I just wanted to express my admiration for your work in preserving the historical record, not to mention the interesting and well considered way you bring it to life.

Have you considered publishing a collection of original sources with commentary

Unfortunately for the author, the most basic of checks of relevant Government legislation belies his conclusion that statements about the oppression and mistreatment of Aboriginal people are merely a black armband view of history.
Read the South Australian Aborigines Act of 1911, which shows that Aboriginal people were subject to all the controls he purports are false. http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/54205.pdf
Or the 1934 Act: http://archive.aiatsis.gov.au/removeprotect/54213.pdf

John ,you have done an admirable job on researching South Australian Aboriginal events but I think,nay,know that both NSW and Queensland were a vastly different scene. "Herding" and massacres are well documented. Don't dismiss oral history lightly - there are many examples of events that are passed down with frightening accuracy with vast geographic spread.Many have been verified 'scientifically' in recent times,other have verified by various forms of art.
Tread carefully

What a load of toss.
Check out WA's history with Aboriginal treatment in the early days.

There are many books and articles on the subject.
How South Australian people could have been so different is a bit of a stretch.

What an interesting Article .

What is nice about it ,is that it is "traditional" History... ie it uses primary Sourses and is based upon Facts.

Modern History , is a rewrite ,based on the Writers 'opinions"

having known a number of the missionaries who served the aboriginal people in the 1950s to 1970's I can guarenntee that most of them were 50 times more self sacrificing than the industry that replaced them. They genuinely had the aboriginals interest at heart in contrast to the history revisionsist who often hate everything decent and want everyone to conform to their godless worldview. Many of the rmeaining elders still testify to this. Don't expect any truth to be published or shown by our self serving national broadcaster. As they collect their $300000 plus pa they trash the sacrificial efforts of many while taking the high moral ground. The sneering left fell very comfortable cheering them on.

To Phil W

I’ve had a look at the 1911 Act (Act) and, with respect, believe you should re-examine it with proper regard to the rules of statutory interpretation.

The Act makes provision for certain controls but mandates few.

It certainly does not evidence a flaw in the author’s work. Indeed many of the “protective” measures seem consistent with the article.

Just wondering, in all the wonderful work you are doing, is there one comment that say why the people returned.

Maybe there was no need for fences, as there was nowhere they could go.

Maybe their lands were already out of their reach.

Hi drgal1,

I'm not the 'author' of all this, merely the recorder, the transcriber of about six thousand pages. I've put it all on a web-site: www.firstsources.info

A friend is about to launch a commentary.

Suse,

I have transcribed as much as possible, word for word. I haven't made up a 'load of tosh': it's there, have a look if you have the courage, and then come back.

Growly,

I'm pretty confident that SA was some sort of exception, although I don't know for sure, and unless somebody has done a similar job on their particular state's first-hand data, then they don't know either.

In those early days forty years ago, I assumed, like most people, either that the material didn't exist any more, or never had, or those 'b@stards' had deliberately destroyed it, or that it would be impossible to find it. Not so. Five minutes registering at the public library here, and half an hour waiting, and bingo ! there's your material. With State Records, it might be half a day, no big deal.

And there's mountains of it, maybe, across Australia, in all the depositories, it measures in the kilometres. So nobody can say it isn't there.

As anybody who has tried it knows, when you transcribe, you read the same stuff over and over half a dozen times, first in the record itself, making sure you have understood what the writer, with his good or bad handwriting, has been trying to say, then for your own spelling mistakes, then to turn off that bloody Caps Lock key and re-do a couple of lines, then to format, then to perhaps index, then to double-check.

But I haven't modified any of what I've transcribed (what would be the point?), or 'interpreted' it, or in any way 'creatively' re-fashioned it. What the writers write, that's what you get.

So shoot the messenger if you like, it makes no difference to what they actually wrote. It's there for all time.

