[continued]

either taking children away, or driving people off their lands (pastoralists were happy to keep people nearby to use their labour: check out the works of Robert Foster on Google for this), or pushing people onto Missions. Nada. Niente. Niechevo. Dipote. Rien.

What IS there are crucial facts, crucial parameters if you like:

* one single full-time member of the Aborigines Department, the Protector;

* up to sixty or seventy ration depots, mainly for the elderly, sick, infirm, nursing mothers and orphans [coloured Spread-sheets for your convenience, available on that web-site];

* instructions to pastoralists (this had to be done only once) to note that a clause in their leases allowed Aboriginal people to use the land as they had done traditionally;

* Mission staff numbering two or three - the Missionary, a teacher, a farm supervisor, one of them doubling up as store-keeper; no fences around any Mission; [so, who's doing the herding ?]

* issue of boats (maybe up to a hundred in SA), fishing gear, guns, with repairs done free for non-working people, half-cost if they were working;

* leases of land, 160-acre blocks, to around a hundred Aboriginal people, including women married to white men, rent-free.

Like it or not, those are 'facts' and you can bullsh!t all you like about how they are 'ideologically produced'. It seems that many Aboriginal people benefited from 'ideologically produced' boats, fishing gear, guns and land leases. Not to mention 'ideologically produced' rations.

By the way, from the amount of rations given out annually, it is intriguing that the amounts increase year by year. So I'm very tentatively surmising that maybe the SA Aboriginal population didn't decline, but hovered around four thousand from the 1840s to the 1940s. Some demographer could make much more out of the Annual Reports that my friend Alistair Crooks has typed up, in which there is an annual Census. Yes, people WERE counted, just not in the National Census.

[TBC]

Joe,
you can chant bullsh!t all you like, what I say about history and primary records has been nothing more than a banality since the early-nineteen-seventies. Look up Hayden White’s "Metahistory".
Paraphrasing Arthur Lovejoy from 1939, anything more than bare chronicle implies preferential interpretation of salient material whose importance is at the predilection of contemporary thought. History, as a map of the past, is muddled into the shape of present concerns, its original milieu largely redundant.
This explains why histories date so quickly or appear naive. As Conyers Read laments, the few written histories that survive are often noteworthy merely for their eccentricity, owing more for their survival to style than to substance.
The primary record offers valuable clues, but can’t open a window onto the past. Even those who defend history as rigorous are forced to acknowledge the fragmentary nature of original documents, often created for specific purposes and/or in a rote manner, rendering the artefacts devoid of the richness of original contexts. Most such primary documents are denuded at the outset, then pared-back further by the purposive and economic manner for which they were created. There remain huge deficits in any identikit picture the historian hopes to depict; and these are too easily coloured-in in the ideological hues of the day.
Journalism is the best form of primary documentation, but even this has to be interrogated closely before conclusions are “postulated”.
That’s why good history is so much more circumspect; the historian shrinks from “automatically” filling in the gaps, likewise cautioning the reader from doing so.
Thus, I reiterate my complaint above. I don’t want to belittle your heroic efforts gathering material. I’m sure it’s a valuable archive. But in a sweeping manner you declare without preamble that the Stolen Generation didn’t happen: you see through all the complexity, missing data and ideology that clouds past and present accounts, and you perceive the truth in a moment of clarity we must all accept. Similarly, like your denialist brethren, you see through the vast complexities of climate-change (which you don’t begin to understand) and conceive a vaster conspiracy.
Bullsh!t

[continued]

Squeers,

Your repulsive conclusion: “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 backward by nature !”

That's YOUR take, certainly not mine. Interesting how you mind works. No, I'm tentatively exploring the interface between a hunter-gatherer ethic and an agriculturalist/early industrial ethic – more particularly, how people embedded in a hunter-gatherer ethic would have interpreted the sudden provision of as much food as they needed, free, no effort. AND how the colonialists, embedded in THEIR ethic, misinterpreted the willingness of people to keep hunting and gathering, and underestimated the impact of the ration system on the continued access to land and traditional land-use. Still teasing that out.

