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]