Joe your thread premise is particularly repugnant….just saying. Comparing blood lines of an evolving Asian culture and the Stone Age yesterday of our first Australians.

Hi Son of Gloin,

Your recent post-but-one - remember that only around 10 % of Indigenous people live in remote sink-holes, and around 60 % live in urban and peri-urban areas and are working, and that urban population grows, from one Census to the next, by 20 % - and after all, Indigenous university participation rates are around 65 % of non-Indigenous Australians' - in fact, Indigenous women are participating at universities (at least the 18-509 age-groups) at a slightly better rate than NON-Indigenous males. Would you like the figures ?

The upshot is that the great majority of Indigenous people live in towns and cities, and a majority work, alongside non-Indigenous people, socialise with them, marry them and have kids together. It worked for me :)

On cultural change: people aren't stupid: from the letters I've been typing up of the SA Protector of Aborigines between 1840 and 1906, it's clear that Indigenous people were quick to adopt more effective technologies as they became available.

For example, from the earliest days, amongst the rations handed out (and there was quite an amazing range of items counted as 'rations'), were fishing lines, fish-hooks, netting twine and boats. 'Boats' meant canoes, i.e. pointed at each end, fifteen feet long, five feet beam.

So, no surprise, fishing spears quickly fell into disuse. It's a hell of a lot easier to sit on the river-bank, especially in winter, wrapped in a blanket, and throw a line in and wait, than to have to wade through the near-freezing shallows looking for the odd, dumb fish stupid enough to come close to the bank. By 1886, for the half-Centenary celebrations, and for Q Victoria's Jubilee in 1888, the Protector tried to get the coppers up and down the Murray and around the Lakes to ask if any of the old fellas know how to make a fishing spear. No luck. How about a bark canoe ? No luck.

[TBC]

[continued]

It's called cultural change: we all grab what's most effective. What did you do on the day you worked out how to use a computer instead of an electric typewriter ? I recall that I stopped using white-out tape from that day - I'd just bought a box of tapes, and never even opened it. Still have it somewhere, unopened. Cultural opportunities, cultural change.

Forgive me, I'm not sure what you find repugnant in my postings. Please let me know and we can clear that up.

Cheers,

Joe

The Quadrant article is spot on. Which means it will never come to light if the political 'Progressives' have their way. No way it will be discussed on the ABC's Q&A, that goes without saying.

On the beach,

I spent four years at an Aboriginal settlement across the mid-70s as a laborer, my wife Maria running the pre-school there. A few years later, we had gone off to tertiary education, and in 1982 I did an income study of this particular settlement. I found that the median income at this place was equal to the Australian average median income. In fact, people there were better off when you took low rents into account.

It was incredibly traumatic: I contemplated suicide but instrad went off and applied for a taxi licence. So I can understand how difficult it may be for people involved for it to suddenly hit them that so much of what they believed was not so. It took me a lot longer, another twenty years, to begin to doubt the entire notion of self-determination - a wonderful notion - but came to see it as a fraud.

I must confess that I met Frank Pledge many years ago, in an outback pub, well sort of a 'pub' - he was a dogger and bush-geologist, the sort of bloke you move away from even in a remote pub, but I came to realise he was an incredibly erudite man, thwarted in love by a beautiful woman and hounded by multinational mining companies for his profound but secret knowledge. He came into 'town' only every few months, unwashed and barely able to speak. But we built an odd sort of friendship until he disappeared again. One of our best bush-philosophers, somebody you imagine Henry Lawson would have drunk with. I'm overjoyed that he is still around and now writing.

Joe

Hi Joe and thank you for this thread, the article and your potted history as well.

My much lesser exposure comes from my own and family experiences as farmers (cattle mostly), as a contractor to State and federal government (but mainly to private companies) and from years of going bush, some of which was into indigenous lands on permit.