Back again Pilger. Money for nothing & yer kicks for free. We've been down this discussion before & you never reply to any of the Posts. Your article is not worth commenting on.

A Pilger article with an inbuilt Godwin.

>>It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis<<

How efficient.

A bit more detail please.
How many of those children were from families awash in grog and other substances?
How many of those children showed signs of abuse and/or malnutrition?
How many of those children were suffering from Foetal Alcohol Syndrome?
As it stands, this article is too glib, too condemnatory. It has no backing substance.

Have to agree with Hauduell!
John is a completely disgruntled stirrer, of the first water!
Who rarely if ever never ever lets the facts get in the way of a good story, or fantasy!?
I don't have a problem with people building dream castles in the clouds, even where those dreams are mostly horror stories and nightmares.
I just don't think it's a good idea to move in as a permanent resident?
Rhrosty.

John.Over many years I have been one of your champions, but recently, unease has grown to opposition as you get it wrong, as in this case of the “stolen generation” –all emotion, no empirical evidence. Perhaps even worse, some suggestion of dishonesty is creeping in. This article was previously published in CounterPunch. It is improper to propagate your ideas in OLO and refuse to respond to posts. I have tried to contact you directly and followed up your direction "John Pilger can be reached through his website: www.utopiajohnpilger.co.uk." But this is an advertisement for you film

Pilger is one of those academics who can't see why things happen, they only see the end result. Why does Pilger never discuss such issues before they get to the stage when the outcome upsets him ? I wonder if he could comprehend the term prevention ? Probably not otherwise he'd not write in hindsight expertise. Hey Mr Pilger how about an article about the indigenous who are now infiltrating the public service & feathering their nests by bleating racism, discriminiation etc. all of which THEY are now dishing out against their own purely for personal gain. Write about that before it becomes a greater issue.

We been done Pilgerred yit agin.

How can we racist Hillbillies cope? Weez a few Banjos short of a p--s Up.

Rumor is his visitations to Oz now and thin is to top-up his prestigious suntan. Prestigious in iz ome Blighty that iz.

Pilger, academic, please! The man has been shoving the same old race hate barrow since the Daily Mirror in the 1960's.
Give it a rest John go and see that nice Mr Putin and retire with all those lovely communists. You know waving wheat fields and bally in the evening.

Good Lord - is this man for real? Next he'll be claiming the high rate of aboriginal incarceration is due to being singled out for offences involving bicycles and safety helmets ...

Get the tapes rolling during a drunken party or two in some of the communities where no children should be left John. U might pick up on the screams of women being knocked about and children being raped ... But don't worry, they love the kiddies. They can sleep it off tomorrow rather than go to school and besides they are used to it. We don't want to remove them from their 'culture' do we ...?

John Pilger can't afford to reply because it would jeopardise his income. It's safer for him to watch it all develop & then happen until it's safe enough to criticise.
He's had two days now to reply but not a single word from him or doesn't he post these things himself ?

…Two thirds of “removed” children are not Aboriginal, is more telling!

…Maybe the focus here should be towards the other major group who lose their children in this way, and may add balance to the article!

…I would suggest the primary reason for removing children from their parents is more an issue of failure of successive Governments to acknowledge and deal with, the difficulty in Australia for families who fall into poverty traps through unemployment and other social failures.

…The major impediment to the success of the family unit, is a simple issue of affordable housing: Young women who find themselves pregnant, will face a stark reality of raising their child in a community fractured by Government policy of excessive immigration, which mops up our housing stock, and forces rents to skyrocket.

There are some pretty dreadful people in this world.

People who steal little old ladies handbags in the street, people who glass others in a pub, people who give 5 year olds Venereal diseases, & of course people who will write anything for a buck, but never report the Venereal disease.

I think the latter are perhaps the worst.

Diver Dan: I would suggest the primary reason for removing children from their parents is more an issue of failure of successive Governments to acknowledge and deal with, the difficulty in Australia for families who fall into poverty traps through unemployment and other social failures.

