IrishDigger

This song by The Seekers expresses my views,

Beoz

I am interested. We all had to submit to highly unsuccessful referendum costing us taxpayers millions on the basis of an Uluru statement which looked deeply into this history.

And it will continue.

https://www.news.com.au/national/queensland/news/native-title-claim-underway-on-3500-brisbane-properties-along-redland-coast/news-story/67000f096ad7d2034d67250b8b526bf6

Is there an issue with the discussion?

Gordon Barlow

Good Lord, I hadn't realised that Dorothy had been chastising me for not being woke enough in my mentions of Australia's native peoples. (Peoples plural, you'll notice; they're not all of the same blood.)

Dorothy

It's not "woke", Gordon, and nor have I been "chastising" you. I have simply pointed out that the terminology you use is not the accepted contemporary word. Being of a certain age is not an excuse for using outdated terms which are offensive to the peoples being described.

Beoz

I must admit, I did not give it a second thought that aboriginal was considered non offensive and aborigines is considered offensive. And I'm not in the retired, grey haired brigade. Its very hard to keep up with all the accepted and not accepted nouns these days.

Gordon Barlow

The 4th Red Flag is "too much pure guesswork"! As a working hypothesis, scholars reckon that "modern man" evolved as a separate species in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Give or take. Maybe 300,000. Nobody knows. For the first 100,000 years - or maybe as many as 200,000, the new species was confined to Africa. Other almost-modern-human species - Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc - evolved in Eurasia. It is speculated by the scholars that the earliest human-humans spread out in small bands all over Africa until - driven by unknown forces (climate changes, over-population, diseases - who knows?) some of them migrated into Asia.

The stay-at-home African originals did their thing (stayed at home), while the emigrants populated the rest of the world, during the next 100,000 years or maybe 200,000. Or maybe 50,000. Some of those emigrants are distant ancestors of today's native Asians and native Americans, and others are of today's native Australians. The scholars' working hypothesis is that Australia's earliest settlers reached Oz after fifty or seventy or a hundred thousand years of wandering along the southern coasts of Asia in their tiny bands, each with its own language. This was not a tidal wave of a single huge community.

What prompted or encouraged or forced the wanderers to keep moving? More climate change, perhaps, or diseases, or huge volcanoes going off, or over-population in popular localities, or maybe even wars. Could be. The wave of humanity swept from their homes in Africa across deserts and savannahs and mountains and rivers to the rest of the world. The wave comprised thousands of small bands - a couple of hundred adults in each - speaking thousands of languages. There was no central control of any kind. The family groups jostled for position, the way we jostle for seats on a crowded train when the doors open. Some of us get good seats and defend them from all attempts to oust us. The weaker and slower have to sit wherever they can; and some get off and catch the next train. That's the way it was in the beginning.

[There's a bit more to say on this topic, but this post is long enough. I'll post the other one in a while... The 4th Red Flag Part-Two!]

Gordon Barlow

The 4th Red Flag Part Two.
If we are to understand how and by whom Australia was first settled, we have to imagine the fantastically long and weary journey by foot from Africa, undertaken by a rabble of unrelated small bands of people all speaking different languages and jostling for places to settle. Like men on a crowded bus, the stronger of them would take the most comfortable places and put down roots there - fending off all would-be squatters. The weaker bands had to move on until they found places they could defend. All this over a period of fifty thousand years or so - 3000 generations, maybe a lot more..

Those who came too late to the exodus had to settle for wherever they could conquer and keep; and those who failed to find places were bounced up the line. Some were bounced all the way to Australia, and when they reached that virgin territory, the inevitable strong-versus-weak competition was played out again. The strongest "teams" got the best places, and the weakest were bounced around until the Europeans came. There is absolutely no way of knowing how long each little band with its own little language, had lived in each little place. Claims of today's residents to be "the traditional owners" of this or that patch of Australia are shameless hoaxes, and we should not be bullied into believing them.

Gordon Barlow

The generally accepted belief is that the exodus from Africa occurred in three waves - one going north into Europe, one north-east to eastern Asia and the Americas, and one south-east along the coastlines of Arabia, India, Indonesia and into Australia. That seems a bit too choreographed, to me. Surely the swarms of independent little bands - all hunters and gatherers - just drifted hither and yon, camping for a few generations wherever they could for as long as their food sources allowed. None of them were actually headed anywhere.

