Dear Redneck and Doc Halliday,

Man is a worm.
Job XXV,6

I can't believe that you don't know your country's history. You remind me of the "Quadrant" denialists.

Quadrant is a far-right magazine deployed in a manner not dissimilar to the way David Irving used his history texts to promote Holocaust denial. They reject the 'black armband view of history,' an expression coined by the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey, who now appears to have disowned it.

'Black armband' historians, say the denialists, denigrate the heroic story of white Australia by the manufacture and exaggeration of evidence of Aboriginal suffering and resistance. Genocide simply did not happen, they say.

Australia is a country littered with war memorials to its Anzac soldiers who died in foreign wars. There was, until recently, not a single monument to those who fought and fell in defence of their country, Australia, during its white settlement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The late Kevin Gilbert, the great Aboriginal
poet and playwright, once stood in the main street of a New South Wales country town, facing the cenotaph, and read aloud his poem
"Memorials."

Our history is carved
in the heart of the country
our milestone memorials
named Slaughterhouse Creek
the Coniston Massacre, Death
Gully and Durranurrijah
the place on the clifftops called
Massacre Leap
where the mouth of the valley
filled up with
our murdered dead bodies
the place where our blood flowed
the river ran red
all the way to the sea...

As the Aboriginal leader, Rob Riley said, "But it's simple...
Unless you give us back our nationhood, you can never claim your own."

oooops sorry - my apologies for the typo - it should be:

Dear Redneck and Doc Holliday...

Get a life Foxy - and, preferably, one in the current time frame.

If you continue to command the tides of history to "go back", you will go down in future history as a Canute syncophant.

Foxy: "As the Aboriginal leader, Rob Riley said, 'But it's simple...
Unless you give us back our nationhood, you can never claim your own.'"

Nice one, Foxy - I wasn't familiar with that point. Of course he's correct. It'd be an interesting exercise to poll those who deny Australia's past and continuing injustices towards Aboriginal people and see how many of them are opposed to Australia becoming its own nation, independent of colonial ties to Britain.

I'd put money on there being a significant correlation!

We tried giving back the country via ATSIC. The only problem was the real aboriginal people screamed for the whites to rescue them!

Thethinker,

Yes, we are proud. It has not been easy, especially when you consider we are not indigenous Australians ourselves. There are still issues, as there are with any family living in any society today. But with love, understanding and mutual respect, we know things (at least for our family) will work out ok.

We have 2 other daughters and a son (who are not indigenous) – one of which has graduated in both environmental science and anthropology. However, she also wants to do post-grad work in indigenous issues (she too thinks Oz is at the cross-roads).

You are right of course, assumptions and comments are made that are clearly inappropriate and wrong. We see it here in this thread and as we can observe, it is ugly. But what are we to do?

In our family discussions, we have found that in most cases (regarding indigenous or cultural issues) other people say the things they say because they are hurting deep within themselves. Other times … it is because of their ignorance and/or lack of knowing what is just.

This is why it is important, your message – people “need to talk to those who do have a past in the Indigenous context.” A bit of research does not go astray either. Problem is, most people don’t and the ones that scream the loudest are the ones that need the most understanding – this is tough.

I think a major problem our society has today is that a lot of people have lost respect – for all sorts of things; parents, fellow people, our environment, themselves, add to the list as you see fit.

All the best in your studies, you and yours are so important to our future – as all the generations are.