Good piece, Graham, and I agree with it all.

Maybe the numerous benefits they received by colonisation should be taken away.

Hi Graham,

"I have always been sympathetic to the Aboriginal cause, but it can't proceed on the basis that some people have a better right to title, or say, than others because of race. The cards have fallen where they are, and we must all play our best game with what we have, not try to reshuffle the deck."

Yes, indeed. Australia didn't exist as a political entity until 1/1/1901. It's 118 years old. Before the colonies came together in 1901, Australia didn't exist as a single political entity. Before 1788, Australia was fragmented into more than three hundred language groups and maybe five to ten thousand clans (numbering around 100-200 people each): clans as the land-holding and land-using groups.

Now, of course, we're supposed to believe that they were all farmers, if we bend the meaning of the word somewhat to include pulling eels out of a creek, building fish-traps, setting fire to the bush and 'stooking' kangaroo-grass. Forget about farming requiring cultivation - Aboriginal people were the first no-drill farmers.

Back to reality: the rights to use the land in all traditional ways (i.e. hunting and gathering) of those five to ten thousand land-holding groups were recognised and written into pastoral leases, at least here in SA, in mid-1850. I typed up the letters of the Protector 1839-1912, and many, many times he asks police and missionaries to 'try to keep people in their districts'.

To facilitate this, a network of up to seventy ration depots were eventually set up as the frontier moved out. By 1900, most of the ration-issuers were the pastoral station managers. The Protector also issued 15-ft boats, 'canoes', to people on the waterways, the coasts and rivers - even one on Cooper's Creek. And guns, as well:
boats and guns were issued and repaired free except for able-bodied people who paid half of the costs. Those letters are on my website: www.firstsources.info

[TBC]

[continued]

Did clans exercise the powers of governments ? Sort of family governments ? Did groups come together for some elders to make decisions of any sort, over and above clan-level ? Yes, mainly to deliberate over the deaths of able-bodied people, since all such deaths had to have human causes. That seems to have been about it. Of course, clans related to each other for the purposes of marriage and simple trade as well. Whether all of that is 'government' is up to others to decide.

Humans, intelligent human beings, have been in Australia for maybe sixty thousand years, in their amazing diversity. Did any of them ever know 'Australia', walk all over it ? I don't know how that could be ascertained: people trod lightly on the earth, after all. Of course, they had immense and permanent impacts on the landscape, as Bill Gammage has written about so eloquently. But does setting fire to something confer government, or ownership ?

Australia is a young country, 118 years old. Indigenous people have equal rights to participate in all its workings. In that sense, we are all 'young and free'.

Joe

These ignorant people are not worthy of the country they live in. They are not worthy of any discussion or consideration. Will they sporting organisation they are paid by treat them the same we it has treated Israel Palau? Not likely.

I also think it's an excellent piece. What's more it states the essence of the problem - "when you can't win using rational argument"..... I'd even add that most problems today seem no longer resolvable by rational arguments (if they ever could be). As evidence we have a roughly 50:50 split in political leanings that no amount of argument, rational or otherwise, seems to influence. Underlying values seem unshakeable, over the short term at least. What's more, these particular young men, whom I too admire enormously (as a recent convert to watching NRL), are accustomed to resolving differences, to winning their disputes, by mainly physical measures. That's what their job's all about and they do it admirably. I think the best response to their public display is pacifism and tolerance. The crowd seemed not to mind. I've convinced myself to agree with them. As for the people who ought to know better, keep at them!

I have never ever liked this "anthem". neither do millions of other Aussies. And born out by the spontaneous singing of waling Matilda, the most recognised national song of Australia, at various sporting venues.

For mine, we should completely jettison this dirge and replace with, I am, you are, we are Australian, and for all the world we come etc-etc. But only if we want genuine reconciliation, recognition and a long overdue treaty!
Alan B.

Actually it is NOT only due to ONE WORD... :-(

https://www.facebook.com/senatorbriggs/videos/338652323486058/

The anthem SHOULD be changed.

Correction, for all the world, should be replaced by, from all the lands on earth.
Alan B.

The Australian Anthem has a really nice melodic sound but the lyrics need working on.
"For we are young & free" " does not represent reality !

Ah good on them for pointing out the bleeding obvious, this land contains some of the oldest living cultures in existence and the incarceration rate on indigenous folk is at world record levels. Perfectly understand their position.

