Well, he has been referred to the Federal Police, so he could very well face prosecution, as of course he should if there is a case against him.

Les Louis,
Well said !

The past is a foreign country. Every nation advanced or still relatively primitive came from some stone-age culture that used fire to assist hunting.

This doesn't work on ground overgrown with feral weeds that burn hotter than ground soaked in kero! Or where average wind speeds have increased markedly.

There is plenty of evidence-based research that confirms for the non-brainwashed, that this is just more of the humbug of folk wanting to reoccupy country and practise their traditions without interference including the taking of child brides by tribal elders whose word is law!

Cool burns never ever leave the country better for the burn!

Yes, this may clear some of the fuel load but that same fuel load is better reduced by intensive cell grazed animal that doesn't bake the soil and send tons of new CO2 into an atmosphere already overloaded with record CO2 way up in uncharted territory.

Some hare-brained decision-makers are taking notice of humbug!

Mosaic burning may reduce the fuel load. But it also destroys all the non-fire-tolerant species not able to outrun the flames, i.e., most rainforest tree species and many crawling insects.

We've burnt enough of the land already, changed it for the worse with millennia of this practice which progressively removes scarce irreplaceable soil nutrients and trace elements which go up in smoke and out to sea, to never ever return.

And the soil bakes and hardens with millennia of repeated annual burning to the point of becoming impervious to the rain which then runs off as flash floods and massive erosion instead.

Whereas, intensive cell grazing available around the year! does the opposite breaks open the soil to allow the rain to penetrate and deposits nutrient that can then adds carbon to the soil!

If Aborigines had any skill as alleged farmers they would know this from hard-won practice and the power of observation!

There is not a white way or a black way, just a right way. and there is always a better way
Alan B.

well it will soon be 26 January. Lets just thank God and celebrate we live in a great country.

All Pascoe has to do is find just one Aboriginal person who says that they are related. So far, zero.

Anybody who has knocked around with Aboriginal people knows that you can establish links, no matter how tenuous, with pretty much any Aboriginal person, even a whitefella like me. All it takes is a minute or so:

"Where you from ?"

"Up around X."

"Yeah, my wife's uncle lived up there for years, had a couple of kids - he lived with So-and-so."

"Yeah, that's my wife's aunty, Z, I think I remember him, a So-and-so, nice bloke."

"What, she's a sister to So-and-so ?"

"No, a cousin of hers, I heard her husband shot through and worked on the railways in the south, I heard he lived down near Y."

"Yeah, my brother-in-law has lived down that way for twenty years now."

And so on. Sort of mosaic genealogy.

Yonks ago, I proposed in a local mag, after the Mabo Decision, that groups should move quick to put together genealogies (they were quite big down this way in those days), to identify who could legitimately be involved in land claims. Nobody took any notice.

And nobody does yet. Christ, how long does it take for the simplest and most obvious idea to get off the ground ? Now it's a generation later, and knowledge of ancestors is getting more stretched.

By the way, for any Indigenous person really interested in their genealogy, get in touch with the SA Museum (check it out on Google) and ask to speak to Ali Highfold, and to have access to the Tindale Collection. Mountains of family information from all over Australia, just lying there going mouldy.

Hey, maybe Pascoe could try that :)

Joe

Perhaps now we shall see the dark emu enlightened?