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Reconciliation: a worthy and achievable cause or a political idea before its time? : Comments
By Brendan O'Reilly, published 10/6/2022Official policy suggests that reconciliation between Indigenous and other Australians needs to live in the hearts, minds and actions of all, for the nation to move forward.
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I for one own my own behavior not that of generations past. And given neither I or my forbears did any harm to any aborigine, but rather the opposite.
We fed them from time to time and then taught them to shear, so they could earn money like other Australians. They gave my white forbears bush medicine and bush tucker. We lived alongside a local northern rivers tribe.
Yes, there was conflict and some very bad people and the new settlers brought small pox, typhoid and other diseases the natives had no immunity from. Including STD's.
That was not all whites, but those with power like the redcoats and some squatters. Early settlers were dragged here in chains! Like Alexander Piece a maternal forebear who went native for many years after escaping from that hell hole, Sara Island. For the crime of stealing several pairs of shoes for a shoeless family in the dead of an Irish winter. That he was penniless didn't count nor that he had his small farm annexed by the crown for not tithing to a church he was not a member of!
Others for the crime of stealing bread when they were starving. None I'm sure wanted to be ripped from their homelands and transported to these foreign shores, half dead, then if they survived subjected to years of unpaid slave labour.
My paternal forbears came much later as free settlers and father and son Doctors, who settled in Adelaide. Their offspring making it to the northern rivers and bought and paid for farms. Where by all accounts, lived in relative peace with the local tribe.
Alan B.