Can also understand why some of older the WASPs are getting salty over it. Uppity I think is the word.

'his land contains some of the oldest living cultures in existence and the incarceration rate on indigenous folk is at world record levels. '

easy solution. Decrease the crime rate among Indigenous. Pig headed refusal to sing national anthem just encouraged the victim industry giving many criminals an entitlement to break the law in the land that was 'stolen' from them. Crime rates will continue to rise as victim industry make excuses for domestic violence, child sexual abuse and home invasions.

There are cultures & then there are cultures ! The Origins of the Term "Culture" 2The word 'culture' comes from the Latin cultus, which means 'care', and from the French colere which means 'to till' as in 'till the ground'. There are many terms that stem from the word culture.

Steele,

The ancestors of all of us came out of Africa at different times. The ancestors of Aboriginal people here must have crossed from Africa along the Arabian and South Asian coasts, and down the Malay Peninsula, through what is now Indonesia, in order to get here, evolving all along the way according to changing circumstances. Logically, those ancestors must have passed along that way, over ten thousand years and more, before they reached Australia, and would have taken another x thousand years to spread across Australia.

So logically, if anything, many other societies have longer cultural pedigrees than Aboriginal people here. Especially African people. Logically on that criterion, African people have by far the oldest cultures in the world. Clearly, those cultures would have evolved and changed with climate and environmental changes, and with the human innovations that inevitably would have been devised and disseminated. All cultures have changed enormously in the past hundred thousand years, African, Aboriginal Australian, Chinese, Indian, Native American, European, etc.

Is that what you mean ?

Joe

it's futile to try to make something out of something that is not there !
The inevitable result is disharmony & unnecessary grief !
Some people just need more than 250 years to see that.

Well. I liked God save the Queen. Firstly because I'm a Christian and it has the word "God" in it. And secondly, because I'm a royalist, as most Australians were when asked to decide on a republic.

What idiot changed all that against the majority opinion?

As far as I'm concerned the current national anthem has no credibility at all, and should be scrapped as a space saver for the return of God save the Queen.

Dan

Dear Loudmouth,

Nope.

I don't give a damn if a few over paid footballers don't want to sing the song.

However I will give a damn if these over paid malcontents are picked to play for the country they disrespect

Hi Steele,

Thanks so much for striving to reach the limits of your analytical abilities.

Cheers,

Joe

My understanding of history, is that every single grass roots reforming organisation that has ever existed, will eventually turn extremist. The reason being, is that the overwhelming majority of people simply are not politically active. Where circumstances exist where the majority of people rise up and demand action against an overbearing superior ruling caste, extremism always follows moderation. This is because the ordinary people soon tire of being politically active, while the extremists never do. What results is the gradual removal of moderates from power and the replacement of these people with extremists, who look after their collective interests and become the new oppressors.

There exists within the western world today people who think that democracy is a real impediment to the sort of idealised world they envisage for the future. Refusing to acknowledge that the western democratic, free market culture just happens to be the best form of government ever invented, they seek it's destruction by any means. They are convinced that because western culture can not solve every human problem, it is therefore fundamentally unsound.

To destroy the west, they use the natural apathy of the pleasure loving populace against themselves. They use immigration to dilute the cultural bonds which are the glue which holds any nation together. They champion illegal immigrants as a way to increase the number of welfare dependent people who will vote for them in elections. They claim that all races are equal, when quite demonstrably, they are not. They look for any excuse to set indigenous or imported minorities against the white majority. The laughable claim by well paid indigenous footballers that their race is oppressed, by one word in the national anthem, is an example of that.

It is also a repeat of the same sort of behaviour exhibited by millionaire African/American NRL footballers in the USA, who refused to stand for the US national anthem. When faced with such stupidity, ordinary, usually apathetic members of the population begin to get angry and hit back. Thus we get Trump, Brexit, and anti immigration parties gaining ground in every western country

https://www.facebook.com/senatorbriggs/videos/338652323486058/
Yuri,
He has a point but, being just as bad & even more hypocritical than those he accuses makes the whole argument pointless.

Graham,

Well put.

