"Blainey's brand of conservative populism looks dated,
a record of partial truths and unexamined assumptions.
To update his story of the Australian people he didn't
return to the archives, or the last two generations of
history books and ask himself a fundamentally new question:
"Who are the Australian people?" He remains locked in an
"us" and "them" mentality."

"Blainey might have found a tad more room for "them" in his
narrative, but the "us" remains steadfastly - white, male,
middle-class, and Protestant. A bit like the old dog himself."

And sadly like the old guys on this forum.

There's more at the following:

http://smh.com.au/entertainment/books/story-of-australias-people-review-geoffrey-blaineys-conservative-populism-20161229-gtjc1r.html

Dear mhaze,

My goodness, I really have to take this slowly for you.

No I never conceded that you didn't represent him. You did over blow it. Blainey may have been able to worm his way out of it by saying the time frame was over any of the last 3 centuries. You however restricted it to WW1 thus have absolutely nowhere to go.

You claim: “For a start, we have good evidence that infant mortality ... was in the range of 40% to 60%.”. No we don't.

At the same time Engel was writing: “The great mortality among children of the working-class, and especially among those of the factory operatives, is proof enough of the unwholesome conditions under which they pass their first year.” William Scott at Port Stevens was admiring the fact that aboriginal children “were not weaned until six or seven years of age.” and remark “a people that could treat their children and pets in this fashion could have little guile or evil in their hearts.”

But this takes the cake from you: “Even if every person who got to age 5 lived into their 70's, life expectancy wouldn't have exceeded 35.” In the very book you are quoting Blainey clearly states: “It would be difficult to estimate what proportion of children in each society could expect to live to the age of forty: probably a new-born baby had a higher prospect of living to the age of forty in eastern Europe rather than in Australia, but after the child had reached the age of two the expectations of life probably favoured the Australian.”

Your “It was a highly misogynistic, militaristic and genocidal society.” applies to the colonialists in spades. In Victoria aboriginal numbers were reduced to under 200 within a number of decades. The massacres of women and children were brutal and commonplace.

Blainey followed the tropes of the times with an eye on book sales no doubt. That you seem to slavishly follow his every word but given what we know today is down to you but it can't becoming from a pleasant place.

mhaze,

"Were Paul to read Blainey" sometime back I read his "The Tyranny of Distance", Blainey was a prolific author, more so than an historian. You have nothing to indicate regular pitched battles between Waring Aboriginal tribes resulting in massive casualties over the past 60,000 years?

SR,

Well I did demonstrate the facts of the matter as regards WW1 and that the normal deaths per year in aboriginal society equated with the deaths in the worst period in European history.

As to life expectancy, I was talking about life expectancy at birth. This is going to confuse you but this means we look at life expectancy at birth not life expectancy at 2 or 5 or whatever number you think might suit your purposes.

We know that in all societies over the millennia, the first few months of life were the most fraught. This was true even for advanced societies up to the mid 19th century when infant mortality rates began declining in western Europe. This was also true of aboriginal society.

But the big difference for aboriginal society was the outsized instances of infanticide. Again, outsized as against Europe but not for stone age peoples. There were lots of reasons for aboriginal children to be executed not long after birth. Since women had to carry the young as the tribe roamed their domains. more than one child was impossible. So any child born to a women who already had a toddler was surplus.

"Victorian government surveyor Philip Chauncy saw a young woman, shortly after her child’s birth, scratch “a hole in the sand behind her hut and having given it a ‘little’ knock on the head, laid it in the hole and kept on crying, the child crying too, till she could bear it no longer, and she went out and gave it another little knock which killed it”. Asked by Chauncy how she could do such a thing, she “replied pointing to the bag on her back that there was room only for one child, and she could not possibly carry another”.

"“The natives are generally much attached to their children … and yet there is no doubt that infanticide prevailed to a fearful extent.”

/cont

/cont

"connected with the difficulty of bringing up a child in the conditions of native life in Australia, and namely: the long sucking of the child at its mother’s breast, and the necessity of carrying the child on her back for several years during the wanderings inseparable from a roving way of life."

"Some authorities even assert that 50% of the new-born children died a violent death immediately after birth."

"says of the parts of Central Australia known to him, that at least 60% of the women committed infanticide. He tells of one woman that she had five children, three of whom she murdered immediately after birth, and she explained in her broken English: “me bin keepem one boy and one girl, no good keepem mob, him to[o] much wantem tuckout!” Therefore the women of the bush daily murder their children and do not wish to raise more than two."

This is before we even get into the issue of killing one child to feed another which ws widespread but something I'd prefer to not assail your sensibilities with.

So quite apart from the normal travails of birth and birth defects, at least 20% and maybe up to 60% of normal births results in infanticide. Thus the chance of a child getting to the age of 1 year was around one in two. Mathematically therefore, if all the rest survived into their 70s (and they didn't) then average life expectancy at birth was still in the low 30s.

As Blainey says, once the child got past the toddler stage, they probably did as well as the poorest of Europeans. But they had a much lower chance of getting there. BTW Blainey's lack of bias is on display here. It shows his work as the search for truth as opposed to the search for confirmatory data. The concept will be alien to you.

"You have nothing to indicate regular pitched battles between Waring Aboriginal tribes resulting in massive casualties over the past 60,000 years?"

And you have no evidence that they didn't have such battles, because (and please sit down to read this because you're gunna be shocked) aboriginals did write anything down.

Therefore everything has to be inferred based on what evidence is available. This is the case as regards all stone age societies.

Its fascinating that the aboriginal apologists constantly tell us that their society remained unchanged forever (swoon swoon genuflect, swoon) but as soon is its pointed out that this means that bad things that applied in 1800 also applied in 60000BC they suddenly decide that things weren't always the same. And they call this truth seeking!!

BTW Paul have you noticed that no one, including yourself it seems, is prepared to support your ignorant assertion that aboriginals lived 30 years longer than Europeans. Even silly old SR is just trying to argue their life expectancy was similar.