Fair point, Nick: there's 'enough' evidence, and there's 'overwhelming' evidence. What evidence would you need that Burke and Wills almost reached the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1861, or whenever, apart from their Journals, King's account and physical markings along the way ?

Would you expect as much evidence, urine samples, camp-smoke in the lungs, of victims of massacres ? Or just somebody's second- and third-hand accounts, the odd painting of what might have happened, or bar-fly's yarn ? Or somewhere in between, such as distinctive killing marks on bones, especially skulls ?

I suppose there is never TOTAL evidence for anything, even for something that happens before your eyes. But there is SUFFICIENT evidence, such as gun-shot or sabre wounds on bones - or on fresh bodies, if possible, to lead one to be fairly certain that something happened. That's how the courts go, I suppose.

That might be the touch-stone: would the evidence pass muster in a court, before a judge or jury ? Beyond reasonable doubt ?

Take issues to do with children taken into care: every child, one would expect, would have a case file, and those files probably can't be destroyed legally for, say, a hundred years. So uncle or auntie so-and-so's dreadfully sad story can be checked: were their parents negligent, or drunk, or absent ? I recall a Queensland case, oddly enough in a SA Royal Commission (1916), of a single mother with two kids, the mother died and the kids were taken from their hut, in a starving condition, into care. Were they 'stolen' ? There would be a record of that, perhaps even now.

Again: when the Japs bombed Darwin and all the settlements along the north coast, from Broome around to Charters Towers, white and 'half-caste' children from the NT Top End were evacuated to Sydney and Adelaide. Many didn't get back for ten years, and many were too old by then to be counted as children. Was that a 'stolen

[TBC]

[continued]

stolen generation' ? Many didn't want to go back: one girl, finishing Year 12, was hidden by Communist Party members in various places around Sydney until she could finish her exams. (Makes me proud to think of it). By that time she was eighteen, so she could do what she liked.

Again: on many missions, arrangements were made for parents to go out to work during the week, while their kids were looked after by the missionaries. Then the families were re-united on Friday nights for the weekend, then the same again. Are those kids 'stolen generation' ?

History is stranger, more fascinating, more surprising, than pat formulas and 'well, how else do you explain it?' idiocies.

Joe

I came across the following on the web:

http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2009/november/1270703045/robert-manne/comment

Do we really want an unblemished history?

Do we want to ignore eye-opening histories like those written by
historians like Henry Reynolds or do we prefer the
denialist apologetics of Keith Windschuttle?

Can't we have both?

Or is polarisation going to infect every discussion we have
of our nation's past.

Henry Reynolds and Robert Manne are LW PC revisionists... nothing they say should be taken as fact let alone truthful.

Dearest Foxy,

As a denialist apologist myself, I've been totally impressed and persuaded by pretty much everything that Keith Windschuttle has ever written. He provides evidence, records, accounts, dates and places, which seem to be lacking in much of Reynolds' work. He examines legislation for any evidence of racist policy - in other words, he relies on evidence, as if for a case which could be mounted successfully in a court.

That's what Crooks and I have tried to do with 'Voices from the Past' (available now on Amazon and Book Depository). We both derive from the Left, but are sceptical about much of the conventional Indigenous Narrative: we ask for evidence for any assertions and suspend belief until we get some. In our readings and transcriptions of (I lost count) maybe eighteen thousand pages of material, we notice what is there, AND we notice what isn't there. And what isn't there is much foundation for the conventional Narrative, certainly not in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The single-person 'Aborigines Department' had the primary job of supplying up to fifty ration depots across the state of South Australia. He also had the task of providing health care - free health care, in an era when such a thing was unknown anywhere in the world - free travel passes, boats, guns (and the free repair of both for indigent people), funding for missions to run schools for Aboriginal children and to get local economies up and running.

What he didn't do was take children off caring parents, OR drive people off their lands, herd people onto missions, or oversee massacres. I don't think any of that happened in SA.

Foxy, I prefer the word 'sceptical' or the phrase 'using scientific rigour' to 'denial': denial assumes that people deny evidence which is right in front of them, and assert something for which they provide no evidence; i.e. bigots. Of course, anybody on the Left who is in this situation is entitled to be a bigot. But open your eyes to evidence, and close them to baseless assertions.

Love always,

Joe

I don't regard Keith Windschuttle as a 'denialist'. Everything he writes is scrupulously footnoted, from original documents where possible. He does not editorialise, but reports the truth, unlike revisionists like Henry Reynolds who is, to say the least, adventurous when it comes to history. One of the greatest rogues of Aboriginal history, however,is Professor George Williams, not even an historian, but claimant to the title of 'expert' constitutional lawyer; an expert who hasn't bothered to read the transcripts of 18th and 19th century court cases regarding Aboriginal matters. Some lawyer! We do not need various 'opinions' of history; we need the truth and, in my humble opinion, Keith Windschuttle tries hardest in that. The works of now deceased anthropologists who actually lived with Aborigines are also worth reading. Despite the connection to the land (of current Aboriginal-identifiers) claimed by elites, it is quite clear that Aborigines were 'coming in' very shortly after British settlement, and what W.E.H Stanner described as the High Culture had well and truly expired by the early 20th Century.