Inventing Aborigines (article)
Bob Reece

http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p71991/pdf/book.pdf?referer=1077

Aboriginal achievements:

60 000+ years of human occupation of an isolated continent
Complex forms of art that have survived in excess of 10 000 years
Eel farming that involved carving channels through volcanic rock in order to manipulate lake levels
Fish farming in various forms
Invented an aerodynamically complex returning boomerang
Complex land management practices using fire
Animal management practices
Intricate knowledge of astronomy
Could navigate the land without needing compass or maps
Agricultural practices of harvesting and storing resources
Could navigate sea routes without compass or maps
Used medicines from natural resources
Survived violent invasion and over a century of frontier warfare

This is not an exhaustive list of achievements but highlighting some of them.

Hi Leoj,

On Reece's article, it's amazing that he wrote it thirty years ago. Brilliant. He was school captain at Wagga High School in 1955 when I was in First Year, along with my class-mate and friend Bill Gammage. I'm passing that article around.

Hi Toni,

Re Tasmania: it's possible. I'm not in Tasmania, so I can't check out the archives there, or transcribe documents, that's up to someone else with years to spare. But why do people have to massively exaggerate numbers ? Over the 35-or-so years up until Robinson brought the people, and their assigned servants, to Flinders Island, if we trim the numbers to account for front-bar rumours and the usual inflation rate, I would be surprised if 200-300 were killed on both sides put together, maybe 5-8 per year.

Dearest Foxy,

I'm not sure why you keep citing the most banal and infantile sources, such as The Conversation. As for archaeology, when I was in Primary
School in 1954, I was fascinated with palaeontology; I read all the books in the Penrith Public Library, I used to copy out the ancient skulls of Pithecanthropus, Australopithecus, the Taung Man, etc. If I had another life .....

Yes, you're partly right: sometimes, oral stories can fill out broader accounts. But seriously, would you believe every story that you were ever told, just on the say-so of the teller ? Even stories that relate to very distant events, say ten years ago ? Surely you're not that naive, I can't believe that.

People get details wrong, even fundamental details. We all do. I would respectfully suggest that not one of us has a perfect memory, not even from one day to the next, let alone decades.

Find evidence, piece it together, make sense of it. If a story backs it up, so much the better. But never, never a story alone.

Love,

Joe

Nicknamenick you are a racist crunt.
Posted by minotaur
Absolutely. Completely. Total. What did I do?

Joe, Aboriginal people were forced off their lands all over Australia. Your continual reference to South Australia is meaningless in the overall context of the results of invasion.

The experiences in Tasmania have been well researched and documented by many historians. Two of the more recent ones are by Nick Brodie and Nick Clements. There was a declared war in Tasmania against the Aborigines and roving parties committed massacres against whole groups while they slept.

As a result of the invasion and subsequent war in Tasmania the Aboriginal population went from approx. 7000 to around 200 in around 30 years. Your guestimates are rubbish and have no validity.

"Survived violent invasion and over a century of frontier warfare"

Dispossession-resistance model, 'choosing to interpret every example of Aboriginal attack on Europeans and their property as ‘resistance’ or ‘warfare’'.

Presentism.

Misunderstanding the 600 aboriginal tribes as one 'nation' with homogeneity.

"As Reynolds himself says, ‘the evidence . . . suggests that Aborigines attacked and killed Europeans for a variety of reasons’. Precisely, and it is wrong to subsume all these reasons under the rubric of ‘resistance’ and create the impression that it was all of a piece.

It can be seen that ‘resistance’ has served a useful purpose in overthrowing the notion that the Aborigines simply ‘faded away’. Henry Reynolds, Noel Loos and others have performed an important service in quantifying the conflict (particularly in Queensland) and revealing Aborigines as far from passive victims of European onslaught. In so doing, however, they have created the impression that ‘resistance’ of some kind was the typical Aboriginal response to the European presence from one end of the continent to the other.

In their enthusiasm to document the bloodiness of the process of colonisation, Reynolds and others have not been so interested in documenting and highlighting that other major characteristic of Aboriginal-European interaction: accommodation. Perhaps this in itself is a reflection of the character of Aboriginal political action during the decade when Reynolds was preparing The other side of the frontier: a period which was typified by sometimes violent physical confrontations between Aborigines and police and by the belligerent rhetoric of the Black Power movement in Australia. Reynolds himself was quite explicit about the political purpose of his book, emphasising that it ‘was not conceived, researched, or written in a mood of detached scholarship’.

from Inventing Aborigines (article)
Bob Reece
http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p71991/pdf/book.pdf?referer=1077