lostpunk5545
Bluelighter
- Joined
- May 20, 2003
- Messages
- 10,324
Ok the last thread on this topic was closed and seeing as it denigrated into nothing of worth rather than ask for it to be reopened I thought I would start a new thread.
I would like to ask from the start that people avoid using racial slanders of any kind, after all it's the twenty-first century. I would also like to share this pseudo-essay (it's rather informal) that I got caught up in writing when I was going to post about a book I've read recently (which has had a profound effect on my thoughts on this country), in the reading thread. It's only the first half and I plan to relate the past into the plight of the present Aboriginal population and their societal problems.
But as always please feel free to discourse on anything relating to Indigenous Australians and issues.
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Bruce Elder's Blood On The Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of the Aboriginal Australians Since 1788 puts together a history of as many massacres of Aboriginal people as he was able to find out about through letters, records and stories passed on by the Aboriginals in their oral tradition. It’s not inclusive because a culture of silence means that many massacres were never reported in any sense, and if no Aboriginals survived there was no oral account passed down.
To tell the truth I had never actually really thought about how the Aboriginal people ended up in their current situation. Not really thought about the details. The only word that can adequately describe what the settlers of our country did to them is genocide. When Cook first landed here there were and estimated 300 000 – 600 000 Aboriginals living in Australia. According to a census in 1911 there were 20 000. The only way Hitler could have done a more effective job of eliminating the Jewish people is to have invaded Israel itself and systematically plundered the country exterminating the Jewish people along the way, which is exactly what we did here (I’m well aware that when Hitler was alive there was no state of Israel, I’m just analogising here).
To start with tens of thousands of Aboriginals were killed by diseases brought by the settlers of Australia, mainly influenza and small pox. It was not uncommon for settlers to come across caves full of corpses and skeletons of Aboriginal victims of these diseases in the first few years of settlement. But the unwilling destruction of the Aboriginal people through diseases brought from Europe is in no way the disturbing part of the story.
Prior to Europeans arriving in Australia the Aboriginal people lived all over Australia. Their lives were structured around the seasons moving with the food, using both the native flora and fauna. There were many tribes and sub-tribes, and a corresponding amount of dialects, although in an area the languages were common enough for neighbouring tribes to speak with their immediate and extended neighbours.
The Aboriginal people were generally peaceful. But they occasionally had fights with each other, and small battles based on transgressions of honour which was important to them. Their life was fairly vibrant, with tribes that shared resources, such as pine nuts from trees in an area having annual events to catch up and eat. Songs, dancing, yarning, all that shit. As they moved with the food sources during the seasons they lived harmoniously with the land allowing resources to recover before they used them again. This is a balance that was developed over the 60 000 years or more they have been present in this country.
I’m not going to rave about lessons we could learn from them about sustainability because quite frankly, from any scientific view point it’s too late. We’ve fucked this country with inappropriate agriculture and pollution, and we’re reaping our reward with water shortages. We won’t recover.
But back to the point, not long after the colony was established tracts of land were given out to settlers (ex-convicts, people who had come here to colonise etc.). Of course in the European way land was cleared to grow crops, and cattle were left to graze on native plants. In no time at all the delicate balance the Aboriginal people had maintained with nature for at least the last 40 000 years was destroyed.
In an area that was being moved to by settlers there was almost a formula that was played out time and time again. As the settlers first started moving into an area relations with the Aboriginal people were amicable. But once settlers started pouring in the land was destroyed and the indigenous people had no food. So eventually they would have no choice but to spear or take cattle and sheep. They saw the animals as theirs in a lot of cases as the animals were on their land. Obviously they had little to no concept of European laws of ownership.
So eventually European land owners would become sick of their cattle being stolen and decide the Aboriginals needed to be taught a lesson which usually involved shooting a few Aboriginal people. Which would provoke a retaliation from the Aboriginals and a shepherd or squatter would be speared. Seems pretty much tit for tat in my humble opinion. The Aboriginal people were pushed into a corner and had no choice but to fight for their survival, or starve to death.
I’d like to say that this was the usual chain of events. But it was just as common for the provocation of Aboriginal violence to be the (repeated) raping of an Aboriginal woman by a squatter or shepherd. Or the use of a couple of Aboriginal children as target practice. Also a common cause of violence was a white man entering into an agreement with an Aboriginal woman with some sort of payment for sex. In the most part they were not paid and this could cause violence against the white in question. Remember I said that the Aboriginal people had a high sense of honour, a deal’s a deal.