I would suggest the primary reason for removing children from their parents is more an issue of failure of the parents. Some parents just shouldn't have children. Rich, poor or in between, it doesn't matter. Drugs, alcohol, or just plain Bogan head banging Durs. These are the people that should be tested for suitability before they start breeding. Some people just need to be neutered to save the Gene Pool.

Harsh, Politically Incorrect, yep. Never-the-less true.

Pilger’s outstanding feature is his propensity to tell lies. He seems to particularly enjoy telling lies about aborigines, such as his confection about the Battle of Patonga, which,.in reality, never happened, but was asserted by this author, to be fact.

I started to read this article, until I gave it a few second’s thought, and desisted. Rubbish like this should never be read, when the time could be far more profitably spent staring into empty space.

"Pilgering" is the trait of getting people righteous and ANGRY - accuracy doesn't matter.

Pilger then makes money from his loyal audience - dreary old British socialists who need a bit of little revolution in their otherwise quiet lives.

We'll never pass the Pilger test - that test being Pilger's unchanged view of Australia in the 1960s.

Best to disregard this sun-lamp codger.

"Stolen" for good reason.

Case 1 Deborah Melville.

Foster child Deborah died in the dirt in a suburban Darwin backyard, propped against a trailer. She was suffering from a leg infection which had spread into the bone, and was visited by FACS case workers the day before she died. A FACS worker assured the child, “I am not here to take you away.”

A manslaughter trial and coronial inquiry was told that Deborah probably died in excruciating pain, and that she had been unable to control her bowel and bladder in the days before her death. Because of this, her carers, Denise Reynolds and Tony Melville, put her outside to sit in the dirt. One witness told the manslaughter hearing that Reynolds's had said that “If Deborah wanted to wet and soil herself, she can go outside and do it like an animal.”

Case 2 "Peter."

Seven week old Peter starved to death in the back of a hot car on the Stuart Highway in 2005. Peter was born to a drug using mother who’s six other children were known to FACS. In 2002, one of the children, a daughter, was taken (stolen?) and taken to Alice Springs Hospital at three months old, “haunted and looking like a bony skeleton.” Peter at death weighed 1kg less than his birth weight.

Case 3 "Joy."

Joy was assessed by health workers as being ‘at risk of severe harm”, and she was one of eight teenage girls in a remote mining town who were being sexually abused by a government official. The teenager, who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, had a long history of neglect in her aboriginal family. As early as two, she was deposited at a local health clinic because nobody was looking after her. But repeated attempts by the police to get FACS to intervene to protect Joy came to nothing.

When I read this article my first thought was that I must live in a different country from the author. I live in the Kimberley now, having spent the past 44 years in the top end, surrounded by aboriginal people of all types, from full blood tribal to almost white urban. I have a huge indigenous family myself. My passion in life, after my family, is child protection, especially of indigenous children.
For the past four decades I have watched in disbelief as indigenous children are left in conditions the RSPCA wouldn't leave a dog in. Unfed, unwashed, uneducated, sexually and emotionally abused. Reported repeatedly to Child Protection officers by Health and Education department workers. But to no avail. Indigenous children are invariably left in conditions that wouldn't be tolerated for white children. The standard of care requirement has been set far lower for the indigenous than the nonindigenous.
One of the cases that horrified me was that of a malnourished 16month old boy from a remote out station who has been sodomised within 24 hours prior to his admission. This was not conjecture, he had the evidence still in his body, yet this poor infant was returned to his family, due to lack of evidence of a perpetrator. Imagine the outcry if that child had been white!
John Pilger is wrong, not enough children are being removed from the hell that is their life. We now have the abandoned generation.

It won't be too long now & John Pilger will accuse his fellow bad, bad whities for abandoning indigenous children by not taking them away from unfit parents, same goes for white parents but they're not in fashion.
Why not do a program on the victims of ALP policies over the past 40 years since Goaf ?

Big Nana:

...The question regarding Aboriginal communities is simply this: Will those communities be in existence in say four generations of time? The answer to this question will include their current fragility as a community in this present time!

