Entitled to sympathy but not to an apology

Our Indigenous people were described by the early navigators as being exceptionally primitive and, by deduction, stupid. But, they had all the technology they needed. Necessity is the mother of invention and their low-tech did the job. The Dreamtime also exerted a powerful inhibition to experimentation.

This continent had no herding animals which could be corralled and domesticated, so the human inhabitants had to seek elusive game while picking up wild vegetation on the way. Before any society can become complex it must have domestic animals and agriculture to be able to stay in the one place so that trades can then evolve.

By 1788, Indigenous Australians and Europeans had the same intellectual potential but their brains had some very different neural networking. As this continent’s occupants were tribal, a tribe moved over a loosely defined range of land. In stark contrast, the colonists had a strong concept of an individual’s title to a measured allotment of land.

Gradually, the process of dispossession was seen as something unjust. This led to Aboriginal land rights. There was a fatal flaw in this reasoning. It was not recognised that the preservation of a culture in its original form has no validity after the loss of the original environment it evolved out of.

From the Sydney Morning Herald on June 16, 2007 - “Our people are out there going quiet mad and turning in on themselves”. The alcohol-fuelled sexual abuse of children and the bashing of women within Indigenous communities is rampant. Medical officers are describing the inhabitants of Aboriginal outback communities as being among the sickest people in the world.

There is not just a black and white story - there is also a yellow and white one

During the latter half of the 19th century, there were about 35,000 hard-working Chinese in this country. They were depicted in cartoons and on posters with coolie hats, pigtails, buckteeth and evil grins as they hid in the shadows conspiring to do something sinister. There was a popular xenophobia that the government did little to curb. The Chinese lived in fear and humiliation which continued into the early 20th century.

These days staging a Sorry Day for Chinese doesn’t fit in with that race’s understanding that to survive you must adapt. They follow a proven formula: you get a job, you then get a mortgage and you then hang on like grim death to your job to pay off the mortgage. Eventually you become a stakeholder in the nation. We live in a competitive economy to which Aborigines will never belong while there is talk of self-determination and a treaty. Every effort to have them treated differently simply puts more lead in their saddle bags.

A problem most of non-Aboriginal Australia has is the number who have identified themselves as Aborigines but who are in fact 50 per cent or less Aborigine. Only a minority today look anything like those in photos taken in the 1890s. Who would we actually be making a treaty with?

At a time when Aboriginal children attend school for two or three days and then disappear for weeks, the top performing 10 per cent at our high schools have mostly Asian names. One might joke that two centuries from now we Caucasians might be pleading for a treaty for ourselves.

Aboriginal activism has been off the mark

The January 26, 1788 is referred to by some as Invasion Day. That label is potentially divisive. There was no invasion. When Hitler’s armies crossed into Poland under orders to destroy every trace of the administrative infrastructure: that was an invasion.

Throughout history, people have been on the move displacing animals and other people in the process. It is absurd for activists to claim that the Aborigines once here (and driving the megafauna to extinction) should have been left alone forever. It is unimaginable that spacecraft could be passing over the continent today with the astronauts wondering if dinosaurs occupied the big brown island below.

There had to come a time when the Aborigines’ sole occupation of this land was going to be challenged. They are claiming 50,000 years of unchallenged settlement of the one place. That is a world record. By 1788 they already had more than their fair share of undisturbed time.

Sea-faring canoes from Indonesia were touching the north coast maybe 1,000 years ago. These people saw no point in leaving their fertile islands for semi-arid land. Eventually people who had the technical capacity to come in from the south would be arriving - and when they did, they would be colonising the place.

While acknowledging the inevitability of colonisation, the activists should also acknowledge that the Aborigines were fortunate that it was 18th century England which did the colonising. They would have been enslaved and worked to death if it had been 16th century Spain.

In the period 1910 and 1970, it was the judgment of government that children living in the camps had no hope of ever being part of the modern world and those of mixed race should be removed. The outcome is referred by some as The Stolen Generation. The records show that there was a significant amount of goodwill behind a very misguided policy which caused the Aboriginal people much misery.

Also in the period 1910 to 1970, thousands of unmarried white girls had their babies removed. They were dismissively told: “It is for the best dear”. What happened to the babies? Will they get a Sunday when Sydney Harbour Bridge will be closed off so that 250,000 can walk across in their memory?

Why you had no idea of the long-established sexual abuse

Your ignorance has been primarily due to Aboriginal activists keeping the media’s attention on what whites had done and were doing to blacks and not what blacks were doing to themselves and to other blacks.

There was the Deaths in Custody furore which a subsequent royal commission and its aftermath revealed the despised “coppers” to be not the real problem. Then there has been the silly obsession to extract an apology from Howard for the treatment Aborigines underwent decades ago. Then there has been the campaigns for “healing” and “reconciliation” which put the white-black social divide under the spotlight and away from what was happening on the ground in the communities.

An example of a city community out of control

More than 30 years ago the Whitlam Government granted Aborigines cheap housing in an area of central Sydney which was on land of enormous real estate potential. This area was in the national news in February 2004 when the locals set out to wreck the railway station injuring 40 police in the process.

Here is an extract from a community worker’s website:

Countless times I had seen toddlers and their slightly older siblings wandering the streets at night while their parents got drunk at the local. My brother told me of a student who had been robbed of his wallet at knife point, and when he pointed the boys out to the police, they did not want to get involved for fear of causing a riot. I have seen a bonfire made from newly delivered telephone directories and the shells of burnt-out cars. I saw a woman step out of her car to confront boys who had been throwing stones and then had her car attacked with bricks.

This is in the heart of Sydney!

The decisions of the past were the best we were capable of at the time. Now, on the weight of two centuries of evidence, the only conclusion a rational person can come to is that the Indigenous problem will never be solved until they leave their communities to be absorbed as individuals into the mainstream.

Actually - I feel sorry for us all

A few years ago I was walking along a fire trail south of Sydney. Where it crossed a creek I saw a rockshelf a few meters up the creek and went up to it. There were some spear sharpening groves in the rock. I sat down and was soon imagining a small group of Aborigines sitting and chatting on that same rock in 1788.

It was a scene of pristine perfection. When I came back to reality there was a dumped washing machine on the other side, a broken beer bottle in the water and I could hear the distant roar of a truck on a highway about a kilometer away.