>>If such a small issue can create such a disproportionate response it is a sign of just how fractured our society has become under pressure from grievance merchants and left- and right-wing identitarians who want to give special privileges to particular groups. ... The cards have fallen where they are, and we must all play our best game with what we have, not try to reshuffle the deck.<<

This can be applied to many situations throughout the (Western) world, where remedies for PAST grievances (real or just as seen from a 21st century perspective) suffered by this or that minority, are being sought in “reshuffling the deck”.

Maybe that 1/3rd of players don't know the words! Me neither.

But more seriously "I AM AUSTRALIAN" beats all http://youtu.be/jD3SkTyXzcE

and should replace the Girt Song.

Pete

Lego.

I think you shot yourself in the foot.

At th beginning you describe extremists as oppotunists capitilising on apathy.
At the conclusion, you describe extremists as those same apathetic waking from slumber.

Which is it to be, extremists as the apathetic, or extremist as the oppotunists?

Dan.

Diver,

Well, LEGO does write: "When faced with such stupidity, ordinary, usually apathetic members of the population begin to get angry and hit back."

"Usually apathetic" - that was his point, that what he calls extremist behaviour makes 'usually apathetic' people react against it. It doesn't necessarily make THEM extremist, simply more actively hostile to some dumb-arse extremist activity.

How young or old a nation is depends on how people use or abuse its history: Germany and Italy were unified as single nations only in the mid-late nineteenth century. In that sense, they are very young nations, barely much older than Australia on the same criteria. But both could claim to be the inheritors and locus of the Holy Roman Empire, going back 1200 years to Charlemagne on one hand, and nearly three thousand years to the birth of Rome on the other.

But in both of those cases, ancient Romans and ancient Germans would have known what territory came under their control, and its boundaries, topography and extent. Strictly, nobody knew of the 'boundaries' of Australia until Flinders circumnavigated the place. Certainly, Aboriginal people roamed over it at great distances - they were nomadic foragers, after all - but nobody would have been able, due to traditional hostility between groups, to traverse the continent, let along travel right round it, across hundreds of rivers, and through the clan-territories of hundreds of alien groups.

Cheers,

Joe

And if a pollie has the guts to not acknowledge welcome to country or sorry day they are labelled--

Dear George,

You quoted Graham "If such a small issue can create such a disproportionate response it is a sign of just how fractured our society has become under pressure from grievance merchants and left- and right-wing identitarians who want to give special privileges to particular groups."

How true. The furore over the rather innocuous twitter post of Yasmin Abdel-Magied is a case in point. The gnashing of teeth and renting of garments was astounding.

Dear Uncle Joe,

Request: please stop with your infuriating politeness...

Lego’s text could be the example of Anatole France’s dictum that the popular success of a book almost always rests upon a misunderstanding between author and reader.

However, using German history as example (as you did), and drawing on that comparison to configure the madness we are now witnessing, in a strange struggle between what some call left and right of politics, and which I prefer to align to a war between conservatives and arch liberals, which takes into account all the useful idiots accumulated across football fields and sporting venues in the West as a small example used by GY here: a sporting mans example of Dadaism in art and applicable to 1919 onwards in Germany, as the struggle between extreme left and a soon to be extreme right, fought it out while the Greater German population partied on!

Spengler’s nailed it for the left with his strength in his ability to expound socialism agreeably. In his hands it became, not a Marxist bogey but instead a bourgeois phenomenon. That one is called credibility reinforcing; so too are high paid useful idiots being used up to project a credible view of the obvious madness of cultural engineering in our time.

God save our gracious Queen!

Dan.

To Diver Dan.

My foot is uninjured, and I think that Loudmouth did a sterling job of explaining with infuriating politeness, the simple concepts I was imparting, that you were unable to grasp. Unlike Loudmouth, politeness is not my strong point.

The terms "Left" and "Right" can sometimes be difficult to define as some people can exhibit both qualities on different issues. So too, the term "conservative" and "liberal" are relative terms like "near" and "far."

Yesterday's "conservatives" can become today's "liberals". And yesterday's liberal's" can become today's "conservatives." Take the concept of Freedom of Speech. This had for a very long time been a feature of Leftist "progressive" thought. But today, it is the Left which generally champions political censorship, and the Right which are the progressives championing free speech.

As old Bob Dylan once wailed, "And the first one now will later be last, for the times, they are, a changin'".

