Dear Foxy,

Nothing could give me more pleasure than making you happy :)

Love,

Joe

PS. Those Quadrant articles are available on-line. Like all good historians, Windschuttle writes exhaustively, thoroughly, citing evidence for each point, I suppose like a lawyer would in court. We an surmise, we can prefer one plausible story over another, we can assert (and thereby condemn anyone who disagrees with our assertions) - or we can try to find evidence and base our beliefs and understandings on that evidence. That's much more time-consuming. But of course, you can lose friends that way :) It's probably even more problematic with things like a Treaty if only because it's in the future, it hasn't actually happened yet, nobody has even clarified what the hell is supposed to be in one that is acceptable to 'both' sides. Now, that's an aspect that nobody has thought of: acceptable to 'both' sides. Or all sides, really, since there would be so much disagreement. Christ, life's too short.

Joe

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

You're such a sweetie.

But back to the topic...

This Recognition Referendum is certainly a complex issue.
I did look up the book on line. I read bits from it. I'm
still going to ask for the book for Christmas - it will
keep me busy over the holiday period. The views that you
state and ttbn states - also reflect my husband's views.
He'll be delighted to buy me Windschuttle's book.

Dearest Foxy,

Your husband is not just lucky, but intelligent as well. Don't tell him.

I've been struggling with the Indigenous Narrative for decades now, I've gone from a 100 % True Believer to a Sceptic about most of it. Living in a community was a wonderful encounter with reality. But even after that, I had a rock-solid belief in many of the pillars of the Narrative, for example 'that Indigenous people live in poverty'. So in 1982, I did an income study of the community where we had lived, assuming of course that aspect of the Narrative. Instead, I found that average income there was equal to the Australian average. This was incredibly traumatic, I went over and over the figures and eventually buried them.

Then I read the Journals of the missionary who had set up Point McLeay Mission, on the lower Lakes of the Murray. Of course I assumed that he might have written them - fabricated them - with an eye to the distant future, but it was soon clear that he simply wrote down what he did and what he experienced, no more and no less. What he described over twenty years transformed my understanding of early life - no, no herding onto the mission (how ? One person ? Why ? If anything, people came and went as they pleased, and he was picky about who could be catered for, if only because of his shortage of funds). In the next fifty or sixty years, no great numbers of kids being brought to, or taken from the Mission, and no evidence of a 'stolen generation'. And none since either. Reality rules, not convenient Narrative.

Yes, the British invaded and settled Australia, probably the One Great Crime. But even now, who would go back to an entirely traditional life ? Nobody seems to be rushing. So, the Terrible Question: are Indigenous people better off living modern lives or going back to foraging ? I suspect that that Great Crime has been, or is being, paid for.

[TBC]

[continued]

Yes, there were probably massacres and, out beyond official control, driving people off their land; maybe: after all, pastoralists needed labour everywhere and yes, it does seem - at least in South Australia - that Indigenous workers were paid equal wages or their equivalent. During the depression, the SA Protector complained that men at missions and settlements refused to work for less than award wages, which other Australian men were doing at the time, just to get by.

As for massacres, how many ? Henry Reynolds estimated that fifty to eighty thousand people were killed in massacres. Now, that's a lot of large massacre sites, perhaps many thousands. Surely people are finding them all the time ? Not just bones (which might be at burial sites, mass burial sites after the small-pox epidemics swept through before whites arrived, or sites of inter-group battles), but evidence of gunshot wounds, sabre cuts, etc.?

Perhaps half a billion people, at least, have lived and died across Australia in fifty thousand years, so surely there are plenty of bones ? Forensic experts could identify how they died, but we don't hear much about established, definite, identified massacre sites. Surely there were some ? Not just Myall Creek ?

As for 'recognition', special benefiting laws, programs, funding for a multitude of organisations, the Flag, inclusion in school curricula, special media like NITV, constitute various forms of 'recognition' ?but I'm puzzled these days about what people want that they don't already have. Am I wrong ? Have I gone rabid-Right-wing and become complete bastard ?

I want to keep working, voluntarily, in the Indigenous Cause until I drop, like many, many other people, but we need to be confident that our contributions are in the right direction :) For me, it's the rapid improvements in higher education - perhaps one in every four urban Indigenous women is now a graduate - which won't stop, and which will form the basis for a strong, healthy, secure, contributing population into the future, long after I'm gone.

Love,

Joe

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Gosh, fascinating stuff. Ever thought of writing a book?
I'd buy it!

I'd love to read more on the subject. Personal experiences
open one's eyes.

Dearest Foxy,

As it happens, now that you mention it, my friend Alistair Crooks and I have a book out this week, available now on Amazon and Book Depository: 'Voices from the Past', mostly Alistair's work, mostly from the annual reports of the SA Protector of Aborigines between 1837 and 1959 - Alistair put more than a year into typing them up and putting them on both his (and my) web-sites. I did most of the maps of ration depots at the back. 300 pages of detail: good value.

The book covers most of the suspicions and gripes that people might have about the role and activities of the Protector, i.e. as to what an utter bastard he was, how he connived at massacres, driving people off their land, herding them onto missions, and other unsubstantiated allegations. None of them true, by the way. The maps of fifty rations, expanding over time, gives much of the lie to those suspicions. The constant worries of the Protector, what to do with neglected or abandoned kids (surprisingly not many), employment, illnesses, travel passes, boats, guns, getting rations out to those fifty depots - all by one man. Quite amazing. Annual censuses from each centre track the decline and rise in the population. The preoccupation with the proper treatment of girls and women stands out.

Next, we'll have to do something similar with the nine thousand letters of the Protector. Then maybe a rough history of some of the Missions, from an outsider's point of view. There's a lot of material there - and that's just little South Australia ! The truth is still out there in other States, just waiting for someone to bring it to light.

If I had a couple more life-times, and better eyes, I'd give it a go. But if I had better eyes, they probably would never stray from gazing at you, Foxy :)

Love,

Joe