My colleague Alistair Crooks and I have published a summary of findings from the Annual Reports of the Protector of Aborigines in South Australia, covering the period from 1837 to the late 1950s, some fifteen hundred pages. They run parallel to the nine thousand letters (up to 1912), cracking out at two and a half thousand pages. In each annual report, the numbers of Aboriginal people were carefully enumerated; employment, health, housing and other major issues were described.

Our book, "Voices from the Past", (available on Amazon and Book Depository) canvasses all of the major issues of the Conventional Narrative: massacres; people being driven off their lands; people being herded onto Missions; stolen children, and so on. There doesn't appear to be any mention of such atrocities in either the Reports or the Letters. Perhaps somebody else can find evidence. But in the meantime, we're reconciled to work with what is there.

Perhaps we're wrong, duped by bureaucracy, suckered into believing that what the various protectors wrote was close to reality.

Let's take each of these in turn:

* the right to use the land for hunting, fishing and gathering: from the outset, after the 'Great, Primal Crime' of Occupation, usufructuary rights were recognised, written into the Proclamation, underwritten by the British Colonial Office. Those rights were legislated in 1851, with a detailed clause included in every pastoral lease. Those rights continue.

* massacres: apart from a few massacres of passengers and crew of the ship-wrecked 'Maria' in 1840, and of some white families on Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas, one major battle took place in 1841, when several hundred warriors and thirty-odd police and volunteers fought on the Rufus River, just over the border in New South Wales, following the massacre of a party of overlanders and the theft of five thousand sheep. Officially, that's it.

* as for people being driven off their land: one pastoralist, in 1876, declared an intention to do so, but was reminded that he would be breaching his lease. End of.

* people being herded onto Missions ?

[to be continued]

[continued]

* people being herded onto missions ? No evidence whatsoever. Mission staff usually consisted of the missionary, the farm supervisor and and the teacher. often the missionary was all three. Not much time to round up anybody, if it were even possible, and no evidence that they did, or even wanted to. End of.

* stolen children: apart from the fact that it was neither legal nor contemplated by any Protector, numbers of children taken into care as abandoned, orphaned, etc. were surprisingly few. One gets the inpression that Aboriginal family structure was amazingly coherent. At one Mission, only seven or eight children were taken there in the nineteenth century, mostly foundlings, boys brought down by stockmen and survey teams from the North, and abandoned. On one occasion two boys were brought to Pt McLeay with their single mother, and a total of only forty seven out of a school roll totalling eight hundred between 1880 and 1960 were ever taken away from the Mission, usually for a matter of months or a year or so, ofgten after a parent had died.

* what else ? Missionaries stopping people speaking their languages ? Never: the missionaries were usually the very people who recorded the languages, and struggled to teach in them. Where all children were of the same language group, as at Killalpannina in the North-East, schooling was always in the local language, in this case Diyari. Of course, where children came from many parts, such as at Point Pearce or Koonibba, English was their only common language, so it was used instead of a local language.

So we're at a loss to uncover what atrocities and crucial issues any Protector avoided writing about. Perhaps he, and everybody else, had some elaborate conspiracy between themselves (devilishly cunning) not to mention some events, but that's up to someone else to ferret out, because after a total of eight years, we couldn't find them.

We tentatively look forward to Aboriginal researchers enthusiastically uncovering a different story and exposing us as a couple of ratbags.

G'day Joe,
In the absence of any contrary evidence, that seems to put paid to any allegations of the 'stolen generation' as far as SA is concerned.

I say well done to you pair for your diligence and hard work. I hope similar research can be done by others in other states.

Merry Christmas.

Dear Joe,

There's an interesting link:

http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/politics/a-guide-to-australias-stolen-generations

Also - are you familiar with the "Bringing Them Home Report?"

My dearest Foxy,

Of course. I'm also familiar with the fact that only one person has ever been found to have been 'stolen', my wife's sort-of-step-second-cousin, Bruce Trevorrow: some of his cousins were my wife's, through her step-father and their mother, brother and sister.

So perhaps we should be talking about a Stolen One, don't you think ?

One.

Children were taken into care, of course, just like white kids. Our grandmother wanted our mum to put u into care after she ran away from our abusive father. In Aboriginal settlements and Missions, mothers died - forty at Pt McLeay between 1880 and 960, leaving 140 school-age kids. Fathers died, mothers remarried and put their daughters into training institutions. Some parents were boozers, some were just utterly neglectful, and some still are. No real mysteries.

One.

Sorry, dear Foxy, but you raised the topic :)

Love however,

Joe

Thanks Loudmouth. Your writings are consistent with some missionaries I know that were helping out these guys in the 50's. Fake news is not new, it has been embraced by the left for decades. Foxy demonstrates that fact.