Eventually, there would have been - formed by default - a European group, an Asian & American group, and a smaller Australian group. All of them were tiny bands of a hundred or two. There was never any cohesion, no banding together into anything resembling a nation, or an alliance of tribes. It was thousands of years before cohesion came about or any kind of amalgamation, or even cooperation. The identifiable Europeans, when they came thousands of generations later, faced anarchy - an absence of any form of "government".

More speculation is needed, if Australians are ever to arrive at a fair arrangement between the two modern combatant groups. Goodwill seems to be lacking on both sides; and the extremists have the field to themselves. What we call the aborigines' narrative needs to be dropped right now. There were no "First Nations", ever, so a Treaty is a stupidity. For their part, the latest invaders (from 1788 to last week) need to recognise the difficulties that face the unsophisticated communities currently forced to adopt entirely new societal customs. If both sides will accept that compromise, no more time will be wasted on composing a Treaty!

abner

WOW, what an echo-chamber of a political thread, and what an identity-denying manifesto for it, as quoted above.

No wonder BE is dying, particularly in the Australia country heading.

brits1

I have just read this “thread” and I think your post is fairly accurate, I have a fairly “mixed” family, we look forward not backwards, I think it would be impossible to “compensate” peoples as hardly anyone can claim to be squeaky clean.

scotty9000

It's interesting to note that the word "slaves" is derived from the many tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans ("Slavs") that were abducted and taken to Africa by invaders from that continent in the first Millenium.

Gordon Barlow

Norm is quite correct (post #30) to put the war against the aborigenes into perspective. It has been a worldwide custom to simply accept the loss of territories in wars. What an unholy mess it would be if that weren't so! It has been a British tradition since 1066 (the last time the British mainland was invaded) to invade one foreign land or another, and to kill or enslave the defenders. And the original inhabitants of Britain itself have been long forgotten! And all the victims of Britain's thousand years of empire-building have just had to accept their fates.

The wars against the North American aborigines were just one such unapologetic venture. When the British settlers there rebelled against their masters, the Australian continent was chosen to replace the lost territories with new ones. No big deal. When the local residents there didn't put up much of a fight, the place attracted adventurers the way America had done. The new settlers themselves happily adopted the longstanding British custom of invading foreign places without apology. The 1915 invasion of Turkey is a celebrated day in Australia every year on 25th April - Anzac Day - without apology, or fuss. Since then, Australian volunteers (not conscripts) have happily invaded Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan... all without even a whisper of compensation for the victims. The tradition lives on.

Norm_uk

One would need to determine the people who had ancestors who were involved as perpetrators and victims - a task which if done with any degree of accuracy would probably cost more than compensation itself!

And then there's the huge injustice of making people pay for things they themselves did not do. After WWII the idea of collective blood libels across generations was condemned because it tends to lead to group punishments and excuses to commit atrocities. I cannot think of a serious court anywhere that would punish someone for a crime their granddad committed. In many cases we would be talking about going further back than two or three generations.

And as I pointed out, calls for reparations and endless guilt don't seem to be laid at the feet of anyone except European peoples. Not a word about the incredible cruelty of some of the Bantu Empires like the Zulu. Not demands to the Mongols - who killed so many it caused regional climate change. No demands from the many Western African kingdoms to took their neighbours as slaves to sell to Europeans and Arabs. Turkey itself sits on occupied lands - they come from central asia yet no one calls them colonisers. Same with Arabs in North Africa and other groups around the world. Europeans just did the same thing on a bigger scale.

abner

So you'll be happy then when China starts encroaching on us, a step at a time?

Gordon Barlow

Well, they always have before, right?

Nah, I mixed that up. It's we who have a history of encroaching on them. For no sensible reason, back in the 1950s, Australian troops warred with Chinese troops in Korea, on China's doorstep! And a while earlier than that, Australia's motherland (Britain) actually invaded China proper, and annexed some of its land. If I lived in Oz, I'd be more frightened of the Americans than the Chinese. Why would China encroach on Australia? (Unless the Aussies invaded some part of China, of course. Taiwan, say...)