Poirot,
There are many very enterprising business people in India and Asia, so why are the places you speak of not 'awash with grog'? There are parents, in India and Asia, that sell their kids into the sex trade, so why not grog? Is it their religion?

Is grog the problem here or just one of many?

There was a hell of an outcry when some communities were made grog free and imposts put on pensions to restrict what could be purchased. what has been the outcome of that and has it improved the situation for the women and kids there? I suspect not, as the government would be trumpeting it from Canberra.

Can anyone tell me the place near Newcastle that dramatically lowered the kids abuse rate and what has happened since? They must have done it right.

Poirot I value you and your input, have no idea what your exposure to these people has been.
But disagree, with the way you approach this subject.
Grog is forced down no mans throat, yes filth make big money out of taking it in to dry areas, that filth is one both sides.
Banjo my plan says SHOUTS! give them and every one no dole, but a job, with dignity and hope, a job that if needed as long as it produces some thing, leave to study for a better one.
We can and must see jobs are not taken from others , but give to both worker and community.
We must ENFORCE school attendance and require an end to not learning for the kids.
Public housing should ALWAYS be monitored and all damages paid for, by any one.
We by not inflicting rules and a tough but truelove fail our selves too.
Cheap and nasty racism, from both sides must have meaningful impacts fines prison.
Above all keep the trouble making do gooder,s away.
We must train the next three generations to lead as well as Noel Pearson would if he was given the job, being the victim if only in their own heads is no path to the future.

Belly,

It's all very well to say no-one forces grog down their throats.

But do you deny that, coupled with a directionless disconnected life experience, that grog is one of the biggest problems in these communities?

Why do people drink so much that their lives are conducted in a anesthetized cloud. No one forced my dad to drink, but once it got a hold, he just carried on regardless...which led to all sorts of problems and destroyed our family.

I don't know what it's like to live in an aboriginal community like those we are presently discussing, but I'm probably one of the few non-Aboriginals here who have lived in a "mission" and enjoyed the same status as the Aboriginal kids who were there, having been removed from their families.

So what I noticed is that this mission was fairly well run, and the Aboriginal children well decked out and clean, enjoying good food, doing "all the work" around the various houses and totally disconnected from their carers. I know, because even though I'm not Aboriginal, my drinking, feckless dad wangled me into that place for quite a few months while he was working at a nickel mine.

It certainly wasn't a bad experience. From going to chapel on Sunday mornings to catching "our bus" at high school.....the one perception I'm left with is that they were materially cared for in an environment where the people were kind, but religious (little comic books with pictures of hellish torment for those who weren't saved)...but these kids didn't connect with the carers at all in ways that help a child develop.

Belly>> SOG! nice of you bloke .
To give such unchallenged evidene some know bugger all about the subject.
Not having a go at you bloke, you do the best with what little you have.
And its nice to see you being happy,and wrong in every post<<

Thanks china, I try to do the best with what little I have…lol… and that seems to be the crux of the complaint against first Aussies, supposedly they do not do the best with what they have been given. But I assert that they are doing the best they can, and because it does not meet Caucasians expectations they are supposedly rubbish people from the vibe of this thread.

Belly>> They force fed us [so happy they did] to get a job and plan our lives around it, give a fair days work for a fair days pay. Buy a block of land build a home.<<

China, those are the values of the Caucasian, and how inherent that is to our psyche is exampled by the family dynasties that built Europe and the New World. Whereas our mate’s great grandfather had a Stone Age mind and had not moved past hunter gatherer….As I said what do you want from them, a Plato, a Rockefeller, an Einstein?
I am not discussing first Aussies who have lost their peoples colour and appearance because they have a fair slice of our genes.

Banjo>> I, like others, am waiting to hear how to tackle the problem. Again I ask, what has not been tried.<<

That sums it up Banjo. We first treated them like children via the missionaries, and then a government of self serving whites treated them like second class citizens, and finally a corium of blacks mismanaged their futures with raging nepotism seeing a few prosper and most go further down the gurgler.

Even when the handouts came from their own they lacked appreciation of worth…how great a new house is compared to a trashed one. As a people they have no concept of ownership and worth when it comes to personal wealth. They have only owned one thing, the land, and they respected that.

Poirot>> ...their culture sustains them, they've adapted to their situation, even in a situation most of us couldn't imagine.<<

As did the first Aussies, the lived in a harsh land for 60,000 years and their minds adapted to a low intellectual denominator, their minds had no new input, it had no stimulus other than the knowledge needed for survival. Banjo remarks that we have tried everything and nothing gets through, it is because of their minds. Their minds do not have our values.

It’s not an us and them issue, it’s a them and their minds issue.

Son of Gloin,

There's no such thing as a 'Stone Age mind', not one that anybody's born with anyway - and in the earliest days, Aboriginal people learnt very quickly sometimes about new opportunities offered, and new requirements demanded, by the 'Martians' suddenly in their midst. Of course, children were the quickest to pick up new ways of seeing and doing.

And we forget that after the 'Invasion', physical mobility was greatly enhanced by horses, carts, ships - down this way, in SA, by 1845 - seven years after the 'Invasion' - the Protector remarked that he had noticed that when Aboriginal people met each other, they tended to speak in English: increased mobility after all brought many different people from different groups into contact with each other, and they tended to talk about things in common, and in relation to jobs, crops, animals, opportunities, grog, money, where to stay, etc., which necessarily were in an English-language domain.

It depends, SoG, how much interaction and day-to-day contact and experience people have: down this way, in southern SA, interaction was so many-sided from the earliest days, in terms of improved methods of hunting (guns, fishing gear) and a sudden explosion of new 'stuff' - clothes, grog, tobacco, tea, sugar, money, sheep, horses, ships - that I'm sure some younger people were swept up in it all very quickly - but without necessarily perceiving any loss, quite the opposite I suspect.

And after all, it was soon (from 1851) written into every pastoral lease that Aboriginal people had the same rights as they had always had to use the land. Henry Reynolds has written about this, with Jamie Dalziel (1996). In the Protector's letters, there is only one occasion where he has to remind a pastoral lessee that the terms of his lease (1876) included these use-rights. Those conditions were still in pastoral leases in SA into the 1990s.

Keep learning - I hope we all do :)

Joe