...Can remote Aboriginal communities withstand the trauma that alcohol inflicts on the moral compass of the remote community? The most devastating side effect of alcohol abuse on the community, is child neglect and abuse: A symptom of that abuse is the removal of the children for protection by State authorities!

...So, is the question one of survival of the community, or a question of the rights of the child? It would be over-simple to conclude that removing the child will either protect it or promote the “extent” of the community from which it was removed!

...Is it (in the long-run), better to sacrifice the child for the community survival, or pull down the complete society by removing the child, then dealing with individual transgressions of the community by existing laws of the land, until the communities are restored to a condition acceptable to raring children in safety?

...I am positive in my thinking that Aboriginal communities will eventually restore themselves to strength, since these communities have been existing in their current or similar form for many thousands of years! There is cause for great hope!

Jayb:

I get excited when somebody mentions my name! Interesting though, in NSW, one third of all children under sixteen have been removed from their parents at some stage of their lives!

http://www.smh.com.au/national/number-of-children-removed-from-parents-soars-20100701-zqqv.html

You would not be wrong in guessing that the fault for that lies squarely at the feet of the parent (In the end): I don't think that point is disputed!

But the broader question is; what leads to this situation of necessity of State Authorities to remove children from their parents in such alarming numbers?

WHY are parents failing? Thus, the conclusion in my tome above!

Big Nana tells it how it is. As for the suggestion some of these communities will somehow restore themselves and questions of whether children be left in the circumstances "that RSPCA wouldn't permit an animal to remain" for the purpose - I think the answers are NO and only if we were prepared to tolerate torture and deaths of innocents for the sake of some bizarre experiment.

Diver Dan writes: "The most devastating side effect of alcohol abuse on the community, is child neglect and abuse"

It's worse than that. Many children are born with the condition FAS (Foetal Alcohol Syndrome) which ensures the collective intellect and ability of survivors of current and future generations to thrive are further compromised.

At least a child removed early from neglect and abuse and placed in a SAFE environment where they have adequate nutrition, affection and education may have half a chance of returning to their community - if they desire. Not much opportunity to improve the state of affairs if you are dead from neglect, been murdered, suicide or worse ... rendered useless through the effects of ur birth, upbringing and lifestyle

As Pilger refuses to engage in debate , is there some way to communicate directly to him the contributions of Lego and Big Nana. Then we can at least say, "Now you know". My attempts have been unsuccessful.

Perhaps Mr Pilger could name ONE person who was illegally removed, and the circumstances of that removal ? Perhaps it could be taken before a court ?

It was never legal, anywhere in Australia, to remove a child from his/her carers for no cause.

Years ago, I studied the school records from one Aboriginal community here in SA, from 1880 to the 1960s. Eight hundred kids went to that school in that time. About twelve were taken TO the Mission (as it was) from outside the region (1.5 %), and about 47 school-age children (6 %) were, at some time or other, taken AWAY into care, usually for less than a year. Family break-down, destitution, maternal death, paternal death, etc. may have been the cause in most cases, as they would have been with white kids. Forty mothers died in that time, leaving 140 school-age children. Only one of those 47 did not return, as far as I can tell, and of the other 46 that did, the majority later married other Aboriginal people.

Yes, this was just one Mission, one setting. But here was a population with English as their first language since late in the nineteenth century, many very pale, comparatively well-educated, yet so few seized and taken away forever. Well, not one, really: the one child mentioned above was the child of a single mother who died of TB, with nobody to really look after her, but a very old great-grandmother, already burdened with numerous grand-children to care for.

Until a generation ago, there was a huge Orphanage in Adelaide (Goodwood). As far as I know, no Aboriginal kid was ever sent there.

Meanwhile, today, Aboriginal kids make up a third of kids taken into care. I'm tempted to paraphrase Gandhi: if anybody asked, 'What do you think of Aboriginal parenting ?' Having seen kids fishing around in garbage bins for food while their mother wolfed down a KFC chicken, having sent off the kid with 'F..k off, you little black ape!', I am sorely tempted to answer, 'Hey, that would be a good idea.'