So as soon as a white was killed the local settlers would get up in arms and a posse of generally between three and fifteen would be formed and punitive action would be taken against the Aboriginals. It was always stated by these posses that the intention was to capture the specific perpetrators of a crime, but this almost never happened. These men were not what we think of as civilised men. The Australian continent was tough and so were the most of the men interested in colonising it. The majority (I’d love to say it was the exception) of these men would think nothing of shooting Aboriginal people for fun, or raping native women or girls that strayed unknowingly near them.
So anyways a posse would ride out and sometimes for days murder any Aboriginal they came across. They would surround entire tribes (sometimes when they were relaxing in a swimming hole, or collecting food) and open fire (though just as commonly hack them up with swords, bayonets and axes). Women and children were shot just as indiscriminately as men. Women were captured and raped repeatedly. Babies heads were smashed upon trees or they were simply thrown onto fires alive. Numbers for these massacre could number between a few or more commonly between 20 to 60 Aboriginals killed.
These massacres however were not always just in retaliation to the killings of whites. Sometimes just for spearing cattle or sheep.
So after these massacres occurred the Aboriginal people were truly backed against the wall. It was fight or die. So for a period there would be guerilla-like skirmishes. Sometimes the goal was just to slaughter as many cattle or sheep as possible, other times shepherds and squatters were killed. In any case the Aboriginal casualties of these frontier wars were always ten fold the European. Eventually the local Aboriginal population would be beaten to defeat. Either the whole tribe became extinct or they were employed as slave labor on properties for food and tobacco. Or they ended up in a town. This is when alcoholism first became an issue for indigenous Australians. When you’ve got nothing left, you drink. The same thing a person who loses a job or spouse does. When you’re at the bottom, it’s hard to look up.
Having read this book I was interested to research what had happened to the local Aboriginal people in my area, as the book obviously covers the whole of Australia it’s not possible to cover every area in detail. So with a bit of browsing I found out what happened to the Darkinjung people, the traditional owners of my home, the Central Coast.
In short they are extinct.
Scenarios such as those mentioned above were played out over and over again as Europeans settled new areas of Australia. From Victoria to Queensland to South Australia as we spread out from Sydney. The Aboriginals of Tasmania were treated particularly viciously. Some massacres occurred in Western Australia and the Northern Territory as late as 1928. Whilst the offenders were prosecuted they were all acquitted. My Uncle (who lives in the NT) told me that there was apparently a massacre of Aboriginals as late as the 1960s there, with a bunch of Aboriginals rounded up into a cave and shot down. Western Australia and the Northern Territory were the last areas of Australia to be colonised and civilised.
But massacres of Aboriginal people by these means only were not to be the only way of eliminating them. We got more ingenious as time went on. Soon on a regular basis they were being poisoned en masse by giving them gifts of damper laced with strychnine or arsenic. In one case a particularly sadistic settler employed a tribe of Aboriginals to work for him for a few days and payed them in poisoned damper. Man sized traps similar to those used for bears were used on properties. They were impossible to open so all the property owner had to do was walk around in the morning and murder the Aboriginals who had been caught overnight. It all sounds a bit different from Banjo Patterson’s poems doesn’t it?
Technically Aboriginals were British subjects under the law. It was illegal for them to be murdered, they technically had the same rights as white Australians. But as they were not Christian they could not swear on the bible and this contradiction meant that they could not represent themselves in court. In fact the only case of whites ever being successfully prosecuted for crimes against the indigenous people occurred because a massacre by a posse occurred on a settler’s property. This man was sympathetic to and respectful of the local Aboriginal people, whom he allowed to live on his land. Although in this one case of justice, 7 of the 11 of the posse were hung, instead of preventing further crime against the Aboriginal people it simply drove the massacres underground. Men formed bonds of silence along with their posses.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Ok I’ve been writing for a fair while now so I’m going to wrap up what I have to say there and finish my thoughts into a second installment at a later time or date. Note that I am paraphrasing a book that is some 300 pages in length so I’m not really using specific dates or instances of which the book is full. I recommend that everyone should read this book. If our schools won’t teach us the the truth of our dark history, and only offer up a sanitised version of events, then we have to do it ourselves. The stuff I’ve been talking about above is the real truth that Howard is so afraid to admit to and apologise for.
