ttbn. Hear what you are saying mate and mostly agree. And can only add, there's not a black way or a white way. Just a right way!

Those that followed the very first of the first, are the very first to deny the oral history of those who may well have proceeded them, given it essentially destroys many of their ambit land claims etc?

Otherwise, truth be told, to the victor goes the spoils, and if good enough then? Why not the late 1700's early 1800's? And or, if one isn't a native born by the third generation when?

I think the sooner we decide the past is a country nobody can return to, and just set about understanding, it is what it is and just making the best of the new reality, the better.

After all, there is just one constant in the universe and that constant is constant change.

Nobody really owns the land we were born on. Only someday the land will claim each and everyone, regardless of the place of birth, race, colour, culture or creed! And own us.
Alan B.

ttbn,

"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."

Spot on!

Alan B.,

Great comment. Now at 230 years and counting, we're still being conned into obsessing about "colonisation" as the catch all excuse for bad and criminal behaviour. Really, why would the white feminists want to explain away the violence of some indigenous men? Oh yeah, and by their silence, Islamism, too: wife beating, genital mutilation, subjugation of women, terrorism, racism. Yet the white feminists are nowhere in sight and nowhere to be heard.

Gentlemen, your comments also remind me strongly of the point the federal Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, MP, was trying to make about the murder of the passengers aboard MH17 over the Ukraine. It's over, move on; we're not looking to go to war with Russia. And yes, that won't help the families and friends of those killed: they'll still suffer enormously, and the rest of us can only sympathise and empathise. But dwelling on the past won't change anything for fear of something worse. As you said, Alan, the past is a country nobody can return to. You and Craig Kelly have stated an obvious truth.

The aboriginals have no right to claim “first nation” status.
Alan Thorne, who excavated Mungo man said the skeleton was undoubtedly Chinese, as it issimilar to skeletons which he had excavated in China.
No genetic link to Mungo man could be established, so he is not an ancestor of present -day aboriginals. The claim is baseless.
“, Mungo Man's gene is extinct. According to the out-of-Africa model he should have had a gene like everybody else. But there he was, a physically modern man living in Australia 60,000 years ago with a defunct gene that probably appeared well before the most recent common ancestor of all of us.”
http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2001/01/01/2813404.htm

The most fundamental criteria of civilisation are the written word. Thus civilisation only started with the first fleet.

The "first peoples can claim the oldest "culture" but without any written history the claim that it in any way resembles that of 1000yrs ago let alone 60000yrs is pure fantasy.

Hi SM,

I can never understand this idiotic and smug assertion that Indigenous culture is the oldest in the world. All cultures are equally old: other people weren't sitting around for tens of thousands of years with their thumbs up their arses. Some 'cultures' evolve, develop, innovate, improve if you like; some stay more or less stagnant; but they are all equally old if only because they all come from the same cultural origins in Africa.

And given the drastic changes across Australia during the Ice Age - twenty-odd thousand years of very different 'culture' before and after - anybody with the slightest grasp of the impacts of that period of dryness (drier than currently) and bitter cold over most of the continent, it's inevitable that that Ice Age would have forced major changes in people's responses. And intermittent droughts since then - one lasting 32 years, about eight hundred years ago - would have also forced drastic changes in human responses, not least drastic reductions in populations, not just through deaths by starvation and thirst but simply because births don't occur, babies can't be sustained, during droughts.

Of course, Indigenous societies have undergone a multitude of changes over sixty thousand years. Probably no group is in exactly the same place as it was a thousand years ago, let alone sixty thousand years. Som clans grow and split, other clans fade away and are absorbed by related groups. Like anywhere else, the constant factor in Indigenous history over sixty thousand years has been change.

Cheers,

Joe

Joe, what you say is quite reasonable. However, what Ian Nance says is:
“its original residents who founded it some forty to sixty thousand years ago.”, and “Theirs is the longest-existing civilisation in history. Yet many modern Australian residents have no concept of the incredible cultural depth of our first nationals.” This is baseless
The aboriginals have no civilisation, apart from the one set up by the British, which they appear to have joined, they have no nation, or political structure of any kind.
Those who claim leadership have no basis for the claim, and talk of a treaty is nonsense.
The aborigines founded nothing.
The first nation, if represented by Mungo man, was chinese, and they do not exist, having left no descendants.
They were probably eaten, if the aborigines had the same predilection for chinese flesh as they showed during our gold rushes.