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Diver Dan "..I am positive in my thinking that Aboriginal communities will eventually restore themselves to strength, since these communities have been existing in their current or similar form for many thousands of years! There is cause for great hope"

Not while the present consumption of alcohol in aboriginal communities remains.

David

Hi Diver Dan,

On your assertion that "..I am positive in my thinking that Aboriginal communities will eventually restore themselves to strength, since these communities have been existing in their current or similar form for many thousands of years! There is cause for great hope",

I must respectfully suggest that in traditional life, pre-Invasion, there was nothing remotely like the present-day 'communities' - for one thing, people were mobile, nomadic, without electricity, running water, lifelong welfare payments, Toyotas, grog, ganja, Ice or fast-food outlets. i.e. traditional society was a totally different society from today.

Check out any remote 'community' on Google Earth - it will have running water. So, why no vegetable gardens, which is about the simplest project I can imagine ? A spade and some packets of seeds (= $ 20) should do it. But no, not in any 'community'. And if not that, then what ?

A couple of years ago, I went back to a community we had lived in across the seventies. Back in about 1982, they had ripped out their 40 ha of grapes and other crops, to put in 130 ha of almonds (with 4000 ha, they could have done both, but no: either/or). In 2012, there was one family living here, amidst a couple of dozen fairly new (8-10 years) houses. Clearly nobody else had lived there for about five years. Why ? Long story, involving CDEP.

Another 'community' in the Flinders seems to have been abandoned. Many if not most of the 'homelands', the piddly outstations, up in the North-West, have rarely been lived in. Not that it mattered, since people can get lifelong welfare wherever they are, and some government agency or other will rebuild and refurbish at great cost, if they ever feel like moving back to a homeland for a while.

Marx was right: society is built on economy. So no economy: very fragile 'society' and not really any 'community'.

Cheers,

Joe
www.firstsources.inf

How do we get Peter Read to read Joe's evidence? He was the author of the 21 page propaganda pamphlet "The Stolen Generations". Partly (largely?)on this, he went on to be a PROFESSOR! at Sydney University.

Hi Leslie,

Thank you for that. One reality is that many Aboriginal children were taken into care over the past century, and that many tens of thousands of non-Aboriginal children were also taken into care.

Family break-downs happen. Surely most of us know of examples, at least from our childhood. Until well after the War, mothers died frequently in child-birth, given the lack of birth control and poor health care for both Aboriginal people and 'lower-class' white people, leaving children mother-less. Many diseases, like TB, didn't have cures until well after the War - after all, George Orwell died of it in 1950.

For Aboriginal people, until well after the War, the only work was in low-paid rural labour, intermittent, dangerous, often at great distances from their families. Intermittent destitution was common. After all, how DO you raise a large family on bugger-all ? Men shot through, tempted by other attractions. Others hit the grog. Until 1971 or so, non-Aboriginal women who were abandoned, had to wait the mandatory two years before they could get maintenance, terrified that the bloke might come back just before the two years was up, sweet-talk them, and they would have to start all over again.

Fathers died, and mothers re-married, raising the question: what to do with the teenage daughters ?

But other factors worked as well. I don't know about other states but here in SA, there was a paradoxical process in relation to Aboriginal single and separated mothers: the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board paid some to keep their children, at least from the late forties until the early seventies.

Those kids would have been counted as 'wards', and I think the payments for them continued until they were 21. Peter Read probably counted these kids, perhaps hundreds, as 'stolen', but clearly they were extremely 'un-stolen'.

Rumours are cheap and easy: Gypsies steal children to sell, Jews steal children to use their blood in matsohs. Nasty white governments 'therefore' are likely to - God knows why - steal children, they're such b@stards.

Evidence, not rumour, or suspicion, please.

Joe

Posts of Loudmouth and VK3AUU acknowledged:

...The future of Aboriginals as a collective will depend on random variables. There is never one single random variable in real life; there are many things moving together: The most destructive variable appears to be myopic (and chaotic) interventionist policies of various Governments. The inevitable outcome of these polices is to strip more power and responsibility from the individuals, compounding problems targeted.

