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
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