kartiya jim, there is greed and dishonesty in every level of government.

The Chief issue with past and present Government is the idea of needing to be responsible for those 'hapless natives who are too happy to sit on a hot rock all day chewing beetles or going walkabout for weeks on end.' Treating the Aborigines as such and completely managing their lives has lead to such a dependency mindset with in the Aboriginal community. Putting Indigenous people on the dole and providing housing and education and health care, etc, etc, isn't good for their collective consciousness of self no matter how much it may have been salve for the white invasion quilt trippers, and those angry Aborigines who wanted to make the white man pay. All peoples need to acquire the things they need for living and growing through their own effort. Such work feeds the mind, the heart, the soul, and the body. And allows for that man or woman to stand proud as a contributor to their society. This work, this pride of self, has been denied the Aboriginal by successive government management. One can not manage a people. Period.
It's time the Aborigines took their lives back and began to function as independent, self-actualising human beings capable of standing on their own two feet and feeding themselves. They have to own up to their own actions and behaviors and start their own healing process. And they really need honest caring leadership from with in their own communities.
The government may give the Aboriginals the tools and budgets and availability to services as they do any other community but, then must step back and adopt a hands off approach letting the aborigines learn to live and be a responsible contributor to the greater Australian community with out exception.

Frank Col,

"What does that say about how we should have acted in Australia between the beginnings and 1788, and between 1788 and now..." -FC

Who are "we"? My family, both sides, in Australia goes back well into the nineteenth century. [nothing compared to 50K years, I know]
I am sure that no member of my familial line was involved in any agressive actions against indigineous people. Does "we" include Australians of Greek, Italian or Vietamese heritage?

In eighteenth century, there were some terrible atrocities committed by British guards against white prisoners. The British in recent centuries denied education to the [Catholic?]Irish. Bad things happened, but over the generations people move on.

I see no reason why a twenty year old Japanese person should apologise to me over Japan bombing Darwin. Historical accounts need to frank and honest, though.

Anyone born in the 1950s-1970s, black or white, needs to make big adjustments in meeting the twenty-first century. We cannot live the past. It's gone. The past is the past

I thought this was an uncontentious rehash of Jared Diamonds "Guns, Germs and Steel", applied to Aboriginals. Only the title looked out of place. Typically in our society you apologise if the hostess runs into you and spills wine down her front even though it isn't your fault. So, apologising for wiping out most of a race doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, regardless of how it happened. Perhaps Brian was trying to generate a interested in what is mostly a piece about common sense.

If so, by god it worked! Sheesh! Why is saying something simple, like "the Aboriginals were doomed to their current fate regardless of who colonised the country" so not PC? The statement is almost self evident! When Australia was colonised the Aboriginals were going to be displaced - regardless of who did it. And they were going to be killed in the process - not in the least because they didn't like being displaced.

And its not like Australia wasn't going to be colonised by somebody - a woomera just doesn't cut it against guns, germs and steel. It happened to be us. Being the selfish person I am, I am glad it was.

And finally, years ago when I was a teenager, I expressed the same frustrations to my Dad as are expressed in the comments above. We whites are selfish! It we just lent a kind helping to the Aboriginals the problem would go away. And Dad, normally a such an understanding man, said: "Do you think my generation is stupid? Do you think my fathers generation were a bunch of brutes? What do you think we have been doing?" Or something like that. It was a long while ago.

Brian Holden is right. Apparently we can't stand to see the Aboriginals live by their own rules and all that implies with infant mortality rates and what not. And we can't abide fixing that by mothering them - with the pouring millions of dollars a year into a black hole that requires. So what other solutions are there, other than integration?

Oliver: Your advice, “We cannot live the past. It's gone. The past is the past”, is simplistic, and demonstrably silly. In your own postings you use the past to justify present-day circumstances which suggests you are putting a moral judgment (of sorts) on what happened in history.

You seem to have a developed interest in history, hence your offerings on “the three waves of immigrants into Australia, between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago”. And after all, in your view of history, “We are all descendents of emigrants from Africa."

You use the history of invasions to reflect on the benefits: “With invasions come the opportunity for cross-accrulturation and technology transfer. So, its not all bad.” But you also use history of invasions to predict the future: “If the Anglo-Celts left tomorrow and the West took a hands off Australia approach, the remaining people would speaking Indonesian in no time.” But are you as sanguine about that prospect – ‘the steamroller of history’ - as you are about the earlier invasion?

If you see history as inevitable and its consequences irreversible, we would obviously have to accept an Indonesian or Chinese or American invasion in the future, and just get on with it! After all, “it’s not all bad.”

Why do we have courts and tribunals (domestic and international)? Their work is always based on historical events. They assess evidence about past claimed wrongs and offer redress as appropriate. They don’t just say to victims of crime, “Stiff, that happened in the past is the past; now get on with it.” There is a morality of right and wrong in the laws they use to make judgments.

Just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean we can’t exercise our sense of right and wrong to assess whether it was right and whether those who were wronged should have some redress. History teaches us that that philosophy is a crude 'might-is-right' law of the jungle.

FrankCol,

Thank you for your interesting comment.

I was not lobbying for igoring past wrongs, against compensation or intenational law: Rather that people should live in the present.

Maybe, Arnold Toynbee, puts it better than can I, in context with a defeated population:

A typical background:

"In the Hellenic World ... in the second century BC thousands of Syrians and other highly cultivated Orientals were deprived of their freedom, uprooted from their homes, separated from their families and shipped to Sicily and Italy"... it was "impossible for them to make their homelands."

The above is one of hundreds of historical examples, wherein, because there is no way to escape the present, "there is an archaistic retreat in the past". What also can occur is the self-trascendence of futurism [There will be a messiah ... Jews, Christians]. Thus, defense mechanism prevent those involved in dealing with the "present":

The aboriginal concept we once lived in a Utopian world is archaistic and Land Rights, when culturally significant beyond some legal compensation]is futurism.

The European invasion destroyed the aboriginal domain over Australia just a surely as the Rome levelled the Second Temple [70 CE]. A done deal.

Moreover, the more an aboriginal clan feels under threat the more communalism and fanilialism are strengthened. The more communalism and familialism are strengthened, the more alien are the minority aboriginal clans become alien to a twenty-first century civilization. The process feeds on itself.

Alernatively, clan traditions "should" [in my opinon] remain respected, but need to subordinated those of the national state [most of the rest of society achieves this goals, Scots, Vietnamese, Jews], because we live in the era of nation states.

The push-pull situation should be away from communalism and the past, towards the orientation of the dominant[liberal] nation state. Let go of the buring building and fall into the net.

"It's time the Aborigines took their lives back and began to function as independent, self-actualising human beings..." - Aqvarivs

Catch is, independence and self-actuialisation are not cultural antecedents associated in collectivist societies. Economic outcomes of a pre-agrarian [and agrarian] society more tethered to malthusian limits than are post-industrial and market-based societies. Retaining pre-agrarian system, with the expectations of the wealth generation of a post-industrial society, is unrealistic, unless said post-industrial society supports welfare or compensation [guilt of their (usually Western)ancestors].

My posts are to suggest a "Dr Phil Moment" to aboriginals: Tell it as it. Aboriginals are equal humans, equal Australians and deserve compensation [but not in perpetuity]: Yes, must face the situation and adapt. Aboriginal ancestors may have been in Oz first, but their descendants too often stay immigrants to twenty-first century economic and social systems. Familialism and kinship ties buttress this steadfastness.