...Maybe the correct question to ask is; How will the new face of the Aboriginal community look as the amalgam from modern influence eventually sets, and their own destiny is allowed to rest finally in their own hands?

...For too long, the future of the Aboriginal community has been under the direct influence of academics that operate interventionists polices based on theories and models. It is the kiss of death. Modelling no more succeeds in this case, any more than it succeeds in economics…(The GFC spring straight to mind as an example, where nothing has changed and nothing will, while the vested interests of academics are served who have no “skin in the game” )!

Pilger,

You claim a report into the removing of indigenous children: “as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state”. The report called this genocide”.

Fair enough. Even if I accept that the removals decades ago could have involved sinister reasons, regardless Pilger attempts to conflate these removals of a different era to the modern indigenous child removals, which is simply unfair and deceitful, since he knows that even if he believes the removals were wrong and not properly considered, he cannot deny that the motive usually instigating a removal is evidence of imminent danger of harm, abuse and maybe sexual abuse to the child. I notice that Pilger never engages with that problem.

I wonder if the Pilger and other white elitists can comprehend reality enough to apply those remarks Pilger makes about indigenous removals of some children, to the descriptions of what happened to thousands of the lowest class whites in the UK in the 17 hundreds when the United Kingdom set out to take thousands of young people from prison, most of whom were in for minor stealing crimes amidst a job and food shortage and used the fact of the conviction to ignore all their rights, to rip them from their homeland and force them to risk life by journeying on ships to a newly discovered land (Van Diemen’s Land) where they were subjected to forced indentured servitude for years and years until they could buy their freedom. There was no concern for how they felt about being stolen from ever seeing family again.

Effectively, these "convicts" and all their descendants (poor white class) had their naturally given right of being able to stay residing in the country of their birth and that their ethnic tribe was indigenous to (UK), so that one may attempt to prosper in these most favourable conditions to this native since family and friends (networks) were there.

. . . continue next post . . .

. . . continued . . .

This "native", this "indigenous" to UK Celtic-tribesman where his ancestors going back 50,000 or more years have lived on the same land, was forcibly RIPPED away from his land/home and stolen like property and made to travel harsh seas to a new land where they will be used as slave-labour to build a new nation from scratch.

This "slave" had no way to communicate with any family back home nor likely ever able to see them again, since even if after 10 years he may go free to purchase passage to go back home is a wealthy man's affair. Quite likely he was stuck in this foreign land eternally. Worst of all is the excuses the British government uses

Pilger, surely these people too deserve an apology and reparations.

Not only is the elitist class of whites pathetic and cruel when they dismiss any such appeals and simply state "the convicts were criminals, not slaves", which is common reply.

Furthermore, the clear connection between the poorest class of whites way back before being stolen from Britain (convicts) and all the abuses and oppressions they suffered over last 2 centuries, resulting in what we see today as poor white Housing Estates with endemic addictions and unemployment, widespread abuse and institutionalized behaviour. I believe this class of peoples have always suffered these madnesses but until the last 3 decades they all had jobs (which were abundant) in low-skill labour until the government deleted these jobs leaving them since unemployed and without purpose, much like indigenous Australians.

Next tome you speak openly about crimes against indigenous groups remember that I said here to consider the "convicts" and their descended "poorest-permanently unemployed-addicted Anglos" as also being "NATIVE" and "INDIGENOUS" peoples also to Britain, and who as native peoples had a natural right to be able to live on the land their ancestors thrived on and to prosper themselves. But one the elite just stole that all away from them, effectively committing genocide upon their very lives which by no choice were changed into something of a slave.

Just a comment on the issue of the "Stolen Generation" as applies to the Kimberley. My husband was part aboriginal, one of a huge family numbering in the thousands these days. All were part Aboriginal, only one was ever removed and that was the daughter of an alcoholic mother and absent father. From observation in the Kimberley, it seems that no part aboriginal children were ever removed from families that had fathers, only single mothers. This does raise the question that if this was an attempt to "breed out" the colour, why were far more part Aboriginal children left with their parents than were ever removed. It also gives weight to the policy of removal of children for welfare reasons. Single mothers, or women who were partnered by full blood men but with a half caste child, were probably deemed unable to care for the child properly. I would say the thought at the time was that as these children were part white it was the governments responsibility to ensure their well being.

