
This mob would not be remotely interested in the Voice or the elite running it. They know from the past experience of ATSIC and countless Aboriginal bodies and corporations nothing will change. All they want is sit down money to buy more VB.
ABC, aborigines, ALP, Anthony Albanese, General, Greens, Voice
This mob would not be remotely interested in the Voice or the elite running it. They know from the past experience of ATSIC and countless Aboriginal bodies and corporations nothing will change. All they want is sit down money to buy more VB.
Dear Editor
I acknowledge what you are saying, your view points and experiences. I am not discrediting what happens.
However, I don’t see where I live as being important, I see how I think, view and act as being important.
No I don’t live in a major city, and I have travelled Aust. and know the issues we have here. I definitely have not been living under a rock. ‘But’ I see the bigger picture, in that we ‘all’ have many problems all around the world. I don’t see it as condusive to constantly single out a tiny portion in one race and territory, when we are ‘all’ at fault and to blame.
I am not interested in why we should continue abusive behavioural patterns, I am interested in how ‘we’ can stop the abusive cycle.
Instead of spending so much energy on discussing these particular problems all of you are experiencing, I suggest changing that harmful negative energy to one that is beneficial and positive to create ‘helpful’ outcomes. For example, going out into the communities and asking, ‘how can I help and be of assistance’. Using your talents and creativity to discuss, find and provide ‘solutions’ and supportive measures.
When will people ever learn that hate will not fix hate? We’ve been doing that for centuries. We can only heal and come together through thoughtfulness, kindness, compassion, effort and the willingness to create positive changes.
Here’s a topic for discussion: Is it possible for humans to stop warring with each other and live peacefully or is it part of the DNA?
For once I would like to be proud of people and not think the human species is defective.
I suggest ‘before’ anyone goes to type or speak ask yourself, ‘Am I harming or helping?’
Put your talents to good use. I see all your talents: those who are excellent researchers, writers, critical thinkers etc … Be part of the solution not part of the problem. I’m sure in doing these things you will all feel a great sense happiness, purpose, satisfaction and achievement, rather than anger upset and frustration.
May we get our act together before it’s too late.
Yeah mate but we live in the north where there are large numbers of Aborigines who also live here. I would suggest you live a major capital city
otherwise you would not make such comments. Come and live where we do and watch the action. We have been for decades. At least 75 per cent of our northern blackfellas get on well with the white community and vice versa. The others are not worth mentioning.Editor
Wow! To say I am astonished and upset about these comments is an understatement. In this time and era we are still here. Sounds like this group want to bring back the White Policy.
I am caucasion before you get any ideas. I will not sit back and let a bunch of, what appears by the comments, bullies pick on others. Particularly, when those others aren’t here to defend themselves. I wonder if all offenders would say it to their faces? I feel like I stepped into a mob lynching.
Everytime I come on this site, rarely these days, I find articles and commenters slandering the indigenous Australians.
What is nonesensical is that you are doing exactly what they want us to do: divide. Surely, you know the basic divide and conquer tactic?! It doesn’t appear that any of you do by this evidence.
And, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. My own so-called race became so horrible and abusive to be around over the last 20 years that I was, once very outgoing, forced to become reclusive.
What do you think abortions are? Abortions kill children/babies! And, most of the time for no good reason. ‘If’ the indigenous did kill some of their children at least they had valid reason.
So what if they weren’t as progressive as the English. At least they didn’t destroy the land and very planet we need for survival. Yes, we are so smart (eyes rolling). And, they were free not slaves like us.
Honestly, please get off your high horses and look in your own backyards. As once again I have been given reason to be ashamed of my race.
Seriously, can’t we all just get along for [beep] sake! So, petty and trivial when there are far bigger things we need to tend to and can only achieve as a cooperative, respectful collective. Ugh! I hate to be so in your face but someone has to say it.
There are certain political agendas and movements and you are walking right in tune!!! Left, right, left, right.
If you can’t say anything nice don’t say anything at all. And if you can’t be kind at least don’t be cruel.
I’m so sorry to any indigenous/non-whites that may read these types of posts. Everyone is being mind screwed and we are all being pitted against one another. Some may not see it, some blindly follow the mob, and some just enjoy it. Thankfully we don’t all think and act this way.
I’ll always stand up for the underdog, even when it means standing alone. And yes I would say all this to your faces if I heard it spoken.
Peace!
