come on ttbn you know that Foxy is limited to her narrative. The man made gw alarmist also use the word denialist because they can't win the arguement. Anyone who can think at all knows that Windsuttle writes more from fact that those with a narrative.

Dear Joe,

At the moment I'm waiting for my husband to come
back with the car so that I can visit mum
for the day - so here I am filling in time.

I'll make a note to try to use better words in my
future posts. However, we do have to bear in mind that
there is more than one side to every story. It isn't
wise to accept any one interpretation of events as
your only source of information. For example, in TV
Westerns the Indians are nearly always the "baddies"
who attack the "settlers" from Europe who are just trying
to "pioneer" a new land. We also need to look at the
other side of the story. If it were written by an
Indian, the whole situation would probably be reversed and
the European settlers would have been the "baddies" who came
and "stole" the Indians' land by settling on it.

Therefore it is important to know who said (or wrote) what,
in order to be able to detect the bias that the author would
probably have.

Dearest Foxy,

I hope your husband doesn't have an accident. What road is he taking ?

Yes, indeed, there are many sides to any situation, but before we dissolve into a puddle of indecision, we should stand back and demand evidence, one way or another, and weight that up. History is like a court of law: the judge/reader has to suspend judgment until there is an imbalance in the evidence in one major direction.

Yes, we shouldn't seriously entertain any assertion until we have evidence for it. And we will never get chapter and verse, DNA in urine samples (to cite Nick), or eye-witness statements to the death of some poet or other in about 1783, handfuls of volcanic ash from Pompeii, written records of Asians migrating into America ten thousand years ago. But those events may have happened.

Conversely, claims of people being pushed over cliffs into the sea seem to be unprovable, by their nature - partly from the fact that people would have known their own country better than their white would-be murderers. Strangely, there is such a claim about people around Elliston here in SA - just before a ration depot was set up over near there. Sometimes, assertions do come a cropper.

Evidence: everyone claiming to have been stolen would have a large file on them. It would be no problem to take their case to court. And prove it.

Lots of love always,

Joe

Dear Joe,

Years ago I did my work experience at the State
Library of Victoria. I learned that to study the
past properly it's usually best to go back to what
we call "primary sources." That is the original
documents from which historians gather together
the pieces of information which they use to compile
a theory about the past.

From these sources we can look at many different
persons' viewpoints and draw our own conclusions
about what life must have been like. If primary sources
are not readily available, and sometimes it's very
difficult to find them on all topics we turn to history
books, in which historians who have looked at primary
sources have written down their findings.

We also need to remember history books are written by
historians, and historians are human beings. Their words
are often wise but never completely "gospel."
We need to ask questions all the time and never accept any
reference book as it it could not be wrong.

Therefore, just the same as with primary sources, we need
to consult as many history books as possible to get a
really fair picture of the past. Not only is it necessary
to question the objectivity of what we study (that is, how
fair is it to all sides), but we must be able to use the
different theories put forward.

We need to study not only what is in history books but also
what has been at times left out. If you find a text book that
is supposed to report the history of Australia, and it starts
off with the European exploration of the Pacific Ocean,
you will notice that a significant group, the original Australian,
the Aborigines, are overlooked. Naturally no history book
can cover everything that happened in the past, so the best
thing to do is to pick out what is worth learning about,
and to try to find source material that gives the information required.

Dear runner,

You'll always find people who in their
own minds tend to think that they are always
right. My name is not Google, so I don't
know everything.

However as a wise man once said -
"The most important thing in life is not
knowing everything. It's having the phone
number of somebody who does." ;-)

When ever I see a new book on Australian history the first thing that I do is look in the index for reference to the discovery of gold in NSW. If the author gives credit to Edward Hammond Hargraves I put the book aside as worthless.
If the author did not research Hargraves then what was the quality of research in the rest of the book?

Hargraves had the idea to look in the district where payable gold was first found but he didn't find it and eventually had his bogus claim ruled on by the court, consequently the monument erected by the NSW Government on the Ophir field gives the credit to James Lister and the Tom brothers.

From Wikipedia:
"In 1877, Hargraves was granted a pension of £250 per year by the Government of New South Wales, which he received until his death. Shortly before his death in Sydney on 29 October 1891, a second enquiry found that John Lister and James Tom had discovered the first goldfield."