Modern Art is largely crap. It is so unpopular, that about the only way that "modern" artists can make a living is through government "arts" grants, which fill entire government warehouses with unsellable "art." In Sydney, the "Modern Art" museum could only attract around two visitors a day, before it was moved to Circular Quay, where even a vegan hot dog stand could attract good business.

Australia's most popular and successful artist, Ken Done, is exhibited nowhere in any art gallery in Australia.

If you want to see a modern art outrage, just watch what happens when France's President turns a bunch of left wing architects on Notre Dame cathedral to "improve" it. Stainless steel and acres of glass, that will look like a giant pimple on a pretty face.

Lego.

I think it may be too early in the morning for you.

I'm amused you feel you must stump-up as the defender of the insipid loudmouth.
He is quite capable of obsequious self defence, as boring as it usually is!
I must admit though, I prefer your own style, straight up and honest.

Your comments are actually readable; a reason I decided to energise myself with a response to your original text above, (which you ignored until our mutual mate Joe stuck his bib in).

I was impressed with your piece because it was analytical. Although I didn't necessarily agree with all your conclusions; ie.. the conclusions I “thought” you arrived at.

Taking this comment from your text:
*…Yesterday's "conservatives" can become today's "liberals". And yesterday's liberal's" can become today's "conservatives…*
Not difficult to agree with that. But if you take my view of left and right as being inappropriate to describe today's political scene, and substitute left and right with conservative V liberal, you may find as I do, less difficulty in explains away Turnbull and his treacherous lot.

That type of character becomes slippery when viewed through the lens of left and right.
But makes total sense as a liberal, especially in view of his hyper liberal homosexual son, sitting in a high rise in Singapore, and sniping away in tandem at the Liberal Party his Father once led as Prime Minister.
Turnbull, in his own eyes, is justified to feel cheated with his rejection by the Conservatives.

And I look at the length I've gone to here in explaining a critical point, and haven't addressed the basic point you made, which I want to, but will wait for your motivating influence before moving on, least I present as does poor Joe.

Dan.

It is 5AM in the morning DD, but I just happen to be a morning person who thinks best at that hour.

Loudmouth's explanation of the part of my post which you objected to was right on the money. You seem to have misunderstood that part of my post and I don't understand why you are being nasty to Loudmouth for his polite explanation?

The terms "left" and "right", and "liberal" and "conservative", are simply categorisations. Like stereotypes, they do not need to be absolutely correct, only correct enough to form a concept so that people can think. But if you examine the beliefs of "liberals" and "conservatives" today, you are struck by an anomaly.

Today's "leftist liberal" is in fact actually a "leftist conservative", fighting to defend failed institutions like multiculturalism and political censorship, which are today the status quo ante. "Liberals" are in fact right wing people fighting for nationalism and free speech, and they are today's "oppressed." Western free thinkers like Gert Weelders, Lauren Southern, or Milo Yianopoulos are either being denied entry into Australia to speak, or are subject to oppressive conditions, or suffer from outright acts of violence at their public meetings.

My aim on this site, is to make young leftist "liberals" realise that they are in fact the new conservatives supporting the renewed suppression of truth and liberty, under another flag. They are in fact the very people that they think they are nobly fighting against.

Extremists who hate democracy and who envisage a government by the public service, of the public service, and for the public service, have done a wonderful job of brainwashing young people into thinking that their own reactionary conservatism is fashionable liberalism. The trick for me is to make young leftists think. Young "liberals" today are acting exactly like every evangelical, self righteous bunch of ideologues in history. They have been totally convinced that their ideology is so unquestionably perfect that it justifies any means to promote it

.

Dear Graham,

.

You wrote :

« Why not just omit to sing the one offending word, or more assertively, insert your own adjective ? »
.

Like replacing "young" with "strong" ?

Yes, Graham, why not ? Perhaps we should all do it.

That should bring us all together, shouldn't it – better than your second choice : two separate anthems in two different languages, like the Irish and the Canadians, or multiple languages like the Stars and Stripes in the US ?

I guess we never thought of asking our Aboriginal compatriots if they had any suggestions to make before we adopted "Advance Australia Fair" as our National Anthem in 1984.

Better late than never, though, don't you think ?

Sounds like a good idea to me – now that we've had a friendly wake-up call from our old mates !

Let's not be too stodgy about it.

Don't just sit there playing cards. Let's pick up the ball and run with it !

.

Lego, we might in the future discuss those points on another thread.

Dan.