I'd reached my post limit till now.
Why all this defensiveness? Surely the author's allowed to report his experience and egister his feelings on the matter? Why must they be resented? How about a little empathy?
Thanks for the potted history, Rhrosty, can you give us a few references?
Hasbeen, I was brought up never to hate; I just try to see things from the other's point of view, it's much more interesting and makes me reflective and self-critical. Don't you get sick of reading the world according to that same jaundiced, beady-eyed perspective of yours? Maybe try stepping out of yourself?
Grim, I thought I did address it, as a "red herring"? We can split hairs over the meaning of immigrant if you like, I was just more interested in Australian identity, which is just as much a crock of shyte as racial integrity. I agree, "worrying about your genetic inheritance [is] the very essence of racism". I don't. I dismiss it as a joke. Australian identity is founded in ideology, which doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. It has no substance at all, yet stinks to high heaven in its exclusionary elitism.
It amazes me that Aussies can be so judgemental yet can't endure so much as the suggestion of a criticism.

Just out of curiosity, does anyone else have an explanation for the "aboriginal problem".

Squeers, I don't really have a problem with non Whites having a go at White people, Ramesh may have a point, it's a very subjective and ramshackle article but he may genuinely feel that way and not be merely practicing his PC catechism in the hope of landing a grant or two.
No dear heart, I take issue with a White person backing and even expanding upon his conclusions and pushing the discussion onto a whole other level, do you seriously think that Ramesh, or any other refugee would validate any negative commentary on his own people, like fun he would!
According to Anti Racists like you "Racist" White Australian identity (not the other race based,blood and soil identity of Aboriginality) is tied to ideology, you tie everything to ideology because an ideology is a set of beliefs and beliefs cannot be challenged or scrutinised.
Pray tell, which ideology formed the White Australian identity?
White Nationalism? Nationalists of all persuasions have probably numbered in the tens or at most dozens throughout Australian history, you might as well blame Anarchists or Socialists, there were always far more of them on the ground.
Are you perhaps thinking of the populist Anglo Saxon identity politics of yore, which did exist but as the name suggests viewed Australian identity as very much beneath it's society of, as Fisher put it, "Independent Britons".
Liberalism perhaps? Judeo Christianity? I'm pretty sure most reformers come from those traditions so they're off the hook.
Please, enlighten us as to how a bevy of foreign identity cults and benevolent European institutions managed to conjure into being such a uniquely abhorrent creature as the White Australian?

Squeers—“ Just out of curiosity, does anyone else have an explanation for the "aboriginal problem?

The Whites settled in Australia nearly 240years ago. Yes, the aboriginals were faced with a more advanced civilization who didn’t treat them as equals. There were atrocities and injustice.

But that is history and the Aboriginals have every freedom and opportunity today to get an education and make something of themselves as indeed some of them have done, and just recently I saw an article on how many are enrolling in university currently.
However, there is a hardcore of them that wants to play the victim and have a huge chip on their shoulder about what the whites owe them.

Most white people in Australia apart from some of the early elite settlers were never given land.
They had to get an education, work and pay for whatever they got.
My husband and I had $1.00 in the bank when we got married, nobody gave us land or a house
We worked and paid for everything we own. As did most people. The white government never gave us free land after the early settlements a couple of centuries ago.

As to Anglo Saxon History,(my grandfather was English)
England was overrun many times in it’s history by William the Conqueror, the Vikings, the Normans, the Romans. At one time the warlords divided England up into 7Kingdoms under different Kings(warlords), but eventually with different disputes and quarrels between them England ended up under one King.

The English couldn’t just sit under a tree for 240years moaning about getting their land back because the King would have excuted them for treason against his majesty. I think that most whites feel that it is time for the aboriginals to stand up and have a go and make something of themselves by the sweat of their brow the way most white and other races in Australia have to do. They would have lost this land to the Japanese anyway, the mostly white army paid for this land with the blood of their sons,husband and fathers. Hence we have Anzac day.

Squeeers asks, in his post:

"Just out of curiosity, does anyone else have
an explanation for the "aboriginal problem"[?]"

.

Squeers, it is really so simple. They couldn't stop the boats! That was the "aboriginal problem".

Of course, that is probably a vast over-simplification of the situation, and an unrealistic crystallization of it as if it occurred at a single point in time. It wasn't the boats per se that were the cause of the problem, it wasn't even the whitefellas the boats carried, so much as it was the bags. Bags of flour, bags of sugar, bags of salt. Whitefella tucker. And then there were the jumbuks! Whitefella tucker on the hoof: tucker easy to catch, kill, and eat, but carrying in their fleeces the seeds of conflict.

Life, compared to the unbelievably finely balanced and disciplined co-existence with the natural environment that had had to be maintained up until the arrival of the boats, was early-on seen as just so much easier when oriented more to the fringes of whitefella settlement and its seemingly more dependable and more easily obtained food supply. A further problem being that few enough of the whitefellas, let alone the blackfellas, understood the complexities and implicit social contracts necessary to the maintenance of this supply chain.

And then of course there was the grog. Nearly always the grog. The grog, to which it almost seemed as if most of the whitefellas had almost a genetic tolerance, measure for measure, compared to most of the blackfellas.

All of this, to start with, carried in the boats. Not just any boats, but those of the Empire of the Sea, little more than a generation out from having, against all odds, decisively won the first 'world war', the Seven Years War, 1756-1763.

Britannia ruled the waves, and it had come to do so in part by standing on the shoulders of those earlier masters of the sea, the Portuguese, from whom, serendipitously, if I am not mistaken, the author of the article is descended and as much to blame!

Squeers,

"...Australian identity is founded in ideology, which doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. It has no substance at all..."

Interesting point. I've spent years in the hope of finally grasping what is meant by Australian "culture" and "identity". Other than a generic Western egotism and disdain for anything that doesn't bow to it, what is there?

Forrest Gumpp....the shadow boxers of life. What I think with the grog and all, these are by facts...stone-age people. JayB and the insights, has by all means, hit the nail right by the point of which" : Where are you from?....I guess religion has nothing to say either:)...hunters and gatherers as it was in the real beginning...

This is NO-MANS land....and it comes down to this once again.."your dammed if you do, and your dammed if you dont.

Let it go.

Real men stand up, weak men just die. Its always been just this way....and who am I to say....over 5 million years of us:)

This planet is a hard place to live.

Its always been this way...and it always will.

These are the true facts of life......

cc