Thanks to all commentators,

Cheers,

Joe

Joe,
You made a good point in saying that "we are them and they are us", the more I look into the "past" the more It becomes apparent that people haven't changed, the words of people one hundred or two hundred years ago rarely need to be interpreted or put into context.
The "Black Armband" narrators will always interpret everything literally and regard an absence of information as a sign of guilt or evidence of a cover up but there's nothing to be done about people who see history as "story time".
The vast majority of White Australians today are sympathetic toward Aborigines, based on the evidence there's no reason to take it for granted that our ancestors thought or behaved any differently.
Whoever mentioned "oral history" needs to realise that firstly eyewitness testimony is not reliable and that people lie about things all the time, especially White "do gooders" and Anti Racists. Were there White "do gooders" back then fabricating atrocity stories like they do today? Of course there were.

JoM, I have never put much store in the oral history of anything,from anyone of any colour, especially something like the bible.

However, when some concrete evidence, like old human remains dug up and found to be Aboriginal, with obvious damage to the skeletons that could only have been caused by European invaders of the day, then I tend to believe it.

How about you?

Suse,

Exactly ! If something 'happened', then there should be actual evidence of it: evidence, as we surely know from thousands of hours of murder mysteries, is very hard to completely erase.

On the other hand, rumour is dead easy. Oral history, 'Chinese whispers', rumours, suspicions, slander, &c., is just as likely to be puffery. Some newspapers love the sensationalist stories which take time to disprove, but they are nothing new in Australia.

That's why I'm focussing on what the Protector actually wrote, what were his words and actions, what did he do in his position, and what didn't he do that nowadays, we may suspect he did. But didn't. Especially what he not only didn't do but didn't approve of.

Genuine history is full of surprises.

Cheers,

Joe

Thank you Joe

Why re-think it, why not do the standard academic thing & invent more on the run as money becomes available ?

Joe
Can you forward this account to Professor Peter Read who has done so much damage in his Stolen Generations.

Thanks, Dan.

Hi Individual,

I suppose I would, but I'm not an academic :) I'm retired, a free agent, a very dangerous species.

Hi Leslie,

Done, thank you for the suggestion.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Joe, I would just like to put in my perspective. When I moved to the Kimberley in 1970 I married an indigenous man who naturally introduced me to all his "grannies" and boy did he have a lot of them. I was lucky enough to get a bit of information from some of those who were children when their families moved into the missions. Remember that the Kimberley was settled much later than the rest of Australia. When I asked one old dear why her family had moved into the missions, she looked at me as if I were slow and replied "for the mie of course" . Mie was local dialect for food. She said they were not compelled but simply followed the rest of the tribe who were looking for easy food. I could find no evidence of gross abuse of the people in the early mission days, quite the opposite. The old people I spoke to talked about the old days with affection. The only practise that caused real unhappiness was that of removing the children from their families at the age of 7 and putting them into dormitories, mainly to ensure they went to school I think. My husbands mother and all her siblings had gone through this system and seemed none the worse for it. A bit like boarding school I guess, although they saw their parents on a daily basis and spent Sundays with them. From listening to stories from the old people I gather more trauma was caused by inter tribal fighting than by early settlers and missionaries.

Yes, Susieonline, there are numerous books on the subject of aboriginal and white relations in WA in the early years. Could I recommend two of them for you? They are "Australia's Living Stone Age" and "Over the Ranges" by Ion Idriess.

Idriess wrote about his personnel experiences in the remotest parts of Australia, and they just do not conform to the black armband view of history. I know that you desperately do not want to believe it, but aboriginal life was hardly Edenic (especially if you were a female) and the white settlers that Idriess met were truly concerned with the welfare of the aboriginal people.

The settlers were angry about the WA government's policy of "no interference in native affairs" which meant hat the aboriginals were free to kill each other off for various reasons. One reason was the unique aboriginal belief that no man died for any reason without somebody being responsible. That "somebody" had to be identified and killed. That "somebody" was usually someone in the tribe that the Old Men wanted eradicated.

But I am sure that you won't read these fascinating books. Your compulsive need to believe that your own race are the cause of all the world's misery is something dear to your heart and there is no way that you want to read something which might cast doubt on that premise.

Turn away from the Dark Side, Susie. Come back to your people.

Lego,
Ion Idriss wasn't a historian in that sense. He was a writer who based his novels on actual happenings. You can not use his material as historical reference.

