[continued]

The mere presence of whites, the ration system, horses, ships, clothing, tobacco, schools, grog, money, tinned food, etc., etc., etc., around them, would have wrought very rapid changes in what people did every day in a semi-urban environment, and how they were coming to view the world - which is a broad definition of 'culture' after all.

I certainly haven't seen much evidence of force, to make people change their cultural practices, for whatever purposes you may imagine there might have been in that. Quite the reverse. In his letters, sometimes the Protector lamented the cessation of a particular practice. But that's life, an life goes on, to a large extent as people wish it.

Please feel free to present your half-baked opinions, AJ. Throw in that I'm a racist, and a denialist as well, if you wish, if that's all you have. Great fun :)

Joe

Joe,

I only came here to dispute one point, and so far I don’t think I’ve received a satisfactory rebuttal to that. You and LEGO have led me off on a tangent to your hobby horses.

<<But it is difficult trying to explain to an ignoramus who believes he knows it all.>>

I have freely admitted that I am no expert on this topic, so I don't know where this attack comes from. I'm sensing a lot of butthurt. Your conservative views/beliefs on this topic are obviously very important to you and if this passion is not the result of racism (unlikely given that you are/were married to someone who is part-indigenous) then I don't know where they stem from.

The conservative spin you put on Indigenous history may very well be right. I don’t know for sure (I’m only going by what brief study I’ve done on Indigenous history when doing a unit on Indigenous crime). But I remain sceptical that it is for a few reasons. One being that it would mean that garbage like Bolt and Windschuttle were actually right for once, and that’s something I’m yet to see. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, so who knows?

I don’t doubt that there is an element of black-armbandedness to the mainstream version of events that may have exaggerated just how brutal and cruel the white settlers were. But, on the opposite end of the spectrum, with Nationalism comes all sorts of historical denialism.

Perhaps Professor Robert Foster was right when he said, “What Mr Lane is saying is not untrue, but it is how you choose to spin it ...” (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/amateur-historian-challenges-black-armband-story/news-story/47bca2cddbe39a0fb9bf3e50c0c3d281)

To AJ

If removing a people from their culture is bad, AJ, then I would expect you to get apoplectic over the removal of Australian culture through multiculturalism. But I know how this works, AJ. It is OK to dilute and destroy white culture, but the culture of stone age primitives is sacrosanct.

The best argument that contradicts your premise is to point out to you that those aboriginal communities that live in isolation on their own land, and who largely kept their culture, are the most dysfunctional of all. Children as young as six are being screened for sexually transmitted diseases, and the biggest problem within these communities is alcohol. The "racists" like myself were the ones who did not want aborigines to drink alcohol because we knew what it would do to aboriginal communities. It was the "human rights" morons like yourself who insisted that aborigines must have the right to drink, and it is your team which made the mistake. Don't blame us for your stupidity.

Aboriginal "culture" was largely a gerontocracy where the young men were terrorised through a series of painful and degrading ceremonies to be the slaves of the Old Men. The young women were the property of the Old Men to do with as they pleased. The old women were just killed off when they were no longer any use. The coming of the white man was seen by the young aborigines, male and female, as the chance for a better life. They walked away from the tribal system in droves. The young men to become exceptional stockmen, fencers, and labourers, because on the frontier they were needed. The young women become exceptional stockwomen, cooks, maids, and for some, the wives of pioneering white settlers. These young aboriginal women were treated much better than the Old Men treated them.

Stone age cultures can not survive in a modern world. How ya gonna keep 'em, down on the farm, after they've seen Pareeeee?

AJ,

Perhaps you need to read more, learn more, if you want to make any thoughtful contribution.

I've knocked around indigenous affairs (this is where I pull rank), and read a book-case of stuff, documents galore, histories, genealogies, theses, letters, conference papers and transcripts, etc. etc. There's around twenty thousand pages of transcriptions on my website: www.firstsources.info : each page takes a hour or two to type up, format, etc. I'm thinking about what I'm typing up while I'm doing it. I don't put any spin on what I type up, I just type it up. There it is.

Bob Foster was a bit pissed off with what I had put together, I think, but I was very gratified when he remarked that what I wrote was not untrue. As an ex-Marxist, I still can't see myself as a conservative, as you suggest, I simply comment on what I have learnt.

And if you had told my wife she was 'part-Aboriginal', she would have ripped your eyes out. Try wandering through Redfern and tell the people there they are 'part-aboriginal'.

Perhaps, to paraphrase Grouch Marx, some people may sound like ignoramuses, but don't be fooled - they really are ignoramuses.

Joe

Joe,

I apologise for not being able to make a more thoughtful contribution but as I said before, I only came here to dispute one point. I did not come here to discuss what it is that you and LEGO have dragged me into.

Please excuse me for implying that you’re conservative if you don’t consider yourself to be so, but you seem awfully quick to correct me, yet are quite happy to ignore LEGO’s offensive and racist nonsense. Odd for someone who is married to a full-blood Indigenous Australian.

LEGO,

Australia’s culture is alive and well. I would disagree with you, however, that it is alright to destroy Australian culture.

<<The best argument that contradicts your premise...>>

The damage is already done. You’ve contradicted nothing.

<<It was the "human rights" morons like yourself ... and it is your team which made the mistake.>>

There you go generalising again. Did you learn nothing from our last discussion? (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=17896#318864)

Unfortunately history shows your denial of the negative effects of dispossession to be misguided. The varying degrees, the indigenous peoples of North America and New Zealand are other examples of this. You claim to have read text books on sociology and yet you don’t understand the devastating effects that dispossession has on a people (regardless of whether or not the newly introduced culture is superior). You must have very selective comprehension.

As for your specific claims of savagery in pre-settlement indigenous culture, I knew about the twin bit (done for economic reasons) and the kidnapping of girls from neighbouring tribes wouldn’t surprise me given what us whites did in more primitive times, but do you have any evidence of your other claims? I’ve had a look on and off for the last couple of days but have found nothing other than modern day Indigenous guys appealing to cultural practices as a defence for child rape.

Please don’t just quote a book you’ve read either. I want to know what their sources are, and their sources. The primary sources. Hey, maybe Joe knows? That is what his website specialises in, after all.

Joe?

OK AJ.

I have read many books on Australian history because I am interested in it. I read "Australia's Living Stone Age" and "Over The Ranges" by Ion Idriess. Ion Idriess was Billy Sing's spotter at Gallipoli. He was not at Bersheeba, but he witnessed that historical charge and doubtless saw my grandfather's horse shot out from under him.

In these books, Idriess simply wrote what he saw in his travels around the remote parts of Australia and PNG after WW1. He observed that aboriginal culture in the top half of Australia was almost uniform, and he described many of the cultural practices of aboriginal people in a non judgemental way. His observations of how aboriginal men treated females confirmed what I had read from other accounts. When it came to aboriginal "marriage", he said that aboriginal men had a ceremony in which it would be declared as tribal law that all of the female children of a particular pubescent girl would be given to a middle aged man as his future wives. Confirmation of this was from a university sociology text book which described this exact ceremony.

You know that people are telling the truth when independent accounts cross connect with other independent accounts.

Trendy lefties like yourself have a compulsive need to destroy your own people's faith in their own culture as a way of destroying their nationalism. This is because you equate nationalism with war. So what you do is to equate what the yanks did to the native people of the USA, with what the British and Australian settlers did to the aborigines. But the two histories are different. In the USA, the native people were often friendly to the whites who eventually turned on them and wiped them out. (A lesson there for multiculturalism advocates) In Australia, there were initial clashes and even some massacres, but the young aboriginals saw in the coming of the white man, the chance of a better life.