Beoz

Some country would have colonised Australia for sure. From what I read, one thing that sets the colonisation apart from other countries at the same period was a treaty between the colonisers and the indigenous folk. It didn't occur at the time in Australia and its suspected that this was because Australia was intended to be just a penal colony. No one from that era exists today so one really needs to understand what a treaty involves to pursue it. The general consensus is its decades worth and billions of dollars.

Gordon Barlow

I see in the online papers that some of the States are planning their own Treaties, in the name of "fairness". I wonder if they know - or care - about the backgrounds of all the people who will be signing the Treaties. Did the communities all come by their "traditional homelands" peacefully and honestly, or did they snatch them violently from the people already there a few generations ago? Of course they will swear that they have lived there for 50,000 years, but have they really?

Will the actual signatories themselves be coming to the table with clean hands? We learn from Jacinta Price and her mother that the age of consent for young girls in some tribal communities was 12 or 13 only a few years ago, and that refusal to give themselves up to older men was sometimes violently suppressed. The girls were raped. Is that custom still in force? Are those the kind of men that Australia's representatives want on the other side of the Treaty tables?

The average Aussie doesn't know nearly enough about the proposed signatories. If Jacinta Price is against Treaties, so am I. She is highly intelligent, very well educated, knowledgeable about traditional customs, and compassionate. It would be irresponsible to ignore her opinions.

scotty9000

If anyone wants to start a Do You Like Jacinta poll I will also be voting Yes.

Beoz

When I first saw this video, I thought this lady is going to go places.

Gordon Barlow

Yet another member of the reparations mob is claiming that all non-aboriginal immigrants are living on "stolen land". Sigh... It may or may not be true, of course; it depends on whether there were oral treaties between the two groups - aboriginal and non-aboriginal. We are all entitled to ask the current aborigines how their ancestors acquired their land. Did they acquire it fair and square, or did they steal it from whoever was living there at the time?

Today's aborigines' ancestors were speaking 400 different languages when the Brits arrived. 400!! So it wasn't just one big happy family living in peace for 60,000 years. Every single piece of land could have changed owners 400 times in that period. And maybe 40 times in the past 4,000 years after the Indian or Austronesian speakers invaded and stole the land from some earlier settlers. Most likely, every acre of Australia was "stolen land" at some time or other - in the same way that every acre of Europe was stolen land at one time or other, and Asia, and Africa, and the Americas.

Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone...

Beoz

A fair chunk is not stolen. Or is it. Or who cares.

https://www.theguardian.com/australi...owns-australia

Gordon Barlow

How do other countries handle the presence of conquered peoples? As far as I can tell, there are three ways, roughly and approximately -
1. Apartheid, where the newcomers make all the rules for everybody. The "natives" must live separately in designated places. Examples: South Africa as it used to be, India, Israel/Palestine, eastern Europe for the European Jews as it used to be.
2. Integration, where the "natives" and the newcomers live together. (There may be ghettos, but they are not compulsory ghettos.) Examples: pretty much the whole of Europe, historically.
3. Mixed, where some "natives" choose to live separately in their traditional ways on reservations, but are not forced to, and may change their status at any time. They are subject to most of the laws of the newcomers in matters such as violence and human rights. Examples: Australia and the Americas.

Here we go! Hey, it's an attempt to fit things into categories. I mean well!

old.sparkles

The other one has bells on.

Heard the saying "Those who stir the ****pot should have to lick the spoon"

Beoz

4. The resenters. Those who are wholly integrated but refuse to accept or appreciate colonisation, and demand treaty and reconciliation, but want to retain their colonised existence.

Gordon Barlow

The more I read about today's "First Nations", the less impressed I am with the assertion that they are all - all - descended from the very first settlers (and nobody else) who drifted eastward from Africa via the uninhabited parts of Asia 60,000 to 70,000 years ago - three or four thousand generations ago. According to the political narrative, there were no later invasions before the Europeans arrived a few generations ago.

But there are a few "red flags" in the narrative that are ignored by the claimants, or dismissed as irrelevant. The first is the careful inclusion of the Torres Strait Islanders in all conversations. Now... there are 32,000 of them, and there are a million capital-A-Aborigenes. And it's a clever debate-trick to give equal billing to two wildly-differing sizes of groups. It's not "being fair or generous" to include this minuscule community, when they could so easily be overlooked. If they were left out, people might look a bit more closely at the alleged homogeneity of the larger group. That's why they are mentioned; that's the trick. That's the first red flag.

Gordon Barlow

The second "red flag" is the Queensland pygmies, who were living in the Atherton forest in the 1930s - and transported to an all-natives reservation on the coast. The current political narrative denies their existence. It has to, because their existence gives rise to the question of what happened to them, and were their ancestors dispossessed by the Capital-A Aborigines? That question can't be allowed, if the Capital-A people are to legally cry "it's our land that was stolen!"

Those pygmies may or may not be of the same race - or even species - as the pygmies whose bones were found on Flores Island in Indonesia some years ago, just over the water from the Australian mainland. There's a huge amount of guesswork involved, when the topic is 60 or 70 or 100 thousand years old, and the guesses change by the year - by the month, sometimes. In what order did the first wandering groups leave Africa, and why? Some speculators write of the original emigrants having flourished there (in Africa) - but if they flourished, why did they leave?

Gordon Barlow

The third "red flag" is the claim that the rising of the oceans back in the day isolated the ancestral A-Aboriginals on the mainland of Australia, and did not allow any subsequent invasion from overseas. And, therefore, there could have been no mixing of the blood of newcomers, because the people living on the Indonesian islands were not competent enough to make the journey.

That's nonsense. They were excellent seafarers. By rafts and canoes, at one time or another, they visited every island within thousands of miles - from Madagascar in the west to Hawaii and New Zealand in the east. Australia? They could have nipped down to Darwin for long weekends. They could have built holiday humpies on Cape York, and probably did. Some of them would have mixed with the locals and become locals themselves. And stole the land! Who knows?

Dingoes are reckoned to have been introduced into Australia ten thousand years ago, as domestic dogs in the company of humans from the islands. This invasion alone is enough to sink the theory that the aborigines who greeted the Europeans were all pure-blood A-Aborigines from 60,000 years before that.

Finknottle

Exactly, the issue now faced (& not just in Australia) is who is left now to make the "first nation claim", given that earlier potential claimants simply no longer exist.

Dorothy

Gordon, if you truly "mean well", then you will stop using derogatory language to describe the Indigenous peoples of Australia (and other countries). I have corrected you in other threads that the term is either Indigenous or Aboriginal.

You seem to be pretty fixated on Australia's Indigenous population. Not only in this thread, but in your other one in the Barbie. Why is the settlement of Australia and the Indigenous population is such an issue for you? You left Australia decades ago. Do you also question the race of the first settlers of your adopted country?

Norm_uk

Not sure I am aware of any people who conquer another, settle their lands and within a couple of centuries start guilt tripping themselves.

The Arabs and Turks certainly don't, and refuse point blank any remorse, regret of anything else. They have happily changed names and either ethnically cleansed or converted the locals wherever they go.

So did many of Native Americans, including the Lakota Sioux who now claim the black hills their ancestors stole from other tribes is sacred.

Westeners have become a baffling people who fixate on undoing whatever has benefitted them at the expense of others, while others celebrate and capitalise on their gains. It has all the hallmarks of cultural suicide.