Hi Minotaur,

Thanks for your usual well-informed advice. I've typed up 15,000 pages of old documents, but done very little research per se, except what springs out of the information from those fifteen thousand pages, inadequate as it may be. And although I've typed up some royal commission transcripts from other States, the 1934 Moseley Commission in WA, for example, and a few commission transcripts from Queensland around 1860, and from New South Wales around 1882, and a royal commission transcript from Victoria in about 1880, and the Bleakley Report of 1928 from the NT, and transcripts of national conferences, I don't claim to have done much work in relation to documents from those other States. I'll leave that up got some other idiot with time on their hands.

You can rely on second- and third-hand accounts like Richard Broome if you like, but all I've done - and presumably this is what has got up your nose - is transcribed old documents, mainly from SA, and tried to draw very general conclusions from them. Admittedly fifteen thousand pages is not the be-all and end-all, you've probably done far more reading yourself. But I just report what I've found.

And we keep coming back to it (and to the purpose of this thread): you have to run with the evidence, not with unsubstantiated passion which, as Stan Grant noted in his brilliant article last week, 'runs with a gallop'. Keep your passion, Minotaur, but occasionally pay attention to actual evidence, even if it contradicts your passion.

Joe

>>"Then there is the research of Peter Read who found that between 1909 - 1940 in NSW up to 5000 children removed and one reason was 'for just being Aboriginal'. Broome 2010, p.97..." What were the other reasons?

The argument against Stolen Generations based on a lack of court cases is a straw man. If there were no policies, and policies don't have to be official legislation, to take children of Aboriginal descent then there can't have been a Royal Commission and so many apologies from governments."

Those are assertions, not evidence. And the royal commission found...?
Nothing of consequence.

As for "apologies" - puhleeese! As credible as a tin bell.

Hi Calwest,

Thank you. Yes, every person taken into care would have a file in their respective State Archives. It doesn't need buckets of money to find one's file, just stroll along to your State Archives, register, fill out a form setting out what you want, and wait until they drag it out of their vast store of archives, maybe an hour or two. I don't know how that can cost anything at all.

Yes, Peter Read knocked up his article on a 'Stolen Generation' one evening in 1979, plucking a figure of five thousand (why not ten thousand ? Fifty thousand ? A million ? No, that's probably a bit too unbelievable). So what proportion of children taken into care were from neglectful parents ? Drunken parents ? Absent parents ? What proportion were taken into care because a parent had died ? Or because, given the general level of poverty fifty, sixty or seventy years ago, their family was destitute ? Given the lack of birth control, and huge families after the War, how many mothers simply had break-downs, or whose health was severely threatened by the combination of poverty, insecurity of husband's employment, and poor health ? On my wife's small community (300-odd people), women were still dying in childbirth into the fifties, at about one every two years. Her father's first wife; her mother's aunt ? How does an itinerant worker look after his children AND look for work on his own ?

Of course, these factors impinged on the lives of other Australians, especially from the late twenties until well into the fifties. No wonder, after the War, so many Aboriginal men desperately seized the employment opportunities provided by the multitude of overdue infrastructure projects around the country, railways, electrification, pipelines, roads, dams, school building, re-afforestation and plantations, and so on, to leave their Missions and settlements. Their grandchildren now have opportunities that they never had, and fifty five thousand Indigenous people have taken up those opportunities to graduate from universities, once their families have found their feet. That's our common history.

Joe

Thanks for the 'I'm not very brite but can lift heevy things' response Joe. Quantity is no match for quality. And evidence comes in many different forms but you seem to only give credibility to documents created as part of the Master Narrative.

Stick to transcribing as you clearly are not a researcher. I'll keep reading credible historians who are in-depth researchers and have reputations for good quality work. Unlike that of a hack transcriber who doesn't seem able to look past the Master Narrative. Andrew Bolt would love you, Joe.

Calwest, how about a substantiated refutation instead of glib c.r.a.p..

Joe, if you're going to try a discredit a source then at least get the date/year right. What was I saying about credibility...on yeah, you have none.