You're confusing tipping points with climate change.
What humans are doing brings us to thresholds, triggers and tipping points.
Enjoy your faith.

Hi Squeers,

Thanks for you uninformed opinion, that's what OLO is for :)

Perhaps you know of anybody who was 'stolen' ? I know of many people taken into care, but stolen ? No, I don't think so.

If we combine the two myths, that people were herded onto Missions, and that children were stolen, one would expect to see large numbers of strange children on the Mission school rolls, isn't that so ? My late wife came from the largest Mission here in SA, and we got hold of the School Records 1880-1966 some 15 years ago. I typed them up and constructed maps of the numbers of children coming to and going from that School, decade by decade.

In the first twenty years, out of 200 kids who enrolled, about a dozen were from outside, mostly foundling boys brought down from the North by stockmen and abandoned in Adelaide. One was unhappy at the Mission, but had an idea where he was originally from, so the Protector arranged for him to be taken back there, by rail to Oodnadatta then on to his group on the Finke. Two years later, he was back at the mission, working and asking for financial support to buy an organ, which was given. A couple of girls, daughters of single mothers who had died, were brought to the Mission. A single mother brought her two kids down, and a deserted wife her three. And that was it for most of the next sixty years.

As for children taken away from the Mission - by then a government settlement - out of a total of two thousand enrolments, i.e. eight hundred kids, forty seven were taken into care, mostly in the late forties and fifties, and almost all came back within a year or so, and eventually married local people. Mothers died, fathers died, families fell apart, like for white families. One young girl, the daughter of a single mother who died of TB, went to Colebrook Home and I don't know what happened to her.

[TBC]

[continued]

So, no, I don't have evidence of a 'stolen generation'. Or of people being herded onto Missions. In the eight thousand letters of the Protector, there is never a hint of such things, I don't think it crossed their minds in those days. The single full-time employee of the 'Aborigines department' - the Protector - had his hands full supplying up to seventy ration depots all across the State.

It's all on my web-site: www.firstsources.info

Check out the short article there: 'Re-Thinking Aboriginal History'.

If you do have evidence, please share. But an assertion without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence (Christopher Hitchens): actually it's an old Latin maxim: 'asseritur gratis, negatur gratis'.

But you know better, from your gut feelings ? Ideology trumps reality ? In your dreams.

Joe

What's that to do with Younger Dryas events, oh disingenuous inquirer?

Joe,
“stolen generation" is an emotive and hyperbolic term, suggesting wholesale theft for diabolical ends. Taken literally, this kind of rhetoric is easily contradicted by the sorts of qualifications you protest and the whole process can be readily “historicised”—it cuts both ways.

Just so, the ‘debate’ (discursive fetish) has largely descended into semantics and equivocation, drawing partisans to each side—much like climate change. Conservative historians and their groupies (including Howard and Abbott) have plunged historical events in controversy. Indeed culture wars—far more interesting—have displaced the debate altogether. The past is contested ideological ground—not so much over what happened as how it is read.

The “Left”—rarely taken to task, merely ridiculed—motivated by historical and contemporary injustice and awake to the proselytising effects, in the present, of colonial and jingoistic accounts of the past, has an unabashedly progressive agenda.
This is what the dupes (such as yourself, I fear) fail to appreciate; it’s not about the past—it’s about how the past (and AGW for that matter) critiques the present. Conservatives defend the past, celebrate it, so as to preserve its ongoing institutions—the status quo—and keep the masses in check.

The “stolen generation”, however much you try to rationalise and defend it, was real in as much as the stolen motley was “representative” of those who “could” be taken; aboriginals being outsiders, mistrusted, despised, tolerated and at the mercy and indulgence of their betters—much like today.

Conservative historians and statesmen fear the kind of tampering with hegemony (enlightenment) the left attempts and the masses—typically xenophobic and disposed to have their prejudices stoked—are easily recruited to the cause. That is to maintaining a supremacist culture and a vastly inequitable society.

You think you’re arguing about history, and climate change, but it’s about justice, legitimacy and reform.

The conservative and the fool in the street condemn the poor aboriginal behaviour they perceive; they don’t look at the causes, only the effects in isolation—as if it was wilful.

AGW science confronts them with causes they refuse to acknowledge and effects they deny.

I apologise to readers fro going off-topic but I have to respond to Squeers.

Evidence ? You have some ? Anything at all ? Just gut feelings ?

"The past is contested ideological ground — not so much over what happened as how it is read."

Yes, indeed. And without any evidence, you still 'read' it as you wish ?

What is amazing me as I work through these thousands of pages of old documents is how the realities of the nineteenth century differed from our present-day picture of them. I don't observe, from the record, that - at least in South Australia - Aboriginal life was as disrupted as much as I, like you, thought.

Families held together. New conditions offered new opportunities. People may not have even perceived that the new conditions of life were all that negative: rations saved a huge amount of effort by women, the regularity of rations would have kept the old people alive much more predictably than the old days: in droughts, for example, everybody was kept alive by the ration system rather than would have been the case.

After all, in pre-European times of drought, old people, particularly women, would have died. Young children on the breast would have died. No children would have been born until the drought was well and truly over.

Imagine the impact, say, of the eight-year drought of the 1890s. Previously, groups would have scattered to the four winds, while under the ration system, groups would have been able to come together, assured of a regular food supply, and for many years in long droughts, able to maintain traditional practices and processes more easily than ever, and able to maintain their populations. The ration system saved Aboriginal culture.

[TBC]