Jul 7, 2017
Perhaps this time, finally, we can make the link between indigenous dispossession and the position of Aboriginal people today, writes secretary of the Honest History coalition David Stephens.
The painstaking work of Professor Lyndall Ryan of the University of Newcastle has produced an online map of massacres of Aboriginal people in Australia over the years 1788-1872 (with more years to come). Ryan’s work has provoked considerable interest from the ABC, NITV, Fairfax and The Guardian -- though not, so far, the Murdoch press. Some of the coverage, notably Calla Wahlquist in The Guardian, refers to overall estimates of the number of deaths, which may be as high as 65,000 in Queensland alone (according to research by Raymond Evans and Robert Orsted-Jensen).
This level of interest may be partly because this is NAIDOC week, partly because Ryan is an articulate spokesperson, partly because her map is interactive, and partly because some of this history is so recent. Those who work in the field mostly mention Coniston, Northern Territory, 1928, as the most recent massacre, but Ryan hints that others may have occurred as late as the 1960s.
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Yes, it’s well and truly time we whities of “refugee status” Australians, stood up to be counted. If only this continent’s inhabitants had had the means to send us back to where we came from – as ScoMo and Muttonhead and Lab. airheads before them – have done to more recent refugees. What we did to the native inhabitants of this country was unacceptable. Time to recognise it and not attempt to sweep it under the carpet as inconsequential as Howard tried to do. Terra Nullius indeed?
‘Whities’ is surely a racist term. Many Indigenous are much paler of skin than a lot of non-Indigenous and very much ‘whities’ for most of their ancestry. How are they held accountable?
And why should anyone be held accountable for past actions by others, long, long ago, if indeed the actions ever happened, simply because of the amount of Melanin in their skin?
The question surely is why could the British survive and thrive despite a dozen vastly more brutal colonisations and yet the argument today is Aborigines could not and some cannot, even when their Aboriginal ancestry is minimal? Is the argument that any Aboriginal ancestry has the power to render inferior function in regard to resilience and adaptability? That sounds very racist.
No-one alive today experienced or executed any of the claimed wrongs. It would be delusional to consider one’s self a murderer if one’s parent, grandparent, great or even great-great grandparent committed murder, so why take on the sort of guilt sold today in regard to Aborigines?
Our responsibility is to the wellbeing of Australians today. Most Indigenous are not crippled and dysfunctional. The few who are live in particular circumstances which clearly are crippling and dysfunctional in themselves.
All cultures are not equal even though all human beings are. The worst of primitive Aboriginal culture festers in remote communities and destroys lives, particularly children’s lives.
Time to treat Indigenous the same as everyone else. If they do not care for their children take them away. The current generations may be lost but the children should have a future.
What a load of patronising tosh!
A pity about the graphic cutting off Tasmania – a place where eradication was particularly ruthless.
Yeah, Tasmania .”we blazed the track and shot the black.”
Tasmania is in the original map; just Crikey seems to have dropped it off, as often happens.
Do any sensible people not know there were massacres? That being said what positives does this research bring with it? There is no comparable and definitive record of massacres by invaders on American Indians, or by Maoris on the original Kiwis, or by the Huns in Europe, or by ……..
“or by Maoris on the original Kiwis”
Wuh?…the Maoris were the original Kiwis.
Not so. Sorry.
Enlighten me.
I think it is garbled reference to the Maori caste system, royal & slave. See Alan Duff’s “Once Were Warriors”.
It’s a taboo subject in NZ due to racist overtones however this link is interesting (& does not contain racist bias).
http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-TreRace-t1-body-d22-d2.html
It’s a pity that proper scientific study of this subject is not encouraged.
Thanks for that link – very interesting. Noting the author’s name (celtic/Cornish) and his own comments, one can’t help noticing the similarity with invasion myths from every land, always someone there previously who doesn’t quite vanish, just goes elsewhere.
Since Homo Sapiens all began in the same place, pretty clearly all of us, including Aborigines, are descended from colonisers. There is evidence of the pygmies, killed off or driven out in Australia, questions raised by Mungo Man, and racial mixing in Aborigines which indicate that the favoured story of them being here alone on the continent for tens of thousands of years, is more fantasy than fact.
Not that it matters. Indeed, if Aborigines have been around, albeit of mixed race, for 50,000 years before the British arrived, it gives them no greater rights than someone who became a citizen last week. Or it should not. To have a ladder of Australianess would be discrimination of the worst kind.
And most Indigenous would not qualify since their Aboriginal ancestry is minimal and that would require amongst Indigenous, another ladder effect of superiority.
There is only one race, the human race, and all Australians should be equally Australian. As indeed we are for the moment anyway.
A good many liars deny them. There are plenty of records of massacres in the US by the way. The Trail of Tears, Wounded Knee, the Greasy Grass prelude to Little Bighorn, Rolling Thunder and the Nez Perce.
Is all the other history – dishonest history ?
What a load of nonsense –
Honest history is simply interpretation robustly supported by evidence (The Honest History Book, page 1). In that light, interested to hear your evidence as to why this is a load of nonsense/
“beneath alcoholism, domestic violence, drug-taking, incarceration and all of the other attributes that some settler Australians regard as inherent in Aboriginal people”
Suicide must be inherent in Aboriginal people too. The Kimberley area in the north of Western Australia has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world.