Individual,

I'm not so sure - precisely because Idriess was NOT an academic, a historian, but simply, naively, recording what he was witnessing or hearing, suggests that he wasn't going to be constrained quite so much by ideological blinkers, that he was persuaded by what he heard about, by the possibilities of reality rather than theory.

Arthur Upfield also commented a great deal on Aboriginal issues, without quite as ideological weight but as empirical observation - he lived out there, after all, and didn't have a particular axe to grind. And more importantly, he wasn't the captive of some group, beholden to it - and forced to keep on its good side - in order to keep his job, like so many academic concubines.

Yes indeed, we can't rely too much on oral accounts, but if something can be corroborated independently of those accounts, with forensic or documentary evidence, preferably from more than one or two sources, then we might be onto something.

But I think I can see where you are coming from :)

Joe

Individual.

The bloke was there when a very interesting and now contentious part of Australian history was being made. Your premise implies that we must not believe anything Idriess said about his experiences being Billy Sing's spotter at Galliipli because he was not a historian. (Billy who? says Individual)

Could I remind you that our left wing historians have been discovered to be outright liars who airbrushed history in order to make it conform to their black armband ideology? When an ideology pushed by already discredited sources is contradicted by eye witness accounts from people who were there and who recount their stories without seeming to push any ideological position themselves, and when their accounts cross connect with other reliable sources, then the weight of credibility rests with the eye witness.

Read his books, Individual, and be proud of how your pioneering ancestors treated aboriginal people. Then get angry about how you were naively conned by the lefties into thinking the opposite.

The most amazing aspect of trendy lefty viewpoints is their advocacy of the "stolen generations." The removal of mainly half caste aboriginal children from dysfunctional tribal life in order to teach them hygiene and to equip them for the modern world was a LEFT WING IDEA that was advocated by lefties including members of Australia's Communist Party. It is utterly incredible that today's lefties are trying to use something that their predecessors advocated to try and claim that this is proof of how ghastly Australians treated aboriginal people.

Don't believe anything I say. Pick up some books on Australian history and start reading.

Lego,
I frequent a part of the country Idriess wrote about. For example the Drums of Mer were heavily coloured in so to speak. As I said earlier Ion Idriess was a writer who wrote novels with a major content of factual happenings.
Real historians would never write history in the first person as some leftie historians tend to sneak in by pretending to know what a character actually thought.
As a matter of fact I find Idriess's writing very interesting with a true sense of romance & history, a liitle like Hector Holthouse. My greatest admiration for an historian goes to the late Captain Brett Hilder on his book "The voyage of Torres". This man was incredible in his achievements & competence & integrity.

Thanks, Individual, I fully agree with you.

Hi LEGO,

When you write

"The removal of mainly half caste aboriginal children from dysfunctional tribal life in order to teach them hygiene and to equip them for the modern world .... "

From the Protector's letters (at least up to the end of Hamilton's tenure in 1908), it seems that, as long as a 'half-caste' child, or the child of a 'half-caste woman, was being looked after, he didn't involve himself in any attempt to 'take the children away' - quite the reverse.

In any case many 'half-caste' children and 'quarter-caste' children of 'half-caste' mothers, were not living in any way connected to traditional life, usually they were in towns or on missions. One deserted wife with four or five children was provided with rations in Adelaide for at least nine years. Another widowed woman with a big family, who had taken over the lease of 160 acres from her late husband, obviously couldn't look after the land AND raise her kids, so the Protector had her provided with rations by the local district Council for many years. As long as kids had a caring mother, the family was provided with rations. There seems to be no evidence of families or children being compelled to go to Missions.

But if a 'half-caste' mother died, or if a child was otherwise an orphan, the Protector had an obligation to take care of that child, and usually sent them to a Mission, where they could be looked after by the Matron of the dormitory, fed and clothed, and enrolled in the Mission school. In that period 1840-1912, there don't seem to have been any exceptions to this guiding principle.

[TBC]

[continued]

Of course, the focus was om female children - male children, even orphans (if they were old enough) were assumed to be more able to make their way, and didn't need protection so much - in fact, I have come to think that the policy of 'Protection' really related to female children and single women, who, after all, had very few options for employment, apart from domestic service under the eagle-eye of the mistresses of the household. Marriage was basically their only other option, and this really would have been the situation until after the second world war - as it was for the female children of working-class families all over Australia.