I would like to ask from the start that people avoid using racial slanders of any kind, after all it's the twenty-first century. I would also like to share this pseudo-essay (it's rather informal) that I got caught up in writing when I was going to post about a book I've read recently (which has had a profound effect on my thoughts on this country), in the reading thread. It's only the first half and I plan to relate the past into the plight of the present Aboriginal population and their societal problems.
But as always please feel free to discourse on anything relating to Indigenous Australians and issues.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Bruce Elder's Blood On The Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of the Aboriginal Australians Since 1788 puts together a history of as many massacres of Aboriginal people as he was able to find out about through letters, records and stories passed on by the Aboriginals in their oral tradition. It’s not inclusive because a culture of silence means that many massacres were never reported in any sense, and if no Aboriginals survived there was no oral account passed down.
To tell the truth I had never actually really thought about how the Aboriginal people ended up in their current situation. Not really thought about the details. The only word that can adequately describe what the settlers of our country did to them is genocide. When Cook first landed here there were and estimated 300 000 – 600 000 Aboriginals living in Australia. According to a census in 1911 there were 20 000. The only way Hitler could have done a more effective job of eliminating the Jewish people is to have invaded Israel itself and systematically plundered the country exterminating the Jewish people along the way, which is exactly what we did here (I’m well aware that when Hitler was alive there was no state of Israel, I’m just analogising here).
To start with tens of thousands of Aboriginals were killed by diseases brought by the settlers of Australia, mainly influenza and small pox. It was not uncommon for settlers to come across caves full of corpses and skeletons of Aboriginal victims of these diseases in the first few years of settlement. But the unwilling destruction of the Aboriginal people through diseases brought from Europe is in no way the disturbing part of the story.
Prior to Europeans arriving in Australia the Aboriginal people lived all over Australia. Their lives were structured around the seasons moving with the food, using both the native flora and fauna. There were many tribes and sub-tribes, and a corresponding amount of dialects, although in an area the languages were common enough for neighbouring tribes to speak with their immediate and extended neighbours.
The Aboriginal people were generally peaceful. But they occasionally had fights with each other, and small battles based on transgressions of honour which was important to them. Their life was fairly vibrant, with tribes that shared resources, such as pine nuts from trees in an area having annual events to catch up and eat. Songs, dancing, yarning, all that shit. As they moved with the food sources during the seasons they lived harmoniously with the land allowing resources to recover before they used them again. This is a balance that was developed over the 60 000 years or more they have been present in this country.
I’m not going to rave about lessons we could learn from them about sustainability because quite frankly, from any scientific view point it’s too late. We’ve fucked this country with inappropriate agriculture and pollution, and we’re reaping our reward with water shortages. We won’t recover.
But back to the point, not long after the colony was established tracts of land were given out to settlers (ex-convicts, people who had come here to colonise etc.). Of course in the European way land was cleared to grow crops, and cattle were left to graze on native plants. In no time at all the delicate balance the Aboriginal people had maintained with nature for at least the last 40 000 years was destroyed.
In an area that was being moved to by settlers there was almost a formula that was played out time and time again. As the settlers first started moving into an area relations with the Aboriginal people were amicable. But once settlers started pouring in the land was destroyed and the indigenous people had no food. So eventually they would have no choice but to spear or take cattle and sheep. They saw the animals as theirs in a lot of cases as the animals were on their land. Obviously they had little to no concept of European laws of ownership.
So eventually European land owners would become sick of their cattle being stolen and decide the Aboriginals needed to be taught a lesson which usually involved shooting a few Aboriginal people. Which would provoke a retaliation from the Aboriginals and a shepherd or squatter would be speared. Seems pretty much tit for tat in my humble opinion. The Aboriginal people were pushed into a corner and had no choice but to fight for their survival, or starve to death.
I’d like to say that this was the usual chain of events. But it was just as common for the provocation of Aboriginal violence to be the (repeated) raping of an Aboriginal woman by a squatter or shepherd. Or the use of a couple of Aboriginal children as target practice. Also a common cause of violence was a white man entering into an agreement with an Aboriginal woman with some sort of payment for sex. In the most part they were not paid and this could cause violence against the white in question. Remember I said that the Aboriginal people had a high sense of honour, a deal’s a deal.
