I prefer the more direct 'evasive' to describe Burney, but I'm not a gentleman like Graham. Burney is dodgy: she will not answer questions, and she will not debate Jacinta Price because she knows she would get done like a dinner. She and her quavering voice give me the pip. And she need not think that her lie about aborigines being dealt with as 'flora and fauna' will be forgotten.

To be blunt, the inhabitants of Australia at the time of British settlement were too primitive to deal with in the way some people now think they should have been. They didn't have a written language; they fought each other with bits of wood; they ate each other.

Graham ably sets out the more polite and less unpleasant reasons by Burney is wrong, and will always be wrong, obstinate and ignorant person that she is.

There are some other aspects of the debate which middle Australia discusses in private but which don't make it into mainstream media. One is the observation that the most vocal proponents of the Voice are of largely Caucasian descent but choose to identify as aboriginal. They are using the invader's widely used language and writing, something which didn't exist prior to settlement. If the Voice gets up I suspect it will be these mixed race urban people who make all the noise, not those from remote areas.

From what I understand Tasmanian aborigines were here before the dominant mainland type. Any that didn't make it across Bass Strait were wiped out so perhaps the two groups should have a peace treaty to start things rolling. Another oddity is the fact the SA and Vic mini Voices provide for Torres Strait islander recognition, yet TS is thousands of kilometres from those states. Perhaps it's the vibe that matters not the technicalities.

Well, that puts it in a nutshell.

Seems to me, the ace in the Yes campaign, is almost entirely built on emotional response, and vague on historical realities.

The Aborigines the oldest living culture? The ancestors of all of us were around 200,000 years ago. All living cultures have been continuous since that time. All living cultures are equally old.

It's time for recognition and reconciliation. We do stand alone as the only colonial country yet to do so.

Why? Because too many of us are out and out racists without a decent bone in our body.

Time these mongrels were pulled into line and obliged to end their racist activities that shame us all!

Christians and Christianity do not discriminate. Suffer little children to come unto me, never came with a colour code!

And as those children mature into adults nothing real changes except certain natural born, R soles attitudes.
Alan B.

As david f says. We are all supposed to have come 'out of Africa'.

Modern aboriginal identifiers keep parroting the propaganda about their ancestors. All I can say is: they wasted 650,000 years while other cultures were creating proper civilisations. Australian Aborigines were never a civilisation by any meaning of the word.