You're right, OUG, we are all Africans. Australian Indigenous people are also Indians and South-East Asians too !

I guess one thing about living on the Africa-Asia-Europe landmass for tens of thousands of years, is that innovations and ideas had a chance of painfully and slowly being dispersed across huge distances, being taken up, developed, refined and improved on.

Indigenous people stuck on the Australian-Papua-New-Guinea landmass had correspondingly far fewer innovations and ideas to develop and to share in. So it is no wonder that Old Stone Age culture was still dominant when the outside world arrived in 1788.

And as Rehctub has pointed out, if anybody wants to keep living it, there is nothing stopping them. Nobody is forcing them otherwise. And I hope that any devout OSA adherents don't try to force those ways back on anybody else. After all, the rest of the world moved on from them tens of thousands of years ago, and have learnt a hell of a lot since then.

In fact, I don't think there would be a single Indigenous person in Australia who would genuinely want to return wholeheartedly to such practices - but it's hard to say, because by definition, they wouldn't be on email :)

Cheers,

Joe

I applaud your sentiments, thinker 2. It is true that racism is alive and well in our society, and I agree with you that it is abhorrent and should not be tolerated.

However, you make the mistake of presenting one group as 'villainous' and ignoring any wrongdoing by others. Perhaps the media was caught up in more dramatic affairs, and my neighbourhood (with quite a large Aboriginal population) is too peaceful, but I didn't see any drunken louts professing their hatred of Aborigines this Australia day. I did, however, see footage of some very angry Aborigines shooting their mouths off about how much they hate white Australia. Perhaps they have reason to.

You also spoke of massacres, and Loudmouth questioned the validity of these claims. I did some fishing around for evidence - or at least evidence that there was evidence somewhere - and my first port of call was the little speck a couple of hours north of here called Murdering Point. I had been told that this was the site of an aboriginal massacre, so thought there must have been some evidence. Alas, I misinterpreted. When they said 'aboriginal massacre', they meant massacre BY aborigines - not OF aborigines.

http://www.murderingpointwinery.com.au/the-murdering-point-story.html

I don't know how true the story is, and I understand that there were many of the massacres and atrocities that you describe: I was taught about them when I was at school, while John Howard was PM. Interesting. The Myall Creek massacre springs to mind, but of course that wasn't supported or endorsed by the government - 7 of the perpetrators were executed for that crime.

We have some disgusting characters in our past and, no doubt, in our present. Not all of them are white.

<< Alas, I misinterpreted. When they said 'aboriginal massacre', they meant massacre BY aborigines - not OF aborigines.>>

Naughty, Naughty, Otokonoko.
Go and wash your mouth out with soap and water.
There were no such things as Aboriginal on Aboriginal massacres ...and talk of such is all white lies.
I am sure Thinker 2(sic) would find no mention of such things in his de-Howardised text books.

Otokonoko & SPQR,

As we know from watching so many crime shows on TV, it is very difficult to carry out a murder, let alone a massacre of many people, without leaving some physical evidence - cartridge cases, teeth, bone, skulls with bullet-holes, tools.

It's hard to get rid of evidence. Burning bodies takes a huge amount of fuel, a tonne of wood per person, as Keith Windschuttle pointed out in one of his definitive works.

On the other hand, there was a lot of bragging and bulldust in the nineteenth century, with the intent of scaring Aboriginal people into 'acceptable' behaviour. Oral history accounts are therefore - on both sides - extremely unreliable, just as they would be on 'Law and Order' or 'New Tricks'.

But there must be plenty of sites which are renowned as massacre sites. Now that there are Indigenous archaeologists, it should be getting easier to verify whether massacres were carried out at such places, or it's all just tall stories.

In one of Ruth Park's books, she reports an old Maori warrior who fondly remembers the time when his group caught and cooked a missionary bishop: delicious, he said. As Ruth Park pointed out, no bishop has ever been caught or killed, let alone eaten in New Zealand.

So we need to get beyond stories on both sides, and carry out rigorous research.

Rigorous research ......

Hey, aren't there a thousand Indigenous academics now at universities, most of them working away on their Ph.D. research on obscure and esoteric topics, leaving so much of their teaching work to bought-in white contract staff ? Wouldn't it be great if, just for a change, they actually did some research which had real-world merit ? Like checking out massacre sites under the guidance of Indigenous qualified archaeologists or forensic scientists, and proving conclusively, one way or the other, that they either did or did not occur.

Thinker,
your OLO name is an oxymoron. I do accept that many indigenous Aborigines have been the victims of invasion & I acknowledge that whenever it needs to be acknowledged. Your posts on the subject however are not based on fact but merely on do-gooder emotion & ignorance in general. You're one of those ignoramuses who think the Aborigine live in an absolute Nirvana before the european invasion. You're portraying a wrong view which is just very convenient for bandwagon jockeys to hitch a ride on.
Aborigines were players on an uneven playing field to their detriment. In the last 50 years they have been put on a pedestal which for their own good is too high. Why is it that people always seem to think they know what's best for others ? I don't know that myself but what my experience shows me is that I know what's detrimental to them & that is the do-gooders undermining the bridge-building & compensating that has been going on for a long time. Many self-called indigenous are ruining it for the bona-fide. People like you Thinker are wrong in your philosophy that two wrongs make a right. Doing wrong includes writing deceptively in order to prevent harmony.

Joe,

What's your understanding of the so called "elimination" of Tasmania's aboriginals early 1800's? Just asking.

I really don't want to get into a lather about all this, for obvious reasons. However, despite Keith Windschuttle's "definitive works" (he is not the 'ant's pants' as some would have us believe, due to what some would call, obvious 'predjudices').

Regardless, Wiki is always a good starting point - particularly if you follow the references and footnotes.

I have no doubt that Windschuttle would find many 'errors' in the Wiki link and would like to re-write the embedded history but to me, at least, a helluvalot of research has already gone into it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians

Surely it can't be all twaddle, can it?