Stezza, Banjo ... thank you for your irreverent comments.

can either of you nominate one instance of violence against women and their children in the multi-millennia record of indigenous Australian mythology prior to European occupation?

your evidence please.

Whistler
Archaeological evidence, especially from around Lake Mungo, provides much evidence of high levels of violence against Aboriginal women over millenia, in the form of very high levels of fractures indicative of violent attack or treatment compared to those displayed on male skeletons.

Reliable journal accounts from the beginning of British settlement, especially at Port Jackson, confirm this, as does an examination of traditional family/clan behaviour and law enforcement techniques in traditionally-oriented Indigenous groups throughout Australia both at first contact and later.

Women had varying degrees of autonomous domains in many of these socities, but remained subservient to the patriarchal hierarchies, power structures and customs, and were often subject to the impacts of unmediated physical force. People lived in small bands, so where dysfunctional individuals exploited their physical strength, there was quite often very little recourse for anyone against this.

Violence, sorcery and exile were just about the only methods of sanction against anti-social, rebellious or dissenting behaviour available to the dominant individuals and groups in these Aboriginal socitieties, just as was the case throughout most of the rest of the world in pre-agrarian & pre-industrial times, because resources for more egalitarian norms, less sexist civic structures and non-violent sanctions simply weren't available on any significant level.
Dan

“It was never a cultural trait to wilfully violate the innocence of our children or brutalise our women, and it never will be.”

Stephen
I don’t think that’s true, for a number of reasons.

1. Women
Last week I was reading a book on the traditional Aborigines of the Monaro. The author, an observer in the 1840s, says it is common for a woman to have five or six wounds in the head, put there by her husband with a tomahawk.

Tim Flannery’s two books ‘The Birth of Sydney’ and Explorers’ also give excerpts of 18th and 19th century records that it was obviously common for men to discipline their wives with a nulla-nulla.

Of course it wasn’t only Aboriginal society. In the same period, the English common law produced the ‘rule of thumb’, that a man can hit his wife with a stick as thick as a man’s thumb. There can be no doubt that before that the common law sanctioned rougher than that.

2. Children
I remember reading a book of black and white photographs of outback Aboriginal life, taken in the 1920s and 1930s. One of them had the caption ‘A young bride and her friend on the way to the waterhole’. This young woman was a girl with no breasts. I don’t mean small breasts. I mean no breasts, perhaps 10 to 12.

I read an anthropology in which the author compared information on marriage in traditional societies from all over Australia. The commonest age for women to marry was around puberty. And they would be given in marriage by certain older male relations, often to men who were themselves in their forties.

At common law the age of consent was not fixed, and it recognized marriages younger than nine. The age of consent in many states of the USA was ten as late as the second half of the 19th century. Mohammed of Islam married Aisha when she was six, and consummated it when she was nine.

Of course women being considered marriageable, starting their sex life at or around puberty, and being given in marriage by their older male relatives to men who are older, is also commonly seen as a standard in many more human societies in history than the current legal standard of an age of consent starting four years after the average age at puberty.

It is a simple fact of history that these cultural traits were widespread in human societies generally.

Firstly let me say Peter Hume that the so-called 'rule of thumb' you refer to:
"the English common law produced the ‘rule of thumb’, that a man can hit his wife with a stick as thick as a man’s thumb."
is a myth.
There are ample comments on this myth online and a quick google search will provide many.
There never was such a law but certainly prior to the mid-17th century or so some level of domestic chastisement does not appear to be a concern for the courts.
However, onto the article itself, I think that the author is to be applauded for entrenching personal responsibility as the bedrock of his family. I hopethat this is sufficient to protect him and his and that his children learn this lesson well. It would also be a good start for many of the writer's people and might just start to make the appreciable gains in standard of living that we have all hoped to see for so long.
Race is a peculiar tool - it can serve as both a sword and a shield. But it is best used not to bludgeon or protect but to enhance - bring all that you have which is good, leave behind all that you have that is not, and we will all be the richer for it.

Dan Fitzpatrick, to which anthropological studies do you refer?

The breaking of bones during funeral ceremonies and the outcome of women's business in periods of marginal subsistance do not constitute 'violence against Aboriginal women over millenia'.

Which Aborigines interpret their tradition as you claim?

Or is your claim, with respect, ethnocentric European speculation?

Moreover, a glance at early European depictions of Australian fauna is sufficient to indicate there are no reliable journal accounts of Aboriginal social culture from the beginning of British settlement .

Traditional communites utilised violence mostly in male initiation ceremonies to prevent anti-social behaviour under laws agreed between women's and men's legislatures presided over by elders accompanied by dispute resolution conducted in women's and men's jurisdictions, all of which has modern equivalence.

Women's business and men's business prevents dysfunctional individuals from exploiting their physical strength and provides law making and its interpretation from which recourse is comprehensive.

Neither have 'egalitarian norms, less sexist civic structures and non-violent sanctions' prevented modern Australian women and their children from experiencing horrific levels of violence.

*

Peter Hume, with respect, tomahawks, 'excerpts of 18th and 19th century records'?

The Common Law has always sanctioned violence against women and their children as it does in Australia today, because there has never been a women's jurisdiction to disempower men who seek to control women.

Moreover, projecting misogynist European models of marriage on indigenous communities is a nonsense.

Girls were not 'given in marriage by certain older male relations', what girls did was the responsibility of senior women and still is.

'It is a simple fact of history' European ethnographies are contaminated to the extent their value lies entirely with the prejudice of the observer.