday, yes, as you write: " .... By all means urge aborigines to help themselves, to pull themselves up by their boot-straps--despite the fact that the cards are stacked against them!"

Yes, indeed, you don't have to tell me or my kids about the unfairness of it. But what should people do - try harder, as Amy Wax writes in her "Race, Rights and Remedies", or give up and cry into their beer ? Yes, life is particularly unfair for the great majority of Aboriginal people, in ways that you can't even imagine. So they try harder, as they are doing, actually. Or what ?

Your post this morning: I love that logic: I feel something must have happened, it resonates - I don't have any evidence for it, but I'll go with it anyway. Thank you for your ideology in a nutshell :)

South Africa has a nominally democratic government now, Squeers: wind your clock forward.

You write: " ... I don't think aborigines should be striving to be like us...." So .... whites have the monopoly of the good life, on higher education, on comfort and security ? Other people shouldn't try to get some of what is rightfully yours alone ? Pull your head out of it, dear.

[TBC]