Paul1405,

The British government and the mainly British settlers stole Aboriginal land at the point of a gun and attempted to exterminate the Aboriginals because they imagined them and their cultures as inferior to the highly civilized British who considered themselves to be the children of God and by divine providence given dominance of all other humans and living creatures of the planet.

Was the way the British governments and settlers treated the Aboriginals any different to the way the Germans treated Jews the Hitler years?

It would be interesting to see if anyone has written any comparative histories on this question.

The British government and the mainly British settlers stole Aboriginal
Mr Opinion,
Yes, & their descendants & those such as yourself who enjoy a safe life here live on that land.
So do I & I paid for the land I live on & I have also contributed to the compensation to the indigenous including those who didn't get dispossessed !

I have to say that I get so pissecd off with endless myths and lies about Indigenous issues. I was just watching a program about John Moriarty's designs being used on Australian planers a few decades back. A lovely bloke, I knew him and his first wife Rita back in the early seventies. We went to a Buffy Saint-Marie concert together (I think, in November 1972 ?).

But what browned me off was that he was claimed to be a 'stolen child': however, like so many other children - all of the white and 'half-caste' kids in the Top End - from the Northern Territory in 1942, when he was four years old, he was evacuated south, to Sydney (Mulgoa, etc.); others came to to Adelaide (Balaklava, etc.). It took some years after the end of the War for kids to be repatriated back to the Territory. No, they weren't stolen. Another myth.

Sorry.

Joe

Dear Joe,

Of course there are many who will abuse any system.
Just as there are many who won't.
You should at least acknowledge the fact that there
were genuine cases of "stolen generations". And
they were not "myths".

No, Foxy, i do NOT acknowledge that myth. If anybody has a complaint, they can easily go to their state (or federal) archives, get their file and take it to a lawyer.

Do you think that thousands of people haven't done that already, and got a 'no case' response ?

Do you think that major law firms wouldn't like to mount class actions, @ 10 % of the compensation payments ? Slater & Gordon could do with that financial relief.

Of course, kids were taken into care. Especially, paradoxically, I suspect mainly in the years after the War, when there was plenty of work, therefore plenty of grog, therefore plenty of child neglect. I saw a record of a kid who died of starvation in 1955 at Wellington here in SA: I knew that family very well and still see that child's surviving sisters occasionally.

In fact, on the Pt McLeay Mission/settlement death records, the 1950s were the worst decade since 1860 for infant mortality.

Governments have fiduciary duties, as parent of last resort, in loco parentis, etc., to care for children in their jurisdictions. Many kids were taken into care, usually for only a short time until parents had got their acts together again - six months, a year. Women, until the late sixties actually, had no birth control, so had large families after the War - ten kids was very common; I've heard of eighteen.

And since men were blowing much of their wages on grog, and not very high wages at that, family stress and break-down - especially on the mothers - must have been enormous.

As well, between 1860 and 1960, on that 'Mission', something like thirty women died in childbirth, or from other diseases while still very young (especially TB), leaving about 140 kids motherless in that time. [Imagine how all that sort of crap is still going on in remote 'communities' today]. Usually, grandmothers and aunts took the kids in. I don't know of any Aboriginal kids who were put in S.A.'s largest orphanage, at Goodwood, but there probably were some.

Sorry, dear.

Joe

Dear Joe,

I can only go by what I have read and learned and
by the huge oral history collections that I have
personally catalogued at the State Library of
Victoria.

There is plenty of information available to attest
to what happened in the past. However, proving it in
a court of law may be a different story.

Still, you are of course entitled to your views.
And on this we shall have to agree to disagree.
Seeing as we are poles apart on this - it is pointless
to continue this conversation.