Absolutely brilliant ! Yes, nobody wants to go back to a strictly walk-around, bare-arsed, foraging existence: in his fifty-odd years of research, the anthropologist Stanner could find not a single person who had gone back to foraging once they had experienced the ration system. After all, the strongest driving force in traditional society was food, the search for it, the working-up of rituals to get more of it, competition for it, strict social rules about its distribution. Food.

The historian Bob Reece has also noticed the same pattern across the 'south'. In South Australia, it is clear that the setting-up of a ration depot in Adelaide in the earliest days drew Aboriginal groups from fifty miles away, even from the upper Murray river. As Reece says, people 'came in', they didn't - as some of us on the 'Left' used to think, move away: that seems to have never happened. The whaling stations on SA's south coast around Victor Harbor drew hundreds of people from a hundred miles away: after all, the whites wanted only the skins, blubber (oil) and bone, while the Aboriginal people wanted only the meat. A beautiful symbiosis !

I read once of an interview in the 1930s with Albert Namatjira: he was asked what he like to do when he wasn't painting. 'Hunting,' he said. Oh, okay then, very traditional, the interviewer assumed. Then Namatjira added, "Yeah, on the back of a truck, with a .303.'

Of course, perhaps most Indigenous people have 'culture', since after all, it's usually their mothers who have raised them, and in an 'Indigenous' way - but this is using the word sociologically, not anthropologically.

Close to forty five thousand Indigenous people have graduated from universities now, 99 % since 1970, 95 % since 1980. Commencement and graduation numbers are rising by about 8 % p.a. and that growth doesn't look like slowing down. Bad news for the Indigenous elites who would rather restrict the numbers of potential new elite members to a manageable level. Enrolments in Indigenous-focussed courses

[TBC]

[continued]

Enrolments in Indigenous-focussed courses have shrunk to a few percent, post-grad numbers are now consistently rising about 12 % p.a., with - it seems - the equivalent of more than 50 % of undergraduates - 60 % since 2010 - going on to post-graduate study within five years.

Life expectancy amongst urban, working Indigenous people is about the same as other Australians'. I suspect that, out in remote 'communities, it is barely half, an average of around forty years. Yet that's the life that the elites promote and protect. The Gaps are most certainly there, within the Indigenous population. And getting Wider.

Thanks, Don.

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Hear, hear and well said Don!
Alan B.

“No one of indigenous descent seems to want to return to being a hunter-gatherer with traditional implements, no Western medicine, no vehicles, no Western food.”

No they don't, but perhaps the whiners demanding recognition and all the hand outs that would go with it should be packed off to the bush for a certain period to give it a try. The drop kicks in local councils presuming to make decisions on Australia Day should be sent with them only, unlike the aboriginal-identifying people who need to get a dose of their real history, they shouldn't be allowed back. I can't think of a suitable reality check for Karl Stefanovic, who is just another media crank.

In the meantime, decent Australians of indigenous descent, are still copping flak which should be directed only to black professional activists and white renegades like Stefanovic and the Left hordes.

Don and Joe, you are both right on the money. The days of the traditional aboriginal are passing. Only those who live in coastal communities can/will survive.

David

Legacy anxiety.
I mean really, this phenomenon of virtue signalling and grand moral causes isn't about the particular causes at all.
It's about the virtue signallers themselves.
We all grew up learning of the great achievements and triumphs of our forebears and did physically productive things in our industrialised economy. No matter how small we had a sense of worth.
But now..
Why else would modern "progressives" harbour so much hatred for all our traditions and institutions?