Did the initial landing was there any violent confrontation where the whites enter into violence were any fatalities whereby the invaders had to defend themselves from the originals and there was any fighting where many were killed until they succumbed to the whites?
If so, we conquered the land by defeat, then we took control of the entire continent. As history gives the invaders legal ownership. To this day these rules apply, we see it within the Ukraine conflict the winner takes control and ownership of land conquered.
The originals lost all rights to be valid ownership! The Commonwealth was and still retains all rights of ownership.
So how can they have any claims, making any demands of legal ownership? They have been looked after exceptionally well granting them in supplying their needs to carry out their daily needs, no rights to hold the whites responsible for their inability to handle their affairs through not wanting to integrate. The system supplies all the needs to live.
There is already many programs, but they do not want to change and learn how to manage their lives sufficient funds are being squandered on alcohol and gambling.
I have and continue to have daily interactions with their wishes to remain in the squalid conditions. Not wanting to change their ways. And why should they when whites continue to encourage to remain the same in fact, they are progressively becoming more violent towards the balance of Aussies.
As Edward G Griffith explains at around 42 minutes in on the video I posted here. ” More deadly than war”
He explains that regardless of what name you give it:
Nazism
Fascism
Communism
Socialism
Under total Government control is by definition ‘Totalitarianism’
Sonya Irene… Not sure what you are trying to say exactly.. In a few sentences, please explain.
I have read a few books that tell quite a different story to what you describe from the Quadrant, whatever kind of publication that is. Was the story some kind of excuse for the genocide committed? As we know history has been altered in many cases.
xyz##…
I can clear this up – you are talking about the notion of ‘fascism’ as mis-defined by communists as a projection of what they actually are and do – militancy, terrorism, assassinations etc. For a true definition of ‘fascism’ please read Oswald Mosley – his autobiography (My Life} or his answers to 100 questions; it refers to unity of people, opposition to imperialism and exploitation of foreign workers ad cheap labour, and a fair non-debt non-usury based financial system.
It is also worth noting that according to Madeleine Albright, ‘fascism’ is that ‘horrible’ opposite ideology that does not think it was worth killing 500,000 innocent, defenceless Iraqi children.
Nevertheless, let’s go with what you think fascism is … then it goes without saying that we need a proletarian revolution to ‘neutralise’ them once and for all. You will find a very useful manifesto and guide to the methods to be used here …
• Communism in Germany by Adolf Ehrt
(search on archive-dot-org)
• Audiobook: Communism in Germany – read by Sven Longshanks
search on twelveyearsnotaslave.wordpress
xyz## …
I can clear this up – you are talking about the notion of ‘fascism’ as mis-defined by communists as a projection of what they actually are and do – militancy, terrorism, assassinations etc. For a true definition of ‘fascism’ please read Oswald Mosley – his autobiography (My Life} or his answers to 100 questions; it refers to unity of people, opposition to imperialism and exploitation of foreign workers ad cheap labour, and a fair non-debt non-usury based financial system.
It is also worth noting that according to Madeleine Albright, ‘fascism’ is that ‘horrible’ opposite ideology that does not think it was worth killing 500,000 innocent, defenceless Iraqi children.
Nevertheless, let’s go with what you think fascism is … then it goes without saying that we need a proletarian revolution to ‘neutralise’ them once and for all. You will find a very useful manifesto and guide to the methods to be used here …
• Communism in Germany by Adolf Ehrt
url link to “archive.org/details/ilovepdf_merged_20190519”
• Audiobook: Communism in Germany – read by Sven Longshanks
url link to “twelveyearsnotaslave.wordpress.com/2023/07/08/audiobook-communism-in-germany-2/”
Living up in FNQ I spoke to several locals that assured me that back in the day the Chinese settlers were favoured for cannabilism as they came pre-seasoned!
AUSTRALIA BEING A SECULAR NATION HAVE WE ALL MISSED SOMETHING HERE? Is Australia a secular government?. But how secular are we today?.. Who welcomes us to country.. Who gives to the legal right to acknowledge one secular group over another?. Is Australia a secular government?
Diversity and pluralism are cherished Australian values. But they are both derived from the higher order principle of secularism: that the rules and institutions of the state should not be subject to the beliefs of any one faith or culture.
