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Dear Loudmouth,

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All the issues you mentioned in your last post have been very carefully and meticulously examined by the seven High Court judges in the Mabo case and taken into account in their final decision - for which I posted a link in one of my recent posts on this thread.

It's quite a lengthy text but I think you'll find it interesting. The best I can do is to suggest you take the time and make the effort to read it carefully in detail.

You might also like to read the text of Prof. Andrew Fitzmaurice of the Sydney University, of which I quoted a few excerpts in my previous post.

You'll find it here :

http://www.surplusvalue.org.au/Misc%20Articles%20and%20Poems/terra%20nullius%20copy.pdf

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Foxy,

What I don't get is why you want to swap one form of racism for another?

Is it white guilt or have you subscribed to identity politics where society is to be divided by race and gender?

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Dear Paul1405,

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Thank you for those personal details of your close connection to New Zealand, the Maori and the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi.

I was aware of the unfortunate discrepancies between the English and the Maori versions of the treaty due, no doubt, to poor translation or perhaps, simply, the difficulty of translating certain concepts (such as sovereignty - as compared to land ownership) from English to Maori and vice-versa.

It's difficult, of course, to compare the history of colonisation of Australia and New Zealand. Australia was "settled" as a convict colony, which was not the case of New Zealand. The Australian Aboriginal peoples had inhabited the country for over 60,000 years, in almost complete isolation, whereas the Polynesian people (the Maori) had inhabited New Zealand for about 800 to 900 years at the most. The cultures of those original inhabitants on both sides of the Tasman were quite different.

The attitude of the British to the Maori was also completely different from their attitude to the Australian Aboriginal peoples.

This difference in attitude created two totally different relationships with different results – historically, far more positive in New Zealand than in Australia.

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Hi Banjo,

One crucial difference between Aust and NZ, from the British perspective, was that the Maori cultivated the soil; they were farmers, having brought all those farming techniques with them from Polynesia. It's interesting that, in parts of NZ where their imported tubers, yams and taro, etc., couldn't grow (too cold in the South Island), people reverted to hunting and gathering, accidentally wiping out the moa.

Of course, such cultivation of tuber crops occurred in the north of Cape York, the ideas of cultivation (and perhaps the farmers themselves) 'imported' from Papua-New Guinea.

Yes, of course, the High Court examined previous judgements and decided in favour of Native Title, not just over the Torres Strait islands where tubers were cultivated, but over the whole of Australia. I guess my query is whether or not the term "terra nullius" was actually used anywhere but in Blackburn's 1971 decision - in fact, from memory, I think he used the term "the legal fiction of terra nullius".

My point was that the term does not seem to have otherwise been used, before Henry Reynolds used it in some of his books on land rights.

Joe

And of course, Henry Reynolds has written extensively on 'sovereignty': did he kick the whole goose-chase off at the start ?

And is this one of the pretexts for claiming that Aboriginal people weren't hunters and gatherers, but were farmers ? That farming, cultivating the soil, settling in villages, developing vastly more social and economic and political organisation and specialising of skills, fostering economic (not just symbolic) trade between villages and towns and countries - all of this was far more possible with farming than with foraging ?

And so, one can speak of 'sovereignty' far more easily with farming societies than with foraging societies ? So the opportunists junk the 60,000 years of foraging realities and jump onto the 'farming' bandwagon ?

Whatever wins, regardless of the realities ? Is that how it works for the three wise monkeys ?

Joe

Regardless of the farming problem, there is no doubt that Australian Aborigines had close contact with the Irish people long before colonization.

How else to explain the very close similarities between Aussie Rules football (which we are told, on good authority, was an Aboriginal game from way back) and Gaelic football?

" Similarities between Gaelic football and Australian rules football have allowed the development of international rules football, a hybrid sport, and a series of Test matches has been held regularly since 1998."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_football

The two codes are so similar that it only takes an hour or so of practice for teams from each code to compete with each other.
The Aboriginal influence in the formation of Irish Football is thus obvious.