It could be looked upon as the day that brought Indigenous Australians the wheel.

'We need to face up to our history, to embrace the
past in all its aspects, to cease trying to hide the
violence, the dispossession, the deprivation.'

does that mean Foxy that the Indigenous have to face their history of giving young girls to uncles, clubbing the disabled and horrendeous violence or is it only the Settlers who need to do so? Just wondering. Do some real research and come back with the answer.

Foxy,
Your 'facts' do not always reflect the truth. You make up 'facts' to suit your want.

Then you deny the truth.

Hi Foxy,

"We need to face up to our history, to embrace the past in all its aspects, ...."

My point exactly - but how can you gain any understanding of the past, of our history, without trying to find some substantial backing, some evidence for what you can believe in ?

There actually is no real need to just rely on stories - there is just so much documentation about our past. Frankly, anybody who does is an idiot, and I'm sure you're not an idiot. :)

The truth is what it is. We have to run with it. We shouldn't be afraid of it, even though it might be inconvenient and awkward. And if you dig enough, you can find it, you don't need to rely on just what you're told.

Love,

Joe

Australia Day, a meaning, it depends on whom you ask, and perhaps that is the way it should be. If you ask Americans about the fourth of July the answers are predominantly uniform, “independence day.” The day the 13 colonies formed a nation without the governance of Britain.

What is missing from the 4th of July rhetoric is an ongoing hate for the British, the ones they fought a war to rid themselves of. But here we have a growing lobby of Caucasians that call it “invasion day”. A day to feel guilt ridden about ancestors that treated the aboriginal nations with the same disdain for human life and right of place as they exhibited to generations of their own children by sending 6 year old boys down mine shafts to toil like slaves.

I accept no responsibility for the actions of a society and people that were born hundreds of years before I came to be. I do accept the responsibility for the positive discrimination towards our first Australians that government departments have in place. I do not accept responsibility for the government contributed moneys stolen from the first Australians by Caucasian administrators.

I do not accept responsibility for government monies stolen by the indigenous leaders of the land councils when they had direct control of the distribution. I do accept responsibility of a third world death rate for indigenous children in the far flung communities.

I will leave you with a “wild colonial boy” declaration I heard at an Australia day BBQ in the 1970’s that echoes football meat pies kangaroos and Holden cars.

Australia, land of Waratah and Dahlia
Australia, stick with us we won’t fail ya,
Australia, land in jail we will bail ya,
Australia, two arms two hands two dozen cans,
Australia.

Hi SoG,

One day, we'll all have to debate in real depth about the benefits and losses for Indigenous people in the coming of the outside world into their ancestors' lives. THEIR ancestors may have been on the tail-end of the massive migration sixty-odd thousand years ago out of Africa, hunters and foragers with the most basic human technology, to spread out across the huge land-mass of Australia - a land-mass with no domesticable animals, no or few domesticable plants, a continent condemned to yield nothing but what people could forage for.

On the one hand, no, it was illegal - as it had been illegal throughout those innumerable instances in history for anybody to invade anybody else's country - but did it have an up-side ? Would Indigenous people now genuinely prefer to be living as their distant ancestors did for so long ? Would they prefer to forgo the multitude of benefits that they now enjoy to spend their days hunting, fishing, gathering, sitting around a fire in the bitter cold of winters, and during the blistering heat of summers ?

At least here in SA, from the outset of settlement - and I get the idea that this pattern occurred across the country - people preferred to enjoy the bounty of rations rather than go out hunting and gathering, even though they had the legal right to do so. They preferred to work for wages in order to be able to buy some of the new wonders, tobacco, clothing, hats, boots, grog, food over the counter, and to travel around by horse or boat, rather than hunt or gather. They preferred to use fishing lines and hooks and linen nets rather than buggerise around with fishing spears - at least, down here in SA: the art of making fishing spears had gone within fifty years, by the way, much to the distress of the Protector.

The mission schools, in the earliest days, invariably taught in the local languages: once groups were mixing far more, something they would never have done pre-settlement, then of course

[TBC]