Fester,

The Voice to me was an opportunity for Australians to
make history together.

As for the "Albo cult?"

It really doesn't matter if you don't like his personality.
He has several more.

Yes, I've noticed that cult leader Albo has a personality for every occasion. The trouble is that each of his personalities has no idea of what the others have promised. Less charitable people might describe that trait as being a two faced liar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67me7vsPN8E

Fester,

Your shouty day is a good idea in theory. They could get everything off their chests all at once, then return to their caves. But do you think that professional activists and whingers would ever be satisfied?

The Australia most people take for granted today, and celebrate on January 26th, has nothing to do with the original inhabitants, nomads divided into hundreds of tribal groups and further divided by languages and customs, and with no concept of the place as a continent.

The majority of Australians have no connection with that history. Of the few who do, most are absorbed into what is now the mainstream, and live lives nothing like the original inhabitants. We just have a few noisy malcontents, most with no aboriginality, who just live to make as much trouble as they can at every anniversary of everything most Australians hold dear.

These people - naive or just plain nasty - don't seem to realise that there was no way that civilisation was going to ignore this continent forever, and that British settlement was much more acceptable than settlement by most other countries, including China, snooping about in the Middle Ages; or Portuguese and Spanish despots. There would be no trace of aborigines if their sort had settled here. They, along with the French, still meddle in their ‘colonies’ to this day.

Britain did not “invade”; they had trouble finding anyone to talk to. The locals kept disappearing into the bush. Nobody denies that there were unfortunate incidents (none of which were part of official policy); but, it didn't take long for aborigines to “move in” for regular food that previously they had to keep going walkabout to find.

The yarns about how good aboriginal life was before we arrived put about by troublemakers and frauds these days are downright lies.

I nicked this from a Newsletter from Steven Schwartz.

"The idiot who praises, with an enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this and every country but his own.
— WS Gilbert (The Mikado)"

It seems relevant to this discussion, in some cases.

(GOOD) ONYA!

ttbn,

If shouty day can settle people down it would be good. I wouldn't mind a shouty day on occasion myself.

All so confusing. History describes humanity's journey, yet the shouty people treat it as a body of evidence to be cherry picked, embellished and fabricated for the purpose of condemnation. Colonisation marked the arrival of an advanced civilisation on the Australian continent, yet the shouty people choose to see it only as a tragedy. England, a nation shaped over millennia by the interaction of many ideas and cultures through migration and conquest, is seen by the shouty people as a monoculture of sickly people bringing disease and interested only in genocide of the people and culture it encountered.

Such a view is surely at odds with the Australia of today, a nation embracing freedom, equality and opportunity for all Australians.