Dear Joe,

I greatly appreciate your taking the time and
effort to respond. The commons ground shared by all
participants in the debate is that they perceive history
to be of enormous importance. I'll leave the last word
to Noel Pearson:

"We need to appreciate the complexity of the past and
not reduce history to a shallow field of point scoring.
I believe that there is much that is worth preserving in the
cultural heritage of our dispossessors as a nation."

"The
Australian community has a collective consciousness that
encompasses a responsibility for the present and future, and
the past. To say that ordinary Australians who are part of the
national community today do not have any connection with the
shameful aspects of our past is at odds with our exhortations
that they have connections to the prideful bits."

"If there is
one thing about the colonial heritage of Australia that
Indigenous Australians might celebrate along with John Howard
it must surely be the fact that upon the shoulders of the
English settlers or invaders-call them what you will, came
the common law of England and with it the civilised institution
of native title. What more redemptive prospect can be
painted about our country's colonial past?"

Dearest Foxy,

I can sympathise with Noel Pearson, but the harsh reality is that the Invasion/whatever of Australia was inevitable - if it wasn't the British, it would have been the French, The Spanish, the Dutch, and later the Russians and the Japanese. We're not talking about just Australia but the entire Pacific, New Zealand, the Solomons etc. Would the world have left it alone forever ? Even today ? Of course not. But that's a hard one to swallow for Indigenous people, I can appreciate that. Yet ......

Yes, it happened. But even a sympathetic observer like Professor W. E. H. Stanner could reluctantly point out that, in his long experience, he had never known of any Aboriginal person to choose to go back out and live a fully traditional life, once they experienced that outside world. The temperature here in SA dipped towards zero degrees this morning: I wouldn't want anybody to be sitting bare-arsed around a camp-fire this morning, contemplating yet another day spent gathering grass-seed after sixty thousand years of it.

The ration system must have liberated Aboriginal women enormously: instead of women and girls spending all bloody day (for 60,000 years) gathering grass-seed for damper, then taking up hours grinding it, etc., all they had to do was stroll over to the ration depot and get their pound of flour per head, already ground, stroll back, make a damper, and then enjoy the rest of the day sitting and chatting with each other. Just a thought.

Love,

Joe

"Sorry [mhaze] your misinformed."

Misinformed about what is unstated.

I've observed that Foxy is big on assertion and light on evidence. Just make the evidence-free assertion and then demand that others not be so uncivil as to dispute it.

So what am I misinformed about? That Manne wrote a book? Well I own the book (as a companion to my copy of Windschuttle's book) so that can't be it.

That Manne found plenty of allies? Well since I'd previously written that " I agree that you can find many historians who have written articles and essays and even books trying to debunk Windschuttle's findings " that surely can't be it either.

I guess that in Foxy-land the only way to not fully agree with her is to be misinformed in general.

It also seems that merely having a lot of people writing their opposition to Windschuttle is proof enough for Foxy that he's wrong. You know...safety in numbers, always travel with the herd. That lot's of people and an increasing number write to support Windschuttle doesn't seem, however, to mean anything.

Oh and just on Manne's book...nowhere in that book among the many authors, does anyone try, let alone succeed, to disprove or challenge Windschuttle's findings of error involving the leaders of the black armband view of aboriginal history.

But, it seems, that matters not at all in Foxy-land.

mhaze,

My, you do carry on.

My correction of you - was that Manne's book did not contain
just his opinion . It included essays from many
historians. Which if you have his book you should
have known that.

So what's your problem?

" It seems that regardless of what the facts say on the matter, there are an awful lot of Aboriginal people who believe very definitely and strongly, with a runner-like conviction, that they were stolen. "

Yes there are a lot who fervently believe what they've been told about their childhood. I see nothing wrong in letting them retain those comforting stories, so long as it doesn't devolve into demands for government action to right wrongs that didn't occur or to force others to concur with those fantasies.

I always felt a little sorry for poor Peter Gunner. Raised to believe he had been ripped from the arms of a loving mother by a heartless, racist government he was used as a stalking horse by the aboriginal lobby and the ABC (but I repeat myself). Only to find in court that he was despised by his mother as living proof of her shame at having a half-caste child, reject by his tribe for the same reason and that his mother had sought to resolve her shame by trying to kill him by shoving the babe done a rabbit-hole. Finally, when he was no longer of use to the aboriginal lobby and the ABC (but I repeat myself), abandoned all over again.

And that's been the pattern over and over. Louise O'Donaghue suffered a similar finding. Perkins too. The Rabbit Proof Fence girls. And so on.

I see no value in disabusing them of their comforting tales...so long as it remains a private story they tell themselves. But the aboriginal lobby and the ABC (but I repeat myself) won't let that happen.

individual,

"Wasn't it the practice in tribal warfare to knock the blokes on the noggin with a null nulla & then raid the camp & take women & kids ?"

Pretty much correct. Remember these were a stone age people living a stone age life and doing what stone age tribes the world over have always done.

Blaney calculates that the annual male death toll among pre-European tribes due to war rivalled that of the WW1 trenches. That lasted for four years but the aboriginal carnage occurred every year over every century.

Following these wars, women indeed were taken as captives and incorporated in their new tribe at the lowest levels. I'm not sure kids were taken however. They need women but not the kids.

Among stone age peoples this was usual. A small grouping need a regular injection of new genes (not that they knew it) and taking women from other tribes evolved as the best way to do it.

This wasn't such a good outcome for the women. Even in their own tribe they were little more than chattels but in the new tribe they had even less status. Archaeological examination of pre-European female skeletons shows that about 30% had suffered severe trauma to the skull and about 70% had suffered broken limbs. Even today aboriginal women suffer beatings at the hands of their men at rates vastly greater than any other part of the community.