We have to be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking that what system and conditions apply now, was what the situation was like back then. Unemployment benefits weren't introduced until the Depression, and even old-age pensions weren't thought of until just over a hundred years ago, pretty much anywhere in the world. Everybody was on their own far more than they are now.

Cheers,

Joe

I wonder if the author has done any research on the Elliston Massacres where dozens or even hundreds of Aboriginal men, women and children were herded over the cliffs and into the sea. Elliston is a town on the Eyre peninsula in South Australia and even today Aboriginal people shun the area.

Thanks Eyeinthesky,

The problem with such reports is that there is no way to verify them: push people into the sea and where's the evidence ? On the other hand, if nobody is pushed into the sea, there wouldn't be any evidence either. Yes, I've heard of that rumour, and another 'herding over the cliffs' rumour relating to Moonta as well.

What is one supposed to do with the stories which depend on the 'absence of evidence' ? Of course, one should file it away in one's mind but not believe it outright: rumour and hearsay may not be the 'truth'. Often in the nineteenth century, especially amongst hicks and bar-flies, I suspect that highly inflated stories and rumours got bandied about. It reminds me of a story in a book by the great Ruth Park, dealing with the early history of her native New Zealand, in which an old Maori chief smacks his lips at the memory of eating a missionary - the problem, Park pointed out, was that no missionary had every been killed and eaten in New Zealand.

What counts as evidence ? A passionate and indignant story ? No, all it may be is a passionate and indignant story, without a shred of truth to it. Unless a story can be checked in some way, and backed up by some concrete evidence, by forensic archaeologists if necessary, I wouldn't give it the time of day. Life's too short.

Cheers,

Joe

Dear Joe Lane, It is so refreshing to hear an opinion of a positive nature on aboriginal affairs. You strike me as a well balanced sort of bloke who has always made his own way in his life.

eyeinthesky,
I must admit I know nothing of the massacre you refer to. I will look it up of course. This actually reminds of an incident I experienced first hand about 20 years ago.
A half-caste aboriginal from Central Australia was speaking to some white bureaucrats & a handful of Islanders about cultural awareness on the Qld islands. Even the islanders queried his suitability. Then, an island elder gave a lecture on local history. In one part this elder told of magistrate Frank Jardine having shot 3000 islanders on Muralug island as retalliation to the killing of a boat crew of Beche-de-mer fishers.. Now, the interesting part was that 20 years earlier the castaway Barbara Thompson who lived with the Murarlug tribe for five years, told her rescuers that she counted 49 people in that tribe. The tribe must have gone into procreation overdrive after Barbara's rescue to get to 3000.
The other interesting part is that the magistrate replacing Jardine wrote of visiting the scene & it was only for want of a proper boat & a sufficient number of Police that he didn't punish the treacherous perpetrators as had been the intention of Mr Jardine had he remained here. Jardine was on leave for 18 months at that time when 3000 tribal people were supposedly shot. a little re-thinking of history would go well on this particular subject.

Thanks, JBowyer, you're far too kind.

I don't know, Individual, how do you look up something for which there is no evidence ?

Horror stories have been around as long as there have been newspapers in Australia. Criticising governments has been part of their bread and butter. My mum used to tell me about a supposed massacre in Queensland when five thousand people were killed by poisoned flour. It's taken me fifty years to say to myself, wait a minute, there probably has never been a time when five thousand people all in the one place. And what would the pastoralist supposedly involved have done with the five thousand bodies ? Where are they ? Did he burn them all, at a ton of wood per person ? How long would that have taken ? And would it all have been done without laving a trace ?

One indicative incident in the Protector's letters comes to mind: men from the Lake Hope region near Cooper's Creek, used to come down to the Flinders Ranges for ochre, raiding shepherds' huts as they went, up and down. The Protector's suggestion ? Send two tons of ochre a year up to Lake Hope. Those journeys may have had other purposes, strengthening social relations between groups, arranging marriage partners, but that's for another researcher to explore.

