Ozzie asks:

"I wonder what life would be like for aboringines if whites had not arrived here over 200 years ago."

That's an easy one to answer. Look at the fate of the natives of West Papua at the hands of Javanese settlers.

Had Europeans not arrived here first the Javanese would have colonised Australia. Having no border protection capability the Aborigines would have been powerless to resist.

The fate of the vanquished is never a happy one. Australians would do well to remember that.

It's the white aborigines that are doing university, the ones that their parents were stolen. If it weren't for steeling those kids, there would be a bigger problem now.
White Aborigines are only aborigines, when it suites them.
As far as the black aborigines go they are a lost cause. Their way of life does not allow them to integrate.
The only thing i can suggest is to let them roam free in the outback as they were meant to. One tribe will not mix with another tribe, They can not understand each others lingo, they are nomadic.

An excellent well thought out article pilger ,
Well done more of it please

Desmond,

Why on earth do you think that all that many ofthe 25,000 Indigenous university graduates were part of the 'stolen generation' ? I worked for years in Indigenous student support programs at unis and worked with only a tiny handful of students who had been 'stolen'. The vast majoirty of students had never been take naway or put into care or whatever. Please get that stereotype out of your head.

I don't understand what you mean - white Aborigines. Can you also get it into your head that Indigenous people can come to uni and succeed - as Indigenous, before and after ?

And what's this 'let them' ? billshut ? Pig-ignorance reigns supreme !

To get back to this article: Pilger seems to be content with the usual symbolic stuff. I hope that I will never, never spend a second of my time on symbolic gestures, but I have spent most of my life trying to do something useful, 'practical' if you like, and I hope I will never stop. My wife was Indigenous, our kids are Indigenous, we made the first Flags in the early seventies, and as far as we were concerned, they were not just symbolic but had a very practical intent of pulling people together as one people. Practical, not just symbolic.

Once the gaps are closed, then we can talk about symbolic reconciliation - and even then, it will be up to Indigenous people to make the 'symbolic' gestures, not some ponce writing comfortably from the UK.

Joe Lan

Ozzie makes the most sense.
If the Aborigines had been left alone to hunt and gather in isolation the bleaters would now be calling for government assistance during lean times, health intervention for child birth, complaining that their life expectancy was even shorter and calling for internet access for their young, etc, etc.
Of all the possible scenarios, the original inhabitants got lucky with the Brits.
Even now, they have welfare for life if they choose, free tertiary education if they choose, decent housing if they could only look after it, etc, etc.
Why is it always blame whitey when their kids go off the rails?
There are plenty of people who do it tough and don't go delinquent.
It's called responsibility.
I met a member of the "stolen generation" who never felt the need to find her roots until her adoptive mother died.
She eventually found her biological mother who claimed that she'd been stolen from her.
She spent a long time scouring the historical record before determining that she had not been stolen and she was mighty glad for the chance that she'd got.
Obviously not everyone's story is the same but it is telling that the courts have not found in favour of any stolen claims.
Pilger tells a good story and I suppose you have to spin a few good ones to keep the grants rolling in.
But imagine if all those employed in the grievance industries were put to productive work.
Now there's a worthwhile goal.

I wonder what life would be like for aboringines if whites had not arrived here over 200 years ago.
Ozzie,
I imagine it would be almost the same as all the other pockets of isolated societies of Europe in the past. Inevitable inbreeding (sorry I'm not aware of a politically correct version of this word) followed by the conflicts of which we have saturation accounts as recently as ten years ago.
I believe migration/occupation/mixing it is nature's way of keeping the human race from regressing from a physiological aspect. So far as the psychological aspect is concerned nature's still in the early stage of evolution.
Yes, all you feigning racism bleaters you'll still have a few more generations to endulge before we all look the same.