Good heavens, where on earth did you go to school? I am also over the age of 65 and did not learn what you say you did.

You said: In my time the 'Brown People', the original inhabitants of Australia, were portrayed in books and at school, as a simple, primitive childlike people. The image of the true native was of a near naked savage living an existence of a hunter-gather

Because they were near naked compared to the Europeans, they were hunter-gatherers, and they were primitive, i.e. less developed compared to later 18th century Europe.

You said: I have now discovered that much of what I was taught about the Aboriginal people of pre European settlement days was based mostly on misinformation and/or racism.

So, in your view it is racist to discuss stone-age Europeans or Asians living primitive hunger-gatherer lives? Really? Why would that be?

You said: That there is only one, and there ever was, only one Aboriginal culture. Not true.

I never learned that. I learned there were many different tribes and various cultures but they were all stone-age.

You said: Aboriginal people were then, and are still today inherently passive and lazy. Not true.

Of course it is not true. Never learned that. I did learn that it created a problem holding down a job, for those who took this course, with walkabouts still being practised.

You said: Aboriginal people were nothing more than nomadic hunter-gatherers. Not true.

Which bit is not true? Hunter-gatherers by their nature are nomadic. Where did Aboriginal peoples of any kind have permanent villages, let alone cities and established agriculture to guarantee they would not starve?

Part Two reply to Paul Thomas.

You said: Australia was an untamed wilderness before European settlement. Not true.

Do you have no concept of context? Untamed wilderness by European understanding. It never meant that other peoples had not sought to tame it with fire and hunting.

You said: The fact is, instead of being a simple, primitive childlike people before European settlement Aboriginal society had a high degree of sophistication and the people lived a rather complex existence.

Such as? Describe how Aboriginal stone-age cultures differed markedly from European stone-age cultures? They didn't. Of course all these cultures were complex which is why the Europeans worked hard to record all they found.

You said: The false and sometimes racists narratives of the past are untrue, and we should understand what a remarkable people we now share this continent with.

You have failed to make a case either for deception or racism. As to sharing this island continent with the many different Aboriginal peoples descended from different but earlier waves of migration, you appear unaware that most Australians who register Aboriginality are more Anglo-European in ancestry than Aboriginal and very much shared.

You said it yourself, above: there was no one Aboriginal culture and so there most certainly is not one now. We are not sharing Australia with a people because one people never existed and today, is even more diverse because of intermixing.

@Foxy,

Ken Wyatt you say? He is more Anglo-European/Irish and Indian than he is Aboriginal. What on earth makes him indigenous, the new code word for Aboriginal since everyone born in this country is indigenous?

The whole Indigenous voice thing is a serious joke. The more than 300 different groups of peoples here in 1788, called Aboriginal by the British, were not one people, not one voice, but spoke different languages and were generally at war with each other and today, we have around 600,000 Australians who register Aboriginal ancestry who would be lucky to have 10% Aboriginal ancestry and so are not in the least Aboriginal.

We have a few thousand who claim to be fully Aboriginal but all descended from different groups and a few thousand more who are half, but that makes them as much European, or in some parts of the country, Asian, as it makes them Aboriginal.

The rest range from less than 20% to less than 10% if not less than 1%. It would all be a hilarious joke if it were not so destructive.

No other nation allows people to claim such a thing unless they are at least 50% native in ancestry.

@Foxy,

So, you cite Bruce Pascoe. Can we have his historical, anthropological, archaeological qualifications? No! Thought so because he does not have any.

He writes fiction and has done a bit of teaching. Which explains why his book is faction, a few facts, expanded, inflated, distorted into fictionalised events.

Bruce Pascoe is a joke as a serious research source.

Robroy, you joint the conversation at page 70, well all you seek is in the previous 69 pages, help yourself.

Paul Thomas? Are you attempting to refer to me by name. I assume you are not THE Robroy of Scotland but are a previous poster assuming a new nick.

robroy,

Bruce Pascoe's book won both the Book of the Year
Award and the Indigenous Writer's Prize in the 2016 New
South Wales Premier's Literary Awards. He does have
tertiary qualifications, and has been writing for many
years. He's currently working on two films for ABC TV,
and other projects.

"Dark Emu," is a remarkable book about Indigenous
farming that demolishes the myth of pre-colonial
Aboriginal Australians as mere hunter-gatherers.

Of course it has to be read to be able to make
any judgements.