@Paul405,

I have no issue with people citing instances of violence toward Aborigines but why is it so rare for the same people to balance their comments with instances of violence toward Europeans by Aborigines, or violence by Aborigines toward other Aborigines?

Explain to me, why, if your story of poisoned flour is true, and we can run with it as true, that is terrible, and indeed it is, but the slaughter of men, women and children who were shipwrecked is not terrible? Let us leave aside the slaughter of settlers, including babies, and often the rape of women, because of the mitigating factor that they were on Aboriginal land and looked like staying. Let us deal with desperate shipwreck survivors.

Do you know the story of the Maria, shipwrecked off the South Australian coast, where men, women and children survivors were murdered by local Aborigines? Tell me, as shipwreck survivors, and one presumes the Aborigines were smart enough to work out they were desperate survivors and not settlers, why did they deserve to die such horrible deaths?

Or is Aboriginal violence okay because, well, only European violence counts, because, well, Europeans have to be held to a higher standard? That sounds very racist.

@Banjo Paterson,

You said: It is not surprising, under these circumstances, that many of the descendents of those primitive peoples never assimilated the culture of the colonisers and continue to live hopeless, despicable lives at the periphery of modern Western civilisation.

So, you take the view that there is something about Aboriginal ancestry, in any of its hundreds of manifestations in the peoples descended from earlier waves of migration and colonisation, that makes for inferior adaptability function?

I mean the British survived many invasions and colonisations, lost their land, dignity, self esteem and much of their traditional culture and made their way through. Indeed, surely that is the story of human evolution.

Can I ask you why, it was okay for different waves of people to colonise Australia prior to 1788 and yet, as I read you, not okay for the British to do it?

I mean when the groups out of India arrived about 4,000 years ago with what became the Dingo, they drove other groups south and no doubt killed a lot of them in the process to appropriate their land. When the groups came down from New Guinea into what is now Queensland, and did the same, how is any of that different? Unless you hold Europeans to a higher standard of behaviour which is a tad racist.

We all share a common ancestor. We all came out of Africa. Why was it okay for Aboriginal peoples, or peoples we came to call Aborigines, to walk out of Africa and colonise other parts of the world and it was not okay for Europeans or even Asians to do the same thing?

Surely if colonisation is a worm, we are all worms, except perhaps for a few African descendants who never left the Rift Valley.

How do you think things would have worked if no Homo Sapiens ever walked out of Africa?

Dear rhross,

"Let us leave aside the slaughter of settlers, including babies, and often the rape of women, because of the mitigating factor that they were on Aboriginal land and looked like staying."

The often rape of women? Where are you pulling that from? One of the noted features of the frontier wars was how little if any rape was inflicted on white women by Aboriginals.

Truganini the famous Tasmanian aboriginal women had her mother killed by settlers and her sisters taken into sexual slavery. When being rowed to an island her husband to be was thrown overboard and when he tried climb back his hands where chopped off by axe. Truganini was then repeatedly raped by the two white settlers.

Truganini later went on to joins others in killing settlers in Victoria.

Much of the violence from Aboriginies stemmed from the abduction, rape,and murder of their women by whalers, sealers and settlers.

To even flag it as an excuse to kill indigenous people is wrong.

Steele,

It's interesting that, in the early days, groups used to come down into 'settled' country, raid the huts and kill the sheep - but when the Protector set up ration depots up nearer their country, the raids stopped. Even when the depots were established BEFORE pastoral leases were approved. This seemed to happen in the Flinders Ranges, and at each side of Eyre Peninsula, at Wallianippie and Coralbignie. Pastoralists learnt (the hard way) to set themselves up as ration centres, building store-rooms and issuing rations at no cost. Cheaper than hostility. Plus the young men could be used as labour requirements dictated.

That also stopped - at least officially - killings on both sides.

Cheers,

Joe

rhross, at the end of WWII in Nazi Concentration Camps there are recorded instances of Jews attacking and killing camp guards and other Jewish collaborators. For the sake of balance should those Jews have been prosecuted? Something like your Aboriginal claims. I do not condone Aboriginals killing Whites at all.

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Dear Loudmouth,

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You wrote :

« There may have been cases of the early SA colonial authorities, up to about 1849, 'granting' pastoralists freehold title ... What does this have to do with farming ? »

We already discussed that question in great detail, Joe. But, never mind, I'll forgive you this time. I'll copy and paste the relevant sections of our exchange here to make it easy for you :

The British colonised South Australia on the same grounds as the rest of the country, i.e., that it was occupied by nomadic Aboriginal tribes who had no ownership rights to the land they occupied because they did not farm it.

I indicated that the British defined « farming » in their Oxford English Dictionary, as :

« The activity or business of growing crops and raising livestock »

You replied that « 'farming' is generally defined as requiring the cultivation of the soil. I'm not interested in any claims which skirt around that and talk of 'management', etc. 'Cultivation' is the cornerstone of farming … When Justice Blackburn used the term "terra nullius", thats not what it meant: it referred to land which didn't have a recognizable system of land ownership - land use, yes, of course, but not land ownership. ».

I responded that, effectively, this appeared to be the basis on which the British justified their colonisation of Australia. They claimed it was inhabited by primitive peoples who used the land without « labouring » it, which, under so-called International law, meant that it was « terra nullius » (nobody's land).

I added that "British common law failed to recognise Aboriginal rights to land. International law, as it stood in 1788, had been elaborated by the major European colonial powers to suit their purposes. None of the world’s indigenous peoples were consulted or invited to participate in their deliberations. It was strictly a European construction. The rest of the world had no say in it. Its validity is not at all evident by today’s standards."

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(Continued …)

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