Anthony J.H. Morris, a Brisbane barrister, believes that virtue signallers , using Australian aborigines to demonstrate their goodness, do not have “much to work with”. What has been invented by “white clerics” and “academics” who “pretend to push the barrow for indigenous reconciliation and advancement”, is “intense racism” and “xenophobia”, he claims.

The lack of genuine material to work with stems from the fact that there is little to praise in a culture that had “no written language or literature, permanent architecture, horticulture or animal husbandry.... no wheel, no pottery or ceramics, no use of metals, and only the most basic wooden or stone hand-tools”. There was no calendar, no writing system. No science and no numbering above five. Graphic art still only “demonstrates a level of technical and artistic sophistication not elevated above the stone-age art of other world cultures.”

Hence the inventions, some of which are 'corroborees' and the 'smoking ceremony', supposedly traditional, performed for gullible tourists; and 'welcome to country', which can be traced “all the way back” to the first one performed by actor, Ernie Dingo, in 1976. ( In 2012, Northern Territory MP and traditional Warlpiri woman Bess Price told a reporter that Welcome to Country ceremonies were not meaningful to traditional people, saying "We don't do that in communities. It's just a recent thing. It's just people who are trying to grapple at something they believe should be traditional”).

ttbn,

I have spoke to a number of aboriginals who have stopped and passed by ayers rock in the past. Not one of them had objections to people climing the rock. The superstition has been a recent made up story.

btw see Mundine being able to speak about homosexuality not being normal with very little condemnation from press. How must Margaret Court feel. Its always been about sides ands sick warped ideology when it comes to the leftist. They use aboriginal people as useful ---.

runner,

Warren Mundine has described people, including aboriginal identifiers, making a fuss about Australia Day as "vile" and "destructive" people who do not care about Australia.

Ttbn: There are several possible responses to your post re Aboriginal 'goodness'.

1. I could go through each item that you allege the Aborigines didn't have and challenge it. No language? Of course they had language, complex and poetic. No literature? Stories, songs and poems, similar to other oral traditions such the Scandinavian sagas. No room here to go on, so I'll direct you to a couple of books. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel on the history of human invention and why some places in the world were more advantageous for this than others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel); Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu, for the story of Aboriginal plant and animal cropping and domestication; Ronald Berndt's Love Songs of Arnhem Land. I'm afraid these are not written by lawyers, I tend to go to people knowledgeable in the relevant field.

2. But I agree, Aborigines did not invent the useful technology that European and Asians did. Your post suggests that this means they have no attributes of 'goodness'. They also did not invent: jails, the guillotine, the hangmans noose, electric chair, torture instruments, machine guns, chemical warfare, land mines, bombs of all kinds, especially atomic. Nor did they invent caste and class systems, serfdom and slavery. Perhaps this does entitle them to some small credit of 'goodness'?

3. While the current 'smoking' and 'welcome to country' ceremonies may be new developments, there are many recorded traditional precursors. Again, too many to cover here, but just one example, the used of green boughs or leaves in meeting ceremonies was widely recorded by early explorers and settlers, and could direct you to numerous accounts. Smoking was also used to purify places, for example where people had died, or graves. There are some archaeological traces of this (the remains of ashes of small fires set in the base of the grave). Development of old customs in new ways is widespread in all cultures. (cont.)

ttbn (cont.) Much more serious is the underlying assumption of your post, that the way the British settlers and their descendants treated Aboriginal people was dependent on the 'goodness' of the Aborigines, however you want to measure that.

But you and the barrister have it exactly the wrong way round. The way the British and we,their descendants, now Australians, have behaved towards Aborigines was dependent on OUR goodness. And as Christians, we had no excuse to treat them badly on our supposed measure of their 'goodness', or 'worthiness'. We were the ones with the rule: judge not others lest ye be judged.

Is it 'virtue signalling' to say that the British in the past, or their descendants here today, should live up to their own professed religious and philosophic standards rather than justify their/our bad behaviour on the grounds that 'oh, they didn't and still don't deserve to be treated well'?

If so, virtue signalling = Christianity, generosity, morality.

These 'virtue-signalling' views are nothing new. Here's a quote relating to the 1938 Australia Day celebrations:

"Excessive self-glorification, unaccompanied by any self-examination of our many past follies and injustices, does not evince a high degree of moral development... The past cannot be undone, but let us not continue to withhold justice."

(Letter to the editor, Katoomba Daily, 26 April 1938). See https://aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/day-mourning-26th-january-1938.

And that is why we need more rational, informed voices
on this forum.

Thank You Cossomby.

Someone indeed Had to Say it!