aqvariv

Thank you for common sense. I am one of the invaders - arrive in Oz from England in 1952. But who am I? A Celt, an Anglo-Saxon, a Norseman, a Norman? There seems to be no profit in tracing back "legitimacy" of ownership. How can we as humans level the playing field of opportunity? That is the question.

Things don’t change for the Aboriginal children because whilst adults are arguing, nothing ever gets done.

The real question that has to be asked is how things got this bad? Surely the Aboriginal people have spoken out in numbers, surely good white people have tried to help and protect them. Why are issues not being resolved and matters addressed then?

These situations/problems arise because our system is designed only to come into action when there is a crisis/disaster/death. If our Government has intervened then things must be really bad!

At the same time that they fix up law and order they need to fix up the Education system for our children and in particular to cater for different children's different needs. Aboriginal children have unique needs and they have been provided with disadvantaged schools in disadvantaged areas. How are they ever going to succeed? How can that possibly be fair? How long would you be able to keep your head up if you couldn’t see a light in the tunnel at the other end?

Education - Keeping them Honest
http://jolandachallita.typepad.com/education/
Our children deserver better

A good article, by an author with the courage to put his name to a piece largely lacking political correctness. Pretty well every ethnic group in the world at some time in its history has survived the generally brutal ingress of conquerors - by intergration, and by absorbing new superior cultures and customs. The Australian aborigines have no special claim to the continent of Australia simply by virtue of being here first. Even as I write, the present Australian way of life is being permanently changed by contact with stronger foreign ethnic groups - eg Chinese - and, like the Aborigines, we too will have to integrate and adjust accordingly as we did with the post WW2 europeans. Both Victorian England, (along with the British Empire of my youth) and frontier America have gone -changed beyond recognition. The Australin aborigines will find no solution in alcohol, wife bashing, or sexually abusing their children. If there is a solution at all, which I very much doubt, that solution will have to include intermarriage, education, and finally social integration. There is no viable alternative. Nothing has yet, or ever will be, solved by on-going attempts to create an aboriginal society within the general australian society. If they are to survive at all, Aboriginals must realise that their pre-european history is just that - history.

I am not at all surprised by the opinions expressed in the article and some of the comments. It accurately expresses an emotive hostility towards Aboriginal people that is very common. What I am surprised about is that the editors of this forum allowed it to go up, not because of its contraversial opinion but because of its total lack of academic or journalistic integrity. Every point made is a prejudiced adherence to one particular point of view in some hypothetical academic debates with no evidence at all one way or another connected to scientific anthropology or Aboriginal culture.

The word limit prevents a serious rebuttal, but in very broad terms, please consider.

pre-1788 Aboriginal society, whatever it was, existed for a long time in a sustainable way with plenty of non-work time for artistic and cultural pursuits.

Modern, "civilised" Australian society is a new phenomenon, as is industrialised society around the globe. This new society has systematicalyy polluted our air, water and soil and now we are cooking ourselves with greenhouse gasses. Everybody is working very hard and rarely gets time for anything except resting from work, and suffering cancers, heart diseases and mental health disorders. Sperm counts in the industrialised nations are plumetting.

Our civilisation is a dysfunctional devolution that of itself is the single greatest threat to our own survival as a species.

If we do not radically change the nature of our "civilisation" then we are all stuffed.

And secondly, in 1788, British society was largely illiterate, was just discovering a vaccination for smallpox, used leaches in medical practice and the city of London was a filthy stinking den of all kinds of infection because of lack of education and infrastructure about sanitation. Australian Aborigines were healthy and free. Joseph Banks comments on their health and athleticism in his journal of the endeavour voyage. Yet Banks, and the author of this article still persist in notions of cultural superiority.

King Canute you forget the very high mortality rate among indigenous people in 1788, especially the infant mortality rate.
The conditions in the UK were certainly less than idyllic for the masses but were the conditions idyllic for any indigenous person? Was their wandering lifestyle really to be envied?
It can be viewed romantically, just as the UK situation can be viewed with horror. The reality is probably somewhere in between for both groups. We should however not use some romantic view of the past to suggest that indigenous people were 'better off' - the reality is that they had problems, plenty of problems in fact. The notion that they somehow had something good which should have been preserved and that all would have been well without the 'invasion' is nonsense.

Seems to me that King Canute is aptly named. You are pushing against the tide mate and it is not going to stop for you or anyone else. There have been some very pragmatic comments made on this theme and they need to be taken notice of. It is no good waiting for the white master to come up with solutions to your problems. You have waited in vain for forty years for this to happen. It is up to the tribal elders to grasp the nettle and take whatever is good that the white man has to offer, cast aside those things have been your own undoing and get on with it.

I will be standing on the sidelines barracking for you, but there is really nothing more that I can do but give you encouragement.