Damn, I've done it again - hurried and made a mistake.

http://www.pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/kangaroo-hunting-in-colonial-australia

Foxy,

Do you realise that Australia is a bloody big country ? Plenty of room for both cattle and kangaroos, always has been. BUT also, in the early days, a shortage of labour. So pastoralists had to find ways to attract Aboriginal labour to their stations and PLEASE don't say that they were rounded up and made to work - or conversely that they were all shot. That's simply not possible by the one or two or small number of whitefellas in any one area.

The upshot was that pastoralists NEEDED labour, and local Aboriginal people were okay with their groups being fed in exchange for a bit of work.

In a couple of Arthur Upfield's Bony detective novels, he casually remarks about the dams that pastoralists have built in order to attract Aboriginal people to camp and settle near their stations, so that the younger men could be available as workers. And many of the young women too. After all, the local Aboriginal people knew there country far better than any whitefellas. And people took up the offer in exchange for rations, for all of the clan, that was the common practice.

Bu there was never so much cattle and pastoral activity that kangaroos were ever under threat. It's a big country :)

Joe

Joe,

Read the two links I've just given to Is Mise.

And also read about the Vincent Lingiari and
what caused the walk off of Wave Hill cattle
station of over 200 people and their families
and the conditions that these people lived
under. Then dare to tell us how wonderful
life was for their people.

Joe,

There's more at the following link:

http://www.australianstogether.org.au/discover/australian-history/wave

Also the National Museum of Australia has more information.

Seek and you shall find.

Foxy,

If you want to see something pretty cool - assuming you haven't already done so - have a look at the Google Maps aerial satellite view of the National Museum of Australia. See how many images of The Dreaming you can identify.

Foxy,

Why go to extremes, from one extreme to the other ? No, life was never 'wonderful' for any Aboriginal people ever since their ancestors left Africa. Life was a bit more straitened over that period than 'wonderful'.

Yeah, I met a couple of the elders from Wattie Creek, Captain Major and another bloke, lovely blokes, in 1972 and 1973. When Phillip Nitschke went up there, we were inspired by his example to leave factory work and go up to a rural community here in SA. As it happened, like him, I tried to set up a vegetable garden, given that there was water laid on, and there was a tractor with a rotary attachment, and a shed-ful of fertiliser (and a shearing shed with years of sheep poo in the yards). The people there welcomed it too, somebody growing stuff that they could harvest, peas and tomatoes and sweet corn. That lasted a couple of years.

Joe