Hi Rodney,

So, when I asked if « … you didn't mean to imply that foraging people were inherently 50,000 years behind whites, or that whites were somehow far ahead in evolutionary terms of foraging people … »

your answer is "yes" ? They can put thumb and forefinger together, you know. Do you have any idea how racist that all sounds ? That that nineteenth-century belief was the cornerstone in most racist theories since then, such as eugenics ?

Surely not ? Any child, ANY child, raised in ANY cultural environment, will, I suggest, become comfortably assimilated to that environment. Perhaps even adults - William Buckley spent thirty two years with the Geelong tribes from about the age of twenty three, and seemed to almost think of himself as a 'local'; he was unable to speak English when he made contact with whites in 1835. He picked it up pretty quickly, but that shows how flexible one's learning can be.

So, to me, your 'wonder' at the marvel of forty thousand Indigenous university graduates is tainted with very outdated theories. I find it admirable, but certainly not some sort of wonder, like a horse tapping out numbers, or a parrot quoting Shakespeare. I admire the courage of so many Indigenous people, the first in their families (sometimes the first from their entire communities) who, in the 1980s and 1990s, tried university education, often inter-state as well, sometimes with small children to support.

In fact, a common pattern was of single mothers, aged around thirty, whose eldest was entering secondary school and youngest just entering primary school, who had left school themselves around mid-secondary, and were desperate to make something of their lives, with very little guidance and certainly none from their 'communities'. All too often, they came a cropper, as their eldest also reached adolescence and rebellion and - poof ! - there went their dreams. But they certainly tried their best.

[TBC]

[continued]

Solidarity would be fine, if anybody knew what they are supposed to be 'solid' about: for example, what the hell - after all these years - is supposed to be 'recognised' ? if there is ever to be a Referendum, what will the questions be ? If the 'leaders' can't get their arses in gear, why should anybody waste a second of their time on 'solidarity' ? Around what ?

Isn't it strange that the Indigenous people who - one would think - have experienced most 'British colonialism' are doing best ? That people in remote communities, often on land which was never 'taken', who have experienced colonialism least, suffer from the most social problems ? Perhaps there is a disjunction between a foraging society and a welfare economy, which has operated in sometimes grotesque ways.

As for 'incompetent, corrupt organisations', I have actually come across one which wasn't, but, of many, many others, each in their own way is usually a mixture of both, sometimes to breath-taking levels. Not wanting to get dragged before any court, I'll leave it at that, except to say that they are almost invariably publicly-funded. Easy money, easily spent.

Joe

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Dear Joe,

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You wrote :

« So, when I asked if … “you didn't mean to imply that foraging people were inherently 50,000 years behind whites, or that whites were somehow far ahead in evolutionary terms of foraging people, … your answer is "yes" ?

They can put thumb and forefinger together, you know. Do you have any idea how racist that all sounds ? That that nineteenth-century belief was the cornerstone in most racist theories since then, such as eugenics ? »
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Some people may interpret it that way, Joe, but I know that you don’t because you are not racist – no more than I am.

So far as I can remember, I have never felt than anyone was inferior to me, even when I was living in the bush in outback Queensland. As a matter of fact, I distinctly recall that there were two Aboriginal boys with me in primary school (not in my class) who were far superior to me and everyone else at school at foot racing. I could hardly believe it. Every time there was a race, they were way ahead of everybody else. It was as though there were two separate races. We were just not in the same category as them. I have no idea what they were like at school. They lived with their family in a council house on the edge of town. It was brand new but completely empty, no furniture. They slept on the floor. It looked a bit of a mess.

Much later, after I had been living in France for a couple of years, I heard the French anthropologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss explaining on the radio that for a separate human sub-species to develop genetically it would be necessary to isolate a particular population of human beings on an island with absolutely no contact with the rest of humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. He indicated that this has never occurred, even in the case of the Australian Aborigines, the world’s oldest surviving culture.

The following article is relevant :

http://europe.newsweek.com/there-no-such-thing-race-283123?rm=eu

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Dear Joe,

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You wrote :

« Solidarity would be fine, if anybody knew what they are supposed to be 'solid' about: for example, what the hell - after all these years - is supposed to be 'recognised' ? if there is ever to be a Referendum, what will the questions be ? If the 'leaders' can't get their arses in gear, why should anybody waste a second of their time on 'solidarity' ? Around what ? »
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There are several aspects to that question. Let me say that if the Japanese had conquered and invaded Australia during WWII and we all had to bow down to the totalitarian, fascist and ultranationalist, “living god”, Japanese Showa Emperor, Hirohito, I, personally, should have difficulty accepting that situation and should not find it unreasonable for my descendants, two or three hundred years later (if not before), to wish to be recognised as the second (the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples being the first) inhabitants of Australia – to say the least.