Welcome to Country or Acknowledgement of Country has been added and the rules have changed.. Were you asked if it was OK to except a different idea of the Aboriginal/Indigenous spiritual dreamtimes, truth-telling type of ‘religion? Please inform me what I missed here. I was never asked if I am in full agreement. It is my understanding it also all about ‘displaced peoples’ but not the all white-Europeans.No not them, but it only applies to the Aboriginal/Indigenous peoples?..
‘I begin today by acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we today, and pay my respects to their Elders past and present and Future. We also pay for all aboriginal ritual ceremonies, as a solid reminder all white-
European people do not belong to country.. Indeed we are their invaders..
Life and Death in Pre-Contact Aboriginal Australia- When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788, they encountered an Aboriginal society of almost incredible barbarism and violence. This was the reality of what they found. The reasons for the violence and barbarism of Aboriginal society derive entirely, or almost entirely, from one factor alone. All of the Aborigines of Australia were hunter-gatherers who had not domesticated livestock nor grown crops for food. As a result, the lives of the hundreds of small tribes that constituted Aboriginal society were engaged in a never-ending struggle to find what food they could from what little existed on this continent. Directly because of this central fact, it was absolutely necessary to keep the size of each tribe small enough for its members to be kept alive by what food and other sustenance they could find. It was therefore absolutely necessary for them to avoid adding any excess mouths to feed to the limited numbers who could be kept alive by the methods of hunter-gatherers in the Dry Continent. They did this by systematically eliminating the excess mouths.
This essay appeared in a recent Quadrant.
Probably the most important method of eliminating these excess mouths was infanticide, as Ludwik Krzywicki detailed in his 1934 anthropological study Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics.1 Deliberate infanticide existed throughout Aboriginal society, and it was practised by nearly all of the Aboriginal tribes in Australia. “Horrible tales were told about it. R. Oberlander was shown a woman who had murdered ten children.” Elderly women from the Dieri (Diyari) tribe admitted to South Australian mounted policeman Samuel Gason “of having disposed in this manner of two to four of their offspring: in this way, about 30% of new-born infants perished at the hands of their mothers in the Lake Eyre district”. Among the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri) of the lower Murray district, “more than one half of the children fell victim to this atrocious custom”; the Congregationalist missionary George Taplin “knew several women who had murdered two or three of their new-born children”. Mounted policeman William Henry Willshire:
says of the parts of Central Australia known to him, that at least 60% of the women committed infanticide. He tells of one woman that she had five children, three of whom she murdered immediately after birth, and she explained in her broken English: “me bin keepem one boy and one girl, no good keepem mob, him to[o] much wantem tuckout!” Therefore the women of the bush daily murder their children and do not wish to raise more than two.2
The ostensible reasons for widespread infanticide varied. Victorian government surveyor Philip Chauncy saw a young woman, shortly after her child’s birth, scratch “a hole in the sand behind her hut and having given it a ‘little’ knock on the head, laid it in the hole and kept on crying, the child crying too, till she could bear it no longer, and she went out and gave it another little knock which killed it”. Asked by Chauncy how she could do such a thing, she “replied pointing to the bag on her back that there was room only for one child, and she could not possibly carry another”. When Albert Alexander Le Souef, son of the protector of Aborigines in the Goulburn district, asked a young woman “why she had dashed her infant’s brains out against a tree” she “replied coolly: ‘Oh! too much cry that fellow’”.3
Frail and malformed children were murdered, among other reasons, just because they were frail. A twin was killed (and sometimes both) because the mother could not suckle it … When a mother died while suckling a child, the infant was buried with her, and death often awaited the babe when its father, who as a hunter maintained the family, departed this life.4
Moreover, “sometimes an infant was murdered and cooked for its elder brother or sister to eat, in order to make him or her strong by feeding on the muscle of the baby”. Superstitions regarding twins often resulted in the murder of one or both. There were occasional cases of infants being killed to enable their mothers to suckle orphaned dingo pups instead.5
At base, the reasons for widespread infanticide were the product of the Aborigines’ ubiquitous hunter-gatherer lifestyle. “The natives are generally much attached to their children … and yet there is no doubt that infanticide prevailed to a fearful extent.”6 Krzywicki cites the reasons for this as
connected with the difficulty of bringing up a child in the conditions of native life in Australia, and namely: the long sucking of the child at its mother’s breast, and the necessity of carrying the child on her back for several years during the wanderings inseparable from a roving way of life.7
As Chauncy found, Aboriginal women “justifying themselves before the white men for the murders they had committed, pointed to the bag in which they carry their infants and said there was only room for one child in it”.8 In Central Australia a new-born infant was killed if its predecessor was eighteen months or less; in other places, the new infant was killed if the previously born child was unable to walk; in other places, if the elder child was not yet aged three or four.9
[If] we assume that [an Aboriginal] woman gave birth on an average to five children, then about 20% of the total number of children in these tribes would perish [through infanticide] immediately after birth … In other tribes … it was the custom to murder every child born over and above the three living ones. Here infanticide would dispose of about 40% of the new-born infants … But our percentages are even so very modest ones as compared with those of some observers. Some authorities even assert that 50% of the new-born children died a violent death immediately after birth.10
Some mortality figures may be inferred from these realities. If the Aboriginal population of Australia was 300,000 in 1788—some demographers, rightly or wrongly, put the figure far higher—and if the Aboriginal birth rate was about 4 per cent per annum, and if only 20 per cent of all new-born infants were killed, then this suggests that about 2500 infants were killed every year prior to European settlement, or 250,000 per century. In the estimated 40,000 years of Aboriginal habitation of Australia prior to 1788, it therefore follows that 100 million Aboriginal infants were deliberately murdered.