Hi Big Nana,

Great to hear from you ! On the matter of half-caste children: very roughly, at least down here in SA, the boundary between patriarchal and bilineal Aboriginal groups, and between cattle and sheep country, more or less coincides: cattle country is much harsher, and so are patriarchal societies.

At the onset of our many droughts, Aboriginal women who had gone out to work on cattle stations, and who had liaisons, including long-term 'marriages', were, like all the blokes, suddenly out of work, and so had to return to their patriarchal group. Their half-caste children, however, had no identity in a patriarchal group, no father, no skin-group. They didn't exist in any traditional classification. They could be killed, as many, many early reports suggest. If they were female, they were fair game.

Neville in WA was constantly directing his attention towards the generation after generation of half- and quarter- and etc.-caste kids, especially the girls, growing up on cattle stations, some as white as he was, he reported, but condemned to stay and live and grow to womanhood in the camps around the cattle stations. He didn't care so much about 'full-blood' kids, they could stay in the camps. But he was concerned to get the paler girls away, down to Perth, where they could gat a fair education, employment, and then marry whoever they liked.

Here in SA, a church home on the edge of cattle country at Oodnadatta, Colebrook, tended to find itself loaded with half-caste kids at the beginning of every drought, certainly from the mid-twenties. Mothers would drop their kids off at the police station or church door, intending - of course - to come back later when the drought was over and work was available again. But - of course - droughts go on and on, 'husbands' move interstate for work and don't return, as they expected to.

[TBC]

[continued]

Most of the kids at Colebrook moved down to Quorn, a couple of miles out of town, in about 1931-32 (i.e. = 'assimilation'), according to Depot records (see web-site below). There, they could go to basic secondary school from the late thirties, and some, people we all later came to know and respect, went on to full secondary schooling in Adelaide in the forties - and from there to celebrated careers as nurses, teachers and advocates.

SA - the driest state on the driest continent - has had many long droughts since 1836. Nobody has to posit some devious - and unexplained - policy of deliberately removing kids from families. Any state should have a fiduciary responsibility towards abandoned kids, foundlings, orphans, or - in today's much more affluent society - kids suffering abuse and/or neglect.

Would Pilger have all of those kids die in the gutter rather than be put into care ? I don't know if Pilger is a half-wit, or merely a standard pseudo-Left opportunist, ready to grab any flimsy front-bar rumour or excuse to flog governments and boost his cred amongst naive British readers.

Thanks, Trish. Best wishes :)

Joe
www.firstsources.info

"At the onset of our many droughts, Aboriginal women who had gone out to work on cattle stations, and who had liaisons, including long-term 'marriages', were, like all the blokes, suddenly out of work, and so had to return to their patriarchal group. Their half-caste children, however, had no identity in a patriarchal group, no father, no skin-group. They didn't exist in any traditional classification. They could be killed, as many, many early reports suggest. If they were female, they were fair game."

Joe refers to South Australia here but this evoked memories of my late Grandfather and his dealings with indigenous people in coastal central Qld from the late 1800s through to Depression years. He wouldn't/couldn't employ them as they proved unreliable but generally enjoyed cordial relations with the tribe whose 'territory' his holdings were part of.

Grandfather wouldn't tolerate any of his workers attempting to consort with native women. Apart from stirring up trouble he didn't need, his concern was for children born out of any such couplings. "Neither one nor the other" as he described the mixed race offspring, he'd observed first hand the rejection of these individuals by tribal society, remarking boys would not be initiated, therefore never considered men, often forcibly driven from the tribe while girls might end up 5th or 6th 'wife' of some old man whose senior wives would frequently abuse.

