@Paul1405,

White is a term used by racists against those with European ancestry. However, the ooops factor is that this would include most Australians who register Aboriginality since most are so minimally Aboriginal they are not Aboriginal but Anglo-European.

Labels like white and black are racist. I avoid them. You should do the same.

@IsMise,

The irony is that many Greeks, including my ancestors, were so black they were nicknamed N......r, in an age before ridiculous political correctness. Ditto for Spaniards and Italians. Not very white at all are many of those Europeans.

So, it is racist to dismiss a group as black but not racist to dismiss a group as white. Yep, that makes so much sense.

@Banjo,

I accept that you have no idea how wrong you are but by all means, do some research and prove your following claim:

You said:The method employed by the British colonisers was not much different. They simply chased the Aboriginal peoples off their land and « slaughtered »them if and when they resisted.

There is no evidence for this claim. Indeed, the evidence is to the opposite. No-one disputes that there were at times injustices toward some Aboriginal groups and more so in Queensland than anywhere else, but, NEVER was there a policy of British colonisers to chase Aboriginal peoples off their land and slaughter them if they resisted. NEVER.

The Aboriginal peoples were protected in law as English subjects, their rights to forage and hunt and gather protected in law as Aborigines and the British went out of their way to feed them - hundreds of ration depots set up to follow them - provide medication, take the old and sick left to die into care, save babies stuffed into anthills and left to die, seek to educate children.

You keep tossing around comments which are in truth, lies. But, by all means prove me wrong. Provide sourced links to Government policy supporting and encouraging killing aborigines by settlers and a denial of rights to Aboriginal peoples. Off you go.

Banjo,

I don't know that South Australia was all that different, but when I was transcribing the Correspondence of the Protector of Aborigines here (available on www.firstsources.info ), many times he writes to police troopers and missionaries to plead with them to try to 'keep people in their own districts'. After all, Aboriginal people could get free travel passes on many grounds, and some - like anybody else would - abused the right. One woman travelled around half the colony before being sent back (on a pass) to her home country.

I had a row with an archives bloke who declared that a 'pass' meant that Aboriginal people on Missions couldn't leave without one. No, I suggested, it didn't mean that at all: simply that they needed to get a pass if they wanted free travel, to hospital, employment, etc., and showed him as much as he would look at of references to passes in the Correspondence. It's amazing what we just take for granted without any back-up evidence.

Joe

Dear mhross,

I asked “So time for you to give me proof of white women being raped by Aboriginals.” but instead you quoted vast sections of a Quadrant article at me about the physical abuse suffered by Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men. We had already established the these women were treated in much the same fashion by white men, particularly sealers in the example I gave, but also by settlers.

Do you have any proof that white women were routinely raped by Aboriginal men or are we to just go on your suppositions.

This was the state of play in the early colonies.

“A man was tried last week, for a rape committed on a
little girl only eight years old. A respectable Surgeon
and other witnesses proved distinctly, that the childwas
in the habit of prostituting her person. We feel con-
siderable pain and even hesitation, in calling the atten-
tion of our Authorities to a circumstance, to mention even
which makes humanity shudder; but we feel it a point
of conscience not to let such awful evils escape public
notice. The transportation of male convicts without
a due proportion of female, is a shocking practice, and
a disgrace to a Christian Government. It is a national
iniquity. It is felt in our little community to be a most
dreadful evil. And how our Authorities can cease to urge,
or if they have urged, how H. M. Ministers can continue
to neglect to remedy this shocking practice, we cannot
conceive. Our late Attorney-General, in his valuable
pamphlet, gives a list of ten assaults on female chil-
dren under fourteen years of age, committed in a single
district in this Colony in a single year ! !!

Cont..

Cont..

The Magistrate who transmitted the list to Mr. Bannister,
informs him, that parents, unless they bring forward
such charges at the moment of irritation, generally
shrink from exposing their wrongs, if they live a long
way from a Magistrate and have time to consider. By
which we learn, that such assaults are still more com-
mon, than what the list above-mentioned leads us to
expect.”

How much worse was inflicted on aboriginal children for which there was little sanction.

For settlers to have an aboriginal woman chained for their use may have raised an eyebrow or two in the colony but there was no law against it and by all accounts fairly common practice.