Thank you so much, David, for bringing this to light once again lest we ever forget it. I just wish the Aboriginal people could reconnect with the land and their ancient culture and shed the shackles of the white man’s disease – materialism, greed, envy and I hope the closing of desert communities is not a final nail in their coffin. We need a new radical solution that encompasses social and cultural independence. Farming business communities would be a good place to start but I am just one of those useless onlookers.
Yes indeed regarding suicide.
Suicide rates for Indigenous Australians living in remote communities are similar to those for Indigenous Canadians living in the same sorts of communities.
Most Indigenous Australians are integrated into the broader community, most are in mixed marriages and they do not have this rate of suicide.
It is the circumstance in which indigenous live in many countries which creates the misery and the problem.
And many programmes have been tried to help Indigenous to make the most of their circumstance and failure is the most common result. One of the problems is that like all such cultures, there is a system of sharing, in other words, what is yours is mine, and so even when young people train and take up jobs, they soon give them up because a horde of family members will be waiting for them on payday and take most of what they have earned.
This backward cultural practice, once common to everyone at less developed stages, is why many Indigenous in essence ‘run away’ and hide their whereabouts from family and community.
And Aborigines or rather, those with Aboriginal ancestry, often minimal, have no more connection with the land than anyone else. If they did then remote communities, where they have more involvement, would not be the filthy cesspits they generally are. Even in Africa and India where there are no Government benefits and monies, people manage to burn or bury their rubbish and wash their children.
Reply to Desmond Graham. Interested to read your evidence for this being ‘a load of nonsense’. Honest history (see page 1 of The Honest History Book) is simply interpretation robustly supported by evidence. The evidence for these massacres has been around for 200 years – for those who want to take it in. David Stephens
Eastern states only?
A work in progress I understand.
Could I suggest you lay off the War Memorial? You have no concept of how hard they worked to find the indigenous servicemen where no records were kept and little direct links were to be had. Their remit clearly does not include memorialising those fighting against Australia. The idea originally was to be a place of remembrance for those who could never go to visit their relatives’ graves. By all means lobby the pollies, including the show pony director. Understand that the everyday people are powerless in this regard, have done a bloody good job of what they are meant to and find it aggravating and unfair t0 be harassed over it by people ignorant of the facts.
Not sure who this is directed at but the problem with the Memorial in relation to Indigenous warriors is that it is trying to be too cute. See http://honesthistory.net.au/wp/stephens-david-allusions-in-beanland-two-exhibitions-at-the-australian-war-memorial-2/ Admitting Indigenous warriors fought frontier wars but not being explicit about who they fought them against. You may well be right that this is the constraint about not memorialising the enemies of the crown – but that needs to change.
The stories of WA are still to be told in this interactive map but a recent national touring art show told the stories of Aboriginal people on stations who once they were recognised as people in the Australian Constitution were hunted off their land in the Kimberleys and if they resisted local people state that they were hunted with guns and are still threatened today.
There is a rich tradition, albeit new, of fantastic stories regarding Aborigines.
First of all, Aborigines have never been recognised in the Constitution because the Constitution recognises all Australians equally and does not divide by race or culture.
Secondly, Aborigines were English subjects like everyone else from 1788, and when everyone else became Australian citizens in 1949, when we were no longer English subjects.
Thirdly, Aborigines had the vote, were never classified as Flora and Fauna, no such classification existed, and were always counted in the Census. The 67 Referendum was based on lies and its goal was to transfer responsibility for Aborigines who needed such support, from the State to the Federal Government.
To be fair, schools have long taught the lies of 1967 and most teachers also believe this fantasy. It is however, not true and never was.
http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/cru/2015/06/indigenous_recognition_and_con.html
Secondly, Aborigines were English subjects like everyone else from 1788, and when everyone else became Australian citizens in 1949, when we were no longer English subjects, so too did Australians with Aboriginal ancestry, become citizens in exactly the same way.
Roslyn: ‘Aborigine’ is an offensive term. Acceptable terms are ‘Aboriginal people’, ‘Indigenous Australians’ or use mob identification eg Kamilaroi, Arrernte, if known.
So, it is okay to say white, or ‘white’ or whitefella, but not Aborigine? How odd.
Fact is that there are very few real Aborigines left and most Indigenous are so minimally Aboriginal in ancestry they are not Aboriginal in any coherent sense.
Aborigine is no different to European, Asian, African, Pacific Islander, Maori – are they all offensive terms?
And since there never was an Aboriginal people per se: then that term cannot be used. Aborigines in 1788 were divided into a few hundred tribes, mostly without a common language and of mixed race because of Indian, Macassan, New Guinean, Pacific Islander interbreeding.
Today there are very few full-blood Aborigines of any kind, not many half, and even in the 19th century the British were concerned about the fact that most were a quarter or an eighth Aboriginal and since the view was that any half-Aboriginal should have a choice of culture, the quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second we see today, are not even Indigenous let alone Aboriginal.
If we divide Indigenous up by their tribal Aboriginal ancestry names, no matter how minimal, do you think we should be doing the same with all Australians? Those with some German ancestry are German, those with some Chinese are Chinese, or should we just do hyphenated Australians like the Americans?
Maybe drop Australian all together. Just let people select a part of their ancestry and that is who they are? How do you think that would work?
David – thanks for this reading list. I was aware of a couple but shall now embark on a chronological reading of those many other others you mentioned.
We cannot say we didn’t know therefore it can only lead to the presumption that we didn’t care enough.
We really do have a black history.