Aboriginal tribes were widely separated and different - however there is considerable evidence that many "stolen" children were in fact not forcibly removed but surrendered by mothers who knew they would not be accepted by the tribe. Undoubtedly many more taken into care due to death of or inability of a parent to provide as well as cases of abuse or neglect.

Today any 'stolen' children are victims of abuse and neglect and victims of the highest order to get that level of protection.
Mr Pilger, it would seem, would rather aboriginal kids die, or suffer unspeakable abuse and neglect at the hands of their own kind than see them removed by the nasty racist white fella regime

Thanks, divine Ms N.,

Understandably, it's usually too painful for people to have to admit that their mother had to give them up, but [as one can see tonight on 'Love Child'] it was a terrible dilemma for single mothers - if you thought a bit about it, yes they might be supported financially by their family for a time, but especially working-class families before 1971, when the benefit came in, must have almost immediately felt the burden on their income. When you're barely getting by, that extra is often just too much.

What's the bet that many unmarried mothers, who had taken their babies home, had to give them up by the end of the first month ?

As well, it has to be admitted that many parents have been, or are, and others will be in the future, drunks, utterly useless as parents. I remember a mother when I worked up the Murray, who, as far as I can recall, was never sober. Usually, she was just on the edge of fall-down drunk. It didn't help to live across the road from a winery. Relations helped protect her kids as best they could, and fed and clothed them. Of course. she's gone now.

But who would admit to a mother like that ? It's far easier, especially if independent investigation is frowned on and barred, to claim to have been dramatically seized from a warm, loving, comfortable family by brutal white men in coats with a truck (the image is easy to conjure up and perpetuate). Frankly I've never known anybody, Black or white, who could honestly say that happened to them. In the sixties, I was good friends with one lovely lady, one of whose kids had died officially of starvation, about 1955. Lovely people are not necessarily good parents.

Cheers,

Joe

I recall an article by an English writer-Sophie Love, which was critical and I believe ill informed. Here is another one

Joe, you are correct that today no one wants to admit their mother/grandmother was an unfit parent. Or that they were unwanted. I am very familiar with a family up here who gave away a baby girl 40 years ago. That baby eventually grew up and discovered who she was and reconnected with the family. However she continues to tell everyone in her city that she was a stolen child, despite being repeatedly told that her grandmother had removed her from the hospital and given her up for adoption.Her siblings find her whole attitude puzzling but I guess referring to yourself as stolen is more self gratifying than the truth and provides a handy excuse for emotional instability.
I can understand that she is justifiably hurt by what happened, however her adoptive parents gave her a wonderful life, she has reconnected with her mother and siblings and she fails to realise the damage done by her accusations of " stolen generation". She is just one, there are probably thousands more like her.

IF as Pilger claims the goal was to commit genocide . . .

. . . WHY would this apparent policy to annihilate include a clear policy of leaving-door-open for complete backfire (of Indigenous kids being raised in well to do white families) which gave Indigenous peoples access to tertiary education and other community networks that not even many lower working white Australians ever have access to.

This DID OCCUR.

Many of these “stolen kids” went to university with powerful people, like the numerous examples we see since 20 years ago rising to prominence (e.g. Charlie Perkins, Noel Pearcen, one or two High Justices of law, about 5 or more highly esteemed professiors who are always engaged in politics, etc.).

Many of these people have been instrumental advances in Indigenous affairs.

In fact I argue that this singular fact and phenomenon as result of the 'stolen generation' gave more than anything else to promote and force the Indigenous cause to fore.

Forget genocide.

I in NO WAY attempt to dismiss any real harm done to the indigenous people here. I wish to note the putridity of pretending a 'genocide' occurred when nothing even close took place.

To come back to ground -

What does all think of the hypothetical world where the Leftists did this same exact adopting of kids and raising them in their own tribes, but apply it to not the Australian Indigenous peoples but to the British/Celtic Indigenous peoples, at least the section that were stolen 2 centuries ago by British elite as an excuse to unburden the prisons (filled with poor people looking for food) and under the technical "pretence" of being "convicts" taken away from their homeland and around the globe to a foreign land and forced as slaves to construct the economic infrastructure.