Nor should I have found it unreasonable if the people of our mother country, the British, had expressed their heart-felt solidarity with us (for a change) and rushed to our immediate rescue when the Japanese attacked us – after all, we had sacrificed a large proportion of the flower of our youth in the defence of British interests in numerous wars that had not concerned us in the past.

As I understand it, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as well as the so-called “first settlers” (convicts sent out here as slave labour) were both victims of the British colonisation of Australia in 1788. It was not until well over a half a century later, in 1850, that free settlers came here from the UK and elsewhere, in any large numbers, due to the “gold rush”. The initial inhabitants, the Aboriginal peoples, got the wrong end of the stick from both the British colonisers and their successors, the “free settler” migrants.

In my view, the Aboriginal peoples were the victims in this affair,

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(Continued ...)

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Hi Rodney,

Where to start ? Thank you, though, for crystallising the current narrative being peddled. First, about the Japanese:

1. I don't think policies in South Australia have been any better than they may have been in other colonies, but the British did recognise traditional land-use from the outset. From 1851, Aboriginal rights were written into every pastoral lease. Those rights exist today.

2. From the outset, a ration system was instituted, which had the unintended effect of bringing people into Adelaide, and forgoing their traditional use of the land. Within a decade, Indigenous people in Adelaide had grown accustomed to then-urban life, cottages, schooling for the kids, free medical services (at a time when they didn't exist anywhere else in the world), as well as the goods and bads of the new world.

3. My impression is that the Japanese would have exterminated all Indigenous people very soon after their Invasion. [After the War, my dad still had Japanese money in English in a little tin]. In South Australia, missionaries learnt the local languages and tried to teach in them. I don't know of any actual massacres of Aboriginal people anywhere in South Australia: a battle, yes, up the Murray in 1841; killings, yes, on both sides. But massacres, no.

4. By around 1900, perhaps fifty Aboriginal men and women had applied for, and received, leases of land, to farm or raise stock. If an Aboriginal woman married a white man, the lease was in HER name. This occurred in about a dozen cases. People on waterways were provided with 15-ft 'canoes'; at any time around 1900, there would have been at least a hundred of these boats. Fishing gear and guns were also given out.

So would the Japanese have done the same ?

You need to be very careful with the logic of 'Well, how else do you explain x or y or z ?' There are many other ways, and the most conclusive are those which rely on the 'truth', on evidence. We can fart around defining the 'truth' if you like :)

Cheers,

Joe

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(Continued …)

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not the culprits. They seem to have been considered as a hybrid species of wild animals and human beings.

Aboriginal remains have been removed from graves and burial sites, hospitals, asylums and prisons until the late 1940s and put on exhibition around the world. According to a Sydney Morning Herald article in 1955 :

« It is actually on record in the history of Mackay, Queensland, that one overseas collector made a request to the trooper that he shoot a native boy to furnish a complete exhibit of an Australian aboriginal skeleton, skin and skull » :

http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/aboriginal-remains-repatriation#toc1

I ignore if my ancestors were convict-slaves or free-settlers, but I feel that an act of solidarity by voting in favour of the recognition in the Australian Constitution of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of Australia would be fully justified. I see it as a positive step towards the restoration of their dignity and self-esteem as human beings. I consider thqt that is the least I could do.
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You ask :

« Isn't it strange that the Indigenous people who - one would think - have experienced most 'British colonialism' are doing best ? That people in remote communities, often on land which was never 'taken', who have experienced colonialism least, suffer from the most social problems ? »

No. To me, it’s perfectly comprehensible. As I have already documented in previous posts on this thread, as human beings, we all possess the intellectual capacity with which nature has endowed our species. But that has not prevented differences developing among groups of population due to different physical environments, cultures and experiences. There is nothing “strange” about indigenous people being influenced by contact with British culture.

Whether they “are doing best” or not (compared to those living in remote communities) depends on the way you look at it. Some may consider that they have become “corrupted” by British culture and no longer live in harmony with their natural environment. Will they survive just as long with British culture ?

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