I do not believes that better times are ahead for the aborigines, sure a few of them will escape from the pit of despair but the vast majority will not. In 200 years time Australians will still be wringing their hands about the plight of the aborigines while ensuring that they sabotage any attempt to help them.

They certainly are doing it tough.

Still imagine how much better they’ll all feel when they eventually overcome these massive challenges and become legitimate aussies like me, you , CICI and ZCAI2672.

Better times ahead for sure, eh.

The past is indeed in the past, but its effects remain and you are wrong if you assume that Australians are no longer doing to blacks things which they would consider immoral if not illegal were someone to do them to a legitimate Australian.
Aborigines are still dying in police and prison custody under suspicious circumstances but these events never result in a conviction of any of the officers involved.

The most important thing about racism is that it difficult for those of us that are not its victims to imagine how powerful a force it is in the lives of members of those marginalized and disadvantaged groups subject to it. We look at the bad behavior of people and the dysfunction of their communities and think, “surely this cannot all be the result of racism, surely there is something inherently wrong with these people”. I can attest that one simply becomes tired of defending them from all the cheap shots that ignorant persons make.

Consider just these few things.
1/ The underclass live in a mileau of constant arbitrary violence which raises the levels of stress hormones that in the long term damage brains;
2/ Generations of sickly and malnourished mothers have sickly low birth weight babies that become sickly and malnourished children;
3/ In school children are taught by teachers that hate them and consider them “scumbags and vermin” (a direct quote of a NSW teacher).
4/ Everything an aborigine does occurs under the malign inspection of numerous Australians who are willing to go out of the way to prevent them succeeding if they think that the blacks are trying to appropriate privileges which are the exclusive property of legitimate citizens.

Another fallacy about racism is that it only occasionally becomes a problem as for example in Alabama in the lynching era, in Nazi occupied Europe from 1939 to 1945 and in apartheid South Africa. Racism is universal, to say of a particular human being that he is racist is as meaningful as saying that he has two eyes. Racism is a big problem to those subject to it and also disadvantaged. Members of disadvantaged and disliked minorities encounter far more situations where people prejudiced against them are making decisions that impinge on their life. When racist discrimination against a people occurs over multiple generations its effects accumulate. I believe that the damage done to Australia’s unwanted remnants is so great that it cannot be remedied even if the necessary good will to do anything effective were there which it is not. The kindest thing we could do within the bounds of possibility is to complete the genocide in Zyklon B showers as quickly as possible.

Nothing I say will change your opinion on Australia’s black underclass. All I can do is recommend ready some black armband history of black/white relations written by Professor Henry Reynolds. Try your library. I warn you that they make depressing reading. Dr Roberta Sykes “Snake Dreaming” trilogy may also give you some idea of how relentless is Australian anti-aboriginal racism. Roberta Sykes is one of those blacks of whom you approve who has puuled herself up by her own boot straps.

Most of the ideas that most people have about racism are wrong. One fallacy is that a racist will hate all people that are not of his own ethnic or racial group. On the contrary it is possible for someone to be prejudiced against some groups but not others.

I believe that you are correct in saying that Australia is very accepting of migrants, however the same people who are so welcoming to you and your wife may harbor world class racism towards the descendants of the unlawful migrants who entered this country 40,000 years before the arrival of its rightful owners.
We Australians can never forgive them for stealing something very precious from us, the legitimacy of our nation.

One thing that I have noticed is that contrary to my original expectations recent migrants are every bit as hostile to the Aborigines as are angloceltic Australians whose families have been here for hundreds of years. I suspect that despising Aborigines is one of the things many migrants unconsciously feel that they need to do to become more acceptable.

When you migrated from overseas you did not have absolutely nothing. You had intangible assets such as numeracy, and literacy in your own language and the fact that Australians did not mistake you for an Aborigine and hence adopt an attitude of hostility to you. A friend of mine, Boris from Goa (in India), told me that when he was touring the Australian outback, he was refused service in a pub because the bar tender thought he was black.

I do not believe that any of us legitimate Australians can imagine what it is like to be a boong, a coon or a rock ape. Things happen to Aborigines regularly that rarely happen to proper Australians. I suggest you use Google to research the death by police beating of Cameron Doomadgee in watch house of the Palm Island concentration camp.

Is it racist to consider any group of people of the same race as though each and every one of them has the same profile, strengths, wishes and faults?

You write “I was advised by a non-Aboriginal “leader” that I had nothing of value to offer to “indigenous.” Which part of the statement was the insult and who was the target for the insult? Why would anyone think that there is anyone with something to offer to all indigenous people. Similarly I can’t image that there is anyone with nothing to offer to even one indigenous person.

Can we move away from the assumption that all Xs want Y, where X equals all indigenous, or all Queenslanders, or all Indians, or all Nigerians, or …etc. etc? Could it not be more useful to group people by the actual, measurable quality other than the accident of birth? Then your “non-Aboriginal ‘leader’” evaluation becomes “you have or have not a lot to offer anyone that wants to know and understand more Australian history?”

I enjoyed reading that Sue and well written, someone once said. All truth passes through three stages. First stage it is ridiculed. Second stage it is violently aposed. third it is accepted as being self- evident….. from the risk mob

Yes i’m sure this issue will benefit from a few more years of discussion especially from an obviously brilliant proffessional disscusser such as yourself.

But can i give you a tip ( although i don’t speak for my people either ) -

I can’t understand the language you’re speaking in , it reads great but what are you saying ?. I think you may have to dumb things down for people like me.
Can you actually say what you think you want to happen ?

My theory ( for what it’s worth ) is that things will change when enough individuals want to change , until then there will plenty of discussion work to be done by the rest of us.