That is - imagine the hypothetical political/social result if same Leftist actions and behaviour as in Aussie native's case BUT instead for the "Celtic-British Natives" or "first Peoples" of British Isles who were STOLEN from their EXISTENCE.

I wonder.

I wonder the result for the political and social/cultural recognition and rectification of the wrongs committed by the white elite onto the "oppressed poor whites" originally known as the "convicts" who as slaves built the entire modern Australian nation.

A mass policy of 'removal poor white kids' to have wealthy people raise them would result in well-organized movement representing Native-Anglo-Celtic" Rights.

Imagine future versions of the Pilgers and Bob Brown supporting poor white/Anglo political Recognition.

SO too were these "White Natives" forcibly removed from native land [Britain] and taken across the globe as slaves to construct a new British colony, never again to have sight of loved ones and never again in many possible future generations be able to live and prosper in their native Lands.

Instead they are eternally bound to the NEW land to be mocked and oppressed - which has today resulted in a disenfranchised culture-community of a generational stagnantion which we see evident especially in Government Housing Estates.

Like the many communities of Australian Indigenous (kooris and others) these 'convict descendants' live in endemic and entrenched unemployment, drug abuse, alcoholism, crime and imprisonment, also physical abuse and mental and sexual abuse of even children.

Come on then . . . ALL . . .

. . . Who can give me a decent argument/explanation for why the case of the above imaged 'poor-convict Anglo whites' stolen as cheap or slave labour to build a new nation, is ANY DIFFERENT to the Aussie Indigenous case.

And please refrain from the common erroneous reply of "oh bb...b.b.but they were CONVICTS, CRIMINALS and NOT SLAVES" -

. . . technically true but gunk all the same.

I wonder what would be said if just say, had Negro slaves "technically" been convicted criminals in the native African tribes which initially sold them to the slave traders . . .

. . . would a similar denial of all the historical wrongs therein be merely OVERLOOKED because someone can just say "oh b.b.b.b BUT the Negros were not slaves but CRIMINALS"?

GET REAL Please/

Pilger says that taking children away was genocide ? I guess he's lucky that British audiences are so gullible, but if he knows anything and is not just a fool, he's a liar.

I typed up the school records from the largest Mission in South Australia, records covering the period 1880 to 1966. In those 86 years, 800 (eight hundred) Aboriginal children enrolled at some time or other at that school, and about a dozen children were taken TO the school, most in the 1880s, invariably foundlings, orphans and children of single mothers who went to the Mission with them. And not really anybody without their families after 1890.

That's 1.5 %. All those who married, married other Aboriginal people. Not much genocide there, Johnnie.

Ah, but Pilger would say, he's talking about kids being taken FROM the Mission. Okay. A total of forty seven were taken into care, out of eight hundred. In that period, forty mothers died, leaving 140 school-age children. Fathers died too, and the mothers of young girls re-married. Guess what happened to the girls ?

Of those forty seven, all but one came back sooner or later to the community, usually within a year (some girls not until they were eighteen), and the vast majority married other Aboriginal people. The great majority of 'removals' at this community, by the way, occurred after 1950, also after the enterprising people of the community had up and left to take up some of the multitude of jobs available, leaving the 'less enterprising' behind to fend for themselves. The Mission was set up in 1859, but the local police station was set up in 1953. Make of those two facts what you will.

So genocide ? Hardly.

[TBC]

[continued]

The one-man Aborigines department would have been well aware of the population - he had to keep detailed records of rations issued &c., and population changes around the state, births and deaths in particular. In typing up the depot Ledgers, I was surprised to notice that the amount of flour issued between 1925 and 1941 actually increased, as did the number of issuing points. So no genocide there either.

Hmm, how to rescue a convenient narrative, even if it's bullsh!t ? Ignore the facts, that always helps, and it certainly hasn't stopped Pilger. But perhaps, no matter how awkward they may be, the facts are ALWAYS what have to be confronted in getting to the truth, and in thereby beginning to construct a more accurate narrative.

Not that Pilger would ever take that advice.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

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