Loudmouth,

I think its helpful on the issue of Aboriginals and their historic treatment to examine the mindset during Australia's early years.

We already acknowledge that history is written by the dominant caste - the victors. Therefore, it's not so surprising that written documentary evidence of massacres, etc would be thin on the ground from indigenous people at the time.

From Henry Reynold's "Dispossession. Black Australians and White Invaders (an excerpt of which was included in my uni reader in the course "Different Histories" which examines the very subject you raise here)

"The single most important feature of British appropriation of Aboriginal land was the belief that Australia in 1788 was a "terra nullius", a land without owners. This enabled the settlers to convince themselves that they had a legal and moral right to the land because Australia had never actually become the property of the resident Aborigines. This idea had become accepted legal doctrine in the first generation of settlement and it has played a central role in relations between black and white ever since."

"To Earl Bathurst, Secretary of State for the Colonies, from Law Officers of the British Government - 15 February, 1819:

"That part of New South Wales possessed by His Majesty, not having been acquired by conquest or cession was taken possession of by him as desert and uninhabited and subsequently colonised from this country...."

Starting with a mindset like this, it's not surprising that those "people" who did reside here, and who were discounted as inhabiting this land, would have met with grief in their dealings with settlers.

In the case of Wilson v. Terry - N.S.W. Supreme Court - 1896:

"The circumstance of newly discovered and unpeopled territories claimed by and vested in the Crown, on behalf of all of its subjects, are so widely different from those of a populated and long-settled country, in which the lands never practically belong to the Crown....have for centuries been owned and cultivated by its subjects, that a moment's reflection would present then to the mind of even a stranger. The lands in new territories are unoccupied and waste, until granted by the crown to some individual willing to claim them from a state of nature."

Again, why is it so surprising that their is little narrative or "written primary evidence" from Aborigines on what went on?

They were apparently invisible......

Dear Joe,

I can’t add anything to the history to which you refer, like many Australians, this history has been the subject of so much post modernist deconstruction and socialization that most Australians have become disenfranchised from the debate, which is what was intended in the first place.

What I can recognize is the way this topic has been treated by socialization and the narrative theory. Whilst it is not new it is increasingly recognized by many Australians.

The regulating class has adopted a stance that declares that Australians cannot be trusted with our history, likewise philosophy, sociology, science and literature. It’s interesting that we have social elites, academics and the regulating class who seek to re-write these topics in accordance with their perspectives and now they have assigned themselves the grand and imposing title of the “intelligencia”.

It’s also interesting, as evidenced by many of the responses you have received on this thread, that there is a similar under-class of those seeking to align themselves with what they perceive to be intelligent people, the pseudo-intelligencia.

This is an attempt to be seen as intelligent by parasitic referential alignment. They are so impressed with what the intelligencia has to say on almost every topic, that they wish to be “seen” as and respected for, their alignment with the regulating class. It gives them an intellectual “hit”. They are so impressed at being told what they already believe.

The defense of the “narrative theory” by which they seek to influence the proletariat, is nothing to do with reality, it is all about being “seen” to support something they perceive to be intelligent but cannot explain why they have become victims of it.

It is the association with the intelligencia that makes them feel righteous. It is classic fellow traveler by proxy and I doubt you will convince them that there is any reality outside their adopted ideology.

I think you are spot on however, I doubt you can convince the copy cat intelligencia on this thread, they don’t understand where you are coming from, let alone recognize the problem.

Thanks Joe for your balanced approach.

I have met some of the old timer missionaries who sacrificed heaps to help the aboriginal people. They were not paid like the Government workers of today. In fact many served for a pittance. I would like to have just a small amount of their sacrificial and servanthood attitudes. Often they have been grossly misrepresented by well paid Government academia.

Poirot,

Henry Reynolds had a finer take on land-use in:

http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/swales19&div=23&id=&page=

The British recognised Aboriginal people's right to use the land as they always had done, from the outset. This does not signify gthat they recognised land-ownership, whatever that may mean, and therefore the term 'terra nullius' - an absence of a system of land ownership - was used later, but perhaps not at that time.

But that raises the question: how did Aboriginal people relate to the land apart from their land-use of it ? They did not have any sort of system of selling and buying land, although I think there are instances of 'lending' their land to related family groups, and of exchanging land, i.e. exchanging land-use rights between groups. They certainly had notions of who could, and who couldn't, come onto gtheir lands to hunt and collect and gather.

Land law is an immensely complicated field, I wish I knew more of it. But use-rights are one thing, this fuzzy thing called 'ownership' may be quite another. What is 'ownership' ? Of land, by a person or group ?

There is a fascinating book by J.K. Meek on British Colonial Land Systems from which it seems clear that the British recognised people's perception or concept of land use and land ownership in the forms that they customarily perceived them, across Africa and in Fiji and India, etc.

So maybe the British, viewing how Aboriginal people seemed to relate to their land, concluded that customary land-use rights were about the only rights they had to recognise. Which they did, and their Australian successors, up until just a few years ago, by the way.

Certainly, in George IV's 'Letters Patent' for South Australia, he specifies the rights to 'occupy and enjoy', which it seems the authorities here observed until recently. Unless, of course, somebody has evidence otherwise.

[TBC]

Dear Joe,

Like I said, there are so many on these threads who seek to align themselves with the defense of socialization.

They have no idea why they “adopt” a perspective, they do not know why they have become captive victims of it, nor do they understand the lack of reality in the opinions they promote. For them it is just an opportunity to proselytize something that “sounds” plausible. They are not required to think it through, they are not required to develop their own opinion and they are certainly not required to offer a reasoned case for views of their own, mostly because they don’t have any.

This is the problem with socialization, it’s a comfort zone for those who cannot, will not and refuse to accept that they do not “own” the opinions they promote. I don’t know if it’s just plain laziness, lack of intelligence, bloody minded contrarianism or simple ideological brain washing. In the end it won’t really matter because all the re-writing of history, economics, philosophy, sociology, science, and literature are nothing to do with the subject matter, the only thing that counts is “their opinion of it”.

You will have already noted that you are “wrong”. You have been “offered” a completely plausible alternative reality, failure to accept this of course, puts you outside the norms of social justice and equity.

Cont’d