Cornflower,

I suspect you're right. A lot of the motivation is to get compo of some kind.

The interesting thing is that ever since Howard's commitment to intervening in Aboriginal communities, the bleatings of the Left are drying up because Howard has supplanted the "Sorry" campaign with his own version of symbolic atonement. How ironic.

It should be plain that the author is not a racist. He is just one more citizen who recognises that, after the expenditure of tens of billions of dollars since 1967 and getting in return what appears to be the greatest social failure in the western world, is now saying that enough is enough.

The author claimed that the white colonists and bureaucrats dealing with the blacks should not be blamed for the sad outcome on the grounds that we nearly all have limited visions. He may have been aware that in the crisis we now have, black activists continuing to point fingers at the white establishment would be most unproductive.

Who are these people who posted all those hostile comments? They are the very small minority of white zealots who occupy the high moral ground. If the white occupation is not fundamentally guilty, then there is no high moral ground for this noble minority of whites to occupy.

There are inevitable holes in every argument arriving at a very broad conclusion and limited to 1500 words to do it in. All authors know this. The majority of visitors to OLO get what they can out of an article and leave without comment. It is this silent majority that authors aim at

I am sure that the science in the Quantum program is outdated and whatever the theory of the day is, it won't be long before it also is debunked.

I am not arguing for any hypothesis of the history of Australia, I am arguing that all the hypotheses are fabrications, intelligent guesses at best. These fabrications are used to justify attitudes towards Aboriginal people or to interpret Aboriginal current events, as the Holden article does. It must be understood that this has nothing to do with science or history but is just a deliberate gathering up of malicious opinion in an attempt to build an ideological platform that conforms to psychological prejudices.

Interestingly enough nobody seems to think that the Aboriginal folk stories that go back beyond several ice ages have any relevence to this discussion.

The out of Africa theory is crumbling as dating technology finds older and older humans around the world, including the little person in Indonesia dug up recently. The truth is that the out of Africa theory has no more to substantiate it than Holden's assertions. What if humans appeared during the Gondwanalaland era, what would that do to the out of Africa theory?

The real tricky question is how did humans come to be? Again an unknowable wonder. Of the Aboriginal creation stories that I have heard there seems to be two sorts, one that people grew out of the earth, the other that humans arrived from out of space. Given that everything on the planet came from out of space at some stage, these stories have some merit in scientific terms.

I don't agree that Aborigines migrated from the north, the genetic difference between Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders as well as New Guineans and Pacific Islanders suggests that the people here are not related to them. This is why the Sahul land bridge is fascinating in geographical terms but of little help to explain the genetic difference of the so called "Australoids" (which are also in Sri Lanka (not India) which brings up all sorts of Gondwanaland questions.

King Canute,

Genetic studies should provide stable answers in the next 5-10 years. Not only for/about indigineous Australians, but for/about all humankind. The National Geographic Study you lampoon is important science.

Malevolent psychological prejucies are a bad thing, stop. Both sides [for want of a better word] too often habour these thoughts. Neither remnants of British overlordship, nor the exclusiveness of Aboriginal kinship systems help. Both must face globalisation and cannot be insular.

Folk stories: Cultural anthropologists "would" place significant weight on folk stories: But like the Roman Mystery Cults can be categorised. I suspect most aboriginal peoples were/are more in touch with creation accounts and other ideologies than are those in the Western thread of history.

As animists, Australian aboriginals are perhaps more aligned to the Japanese or first North American clans. The art of latter is remarkably similar to that of earlier Australians. Also, I can't see that animists can "own" Land, as this means they own the spirits. Guardianship over? In the Western thread of history, 6,000 BP, in Sumer, Land, owned by God, was administered by the then priesthood. God owned the Land. This early Western history is one stage removed from animism... "Estate" in land was thousands of years away. The Crown or State has powers over so-called absolute ownership

Oliver says "Johnj refers to another crossing 8,000 BP". I'm sorry Oliver, but that is not what I said at all. I said "the evidence points to a single migration, with a minor admixture of later arrivals, most likely more than 8,000 years ago." The paper I quoted suggested an original migration ca. 50,000 years ago.

I am proud of my Irish heritage, but 9,000 years ago Ireland was covered covered in ice and uninhabitable. Try telling the Irish that they're migrants because they've "only" been there for 8,000 years.

To Oliver and other OLO posters, .... that find our Indigenous History and attachment with Land too hard to comprehend ,

If you have a chance to absorb and respectfully reflect on Ted Strehlow's wonderfull "Aranda Traditions", you will find in his real world Aboriginal people in there that literally are the Land ,in that they are they are the "direct" human descendants of the Creators -that were and are sometimes Animal ,sometimes Human forms of certain geographic features or waterholes, soaks and types of vegetation etc that make up Australia as we know it and of which they can speak for.

For the Aboriginal World ,and ours today , if we want to see it in a different and more enlightened light and in it's most complex , there was and is today in many areas Elders that have an oral Tradition that explains the World of Australia.

We should not let Howard and his manipulating Land hungry henchmen take from Aboriginal People what is theirs, be it their Spoken Tradition or the Dust of their Ancestors .