Here in SA, King George IV's Letters Patent recognised Indigenous land-use rights, the right to “occupy or enjoy' their lands. But the ration system – perhaps inadvertently – drew people away from their lands, often for many years. Within very few years, ration depots at key points - Adelaide, Encounter Bay, Wellington, Clare – drew entire populations out of their lands. Whites interpreted this to mean that lands were 'empty', so legislation had to be explicitly drawn up in 1851, so that an explicit clause had to be inserted in all pastoral leases; existing leases were re-contracted that year, to include that clause. Which is still the law.

So my very tentative interpretation of what was going on in the early days doesn't need to rely on racist theories such as yours. I suspect that there was enough miscalculation – on both sides – to go around about the implementation of policy, about how to make the best of totally novel situations. . Perhaps rule # 1 in policy formation is: Implementation will always get cocked-up, especially social policy. Especially at that interface between two very different types of epistemology, society and economy.

[TBC]

[continued]

But I'm trying to avoid putting any 'gloss' on anything – that's up to anyone with courage to draw out of what has been typed up. I'm too busy.

There's so much to type up that I won't have time to sit back and pontificate for some years yet, or until my eyes give out. But of course, you will. You have the benefit of that free labour, if you dare to read it fully. If not, that's your loss. It's there for anybody, what they do with it is up to them: democratic information-sharing, really.

And it's also up to you whether or not you want to be a denialist. The data's there - ignore it if you like, pretend it doesn't exist. Your choice.

To refer to your latest, I didn't say that a Stolen Generation didn't happen, I said “I don't have evidence of a 'stolen generation'.” Look back and check. Like a hidden planet, it maybe there but I haven't found it.

I partly agree with you that “anything more than bare chronicle [which is what I am doing] implies preferential interpretation of salient material whose importance is at the predilection of contemporary thought [yes, indeed]." But: "History, as a map of the past, is middled into the shape of present concerns, its original milieu largely redundant.” Really? So we 'interpret' what isn't actually there, is that it ? And ignore what IS there ?

Then you demand that I do exactly what I won't do yet – to jump off a cliff with interpretations of what I have typed up. No, I'll leave that to you, Squeers – your evidence-free interpretation.

You write “The primary record offers valuable clues, but can't open a window onto the past.” Of course it can, otherwise how can we say anything at all about what might have happened ? And how do we do that with any confidence at all ? By having at least SOME evidence to hang a tentative theory on. Otherwise why flap your lips about a 'stolen generation' ? Your 'theory' is toothless.

[TBC]

OMG, Don Aitken would be so proud!

Well done Loudmouth Joe, NOT!

As far as the article goes, you Joe, have not got a clue, you are way out of your league and your ignorance shows.

Others:

You want to feed Joe?
I'm going, enjoy yourselves!

David,

Gee the blowflies are out early this year.

On-topic: has there, or hasn't there, been a pause in global warming ? Has there, or hasn't there, been an eight-inch (20 cm) sea-level rise in the past century ? More or less everywhere ?

Squeers,

[continued]

Actually I'm fascinated by your posts, they're incredibly illuminating into the relativist, cultural-studies, post-modern mind, or what there is of it.

And your outrageously stupid statement that “journalism is the best form of primary documentation” is too easy to challenge. What, do you mean hearsay ? FIFO observations ? Story ? 'Narrative' ? Based on what ? Twitter 'history' ? Opinion, stance, sense of outrage, etc. ? Placard or T-shirt philosophy ?

How about 'evidence' ? Something that can be corroborated ? Triangulated ? That means nothing ? I hope to God you're not anywhere near impressionable but lazy students.

I'm not suggesting that anybody is necessary a liar if they put forward a story without a shred of evidence. But nobody has to believe it: call it a 'temporary suspension of belief', if you like.

For example, as far as I can tell, there is no solid evidence of the Rabbit-Proof Fence Story. It may be completely true, chapter and verse. But there seems to be not a single mention of it in the literature, nothing in the 'West Australian' of the times, a pro-Labor newspaper during the term of a Conservative government, with a star reporter, named Paul Hasluck, passionately interested in Aboriginal affairs. Nothing in his memoirs. One would have expected that such a story would quickly get out to the local papers, and from there to the 'West Australian'. Nothing in the key Moseley Report of 1936 under the new Labor Government either. Strange. So suspension of belief until the miracle ingredient - evidence.

So is there any chance you can take some of your own advice, along the lines of “the historian shrinks from “automatically” filling in the gaps” ? I seem to have anticipated you on that score, yet you demand that I shouldn't.

Your serve :)

Joe