Most universities are in the major cities, where archives tend to be kept. it would be great if every student enrolling in a course in Aboriginal History was required to find and analyse just one major document from those archives. At that rate, in barely one or two hundred years, much of the store of documents could be gone over and students could get a feel for the real day-to-day issues of the time. Perhaps the academics involved could give it a go as well, it would be a novel experience for most of them.

Cheers,

Joe
www.firstsources.info

how do you look up something for which there is no evidence ?
Loudmouth,
Academic historians don't seem to have a problem there ?

<<It's taken me fifty years to say to myself, wait a minute...>>

And I'd estimate it will take another 500 years before most who passage through our educational institutions are able to do the same. The dominant meme --actually dominant is too weak a word, it's more like ONLY view aired-- in the ones I've experienced has been very much: noble savage against evil whites bent on nothing less than total genocide. In the Arts, Humanities, Social Science realm(s) practically every text/incident is deconstructed with the view to evidencing this.

It is going take a long hard fighter to unseat the lefty theocracy that pushes that view/line.

"Dogma demands authority, rather than intelligent thought, as the source of opinion; it requires persecution of heretics and hostility to unbelievers; it asks of its disciples that they should inhibit natural kindness in favor of systematic hatred."

- Bertrand Russell

SPQR,
To illustrate the mentality of academia on such issues I present the following excerpt from a declaration by 34 French historians in response to the questions raised by Robert Faurisson (Le Monde 21/2/1979)
"Every one is free to interpret a phenomenon like the Hitlerite genocide according to his own philosophy. Everyone is free to compare it with other enterprises of murder committed earlier, at the same time, later. Everyone is free to offer such or such kind of explanation; everyone is free, to the limit, to imagine or to dream that these monstrous deeds did not take place. Unfortunately they did take place and no one can deny their existence without committing an outrage on the truth. It is not necessary to ask how technically such mass murder was possible. It was technically possible, seeing that it took place. That is the required point of departure of every historical inquiry on this subject. This truth it behooves us to remember in simple terms: there is not and there cannot be a debate about the existence of the gas chambers."

When there is something to gain, historical events begin to change.

Individual,
True enough but I don't see what Aboriginals or Australian White people have to gain from taking a stand one way or another on this issue of "reconciliation".
The whole idea of reconciliation is suspect on the face of it, Aborigines as a group didn't do anything wrong, neither did White people, there's nothing to reconcile between the two races so the argument as it stands is a nothing more than a demarcation of a difference of opinion between different castes of Whites, it's really got nothing to do with Aborigines.
More than that it's become one of a range of emblems of the differing values of two significant portions of the White population, we might even call them two different ethnic groups given that the contrast is so great.

Hi Individual & Jay of M.,

Symbolic gestures like the apology and reconciliation, and in the future (I'm sure), a treaty and who-knows-what-else, are very valuable to many people, who are going to be on all those new and necessary committees for years to come.

They will perhaps even be on full-time salaries, attending conferences here and in Hawai'i and Canada (depending on the season), looking serious and dignified, and having great fun hob-nobbing with politicians, who will respectfully ask for their opinions on all manner of subjects.

How many people are employed in the reconciliation industry, or the apology industry ? Or the deaths in custody industry, or stolen generation industry ? Probably in the thousands.

So don't knock the power of symbolism :)

Joe

Loudmouth &JOM,
I reside in an area where these inustries actually have become the back bone of an airline.
Also, many bureaucrats owe their living to this symbolism. The only ones who don't get special treatment are the normal non-indigenous blue collar workers who are required to swallow all pride in order to being employed whereas the bureaucrats just swallow.

To Loudmouth.

The point I was making, was that the removal of half caste aboriginal children from tribal situations was a humanitarian obligation that was benign in intent, if not in practice. The aim was to remove half caste aboriginal children from situations where they were subject to racially inspired physical and sexual abuse by full blooded aboriginals (and predatory non aboriginal males) who called them "yeller fellers".

This abuse was even recounted in Doris Garimara's acclaimed book 'Rabbit Proof Fence" where she recounts (as a child) how badly her half caste mother was treated by aboriginal children. If I understand the situation, the government supplied "Aboriginal Protectors" of the time thought that aboriginal people were simply too dumb to ever function in a modern society, but that the half caste kids were smart enough to have a chance. Removing the half caste kids from unacceptable tribal squalor and educating them to take their place in society was the best course of action. This policy was fully supported by the extreme Left, who were the ones who originally proposed it, and now they are the ones determined claim that it was an act of genocide proposed by the Right.

