"but it wasn't Aboriginals massacring Aboriginals"

Finke River Massacre? http://tghstrehlow.wordpress.com/1922/10/11/wednesday-the-eleventh-day-of-october-1922/

Many moons ago I was involved in a project on oral history. In the late 1970s a group gathered the oral recollections of 20 or so Gallipoli veterans about the events in 1917. These recollections were then given to three people versed in writing history but not particularly knowledgeable about WW1. They were asked to write the history of the Gallipoli campaign based solely on the oral records of the veterans.

Needless to say, the final report bore little resemblance to what actually happened.

Oral history (its not really history... but whatever!) gave us, the Iliad and Odyssey, it gave us the first five books of the Bible which so many here would rapidly deride. I read of a tribe in Arnhem who 'know' that Cook visited them.

But if all you've got is fables....

A bit more unwanted history, including ahem....oral history:

"When a child looks well, is “well-fed,” or “fat,” it may happen that one of the men, or even the whole community, murders it for cannibalistic purposes in the absence of its mother … We do not think that such cannibalism was common, though there are many references to it … It was only in periods of drought and famine that child-eating assumed large proportions … In hard summers the new-born children seem to be all eaten in the Kaura tribe. [Explorer Alfred William] Howitt inferred this from the remarkable gaps that appeared in the ages of the children … [I]n the Birria tribe during the years 1876-77, in the drought, not only were all the infants devoured, but even the younger grown children. However, in some tribes this practice appeared, even in a normal period, not to be so very rare. At least, if the gossip that circulated among the tribes were to be believed, cannibalism was even more extensive than we suppose. For instance, one tribe relates of another that it marks at birth those infants which are to be eaten later on; again the children of some women were always killed and eaten as soon as they got fat enough. According to [doctor and squatter Richard] Machattie, a tribe numbering 250 when the Europeans came, during the next six years ate seven children, i.e., about 3% of the whole population."

Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics by Ludwik Krzywicki

"So again, do you think aboriginal society was unchanged over the millennia..."

mhaze,

As described by the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow, as "The Running Waters (Fink River) Massacre" which according to Strehlow took place in Central Australia in 1875. The reports were of 80 to 100 Arrernte people murdered by a party of 50 to 60 Matuntara men. Although there is some dispute as to the accuracy of Strehlow account, we can take it that a disturbing incident resulting in a number of deaths did take place at Running Waters between two groups of Aboriginals in 1875.

So what is your point, does the above prove that for 60,000 years Aboriginals were massively slaughtering each other, well no it doesn't. Did Aboriginals murder each other, I would say like the British did to their brethen, Aboriginals most certainly did to theirs, but maybe not to the same degree, like you and Blainey, none of us know.

Oral histories can correct, confirm, and add to
historical records. Without them incorrect written
records can go unchallenged and have done so, and still
do, in our nation's history.

Some historians make the mistake of not consulting an
original collection of oral records assuming the details
in the written records are correct since oral histories aren't
"trusted" by these historians in the same way print sources
are.

That is wrong. There may be dubious reasons behind the
print sources. Oral histories help to recapture lived
experiences that are not written down in traditional sources.

C.S. Lewis once noted that "a single second of lived
time contains more than can be recorded" and therefore we'll
continue to know next to nothing about history if we rely
only on written records.

While we can rely on the existence of memos, letter, and
physical documents to learn about the events of the past,
oral histories can show us things about people we study that
archival records alone never could.

Historians NEED oral history. Whenever possible we need to
seek out people or the experiences of those people - who
lived through the times we study and share their memories with us.
Doing so helps us get a more real picture of the times.

I think it was Winston C. who said "The truth is so precious that she must be protected by a bodyguard of lies." I have studied Folklore at a tertiary level and have written a tad. I also have a collection of some 500 short stories, yarns if you like, where the truth was not a constant as it oft times gets in the way of a good story. I lived and worked in the NT in the 60s, covered most of it. Some time in TPNG and travelled, as part of my work, in to some rather odd places and and have listened to many a story along the way. I developed the habit of scribbling a note in my diary as a reminder of a story I heard that evening or whenever. Getting a story up from a one line entry requires a bit of tampering with the actual but I suggest it would be more accurate, a wee bit, more accurate anyway, than one committed to memory only. SD

Dear Shaggy Dog,

I have catalogued a large Indigenous oral history
collection at the State Library of Victoria where
I worked. There are many other sources available
today for people to access and get to truth-telling.
One simply needs the will-power to want to do the
research.

What concerns me is that Australia now risks a
Brexit-style social and political polarisation, and
setting back progress on reconciliation, and
overcoming Indigenous disadvantage. Voting no would
be a disaster. What a shame that the Coalition can't
see that.