Wolly,

So ........ we can't ever know anything from the past, because it may not have been fully or accurately recorded ? And in any case, we would interpret the scraps that we can find out from our own modern perspective now, today ? So we wring our hands in impotence and make no judgements at all about history ?

Well, I'm not so sure. There was a hell of a lot written about, and in, the past, first-hand accounts of Aboriginal life, so we can cross-check or triangulate, different accounts. They tend to be fairly consistent in their observations of gender relations, from one side of Australia to the other.

And one common thread, from William Buckley's accounts around Geelong over thirty years before 'settlement', through all of the anthropologists' and missionaries' and travellers' accounts, to the present situations, observed by a multitude of journalists, is the common resort to violence in 'communities'.

The bottom line was that women in traditional Aboriginal society - as in every other 'traditional' society - couldn't say 'no'. In one society down this way, such a women would be systematically pack-raped all night, to sort of teach the little lady a lesson. Mind you, the blokes did that also if a woman was suspected of being a bit loose - nothing like a bit of mass-violent-sex to teach her a lesson - or otherwise if her partner suspected that she may be thinking of playing around. Then, of course, he would get stuck into the suspected object of her desires. Or that bloke's relations, especially his sisters.

Joe