Joe,

I don't think you will be called ratbags; deadly silence is more likely. None of the people calling themselves historians and stirring the possum currently will have heard of the documents you accessed, let alone read them, so nothing but playing dead will stop them being exposed as the ignorant fools they are. I think I might have mentioned that real scholars (pre 1960s scholars) regard the current crop of psuedo historians as 'Google historians' because Google provides all their 'research', supplemented with repetition of what their mates have said, all without evidence. Google has its uses, but as with Wikipedia, any chump can write any nonsense they wish online. Anyone offering up 'evidence' from the internet shouldn't hope to convince anyone of anything. Serious reading and research is the only way. Unless a piece of writing is footnoted, giving a reader the opportunity to check its veracity, it is not worth the paper it is written on - except for proven original documents of course.

Dear Joe,

I cannot argue with your logic.

Nothing more needs to be said.

Foxy, if you do some research you will find that one of the criticisms of the " bringing them home" report was that no evidence given was allowed to be challenged or questioned. People were allowed to tell their stories without giving any confirming evidence and were not allowed to be questioned.
This means the whole report was biased and those officials charged with removing children for welfare reasons were not allowed to give evidence on their own behalf.
However, even without this, I can say that in the nearly half decade I have spent in the north, I have never heard of any child being removed from families where the father was working and the children attending school.
My aboriginal husband has literally thousands of extended family and from amongst all those, only one was taken and she was the severely neglected baby of an alcoholic mother and absent father.
And I also know people who were actually given away at birth by their grandmothers but who now claim they were " stolen".
Without any actual, verifiable proof, the whole stolen generations is a myth created to impose white guilt.

Hi Big Nana,

Half-century :)

Narratives are interesting things: they usually have underlying assumptions which act as vetting agents, accepting or rejecting what does or doesn't fit already into itself. If it fits, it's 'true'. If it doesn't, no matter how much evidence there might be, then it's not 'true', or might as well not be, i.e. it's unacceptable. I suppose we all have such biases in relation to many of the facets of our view of the world.

So criticisms of our findings, of i.e. Crooks & Lane, (Volume 1), suggest that all those transcripts are just our opinion. Well, no, it's what's there. So another criticism is that there are probably other sources. Go on then (as the blokes up on the Mission used to say), find them. Thankfully, so far, criticism has not descended into point out that we just a couple of racist white bastards. Bit I expect that will come in due course.

Narratives, as foundational belief-systems, are usually rock-solid: they satisfy, they provide 'answers', and better still sometimes, without the need to produce any evidence for their major features. To find a defect or fault or lapse in a Narrative, can be very traumatic. My traumatic incident with the conventional Aboriginal Narrative, came back in 1982 with an accidental income study. I'd already lost belief in old notions of reciprocity, togetherness and community. But that income study was a real mind-shaker. It ruined the Narrative for me. Clearly, there needs to be a new one generally.

Merry Christmas for all of your family, Big Nana,

Joe

Hello Big Nana,

I'll repeat the comments I made on this issue
on another discussion. There are so many sides
to that debate and unless you've got the time
to do the extensive research and the inclination,
trying to understand all the complexities, the
context and times in which they occurred, trying
to look at things critically, is not an easy task.
There's always more than one side to be debated.

At the moment I'm interested in getting hold of
Joe's book, "Voices From The Past," and also
Bain Attwood's "Telling The Truth About
Aboriginal History."

It will keep me busy for quite a while.

Wishing you and yours a Lovely Christmas and a Healthy, Safe, and
Happy New Year from me and mine.

Our book has created a huge dilemma for us. I'm not a historian and I'm aware that the interpretation of reality (and therefore history) is socially constructed, even if reality is what it is, regardless. Five years ago, when I was endlessly prattling to my daughter about how I'd like to have a good look at the Protector's Letters if I could find them, she got sick of it, bought me a lap-top and said, 'Now get to it.'

I thought that I, and probably Alistair in his transcribing of the Protector's Annual Reports, also thought, that we would discover veiled hints in accordance with the Conventional Narrative, as he ordered his hundreds of staff hither and thither around South Australia, to drive people off their lands, herd them on Missions, and cover up massacres But soon enough, we realised that he was a one-man 'Department', that the law protected the traditional land-use rights of Aboriginal people, just in case they made use of them which became somewhat intermittent after the introduction of a ration system, area by area. The ration system seems to have pulled people out of a full-time foraging economy and, perhaps unintentionally, pulled them into a proto-welfare economy.

With his insistence, expressed many times, often with exasperation, for police and others to 'keep people in their own districts', and the constantly-growing number of ration depots, it became clear that here was no 'driving of people off their lands', and in conjunction with readings of Mission journals and letters, that nobody was ever 'herded onto Missions'.

So we had created a dilemma, a rod for our own backs: much of the Conventional Narrative was obviously up the creek. So, like it or not, we have found ourselves obliged to tentatively put forward what has to be a more 'realistic' Narrative.

