Hi Alan,

No, with the greatest respect to your grandmother, I don't put much store by oral accounts, including my own, without some back-up evidence, what President Obama calls 'objective truth'. I would respectfully suggest that oral history loses about 50-100 % of its validity with each passing decade. I'm not sure how you're connecting it to some past event in which one group exterminated another, more or less at the tail-end of the last Ice Age when there wouldn't have been anybody in frozen-over Tasmania, and nobody wanting to go there either, except penguins. DNA or genome testing would clear that furphy up.

Rhys,

All human societies are equally old, since we parted from our primate cousins, but some have changed while others have stagnated. If we are supposed to value stagnation, then one could say something about Aboriginal society being relatively unchanging (except perhaps during the last Ice Age when changes in the landscape would have forced drastic changes in hunting and gathering techniques).

This half-witted notion of a uniquely-unchanging or continuous culture really does need to be debunked: all societies have equally old cultures, and if 'continuous' means evolving from one form to another, even violently, then they have all been continuous as well. And that includes, alongside a multitude of other societies, Australian Aboriginal societies. Nothing unique about that.

Joe

Since when has Quadrant become the Bible of anyone apart from Right wing thugs,is this bloke Tony Thomas applying for Windschuttles position as racist in chief
Along with glowing tributes from Abbott,David Flint being another, think it & its opinion can be safely ignored

It only takes two short sentences for the “shame” to come out. Naidoc means nothing to any but a very few avid virtue signallers. And there is no reason why a tiny group of the population should be “a normal aspect of our daily pattern”, particularly as “first-dwellers” died out a couple of centuries ago and their descendants are not much different from the descendants of first-fleeters who died around the same time. In fact, the majority of people of aboriginal descent are not any different from anybody else at all. I’m sick of cranky white people and their shame, blubbering about differences between people born in Australia.

And we do not “... live alongside the world's oldest continuous culture”. Even remote-living aborigines wouldn’t last ten minutes if they lived according to Stone Age culture. Anyone is entitled to appreciate any “innate cultural aspects” of their culture and ancestors, but they are not entitled to government (taxpayer) help to dwell on it. With all the blah about multiculturalism in this country, how bloody dare anyone single out one group! It’s all about what the whims of the chatterati and where their brainstorms take them at any given moment.

“Yet we expect them to adopt our culture and become a black white-fella..”? What absolute nonsense. Most Australians of aboriginal background accept “our” culture because they are Australian, most of them being part European, even part Asian. With the rubbish talked by people like Ian Nance, you would think we were talking about Martians, not Australians.

Three pages of absolute tosh.

John Ryan,

Tony Thomas is a respected journalist and commentator. Has been for years. In the linked article, he quotes Watkin Tench (and others qualified to comment). Tench, unlike you, was an eye witness. But hell, your posturing is as good as Tench's facts, right?

Compared with the gentlemen cited by Thomas, you are...well, just a posturer and a troll, apparently.

Why is it "racist" to point out the history of Aboriginal violence and sexual aggression, still with us in many cases?

Even your ABC puts it on the record: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/indigenous-groups-urge-government-to-address-tennant-creek-abuse/9473002

Is it also racist to point out that Aboriginal "civilisation" did not have a written form of language, historical records, pottery, iron tools and weapons, wheels, walls, constructions higher than one storey?

For a long time now we have seen Aboriginal graduates in many professions, thanks to their hard work and the opportunities afforded them by a good education. That is assimilation.

Hi John,

Tony was, like me, a communist as a child, but we've both given it up long ago. I was at a World Peace Conference/Festival just south-west of Bankstown (Milperra?) with him, as it turned out much later, in about 1951 or 1952. Or maybe 1953. Windschuttle was also close to that crack-pot section of the Left as a uni student but saw the light. There's a lot of us around :)

Do you have anything material to contribute, or will name-calling suffice ?

Cheers,

Joe

To my mind it is a very long bow to draw describing a bunch of people wandering around the bush naked, throwing rocks & sticks at things, to try to catch something to eat a civilisation.

Any group that has not advanced in tens of thousands of years is a bit hard to call a civilisation either.

Giving grand titles to a primitive mob is surely only for political gain, & not worthy of consideration.