But the reality gets even worse. It seems certainly to be the case that many Aboriginal children were deliberately killed to be eaten. The existence of this eating of children is testified by all too numerous facts. A swagman, Phil Moubray, relates that he found in the basin of the River Mitchell the Aborigines roasting and eating their own children:
When a child looks well, is “well-fed,” or “fat,” it may happen that one of the men, or even the whole community, murders it for cannibalistic purposes in the absence of its mother … We do not think that such cannibalism was common, though there are many references to it … It was only in periods of drought and famine that child-eating assumed large proportions … In hard summers the new-born children seem to be all eaten in the Kaura tribe. [Explorer Alfred William] Howitt inferred this from the remarkable gaps that appeared in the ages of the children … [I]n the Birria tribe during the years 1876-77, in the drought, not only were all the infants devoured, but even the younger grown children. However, in some tribes this practice appeared, even in a normal period, not to be so very rare. At least, if the gossip that circulated among the tribes were to be believed, cannibalism was even more extensive than we suppose. For instance, one tribe relates of another that it marks at birth those infants which are to be eaten later on; again the children of some women were always killed and eaten as soon as they got fat enough. According to [doctor and squatter Richard] Machattie, a tribe numbering 250 when the Europeans came, during the next six years ate seven children, i.e., about 3% of the whole population.11
ANOTHER apparently ubiquitous feature of Aboriginal society was the striking majority of adult men compared with adult women:
According to [squatter Edward Micklethwaite] Curr, there was in every tribe when it first came into contact with the Whites “a permanent excess” of men over women, amounting to as much as two to one … [Squatter Peter] Beveridge, noting the preponderance of men over women, declares that this exists not because more boys were born than girls—the sexes equal each other at birth—but because the mortality among the women after the age of puberty is attained is far greater than among men: this is caused by many factors, the most important of which is early marriage (at eleven or twelve years of age) and the treatment of the wives by the men as if they were no more than cattle.12
Apart from infanticide and other factors occasioned by the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, another apparently important cause of death was tribal warfare. “Every tribe dreads a night attack from another tribe”.13
Amongst the whole of the tribes of Australia the cause not of fights, but of bloodshed, was, nine times out of ten, the belief that the deaths of persons, no matter from what apparent cause other than old age, was attributable to the spells and incantations of some of their enemies, their enemies including all Blacks not their intimate friends and neighbours … With the death of women and young children the Blacks generally did not concern themselves, but for every adult man who died from any cause save old age, a corresponding victim was anxiously desired … [This] systematized murder throughout the continent rendered the friendship of the tribes at large impossible, and was the great factor of savagery and degradation.14
That pre-literate societies were not the peaceful, idyllic Edens widely imagined today and depicted in the contemporary media, has been shown in many recent works by franker and more truthful anthropologists, such as Lawrence H. Keeley in his War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996). But “The Myth of the Noble Savage” is a powerful and persistent one, and the present tendency to whitewash and obfuscate the barbaric aspects of Aboriginal society—while depicting European settlement in Australia as genocidal—has only strengthened the force of this image.