[TBC]

[continued]

Certainly, it had to start off with the initial Primal Crime, the occupation, or invasion, or colonisation, or 'contact': we're still wrestling with that - was it all-evil, was it a bumbling attempt to satisfy two competing sets of land-users, even - horrors - was it inevitable ? Would SA, and Australia as a whole, have been left alone until 2016 by a long line of would-be imperialist countries ?

Policy famously goes belly-up at the 'implementation' stage: in SA, a ration system was, at least officially, designed to complement foraging, not to replace it. But the people seemed not to see it that way: when there was a shortage of flour early in 1837, and attempts were made to give out rice, the people complained; they weren't going to eat maggots, they declared, and demanded the usual 'buppy'.

And, contrary to what I had always assumed, rations attracted people from far beyond the immediate groups receiving them: 'coming in', as even W. E. H. Stanner had to concede was a major disruptive force, occurred rapidly, at least in SA: River Murray people moved into Adelaide, battles were fought between them and an alliance between Adelaide and South Coast groups, until the Protector threatened to cut all rations for everybody. His solution, quite characteristic, was to set up a ration station on the Murray, under the explorer E. J. Eyre.

How to fit all this in a 'modified' conventional Narrative ? Early on, that started to seem impossible: a different narrative seemed to be operating, like it or not. After all, we can't write history backwards to fit our present-day perceptions, adding bits that we would like and dropping out bits that we don't.

We have to go back and see, as much as possible, 'what happened' (Childe), inconvenient truths and all (and its corollary, what not only didn't happen but couldn't have happened) and move forward, trying to explain what actually happened - forwards -as we go. History doesn't happen with an eye on the future. It doesn't dance to easy narrative.

So

[TBC]

[continued]

So this bumbling amateur has clumsily opened up a huge can of worms: I only hope they don't eat him alive. And I wanted a quiet life, slipping into a comfortable dotage. Not bloody likely.

Straws in the wind: In SA, Aboriginal people had ready, and legal, access to guns. If Aboriginal retaliation for violence against them had been expected, perhaps there would have been a ban on their right to use guns, at least for, say, a generation after the end of violence in any particular area.

Yet, in SA, Aboriginal people were always allowed to use guns - in fact, guns were provided either free, for people who couldn't work, or at half-price, for working people, after about 1870. Often Aboriginal men were employed on pastoral stations, well back in the nineteenth century, to shoot kangaroos and rabbits and dingoes.

As well, people were provided with boats, fifteen-ft 'canoes', i.e. (I suppose) pointed at both ends, each costing the equivalent of two or three months' pay, five and six pounds. One group on the South Coast received a much bigger boat, for sea-fishing with a six-man crew. Another group wanted one too and when the first group demanded to be paid to use the boat, it was given to the second group.

By the way, rations for Aboriginal people were the same as inmates of the Destitute Asylum, i.e. the refuge for unemployed, and of Jails received. Yes, prisoners' rations. The difference was that prisoners and the destitute had to work, prisoners for ten-hour days, for the same rations as Aboriginal people who didn't have to - and had the extra rights to hunt and fish, for which they were provided with fishing gear.

Yes, lines, hooks and netting twine were provided. One group were provided with netting twine to make one huge net, but they demanded that each man got his own twine, nobody wanted to carry those other blokes. A sharing economy, anyone ?

Looking at the maps of ration depots, one is struck

[TBC]

[continued]

one is struck by how every group seemed to be catered for, into the twentieth century, some 'country' having a number of depots. Of course, this kept labour near pastoral enterprises and, inevitably on people's own country. But not much inference of 'driving people off their land'.

Missions, with their staffs of one or two or three, often complained about too many people coming and wanting housing straightaway. Taplin, in his Journal, complained about the lack of room for new people. People came and went, as they pleased, and often in quite large numbers, but this put sudden strain on ration supplies, so Taplin sometimes had to borrow supplies from local farmers.

Schooling, in language, was a major purpose for Missions, and - at least in South Australia - moved as quickly as possible tob a standard-level curriculum. The Rev. Taplin was asked at the Select Committtee hearings on Aborigines in 1860 if the children showed any aptitude for arithmetic, on the assumption that of course it would be too difficult for them, they needed 'different', 'adapted', schooling. Taplin replied that, after barely four months of schooling in a tent while the school was being built, some children could add double numbers: i.e. 14 + 23. In SA, the Education Department monitored the three or four Aboriginal schools working to a standard curriculum, and sent inspectors regularly from about 1880.

Of course, the very act of settlement - and bringing hundreds, then thousands, of settlers to South Australia had the explicit purpose of occupying much of the land, the best land for farming, from the outset. Did authorities assume that co-existence was possible, that foraging and farming could proceed without any conflict ? Taking up land for farming logically took land away from foragers, and forever. Pastoral leases were a different proposition, since even now it is possible to pasture animals AND to forage on the same land: one station in the North-West is doing precisely that. Foraging rights are still recognised on pastoral leases in SA.

Lots of worms yet !

[TBC]