[continued]

A related surprise: on missions during the nineteenth century, the populations grew, they didn't decline, and that growth was endogenous. In fact, I have doubts whether the Aboriginal population declined much at all, while in pre-European times, during a drought, the population of a group might have declined by half or more, and it would have taken generations to build it back up again.

In SA, during good times, able-bodied Aborigjnal people were expected to find their own food, hunting, fishing and gathering - the land-use laws safeguarded those rights - and were provided with boats, fishing gear and guns to enable that. But in droughts, everybody got rations, and could gather together, often for years.

Back to your topic: here in SA, from at least the 1940s, the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board would have paid single mothers to keep their kids, and paid until the kids were 21. My wife found a list in the SA State Records of about fifty Aboriginal children funded in this way.

And was it a coincidence, that the 'stolen generation' came to an end in about 1972 when the single mothers' benefit was introduced ? Of course, children were taken into care before that, and afterwards, even these days, and - unless you have evidence, for fair reason, the same as with white kids. My father was raised by the Salvos, and my mother's mother by Barnardo's in England. Families fall apart. Mothers die in all societies. Young mothers can't look after babies. So there's nothing unique about it.

But stick with ideology rather than reality, Squeers, it can be very comforting. Reality can be so awkward.

If you wish to assert, then you must provide evidence. Otherwise, your opinion is just that, to be respected as an opinion but not taken seriously.

Cheers,

Joe

"The ration system saved Aboriginal culture."

You appear to be saying that Aboriginal culture would have died out if not for the ration system - even though it had survived for tens of thousands of years amid drought, etc, before British colonisation.

What an odd thing to say.

Dying Swan,

Off topic but OK; in answer to your question, yes, in some cases, very likely. Group by group, maybe.

My point was that, in the event of drought, if a ration station was kept open, not only the aged and infirm, and nursing mothers, would be maintained but everybody would. Able-bodied young men would have been able to group around (say, within a mile or two) of a ration depot, with food assured. Nothing amazing, no three-course meals, but enough. So they would have been able, like everybody else there, to share in the cultural life and work under the older men. They would have been prepped to go through the rules. The cultural life of a group would have been maintained and passed on.

But in pre-European times, groups would have scattered, looking for water and food. Some would have found solace in neighbouring groups, but a wide-ranging drought may have affected them too. Drought are unforgiving. Young children, pregnant mothers, old women and some old men, would have died. Populations could have been halved or worse. Periodic droughts - say every five or ten years - must have wrought havoc on many groups. Cultural life would have been disrupted again and again.

Of course, alongside the ration system, was the new economic system for the able-bodied, with its money, clothes, tobacco, pannicans, guns, grog, means of much more mobility, new forms of economic activity, new technologies, new every bloody thing - all these would have transformed the mindsets of young people, from the 1840s (in SA) onwards. By 1860, people would have been at least bilingual, in their own language as well as English, in which they conversed with people from other groups.

[TBC]

[continued]

The ration system was, to our eyes in 2014, pretty miserly: a pound of flour per person per day, a couple of ounces of sugar, tea, rice, 2 ounces of tobacco a week, a new blanket each year, pannicans, billies, clothing material, etc. Free medical services for most Aboriginal people. Meat and milk for nursing mothers and chronically ill people. Actually the same rates as people under the Destitute Board, and for prisoners. Nothing flash. But probably being handed a bag of flour was, in many women's eyes, a step above going out and spending eight hours a day collecting about the same amount of grass seed and coming back to grind it into a flour.

Similarly, boats, fishing gear and blankets: how did people fish on the Murray pre-European ? By walking through the shallows with a spear, Summer and Winter. Post-European ? Wrap yourself in a blanket and throw a line in and wait. What would you choose ?

Reality is more fascinating and unexpected than fantasy, Poirot.

Cheers,

Joe

Joe,

"Reality is more fascinating and unexpected than fantasy, Poirot."

Yeah, thanks for that.

You may remember me regaling you of my story some years back regrding my ne'er do well dad (who was at the time in work in a nickle mine in the outback, contriving to place me in a mission (even though I'm not indigenous).

So I actually lived in a mission for about 5 months with indigenous kids - which at first I thought was the most surreal experience I'd had till then - but now I see as definitely one of the richer experiences of my life.

1974...and it was a Christian run mission located about 14 miles out of the main town, consisting of a settlement with houses, each having a Christian family and four or five indigenous girls to each family. The boys were housed in a dormitory in town.

How's that for reality, Joe?

I also apologise for being off topic, except by analogy.
I bowled a wobbly and it’s gone straight through to the keeper!
I conceded at the outset that the stolen generation is contentious. That is, all history is contentious and can never be recorded or remembered or reconstructed in its discordant and contingent immediacy, certainly not in terms of a unifying narrative. Even our best efforts are hopelessly preferential and biased. Conventional history is thus little more than a nationalist genre of fiction, whose primary purpose—apart from appealing to our penchant for nostalgia—is to rationalise the provenance of the present, to anoint it with a vindicating sense of predestination and hard-won accomplishment.
Neither the stolen generation nor agw can be allowed to cast a pall on our glorious culture, its past, or its legitimacy into the future. Sans the US, UK et al. Their statesmen all blow the same rhetoric about being the greatest nation on earth, placing it above criticism and tacitly purging the evils of past, present and future as the necessary via media of a great and continuing heritage.
That’s why Labor’s apology was so momentous, not because it acknowledged “a stolen generation”, but because it conceded deep flaws in a national psyche which rationalised the patronage, bigotry and overbearing treatment visited upon the indigenous population.
In contesting whether it even happened, equivocating over numbers and motives, you consecrate the whole one-sided spectacle, you put the blame on aboriginals, and you perpetuate their demeaned station in Australia.
People like you make the apology worthless, not that it can atone for the past, but because it loses its rhetorical power to force reflection and so reform the present. Thus even after the apology, indigenous people have to live with the self-loathing with which they are stigmatised as a birthright, however-much they throw their shoulders back. We are social animals and cannot live contentedly or sanely without the respect of our peers.