According to Holden, culture "has no validity after the loss of the original environment it evolved out of".

Really? Then why do I keep hearing about how Australia is a country founded on Judeo-Christian and British traditions that we must all now observe?

It would be fairly accurate to describe the experience of the people who arrived with the First Fleet (and subsequent immigrants) to be a total "loss of the original environment" from which their cultures evolved. They might as well have gone to Mars, for all that 18th, 19th and even much of 20th century Australia resembled their culture's "original environment".

Therefore, by Holden's definition, the following are "invalid" cultural activities in Australia: Christmas, New Year's Day, Easter, Queen's Birthday, cricket, drinking alcohol, orchestral music and football. If you want to do any of those things, you should go back to the "original environment" in which those cultural practices evolved.

The logical conclusion of Holden's premise is that we should all don ochre and a loincloth because, by his argument, we've all lost the original environment of our respective cultures in this land.

Unless, as I strongly suspect, Holden's original claim is nonsense...along with all the other claims he bases upon it.

The trouble with this topic (like some others) is that the real issues will get lost (as usual) in political correctness drowning out any rational debate. It will descend (as it has already started to do) into empty political correct rhetoric.
Certainly, the clash between culture of the colonizing British and that of the indigenous people resulted in the latter suffering great loss. But both cultures were valid for their own people. Both had their good points and both their bad points - neither was inherently bad.
But let us get real! It is just as valid to be critical of behaviours and attitudes of the indigenous people as it is to be critical of those of the people who settled here after 1788. And let us look at practical matters.
As to political correctness I defer to Daniel Barenboim who said, in effect, that to talk in politically correct terms allows one to take the easy way out by not having to actually do the hard work of reasoning through to one's own conclusion and to then have to defend it if criticised for it - that takes a bit of courage.
When one has to actually reason through to one's own conclusion (rather that taking the safe politically correct line) one often has to acknowledge matters with which one is uncomfortable.
The article had thinsg I agreed with and things I disagreed with. But it was honest and courageous and raised issues that should be debated. Pauline hansen was a symptom of suppression of a debate by the politicaly correct

"Political correctness is a denial of free speech" (Cath Gunn). I tend to agree.
You do not become indigenous by living among indigenous people. They may offer you the honour of becoming part of their community and calling you 'brother' or 'sister' but that is something very different from actually being aboriginal. The difference was nicely stated at a funeral I once attended for the late Hugh Bray. The initial greeting was given in the Kaurna language and his kinship with them was acknowledged but he was not considered to be an 'indigenous' person even by those who acknowledged kinship.
That's my two posts for the day so the rest of you can have a field day bashing me now. It will make a change from political correctness.

Remember, most of the babies removed had fairer skins than their mothers. There is no evidence that the mothers set out to have white babies.

It is my understanding there was not much interest in removing true black babies.

These people have been taught by their whites masters that sexual abuseand rape of young children is O.K..

We might not like to admit it but this government has gone way back to a very old method of dealing with our indigneous community. Back to the 18 and 19 century. We only need pictures of blacks joined together by neck yokes and chains.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

People whoever they are have the right to choose their own destinies. Our role shold be to ensure they have choices.

Things have changed for these people. There are many educated indigneous today.

I know my views do not fit in with this article.

Give the people the tools and control of the services to care for themselves, plan in self sufficiency and get out of the way. Give the aboriginals the responsibility of self, the opportunity to earn self, and community respect and success by their own standards. Never mind with endless apologies or needing to have sympathy for a predicament initiated by Government actions and failed inactions.
No people can feel or be at 100% when "managed" by policy.

Holden’s facade of concern doesn’t disguise the purpose of his diatribe.

1. Holden assumes all Indigenous people were nomadic tribes technologically inhibited by the Dreamtime. “Before any society can become complex it must have domestic animals and agriculture to be able to stay in the one place so that trades can then evolve.” He’s never heard e.g. of the Gunditjmara of South-western Victoria? These people lived in stone houses and developed a sophisticated system of acquaculture and eel farming. They constructed stone dams and weirs to create ponds, channels and linked wetlands in which they bred short-fin eels and other fish. They wove baskets to harvest their catch and bartered the surplus. No “driving the megafauna to extinction” there Mr Holden.

2. Holden’s rationalisation of dispossession is pure ideology. It was only ‘gradually’ seen as unjust, he says. Those who died in massacres and those who fought in the Eumeralla wars probably realised their dispossession quite swiftly. To claim “There was no invasion” is to deny the bleeding obvious, notwithstanding Holden’s mealy-mouthed euphemism: “By 1788 they already had more than their fair share of undisturbed time.” Really!

3. Holden’s Chinese ‘formula’ – get job, mortgage, pay-it-off and become a stakeholder - is disingenuous. The Chinese who came in their many tens of thousands in the nineteenth century were so harassed and excluded that the majority went back to China.

4. Holden’s appeal to racial purity is malevolent: “…the number who have identified themselves as Aborigines but who are in fact 50 per cent or less Aborigine.” 50% of what? Who ever heard a ‘white’ man referred to as ‘half-caste’? “Only a minority today look anything like those in photos taken in the 1890s.” No leg-irons and neck-chains?

5. The graphic focus on alcohol-fuelled sexual abuse of children and the bashing of women, and anarchy in the heart of Sydney, will appeal to the rednecks on OLO but it’s just an excuse to introduce Holden’s ultimate solution to his self-defined ‘Indigenous problem’: they must “leave their communities to be absorbed as individuals into the mainstream”.

So neat and final.