A number of conclusions may be drawn from the facts presented here. First, pre-contact Aboriginal life resembled more closely than anything else Thomas Hobbes’s famous description of “life in the state of nature”: “brutal, nasty, and short”. No one in their senses would voluntarily choose to live in the lifestyle of pre-contact Aborigines. Any of our radicals who argues for its merits should be compelled to live in their manner: typically stark naked, with no buildings or more than primitive shelter, permanently foraging for whatever food could be found, illiterate, and, if ill, treated by a tribal witch doctor. Second, it is apparent that the Aborigines had no concept of human rights of any kind, only collective tribal survival, and no notion of any of the aspects of justice which we take for granted, from the presumption of innocence to the sanctity of human life, especially of children and other innocents. Finally, these concepts were brought to Australia, however imperfectly, by Europeans in 1788, but today our radicals are doing their best wholly to reverse the historical facts, branding the Aborigines as innocents and the Europeans as genocidal monsters. As always, it is up to the historian to, as von Ranke famously put it, set out “what actually happened”.
William D. Rubinstein taught at Deakin University and at the University of Wales, and now lives in Melbourne. He has often written for Quadrant.
The references in this article are taken from a remarkable anthropological study, Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics (Macmillan, London, 1934) by Ludwik Krzywicki (1859–1941), who was Professor of Social History at Warsaw University. It should be said that while many will assume that he was a right-wing racist, the exact opposite was the case. He was a lifelong leftist who as a student was expelled from the Medical Faculty of Warsaw University for his radical activities. During the 1905 Russian Revolution (when Poland was part of Tsarist Russia) he was arrested by the Tsarist authorities for his radical views. He edited the newspaper of the Polish Socialist Party and was one of a group which translated Karl Marx’s Das Kapital into Polish. Krzywicki died in 1941 of injuries he received when his apartment in Warsaw was bombed by the Luftwaffe when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Also on the topic of this article, see Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia (2015) and my Genocide: A History (2004).
Krzywicki, p. 123. Each of these statements has a footnote reference, omitted here.
Ibid., pp. 123-4
Ibid., p. 124
Ibid., citing A.W. Howitt.
Ibid., p. 126, citing E. Stone Parker.
Ibid., pp. 126-7
Ibid., p. 130
Ibid., p. 132
Ibid., p. 137
Ibid., p. 140
Ibid., p. 242. On p. 134 we read that, according to Curr, Aboriginal women ‘had, on average, six children, though they only reared three (two boys and a girl), the others dying a violent death’.
Ibid., p. 115, citing J.T.H. Mitchell.
Ibid., citing J.T.H. Mitchell and E.M. Curr. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/10/life-and-death-in-pre-contact-aboriginal-australia/?fbclid=IwAR1vnw0jZ2YNCEBj65t1jor_pD9TpUaWf6sr45rtvQ3pxmT5sUInYjGkNfE
https://youtu.be/gOa1foc5IXI
FYI.
More deadly than war by Edward G Griffith
Video: Reality Zone
Fed Up… Its not communism, its fascism that is happening around the world. There is a difference.
They are all sacred sites of the ‘Crackatinnie Tribe’, please be respectful.
https://youtu.be/v6YVj1q3NxY
Red over Black by Geoff MacDonald
I was always warned as a child, the biggest threat to Australia was communism.
How the commi’s love to cause division to gain power.
And who supplies them with all this beer? All part of their greater plan I bet. Don’t put all the blame the Aborigine – the colonialists have ruined every culture on this planet with their poisons.
My wife and I were in North Western Australia at a park when we walked past an Aboriginal who threw his cans and fast food rubbish on the grass and walked away. I went to over to pick the rubbish up and put it in a nearby rubbish bin and asked him when he didn’t put the rubbish in the bit. The answer was ‘white man made it, it his rubbish he can pick it up’.
To be fair to all cobbers black and white, I remember having driven from Queensland and first driving into Darwin in 1976 and the highway was strewn with beer cans on both sides of the road for about a mile before hitting the built-up area of Darwin city. Never forgot it. So me mates from the back of me HT ute threw our tinies there as well to acknowledge the traditions of country.
It looks like paddocks we saw around Halls Creek , except the colour of their beer cans then, was red!
We drove through there in 1993 … fields of empty beer cans, with an Aboriginal walking around kicking them…looking for a full one!
Looks like a typical Australian sacred site bar-be-que area to me.