Wounded swan,

Still not clear what you are on about. A few months forty years ago gives you some cachet ? Gosh. Wow.

Hi Squeers,

I loved that bit: " .... what I am talking about is not subject to empiricism .... " No, indeed.

As for your slur that I was being selective and partial, I typed up EVERY letter of the Protector - the one and only full-time employee of the 'Aborigines Department' - every letter about every delivery of rations, etc., to the sixty or seventy-odd ration depots. Eight thousand of them OUT, and a Register of thirteen thousand IN. You know better ? How, out of the wonders of your hairy @rse ?

I typed up every entry in the Rev. Taplin's Journal - I never leave anything out [Check out my web-site: www.firstsources.info, it's all there]. Avoiding awkward details, and leaving them entirely out may be the favourite tactic of people in bullsh!t studies such as yourself and Poi, but sooner or later you get copped so I've always acted on the principle of why bother ? The truth will always out. And it's the truth you must base any genuine progress on, not lies.

Of course, lies can be fun, as I'm sure you both have learnt as students. Oops, sorry, I keep forgetting that you are both not under-grads, but mature people. Sort of.

And have you EVER made a total and primary study of anything ? Only piss and wind ? Stance and passion ? Never evidence and fact ? Probably works with the first-year girls but.

What a waste of space :(

Joe

I'm not after "cachet", Joe...I was merely relating an experience after you so kindly pointed out how wonderful "reality" is.

It's a primary source for you - I thought it might be something someone of your vast integrity and industriousness would value as a teeny bit of the mosaic.....but, alas, all you've done so far is sneer at it.

Par for the course......

Hi Wounded Swan,

I have this picture of you and Squeers, like dame Margo and Nureeff on pointe, doing a pas de deux. Ugggghhh !

Yes, I do sneer at your pissy childish experiences. I was just typing up details about patrol officers and welfare officers across Australia in 1963 - about two thousand of them, all over the place, putting in years and years. But I suppose your four months in one place taught you something. Probably.

As you well know, my wife was Indigenous. 43 years of marriage. My kids are Indigenous. We made some of the first Aboriginal flags back in 1972. We lived in a community for four years. We worked in Indigenous student support at universities for a combined thirty five years. We gathered many documents on her community over a period of thirty years, from about 1979. I've spent about five years full-time typing up any documents I could find on Aboriginal policy, especially in the nineteenth century, ten thousand pages. And we read most of the new books that ever come out since the 1960s on the subject.

But if you want to put your four months up against all that, feel free.

I was just remembering the first time I visited an Aboriginal community, I think it was 1959 or 1960, Delissaville across Darwin harbour. Then another one near Adelaide River. Then, in my Maoist days, with a group of like-minded crackpots, a whole rash of communities in about 1964 or 1965. Days of hope !

Yeah, we ran a little scurrilous journal (you should try it some time) called 'Black News', put a few thousand of our own money into it (we were factory workers [you should try THAT some time]); people loved it but contributed $ 0.00 so we had to pack it up.

We ran Career Workshops for about 1200 Aboriginal kids across SA and in western NSW in 1993-1994. Beautiful kids, down to Grade VI, they were so full of ideas and aspirations and hope, especially the girls.

So it's been an interesting life so far :)

Joe

Joe,

You regale me of all your experiences...good experiences...useful experiences....profound even.

You seem to think this is a competition of sorts...dueling braggadocio?

I told you of an experience..

Your reply:

"...I do sneer at your pissy childish experiences...."

You have the graciousness of a brick.

Sad really...

Joe,
By “selective” I didn’t mean to imply you had deliberately selected or excluded anything. I knew nothing about your love of documents and collecting. Rather, I have consistently criticised conventional histories. The so called primary record is nothing of the kind, but is random, partial, selective and exclusive even as it is produced. Strictly, there is no primary data, and what passes for primary is filtered through ideology (then and now) and invisible corruptions of all kinds, at all stages of production, collection, cataloguing and reconstruction.
In any case, having looked at your website, I see no thesis and supporting argument/documentation to the effect that the Stolen Generation didn’t happen. More specifically—since we do need to look beyond the hyperbolic title—nothing to the effect that colonial-indigenous tensions were marked primarily by white benevolence, rather than the depredations university faculties love to lament.
If you are correct, then we can only conclude that the indigenous “problem” is wilful or genetic—the poor buggers can’t help it and are just bad or backwards by nature!
This is exactly what ignorant rednecks, and the bogans of the outer burbs think.
How am I to interpret your gloss—since you offer no thesis and make no reasoned or supported argument—as anything other than another mode of denialism which serves the status quo?
You’re also an “AGW” “denialist”—I don’t like either term because both fetishise warming among a host of undeniable anthropogenic effects, but I’m not going to dignify denialists calling them sceptics—and these are both partisan positions right out of the conservative handbook!
May I suggest you write an article laying out your argument and evidence for the stolen generation “conspiracy”?
You might also offer some explanation for poor and anti-social aboriginal behaviour and high incarceration rates.

Floundering Swan,

Well, you started it.

Hi Squeers,

To take you up on your observation: "The so called primary record is nothing of the kind, but is random, partial, selective and exclusive even as it is produced. Strictly, there is no primary data .... "

Bullsh!t. Perhaps in your universe, where stance rather than truth or reality matters, but there very much IS 'primary data' out there. If you ever try to examine any, you may notice that it is indeed very, very bloody 'primary': hand-written letters, almost illegible, ink blurred or faded, maddening punctuation, idiosyncratic handwriting.

For example: In the nineteenth century, the Protector tended to write two short letters to a page and on one occasion, I thought at first there was just the one letter and was about to move onto the next one when I caught just the hint of something below, and by angling the page, I could just make out the letter. Took about an hour to get it all typed.

When I was given some of the Letter-Books from the Point McLeay Mission, 1880-1900, somebody had fished them out of a rubbish bin, and the books had been exposed to the weather (on Lake Alexandrina) for decades, so the pages were often so brittle (and blurred, faded etc.) that I had to carefully slide a sheet of blank paper under each page in order to be able to read and copy it.

After copying, I have to proof-read it for mistakes, and format each page. Then I usually try to index each letter. So each page of letters can easily take an hour or more. All on my web-site: www.firstsources.info

So, Squeers, I don't have much time to sit back and mentally pontificate about what I'm typing, except to note while I'm going what is there and what isn't there. Analysis will come later. If you ever have to copy out thousands of pages of primary data, you will maybe understand. But, no, I don't think that will ever happen.

But what isn't there, so far, is any evidence or rationale for

[TBC]