Yawn, Joe, I have not bothered with this site for a few years but nothing has changed. The same old rhetoric remains as if in a time warp.

Drab, so after disposessing and masacring Tasmanian Aboriginals you seem to think they should be happy and greatful for being hounded into a reserve/prisons.

Typical colonialist thinking.

Stan Grant was spot on - the great Australian Dream was founded on racism.

Joe, that is the typically pathetic response of someone who poses a lot but has no substance. Given you state you disagree with me then give some evidence that refutes anything I've stated. And your comment about more massacres/atrocities making me happy was just idiotic. There has been more than enough killing, destruction of cultures, rapes and enslavement of Aboriginal people and only a sick person would be happy with any of it.

Drab, it is typical denial tactics to claim disease was a great killer of people and then not address anything else. While disease did kill a great many people who brought the diseases here? And it is widely considered that Major Ross committed biological warfare on the Aboriginal people of Port Jackson using smallpox in 1789.

In Tasmania the research of Nicholas Clements clearly shows that there were massacres done by roving parties. There was also the effect of whalers/sealers and their kidnapping of women that destroyed societies in the north east of the state. To keep hiding behind the cloak of disease is a cop out.

Minotaur,

I know you won't but you could have a look at Windschuttle's massive book on Tasmania -he concludes that roughly as many whites were killed as Blacks, about seventy or so each. As for reserves/prisons, the people on Flinders Island had convict-servants.

Do you have any evidence - not just what somebody 'considered' possible - for smallpox being spread deliberately in 1789 ?

In the early documentation - check out my website: www.firstsources.info - there's plenty of information there, and I've provided Indexes to most of the bigger documents to make accessing information easier - about the impacts of diseases for which there were no cures at the time (and in the case of, say, TB or serious infection, none until after the Second World War): actually go out to any old country town and check out their cemeteries - you will find huge numbers of people who died very young, perhaps entire families.

Certainly, in the Aboriginal genealogies down this way, and in the family and death records, one can trace a major difference amongst Aboriginal families: in some, even with large families, nobody died, while in others, most if not all of the kids died. There's a large family now which owes its name to a single survivor after a couple of generations. There are other surnames which are unknown now.

One of my wife's gr-gr-grandmothers was one of ten Aboriginal kids, born and raised on Kangaroo Island, but that surname is extinct now. TB seemed to have been the big killer in the late nineteenth century, followed by death in childbirth: forty women from her 'mission' died, mostly in childbirth and TB, between 1880 and 1960, leaving 140 kids motherless.

I don't know about other groups, but for the Ngarrindjeri, from the lower Murray and Lakes, there is an enormous amount of documentation: birth, death, marriage records from 1860; school records from 1880; I presume hospital and police records; a 600-page missionary's journal from 1859 to 1879; a

[TBC]

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couple of thousand letters from the four or five superintendents between 1880 and 1900; a Select Committee transcript of a few hundred pages, aimed directly at trying to close that mission in 1860; much other material at a 1913-1916 Royal Commission. Etc.

So when people make airy statements, I suspect that they take it for granted that there is no information otherwise, so they can make all the assertions they like and some fool will believe them.

A 'friend' once told me that his mum had been told by her dad that a farmer woman had poisoned five thousand Aboriginal people with arsenic out around Dubbo. [Strange: it's as if the bigger the story, because it is SO monstrous, the less evidence you need].

Anyway, I said that there's probably never been a time in sixty thousand years when five thousand Aboriginal people came together in the one place (maybe the Bunya harvest times in SE Queensland?). And why did they go there when there were ration depots around Dubbo and Wellington and Warren and Bathurst ?

And just wondering, but how did she dispose of the bodies ? Five thousand people would weigh around two hundred tonnes. To burn the bodies would take a tonne of wood each, an entire forest that this farmer woman had to cut down, cart and put bodies on.

She probably buried the bodies, he said. Then they are still there, at least some bones and teeth (and of course traces of arsenic), I said, presuming that one woman could dig a hole big enough for five thousand people, presumably with a spade.

We're still not speaking.

You need truth, and therefore evidence, to take the first step towards true understanding of anything. And what is more important than a true understanding of our history ?

Joe

Joe, your desperation in telling me to go and read Windschuttle is amusing. Not only have I read it but I was in the audience when he came to Tasmania for a debate about his content. Good ol’ Keify’s work is now out of date and completely discredited. You can’t even get his figures correct either. Winschuttle nominated the figures of 118 Aborigines killed between 1803 – 1834 and in the same period 187 colonists. In his 2014 book, based on years of meticulous research done for his PhD, Nicholas Clements blows those figures away and nominates 600 Aborigines killed by invaders in the east of Tasmania alone.

If you want to go national then historian Timothy Bottoms’ research came to the conclusion that in northern Australia the death toll of Aborigines was in the order of 40 000. That is supported by Henry Reynolds and other historians.

You also stated that the Aborigines removed to Wybalenna had convict-servants but that is blatantly false. Yes, there were a small number of convicts on Flinders Island but they certainly weren’t servants to the Aborigines. In April of 1833 there were 15 convicts on the island; four boatmen, a cook, a tailor, a baker, two brick-makers, one bricklayer, a carpenter, clerk and three labourers. Those numbers did not increase in order to provide Aborigines, a vanquished people, with servants!

Nominating a huge repository of information primarily recorded by those creating the Master Narrative of white dominated historical record is all well and good as long as you recognise the inherent and often extreme biases within. It seems to me that you are intent on propagating the myth of peaceful settlement Joe and not prepared to consider the evidence that counters that of the Master Narrative. You are hiding behind lies and verbosity.