HoHum,

"The pre-contact culture of the aborigines may or may not have been brutal or completely awful"

Actually, I said neither. What I was did say was that it was not the unadulterated Rousseau-esque paradise too many white apologists try and make it out to be.

"If life was so superior in Europe".

Again, I did not say it was. In fact I said explicitly that they were probably about equal in simple terms of life expectancy; however, it is also insulting to pretend that Enlightenment Europe was solely a squalid sinkhole.

"Imperialism and colonialism. "

Why is it that anglo-european apologists seem to think that empire and conquest was purely an invention of wicked whites, foisted upon previously carefree brown people? Many of the cultures conquered by European Imperialist powers had been going about exactly the same business, to the best of their abilities. In many cases, the Europeans were not subjugating previously free peoples, but merely displacing a previous empire, for instance, the Mughals in India. In cases such as the Aztecs, for all their faults the Spaniards were veritable saints when compared to the murderously religious savagery of the Aztecs.

Or consider the genocide perpetrated on the peaceful Moriori by the Maori.

Clearly, Imperialism is not merely the White Man's Burden.

Oh, and some other folk need to lighten up, too. Just because I was defending Anglo-Australian culture, doesn't mean that I'm trashing Aboriginal Australian culture.

The aborigional culture have been here before white man , look at the stolen generation , also the forgotten australians and child migrants , these are victims who were abused ,raped , tortured ,made slaves , for the goverment of australia , and the goverment of australia can get away with what was done to these victims , so where is the justice for us victims who had these terrible atrosities done to us when we were children in these states and territories of australias, run ophanages , girls homes, boys homes, state ward homes , state church run homes, foster homes , out of home care , and many more institutions in australia , the stolen generation got an apology from mr rudd but he will not acknowledge the forgotten australians or the child migrants who were abused the same way as the stolen generation , so how diffrent are we to those who mr rudd apoligized to , as we are still fighting for our apology of which there are still aboriginals who are the forgotten australians so why are we diffrent to the stolen generation , look at the media report on s.b.s 25th june this year you will see aboriginies who are the forgotten australians ,

Pmac

So you're a “white non-religious Australian woman” unhappy at the “total lack of any significant or meaningful cultural activities for 'white' Australians".

Has it occurred to you that we 'white Australians' are heirs to what WAS a very rich culture coming out of our various European origins - but we’ve actively DE-cultured ourselves?

We’ve turned our backs on

1. religion - the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization and cultural practice, including its teachings about morality derived from a source outside of just ourselves, and

2. the extended family, and community generally - as we've let ourselves be sucked into a one-dimensional, economic, view of the human person, and have pursued many manifestations of atomistic individualism.

When you talk about Asian and other cultures which you see as "rich", ask yourself what makes them so. Is it not sense of community, of personal obligations at least as much as personal rights?

John Carroll (Sociology, La Trobe University) in his excellent book "The Wreck of Western Culture: Humanism revisited" (Scribe, Melbourne 2004) writes cogently of this:

"Humanism on its own is not a culture, and the attempts to make of it more than it was, opened the way for demonic forces that only real cultures can check. .... In the nineteenth century, chaos manifested in … nihilism. The last places to stand, the rocks of Christian salvation and aristocratic honour, had splintered, leaving nothing under the feet. … The new reality was Nietzsche’s ‘death of God’ and [the view of] Dostoyevsky’s [characters Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov, that] ‘everything is permitted’.

"[After about 1900] there are three quite distinct phases to the humanist going under: … active demolition of the old cultures, the period of the mockers; recognition of nihilism, producing resistance, a fight-back; then acceptance of nihilism."

A reviewer of Carroll's book points out shrewdly that "humanism, or humanistic rationalism, has robbed Western culture of the deep insights about humanity provided by faith. ... How can a culture survive when its guts have been torn out?"