So as soon as a white was killed the local settlers would get up in arms and a posse of generally between three and fifteen would be formed and punitive action would be taken against the Aboriginals. It was always stated by these posses that the intention was to capture the specific perpetrators of a crime, but this almost never happened. These men were not what we think of as civilised men. The Australian continent was tough and so were the most of the men interested in colonising it. The majority (I’d love to say it was the exception) of these men would think nothing of shooting Aboriginal people for fun, or raping native women or girls that strayed unknowingly near them.
So anyways a posse would ride out and sometimes for days murder any Aboriginal they came across. They would surround entire tribes (sometimes when they were relaxing in a swimming hole, or collecting food) and open fire (though just as commonly hack them up with swords, bayonets and axes). Women and children were shot just as indiscriminately as men. Women were captured and raped repeatedly. Babies heads were smashed upon trees or they were simply thrown onto fires alive. Numbers for these massacre could number between a few or more commonly between 20 to 60 Aboriginals killed.
These massacres however were not always just in retaliation to the killings of whites. Sometimes just for spearing cattle or sheep.
So after these massacres occurred the Aboriginal people were truly backed against the wall. It was fight or die. So for a period there would be guerilla-like skirmishes. Sometimes the goal was just to slaughter as many cattle or sheep as possible, other times shepherds and squatters were killed. In any case the Aboriginal casualties of these frontier wars were always ten fold the European. Eventually the local Aboriginal population would be beaten to defeat. Either the whole tribe became extinct or they were employed as slave labor on properties for food and tobacco. Or they ended up in a town. This is when alcoholism first became an issue for indigenous Australians. When you’ve got nothing left, you drink. The same thing a person who loses a job or spouse does. When you’re at the bottom, it’s hard to look up.
Having read this book I was interested to research what had happened to the local Aboriginal people in my area, as the book obviously covers the whole of Australia it’s not possible to cover every area in detail. So with a bit of browsing I found out what happened to the Darkinjung people, the traditional owners of my home, the Central Coast.
In short they are extinct.
Scenarios such as those mentioned above were played out over and over again as Europeans settled new areas of Australia. From Victoria to Queensland to South Australia as we spread out from Sydney. The Aboriginals of Tasmania were treated particularly viciously. Some massacres occurred in Western Australia and the Northern Territory as late as 1928. Whilst the offenders were prosecuted they were all acquitted. My Uncle (who lives in the NT) told me that there was apparently a massacre of Aboriginals as late as the 1960s there, with a bunch of Aboriginals rounded up into a cave and shot down. Western Australia and the Northern Territory were the last areas of Australia to be colonised and civilised.
But massacres of Aboriginal people by these means only were not to be the only way of eliminating them. We got more ingenious as time went on. Soon on a regular basis they were being poisoned en masse by giving them gifts of damper laced with strychnine or arsenic. In one case a particularly sadistic settler employed a tribe of Aboriginals to work for him for a few days and payed them in poisoned damper. Man sized traps similar to those used for bears were used on properties. They were impossible to open so all the property owner had to do was walk around in the morning and murder the Aboriginals who had been caught overnight. It all sounds a bit different from Banjo Patterson’s poems doesn’t it?
Technically Aboriginals were British subjects under the law. It was illegal for them to be murdered, they technically had the same rights as white Australians. But as they were not Christian they could not swear on the bible and this contradiction meant that they could not represent themselves in court. In fact the only case of whites ever being successfully prosecuted for crimes against the indigenous people occurred because a massacre by a posse occurred on a settler’s property. This man was sympathetic to and respectful of the local Aboriginal people, whom he allowed to live on his land. Although in this one case of justice, 7 of the 11 of the posse were hung, instead of preventing further crime against the Aboriginal people it simply drove the massacres underground. Men formed bonds of silence along with their posses.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Ok I’ve been writing for a fair while now so I’m going to wrap up what I have to say there and finish my thoughts into a second installment at a later time or date. Note that I am paraphrasing a book that is some 300 pages in length so I’m not really using specific dates or instances of which the book is full. I recommend that everyone should read this book. If our schools won’t teach us the the truth of our dark history, and only offer up a sanitised version of events, then we have to do it ourselves. The stuff I’ve been talking about above is the real truth that Howard is so afraid to admit to and apologise for.
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![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
