Entitled to sympathy but not to an apology

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.