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Dear Loudmouth,

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You ask :

« You don't think choice, including poor choices, had anything to do with it ? » 

I think it has everything to do with it, Joe. That is the crux of the problem. It is what we call in legal terms in the insurance and risk management professions, the « proximate cause », i.e., the prime or dominant cause of loss, damage or prejudice.

The British Crown and Government gave no choice to anybody affected by their decision to colonise Australia : neither to the convicts they deported from their homeland to the other side of the world, nor to the Aboriginal peoples whose traditional lands they expropriated.

British colonisation was the proximate cause of the chain of events that ensued :

« Traditional owners parked in reserves. No need to gather. No need to hunt. Nothing to do. Disintegration of social structures. Loss of dignity and self-esteem. Alcohol, petrol sniffing and drugs. Wife bashing, rapes and juvenile delinquence. Prisons and suicides. Child expropriation and religious indoctrination. Progressive urbanisation. Forced assimilation of Western culture and loss of traditional culture ... »

As I indicated to rhross in a previous post :

«  I see nothing wrong with invasion and colonisation by anybody, irrespective of the colour of their skin, provided that the object of the invasion and colonisation is unowned and unoccupied, or provided the owner and occupier (should there be any) arrive at an amical agreement with the invader and coloniser on terms that the owner and occupier consider to be perfectly acceptable.

« I see no reason to dfferentiate on the basis of skin colour. I see good reason to differentiate on the basis of prior ownership and occupation as well as on method of invasion and colonisation » (http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=8797#284959)

Any so-called « choice » exercised by the convicts and Aboriginal peoples was not free choice. It was necessarily made « under duress », in the legal sense of the term, i.e., under the constraint of colonisation.

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We have no way of knowing, today, if, at the time, the Aboriginal peoples had been allowed to choose freely, they would have preferred to be colonised and educated by the British, assimilate British culture and live in modern urban environments, or « stay out-bush, living their charming but quaint culture, doing their colourful dances », as you describe it.

I'm afraid we'll never know, Joe, and, in any event, the question is pointless because they were never really allowed to choose freely, withou constraint of any sort. Some were forced. Others chose under duress. The rest were left stranded in limbo, caught between two cultures, cumulating the worst of both.

Call it apartheid if you like. But whose fault is that ? Who created it ? What was the proximate cause ?

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Banjo,

"We have no way of knowing, today, if, ..... " Well, yes we do. The anthropologist W.E.H.Stanner, at the end of his long career, remarked that in all his time in the field, he had never come across any Aboriginal person who had 'come in' for the rations, etc., who had gone back out into the traditional foraging life again.

People are, after all, not stupid. They weigh up options and, even if their interpretation of what's going on is inaccurate, that's what they choose. Poor choices (as they may eventually become) may lead people to keep making poor decisions, but it's they who make the decisions, there isn't - for all the paranoid post-event interpretations - anybody really stopping them from making them. If grog is available, it's people who choose to get into it, nobody forced them, quite the reverse as far as Missions were concerned. I'm tired of people passing the buck for their own decisions and using everybody else as scapegoats.

So now there's going to be a separate hospital in Brisbane for Indigenous people ? Do these hotshots know anything about apartheid ? Actually, I fear that they may do, but that's just probably paranoia on my part :)

Will there ever be any bloody common sense in Aboriginal affairs ?

Joe

Hi Joe, I hope you are not skirting the question. You speak of choices.

Given all these choices, when confronted by the European what should have Aboriginal people done (choose to do) to put themselves in a position of equality with the European?

Paul,

They could have performed a Welcome to Country ceremony.

Paul,

That's a weird question: I don't think anybody gave it a thought, people were simply interested in making the most of what they perceived as opportunities. I'm not sure equality was otherwise on the agenda, no more than anybody else in their daily lives. And I don't just mean in recent times, but back in the early days.

People were maybe not aware that they had rights to use the environment as they always had done - except of course, that people did go fishing etc., seek out help from the Protector in travel, medical attention, etc. They would not have been aware that they were British subjects, any more than anybody else, except maybe when they had to go to court. Maybe not even then. People didn't (and don't) go around with a set of law books under their arms.

Of course, I can talk only of South Australia, an insignificant part of Australia, and not really much even about that.

Joe