Ah Wounded Swan,

If you had read more closely, that case was covered by the standard mission policy of caring for people's children while they were working during the week, as I pointed out earlier on this thread.

Yes, it was silly of me to ask for a name - obviously, I meant to ask for a case of improper removal. Dr. Raines couldn't give me one.

Squeers,

Hey, that was MY point, your reliance on ideology not evidence :)

Innuendo ? No, I'll say it straight out: I don't have evidence of a 'stolen generation', not in ten thousand pages of transcriptions. What's YOUR evidence ? With respect, I suggest nothing but ideology and stance. not a shred of evidence.

As for a hunter-gatherer ethic, yes, I'm trying to work that one through - there certainly was an immensely powerful hunter-gatherer ethic in the early days, confronting an agricultural/early industrial ethic. To a very slight extent, they may have overlapped, insofar as many Aboriginal people were able to take advantage of opportunities provided by the ag/ind ethic. And of course, many young children quickly were able, and flexible enough, to operate in both types of society. Of course, there are very few, if any, Aboriginal people who are embedded in this sort of society. If any.

Fundamentally, and very briefly, a hunter-gatherer ethic operates in an environment of boom and bust, of either gorging or starving depending whether resources are available or not, of non-accumulation, and with an epistemology founded on magic and ritual. Hence the reliance on family or clan, as against other families and clans, and certainly against other groups, and the submergence of the individual in the family.

An ag/ind ethic operates in an environment of acquisitiveness, of striving to accumulate, store, and capitalise on that accumulation, and to exploit the labour of others where possible, to this end. Hence the need to privatise property and effort, and the drive towards individualisation.

Check out Frederick Engels' 'Origin of the Family', he cites many early authorities here in Australia on Aboriginal life.

[TBC]

[continued]

Outcast status ? Since 1990, around 120,000 Indigenous people have been enrolled at universities. Thirty six thousand or so have graduated, two thousand more each year. Currently, about fifteen thousand students are enrolled.

Ameliorate ? I've made Aboriginal Flags, hundreds of them. I've worked a one-acre vegetable garden on a community, voluntary. I've worked towards those higher educational goals above for thirty years, mostly voluntary, and I'm proud of it. Fifty thousand graduates by 2020 - it's all on my web-site: www.firstsources.info.

And you've done ...... what ?

Actually, I have fears that the constant victim-hood thrust on Indigenous people by the pseudo-Left has done enormous damage to their sense of worth and their aspirations. They'll defeat it, but to be told over and over that the world has done you down, the rest of the world are b@stards, has been, I'd suggest, very enervating, alienating and tending to push some people towards inaction and paranoia. Some but certainly not even a majority.

It isn't working now as much as it used to, thankfully. People are achieving in spite of the bad advice that the pseudo-Left tries to give them. They're liberating themselves, n spite of the Left and indeed, of some of their own elitist 'leaders' who play the same dirty, enervating game of gutting their own people.

This has been fun.

Oh well, back to topic: when will the 'pause' come to an end, do you think ? When will the 20-cm sea-level rise hit Australian shores ?

Joe

Hi Squeers,

I've been almost as surprised as you to find out what was in all those old documents. I too want to believe. But facts keep getting in the way - for example:

* one full-time employee in the 'Aborigines' department', the Protector - from 1837 right through until the 1930s;

* a growing network of ration depots, up to seventy or more in the 1890s;

* Mission staff rarely numbering more than three or four, all with very busy jobs, no time to go out foraging for children;

* in SA at least, no evidence that people were:

* herded onto missions; or

* driven off their lands; or

* stopped from speaking their languages.

To double-check much of this, one can try to propose what SHOULD be there IF something were true. For example, IF people were herded onto Missions AND children were taken in great numbers, wouldn't you expect to see numbers of stranger children on the School Rolls at Missions ?

At the largest Mission in SA, how many 'stranger' children ever appeared on the Roll, apart from a handful of white kids ? Out of eight hundred children enrolled between 1880 and 1966 - about a dozen, some orphans and some foundlings. Two of the rest were the sons of a single mother who married a local. Three were the children of a deserted wife who took her kids to another Mission.

Not exactly a 'generation'.

I want to believe, to be part of the mob. I want to stop thinking and just feel. It's lonely out here :(

Joe

Sorry to be so off-topic, but there you go.

Further in relation to a 'stolen generation':

A range of 'facts' have to be considered:

* after the War, from the Mission that I have data for, many men left to take up jobs in the rural areas, on all manner of delayed infrastructure projects - irrigation, electrification, railways, roads, forestry, dams and reservoirs, etc. From the late forties, they took their families with them; very few of these children were ever taken into care, even though their accommodation was often far inferior to accommodation back on the Mission;

* who was left behind ? The families of men who were perhaps a little more 'casual' abut seeking work. The 'enterprising' families had been in the habit of looking after the children of these families: "Go down to Auntie Jean's, she'll give you tea tonight." But much of that that had come to an end, although pensioners of course still did what they could to look after children, their grandchildren after all;

* the fifties were by far the most common decade in which children were taken into care from this community, about forty out of the eight hundred ever enrolled at the school - and all but one came back within a year or so;

* from a study I did thirty years ago of infant mortality at this community/Mission (from the Death Records), the worst decade for infant mortality between 1860 and 1965 was the nineteen fifties, 1950s;

* the Mission was set up in 1859. The local police station was set up in 1953.

The 1950s were thus a critical time in the break-down of much of social life of this community. One could cautiously conclude that that conjunction of factors partly help to explain the rise in the number of children being taken into care, and why.

Joe