<<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.