Belly, I agree with Bolt. This book is going to be used as school study material. It’s important that history taught in schools is accurate, not some reconstructed fairy tale that’s suits current agendas.
As they say, tell a lie often enough and it becomes truth.
I want my aboriginal descendants to learn their true history, not some left wing version devised to fit preconceived ideas.

Just to elaborate on the complex history of herding and eventually farming, this article from the wonderful site, Quillette, is very illuminating :

http://quillette.com/2016/03/14/why-some-humans-developed-a-taste-for-milk-and-some-didnt/

Again, there were traditionally no domesticable (and milkable) animals in Australia, so this innovation, this step on the long road to farming, did not occur in Australia.

Highly recommended as a history of the beginnings of actual farming is the fascinating book edited by Peter Bellwood, called "First Farmers". It should be in most library networks.

Joe

Dear Big Nana,

And I want my Australian decedents to learn "their true history, not some" right "wing version devised to fit preconceived ideas" which has been a feature of our education system until quite recently.

I want the 'settler' narrative challenged. I want the dispossession and genocides to be acknowledged, and I want the indefensible gap in life expectancy and conditions to be closed.

Hi SR,

Gosh, so virtuous ! Yes indeed, the truth is what we should all be after, the whole truth and NOTHING but the truth. Nothing hidden, nothing tarted up, no con jobs. The truth, warts and all.

When I started typing up the SA Protector's Correspondence, I certainly didn't expect to find what I did find. Of course, as a good leftist, I expected that he might try to cover up heinous crimes, but the whole tenor of the letters was simply too far removed for that: he matter-of-factly had a job to do, providing rations, etc., and medical services, and other benefits, to Aboriginal people all over the colony.

As Coroner, he had to attend sites of massacres of Aboriginal people by non-Aboriginal people and sites of massacres of non-Aboriginal people by Aboriginal people. His solution to the latter was to place ration depots in strategic places, especially at the hardest times of the year. That stopped any further massacres, as far as one can tell from the Correspondence.

To be honest, I came to admire a couple of Protectors here, Dr Moorhouse and Edward Hamilton who, between them, worked in the role for almost all of the period from 1839 to 1908. Theirs was a six-day-a-week job, often with informal visits to depots on Sundays. Well, six and a half really, because they had to meet the train often on a Saturday night and take Aboriginal patients to the hospital and to hostelries where accommodation was provided free. West's Coffee Palace, for example.

I was also surprised that Aboriginal people received free medical treatment around the colony, eighty years or so before the British NHS system. And on the waterways, free boats, maybe a hundred of them. The men at Goolwa were provided with a whale-boat, but when they demanded to be paid, the Commissioner in charge of Aboriginal Affairs ordered it to be taken from them and given to the men at Encounter Bay who were also asking for a boat. What a total bastard.

Joe

Dear loudmouth2,

You have certainly been at pains to paint a particular picture of what happened in SA and as we have discussed I don't buy it all.

However I will acknowledge just by the recorded massacre sites across Australia SA does not feature as heavily. Certainly not in comparison to the Western Districts of Victoria where the history is appalling. However the massacre of over 250 over the space of 15 years in the area of NE of your state running into Queensland was significant.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australia-the-killing-times-frontier-wars

"Why on earth are you linking to a discredited site,"

Discredited you say? Wow I did not know that. And I'm certainly looking forward to you providing evidence of that because I know you wouldn't just make it up in order to hide from data you just don't want to be true. Many would you know. But our SR is way too honourable to do that.

I bet that at this very moment he's gathering all the evidence to show how the site was discredited.

And since the page I linked was really just a conglomeration of our sites, I'm guessing they've all been discredited too and SR will happily show us how, because, you know, he's so honourable in that regard.

"one whose authors are not identified on any part of the site?"

The editor is Ellen Tucker-Moore. Some of the contributors are J & R Camper, Kawon Namor etc. I found those names on the site.

There's nothing like a thorough examination of the data, and what SR did there was nothing like a thorough examination of the data.

As usual.