In an age where social security did not really exist, this was the only sensible course of action that the authorities could manage. And I say that as a person who came very close to be "stolen" myself.

Just give the wheel time to go full turn & the word stolen will again get to its real meaning looked after. As monies become available to promote the term so will the attitudes change.

Hi LEGO,

I'm not so sure that there were many 'half-caste' children taken from tribal or traditional situations, or that there were many 'taken' at all. In the Protector's letters, it appears that almost every child who was quite unambiguously taken into care were the children of women who had been living close to towns, and who had died, usually in those days from TB (which took people amazingly quickly, within a month quite often).

As well, they may have been the children of a 'half-caste' couple in situations where the mother had died and the father wasn't able to look after them.

In seventy years, the numbers of children taken into care in South Australia - at least those who came to the attention of the Protector - may not have exceeded low double figures.

In fact, there was one case which I still can't quite get my head around, in which the Protector paid for the rental of a cottage in Goolwa for two half-caste widows and their children, and over a period of some years. Why has got me bushed.

In another case, a 'full-blood' who had married a white woman, and who had worked for twenty-odd years on the railways in the South-East, but who had to give it up, came into Adelaide to try to set up a green-grocer's business but was too sick, so the Protector paid for the family's accommodation in the city, at least until the man died. Even after, the Protector sent rations for the 'half-caste' children to their mother.

[TBC]

[continued]

Quite tragic, really: she had had two or three kids before she had married this man, quite a good man from the record, and had two kids by him.

After he died, she went up the river to Morgan and married another Aboriginal man and had two more kids by him. But he was Victorian, and not covered by any support from the SA Protector, so he left her and, I think went back to Victoria, leaving her with seven kids, only two of whom could get rations from the SA Protector.

She made her way as a seamstress, but never seemed to lose any of her kids. Some people must have sweated blood to survive in those days.

Cheers,

Joe

Why do we believe rumours ? Because we want to, if they bolster the way we already think. They help us 'pre-judge' issues. i.e. they reinforce our prejudices.

They work both ways. I was just reading a parson's account of his trip up the west coast of South Australia, where he heard a story of a young half-caste girl living with a group, I think from the Gawler Ranges, who was fattened up, killed and eaten. Quite fanciful, without some other evidence to back it up. The rumour probably got going with some bar-fly and was passed on and embroidered until the parson got hold of it and gave it more authority by repeating it.

Oral accounts are inherently unreliable without back-up. At Point McLeay, set up by George Taplin, some people won't have a bar of him because he was supposed to be very cruel to a young woman named Mutjuli. She had been abused by an ex-convict named Challenger and came back to the Mission in 1877 with two young boys. Taplin, I suppose, held that against her, not that it would have fazed him. In his Journal, in fact, he has nothing but praise for her, as she cared for Charlie Peake as he was dying, with the help of Philip Rigney, and they married soon after Peake died. Taplin put on a reception in his house for the couple, the first time he ever did so.

So where did this 'oral history' come from ? Long after Taplin died in 1879, another Superintendent, Sutton, in about 1896-1897, came down hard on Mutjuli for persistently committing adultery while her husband was away working. Sutton warned her that he would have her and her paramour expelled if she continued. In response, the couple spent three days in Adelaide at West's Coffee Palace in Hindley Street under other names. And before he could expel them, they ran off together to Goolwa, leaving four or five young children, and where they lived for the next thirty years until she died.

[TBC]

[continued]

Oral history, like Chinese whispers, can be totally unreliable, and just occasionally quite accurate. The problem is, which and when ? A story may indicate something, but it must surely be treated with scepticism until other evidence, documentary or forensic, can be found. Otherwise it's just a story which 'fits' one's prejudices.

I've just finished putting together a file on the issue of 'Land, Boats and Guns' to Aboriginal people from the 1840s to 1912, covering thirty-odd pages. It surprised me to see it spelt out in detail.

Joe
www.firstsources.info