Dear Foxy,

Oral stories can fascinate: There are quite a few genealogies relating to Ngarrindjeri families from Pt McLeay on lake Alexandrina, and one, the Wilson Genealogy put together by the late Doreen Kartinyeri, describes the patriarch of the family, John Sewsty Wilson, as 'possibly a Russian-Finn.'

This has had me baffled for many years, since, from other sources, it's clear that he was born on Kangaroo island to an Aboriginal mother, possibly from Cape Jervis, in about 1848. Where did this story come from ?

I've just been skimming through a book of early reminiscences written by a bloke called Cawthorne, in the late 1860s. He writes about a shipwreck off Hog Bay (now Penneshaw), in late winter 1860. At Hog Bay, a white bloke named Wilkins had married an Aboriginal woman named Munarto (also later known as Nell), from around the southern Adelaide Plains, perhaps Yankalilla, who had been given a lease of land at Hog Bay (many people still live there with distant Aboriginal ancestry). The Wilkinses had about ten kids. [Stay with me ! ]

Wilkins went out to rescue the crew of the shipwreck. The captain had drowned, but Wilkins rescued the remaining crew members, got pneumonia and died. The wife couldn't look after the land, so came to an arrangement to pass the lease back in exchange for annual payments, amounting to about a third of an annual wage each year. Those payments were still going in 1870.

One of the daughters, Eliza, born about 1854, married Sewsty Wilson.

That's it.

Oh, by the way, the captain of the shipwreck was a Russian-Finn.

So ........ how does the Russian-Finn captain of a ship get confused with an Aboriginal bloke born just a few years before on Kangaroo Island ?

I'm still trying to join the dots on that one. Perhaps later oral accounts first lumped the captain with Wilkins, then instead of the 'Russian-Finn Wilkins' being Eliza's father, he got flipped to being Sewsty's father ? Ergo, both his father and he were Russian-Finns. QED.

Nope, still working on it.

Love,

Joe

[Continued]

People at Pt McLeay won't read the Journals of the missionary there (1859-1879), George Taplin. Why not ? Because he said some terrible things about a woman there, he was a total bastard to her.

Not in his Journal he didn't: he brought her over the Lake with two little kids in 1876, after she had been abandoned by the white fella who had fathered the kids. She then cared for a northern bloke who was dying of throat cancer. Taplin reported how she made the dying man the 'most beautiful little cakes' which he threw on the floor. I think Taplin was a bit sweet on her. After the sick man died, Taplin married the woman and a bloke from Western Australia who had also been looking after the sick man. Taplin put on a wedding reception in his own house, the only time he did so. Then, three years later, Taplin died there, probably in the same room.

So why the oral story ? Okay. Twenty years later, in 1896, a different Superintendent, Thomas Sutton, chided the woman for shagging around with another bloke while her husband was out working and at church and busy looking after their six kids. Sutton warned the pair, but they took off into Adelaide for three days, staying at West's Coffee Palace. When they returned, Sutton gave her a last warning, so the pair shot through to Goolwa and stayed there for the next thirty years, leaving the husband with many young kids. End of story.

In oral accounts, time gets conflated; different 'bastards' are confused, uncomfortable details get left out, favourable but fabricated details - 'honest' fabrications - get put in. A good oral story can change hugely every decade. Thank god for written records.

Joe

What does SCIENCE - that the forum's leftist 'Progressives' (Regressives) are threatened by and constantly reject - say about memory?

How reliable is your memory?
TEDGlobal 2013
http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_the_fiction_of_memory
"Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus studies memories. More precisely, she studies false memories, when people either remember things that didn't happen or remember them differently from the way they really were. It's more common than you might think, and Loftus shares some startling stories and statistics — and raises some important ethical questions."

- Posted as a service to the many OLO readers with open minds and who want to learn.

Of no use whatsoever to the 'Useful Idiots', the clowns who are always prepared to suspend their own critical faculties and allow others to lead them, who find thinking hard and uncomfortable and 'dangerous', lest it cause some shaking up of their 'politics' (such as they understand politics!).

On another occasion, in about 1842, the SA Protector of Aborigines was informed that there had been a massacre of about thirty Aboriginal people near Burra. As a coroner, off he goes to investigate. By the time he gets to Clare, the number is down to eight. By the time he gets to Burra, it's down to four. He examines the area and finds the site of a couple of shallow graves, and finds a man and a woman had been killed, the man by a sabre cut, the woman by musket shot. The killer is arrested around where Port Pirie is now and tried.

On balance, it appears that the number of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people killed in this way, 'massacres', was about equal, right up until the 1860s. An entire family as wiped out near Port Lincoln, and five Aboriginal men were killed in the skirmishes that followed.

Rumour exaggerates. That's what it does. And it's so easy to invent one. Probably great fun. But it doesn't make very good history. I suppose it depends what you are searching for, truth or story.

Joe

Hi Joe,

When I said you were cynical, your experience seems to cover, as far I can tell, The 5% of Indigenous who are South Australian's and from that you extrapolate to cover the other 95%.
You said <<Give me something genuine and solid, and I'll be there." What's so wrong about that?>> Nothing, but how often do you accentuate the positive and mitigate the negatives in relation to Indigenous. In your last post is there any possible fiction and/or rumor regarding the white account of those events? You accept it all at face value, as fact, do you not.

Hi Paul,

Well, yes, we each live in one place, more or less, so how can anyone ever understand the 99.9999 % of the world that we're not in ? Quite logical, really. But obviously rubbish. We read papers, we watch the news, we vicariously experience what we see or hear that other people experience. What's your point ?

I don't know much even about most of South Australia. But like you, I have a bit of a grasp of what's happening in the entire world. So again, what's your point ?

As for accentuating the positive, I'll always try to do that, when it arises. But surely, hand in hand with that, we take note of the negatives. We critique what we think is bullsh!t. We examine and dismiss what we think are lies or false information, or incompetence. What mug would suck all the rubbish in and believe it ?

I'm happy to trumpet how Indigenous people are conquering the heights of tertiary education, in ever-growing numbers, and usually on their own. Let me know when you ever see an article, or hear anybody, even mention success at universities, people who ought to. And no, it's not just a few - perhaps half of all urban Indigenous people will, at some time, go to university, two-thirds of all women. Indigenous women are the unsung champions. That sounds pretty 'positive' to me.

What the other half do is up to them - it's called 'self-determination'.

Right: back to topic. What should be a Treaty, a Treaty for all of us ?

Joe