To Bob G ,

I thought what Herod had said was logically pretty reasonable.
The Catholic Church has changed a fair bit in the last 150years and they keep very good records so you would think any culture based on oral transmission of info would be pretty fluid over the course of a few generations.

Without taking the piss - What would he learn by visiting these people you recommend .Would you mind elaborating.

I am not surprised that my article and my response have caused the reaction that they have(for some) as it is common here in Australia for folk to take the historical issues…and criticisms in relation to Aboriginal people, conquer, dispossession etc. etc. etc. to such a personal level. I know this and only speak from experience as a long-time teacher of Australian History. And lets hope this comment doesn’t initiate another personal attack on me or see me labelled a victim of Australian History.

In relation to some of the comments from others regarding the whole colonial mess - yes it is true that the situation in Australia is not unique but that still doesn’t make it right…and if anybody out there can point me to a successful model of ‘decolonisation’ or point us all on the right road to ‘modernity’perhaps we can find that pathway to real solutions soon.

I do not know if anybody shares my thoughts simply because they are MY thoughts.
And your last comment - yes, I did write the truth and that is evident by several responses I have read today.

Herod’s view that no culture is pure/valid/extant beyond the point in time that it is in some imaginary and undiscernible state of perfection is truly bizarre - according to Herod once any culture is less than pure or comes into contact with another it is therefore invalid. I think we’d all better give up right now!

I dare Herod to go to Arnhem land and tell people there that, because they had over 700 years of contact with the Macassans and a few years of contact with balanda that their culture - then or now - is useless because “what is passed down orally in a hunter gatherer culture cannot be reliable history at all”.

And I really look forward to seeing Herod go out into just about any part of ‘modern’ Aboriginal Australia and telling Aboriginal people that “all white people can do for Aborigines is show them how to live like white people…good and wise white people exhibiting and teaching the better ways of modern people.”

Go on Herod, I dare you - you might actually learn something - and it won’t be from a book.

Australians have always felt the need to control Aborigines, but in exerting control they have been in a position of conflict of interest. Australian interests have always been as they still are in conflict with the interests of the blacks. In exerting control Australian governments have favored Australian interests and used laws originally meant to protect Aborigines from the depredations of lawless settlers instead to contain the nuisance that the existence of Aborigines presents to the settlers.

Improving Aboriginal conditions of life is indeed supremely important, but even more important are other considerations such as:-

Ensuring that the Aborigines do not get any benefit to which they are not entitled;

Ensuring that we do not fail adequately to detect punish any wrong doing by them;

Ensuring we do not let them deceive us and thus make fools of us;

Ensuring that we do not waste too much money on any attempt to help them.

The above list of limitations constitute what Rick Farley described as our grudging attitude to the blacks.

It is much easier to create an underclass than it is to rehabilitate the members of such an underclass once it is created. The latter requires good will and a willingness to spend resources on people that we despise in a way that benefits them, good will and a willingness that are simply not there.

Do not assume that I am criticizing Australia’s treatment of the Aborigines as uniquely bad, it is not so. Australia is a colonial settler nation and its treatment of its unwanted indigenous people is neither much better nor much worse than that of other colonial settler nations such as Brazil, Indonesia (with respect to East Timor and West Papua), Israel, The USA, ……..

How good are you going with your 3 degrees and speechifying ability - way better than than MPM yet she seems happy and you’re not ?

It’s hard to relate the successful author of the response to the confused victim of the original article.
Is this what you were trying to say ? -’ Everything governments/white people have done for us abo’s is/has been /will always be wrong but they should do more of it’

How come if anyone is an aborigine and successful they feel the need to be a spokesperson of ‘your people’.

Remember the best revenge against us white oppressors is simply living well.

Anyway i’m pretty sure most aboriginal people are probably still people and eventually need to make their own decisions good or bad and its up to them to learn by their mistakes and successes.

They as individuals will ultimately need to be able to do this without your help.

If you do feel the need to shine why not do it as an example of what can be achieved .

Tell me what you want me to do. Tell me what I should do that is not too fast, or too slow, or t0o autocratic, or too loose. Who are the people that I must consult before I do anything. How do I avoid the wrong “experts”?

Do you want me to erase history, and if so, how do you want me to do it? When would you like me to start and finish?

How many people share your thoughts? What is the mix of those wanting to preserve and live their traditional culture, those wanting to integrate, and those that are still thinking about it?

What certainty will I have when I get your response that another equally qualified person will not find fault in those responses?

And when you wrote “Oh…and…there is no way you can even catch up with me let alone meet me halfway” you surely wrote the truth.

Oh…and…there is no way you can even catch up with me let alone meet me halfway. But have a good life anyway.

It seems to be the hardest thing in the world for an average Australian to recognise the qualities and potential in an average Aborigine, and its not because the qualities and potential aren’t there.

I don’t have an answers to this - such widespread ignorance - this is obviously a job for Superman.

Your future too, is in YOUR hands

So what are you doing to improve the lot of ‘your’ people?

Make another movie? Establish another Indigenous Corporation?

“They have much to contribute to Australian culture and way of life and they too must share in the economic and other successes as full citizens, with protected rights.”

Dot paintings and ‘cultural’ committees don’t beat a university degree or a trade.

Stop playing the victim and step up.

Happy to meet you halfway.

Your future is in your hands.

But what to do?

Being probably slightly more aware of Australian aboriginal culture than the typical aussie white fella, I reckon there is great progress to be made outside of the political and intellectual landscape. The recent Richmond Vs Essendon ‘dreamtime’ clash at the ‘G’ was a potent emotional event. Michael Long and his fellow organisers deserve a great deal of credit. The event is a demonstration how the mentorship of young aboriginal players is succeeding. The young Australian aboriginal AFL player of today is an example to over-privileged, immature, spoilt, middle-class professional sportsman the world over.