Horus (post 1 June 2006) where is the evidence to support your claims re: "many white Australian mothers also had children removed." Maybe you are right. But, there is no evidence of parallel experiences by white mothers and that of black mothers who had their children stolen from them by the authorities at the time, usually the police, at the behest of enthnocentric policy. I doubt if this is what happened to the white mothers if you are "willing to listen" and learn from the evidence.

Christopher Davis,
I know of one heroine addicted white mother who has had two children removed in the last 6 years because she also allowed her second baby to drown in the bath. It does happen even today; however we dare not remove indigenous children from drunken abusive parents because of past policies. Policies at the time we felt would help young aboriginal children learn to assimililate and be educated and live in a modern society.

In the 1960's a group of builders from Adelaide and a mate of mine from Melbourne and myself built a childrens home just north of Alice Springs, so that the children from the settlement could live with the care of house parents and nurses and still have their parents next door so as to stop these children being removed from the camp where drunkedness, violence and prostitution were rife in the settlement.

To Rancitas:Part One
Rancitas, judging by your use of trendy left-wing words like”invasion”, you are either a student, or even worse, an academic in some cloistered ivory tower, spouting your “noble savage” philosophy to the gullible and ignorant. The marvelous valuable and valued contributions of indigenous “culture” that you’ve come up with? Dreamtime stories? In our culture, we read fairy tales to children, who stop believing them when they grow up. Music? Punk rockers and rappers aren’t my idea of music. Painting? I’m afraid I’m a philistine when it comes to pop art. 200 languages for 500 tribes? I hope you cut and pasted your extensive list of native languages. I’d hate to think you typed them all in for my benefit. I couldn’t give a rat’s arse about this veritable Towel of Babel of primitive and useless languages in this modern age.

The part that I really found amusing was the following -“Linguists say that Aboriginal languages are as syntactically and grammatically rich as European languages”. You then continue on with - “Pre invasion there is estimated there was about 750,000 indigenous, Now there are around 200,000. There was 500 distinct groups using 200 distinct languages.” It’s a shame that the syntax and grammar of the present day English language is beyond your intellectual capacity, judging by the gobbledegook sentences you’ve written. Indigenous what? Mushrooms?” An adjective in search of a noun! Was the estimation done pre-invasion? I doubt it. And let’s not overlook the correct tense of verbs, or their singular and plural forms, shall we? I take it you meant to say “It is estimated that pre-invasion there were 750,000 indigenes, and now there are around 200,000. There were 500 distinct groups using 200 distinct languages.” Go and write those two sentences out 500 times, so next time you’ll remember the richness of the English language.

To Rancitas: Part 2
Rancitas, I’ve never considered hair shirts to be a fashion item, and I strongly object to others trying to make me wear one. So have your “Sorry Days", throw off your clothes, daub yourself with paint and go and wander the country side butt naked with your much beloved noble savages that you so greatly admire for their soul and spirit.

Finally, I find it the height of hypocrisy that all you bleeding hearts who preach love and tolerance act like rabid dogs when it comes to savaging anyone who disagrees with your opinions. I can imagine you frothing at the mouth as you finished off your bile-ridden diatribe about mainstream Aussies in a fury of capital letter words. Go get your crayons and finish off your colouring-in books instead of posting drivel to this forum. Better still, get a life. You’re ravings clearly indicate that you’re a bloody idiot, Rancitas, and that is all the time I will waste on you.

I am re-reading John Morton's original article in the light of a story published in today's edition (June 2, 2006) of The Sydney Morning Herald - "Watercolour offers earliest glimpse of Sydney's original people" by Steve Meacham.

As Morton noted in his opening paragraph: "Ever since Europeans first came to Australia, public views of Aborigines have veered between two extremes. Aborigines have been promoted either as disgusting savages or as admired paragons, uncivilised riff-raff or as noble bearers of their culture - bad or good, but never ordinary."

In this context, Meacham's article and particularly the comments from Keith Vincent Smith continue in this vein - in this case the original inhabitants of the Sydney region (the Eora people) are portrayed as "noble bearers of culture".

Smith, who has a masters degree in Aboriginal studies, is quoted as saying that: "We know about the Aztecs, the Incas and the Phoenicians, but the Eora have never been given their due," Mr Smith says. "In fact, they had a highly developed culture."

However no evidence is given in the article of what constitutes the achievements of the 'highly developed' Eora culture, aside from the fact that they used a four-pronged fishing spear; that they built canoes from a single strip of paperbark, which were "easily repaired"; and that those who fished from the canoes had "mud-daubed hairstyles".

I have to ask myself, are these achievements extraordinary or merely very ordinary?

Comparing Eora culture to that of the Aztecs, the Incas or the Phoenicians is plainly ludicrous as well. When the Spanish Conquistadores arrived in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, in 1519, they were clearly very impressed by the beauty, order and cleanliness of this indigenous city which was one of the largest metropolises in the world at the time. Today, despite the depredations of the Spanish Conquest, some of the buildings of ancient Tenochtitlan still survive, while Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology contains room after room of pre-conquest artefacts which easily outstrip anything that is on display from either Aboriginal or European culture in our own National Museum.

To Leigh,

Leigh, I couldn’t agree with you more. The basic problem is we don’t have a democracy, but a memocracy, which can be defined as “governance by the morally enlightened minority”.
These unelected left-wing “guardians” of the state comprising of lawyers and judges, civil libertarians, media editors and columnists, academics and teachers, the latte-sipping doctors’ wives social set, together with their willing puppets the politicians, have practiced their social engineering unhindered in this country. The abolishment of capital punishment, multiculturalism, reconciliation, native title and asylum seekers, just to mention a few of their disruptive accomplishments, were simply foisted on the public. And when these grandiose experiments invariably fail at great cost and misery to the general community, do they say ”Sorry”? Of course not! They simply move on to the latest trendy “issue du jour”, such as anti-war protests or gay marriage.

In the halcyon days of Bob Menzies, we could afford to be apathetic about politics. Regrettably, as we watch the dismantling of the Lucky Country, that is no longer the case.