Hi again Bazz,

Going back maybe forty years, most Aboriginal people in the 'South' would have known only their Aboriginal relations, no matter how much of their ancestry was non-Aboriginal. Two generations later, the great majority have that much more non-Aboriginal ancestry and are far more likely to know their non-Aboriginal uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, etc. than ever before.

Back about 1993, I knocked up an article about Mabo and the urgent need to put together a Register of Indigenous people, ideally with basic family trees, to avoid claims being made by non-Indigenous people, along with some mechanism to verify claims of Indigeneity. Maybe such a Register, or Registers, was/were put together, maybe for the ATSIC elections; I hope so.

Following the 1937 Conference, Norman Tindale was contracted in 1938-1941 or so to visit every Indigenous community and population centre in Australia, record names and family trees, etc. and photograph everybody he could. Often those photos are the only ones known of many people. One SA community council enlarged this collection of photos and put them up all around their rooms: brilliant. What was striking, by the way, about the photos was that everyone was looking directly, clearly, openly, unblinking, at the camera - no bullsh!t about not looking at a stranger and all that sort of colonialist rubbish. Leave that to the Greens.

Anyway, the family histories are there if people want to dig into them. All that Tindale material is in the SA Museum, but available only to Indigenous people: they should ring 08 8207 7375 to find out how to tap into theif family history in Tindale's collection, who and where they lived, and other details.

08 8207 7375: persist, don't take 'no' for an answer.

Joe

OK Joe, thats good. Someone should put it up onto a genealogy site.
There is very good software available for that sort of job.
I was able to find my Great-Great-Grandfather that way.
Lived near Bath and married Sarah.

Hi Bazz,

Yes, we've all got eight great-great-grandfathers (and eight gr-gr-grandmothers too). Trying to write out a family tree rapidly becomes a huge, wide, enterprise. When I was much younger, I did a vast family tree of all the Greek gods and heroes mentioned in Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths' - it covered a couple of square metres on butcher's paper. My mum accidentally threw it out.

The Ngarrindjeri down here in SA have been lucky that the wonderful Fay Gale and Doreen Kartinyeri put together huge family trees of people from Raukkan, from the late '70s. Doreen later put each major family (Sumner, Wilson, Rigney, Rankine, Kartinyeri, and Wanganeens from Point Pearce) into readable books. It's interesting that some early families seemed to disappear entirely, while others grew very large and more extensive with each generation, including up to a couple of thousand family members.

So Tindale's family trees would provide incredibly valuable foundations for anybody trying to put together their families, anywhwere in Australia. But locking them away in a museum seems precisely the wrong way to go: Tindale's data is already nearly eighty years old, so people need to move fairly quickly to get hold of those family foundations in order to build family trees up to the present. In fact, Doreen's data, printed in the 1990s, is already a generation behind, there would have been many people married, born (and died) since then.

Museums act like dung beetles, finding and hoarding bits of information away and not making enthusiastic efforts to let people know what's there. People need to be the butterflies, find out what's there and fly away with it.

Joe

At some point I believe aborigine families would have started registering
their BDMs so they would give a link back to the previous generation.
I hope someone presumably in Sth Australia does the job.

Hi Bazz,

On missions and government settlements, Aboriginal people were amply recorded, and often curious missionaries would dig deeper and find out ancestries going back before 1800.

My wife could trace hers back to her great-great-grandmother Ngaikinyeri and her son John Sumner on one side, and Rebecca Giles on the other; that's her maternal grandfather's side, and she could do something similar with the other sides. She would have had ancestors going back to the lower Murray Lakes, Yorke Peninsula, the Fleurieu Peninsula via Kangaroo Island and perhaps the southern Adelaide area.

This is one mistake that phonies make, that nobody can check, there won't be records anyway, so they can get away with claiming to be Indigenous. Yes, there are, oodles of them. And one day, they will be called to account.

Oh, of course, then there's the 'Stolen Generation'. One person so far. But that ruse has worked well for nearly forty years now. Of course, there were many kids taken into care, and there would be ample records of that as well. Perhaps they should have the courage to take their cases to court.

On that subject of children in care: certainly from the late forties, if not earlier, here in SA, the Children's Welfare and Public Relief Board paid mothers, usually single or deserted mothers, to look after their kids. I've seen a list from about 1952 of the names of about fifty Aboriginal kids who were being supported like this, and, it seems, until they turned sixteen. That would have given mothers the chance to hang onto their kids and raise them properly. So much for a 'Stolen Generation'.

Cheers,

Joe

Hi Ttbn,

I've just finished Windschuttle's book on the possible proposals for a Recognition Referendum. As usual, Windschuttle is thorough with his research and exhaustive with his evidence, as any good historian should be. Leave 'post-truth' for the liars and bigots, I suggest.

It seems that the more 'radical' a proposal may be, the less relationship it bears to the real world: for example, the notion of a separate State, either within or outside of the rest of Australia, presupposes functional, hard-working, busy and supportive communities in remote areas. Is this so ? is it even likely ? Are 'communities' currently poster-material, likely to attract any of the 80 % of Indigenous people who live in cities to flock out there and devote their lives and careers to building little Utopias ? What halfwit believes that ?

Windschuttle's book is reviewed in The Australian today, well worth buying just for that. On the opposite page is a review of Stan Grant's Quarterly Essay, in which he hints at my last paragraph above. He cites an essay written by my darling wife about ten years ago, differentiating an opportunity-oriented Indigenous population from a welfare-oriented population. Back then, the total number of Indigenous university graduates was only about twenty thousand; since then, it has doubled. Maria never doubted that graduate numbers could reach fifty thousand by 2020, and she was right.

She would be very proud - actually I think she would have suggested a new target, a hundred thousand by 2032 or so - and would echo Stan Grant's comment about white people's worry that Indigenous people might lose their 'culture' by seeking education - that Indigenous people 'have the right to do anything they damn like'.

[TBC]