Today’s Aboriginal Myths and Legends

It’s usually great to see million-dollar managing directors rolling their sleeves up for grassroots activity. But as for David Anderson ($1.16m), the ABC’s managing director, I’m not so sure. That’s because I don’t think bigshots like him should be indoctrinating schoolkids as young as four or five about Aboriginal cult status. Sixty percent of voters last October didn’t like that playbook one bit.

He’s right at the front of an Aboriginal/ABC Education resources booklet for NAIDOC week, which finished July 14. It’s titled, Keep the fire burning! Blak (sic), loud and proud.

Anderson tells us that his ABC is official media partner for NAIDOC 2024 – the partnership launched at last year’s NAIDOC.[1] Its Committee Co-Chair Aunty (Dr) Lynette Riley AO had asked him to support the creation of the NAIDOC education resource “under her supervision” and he was “delighted to accept” (I thought the ABC is independent?)[2] The ABC, he says, drew on expert educators from Culture is Life, an Aboriginal not-for-profit dedicated to First Nations youth welfare and suicide prevention.[3] The NAIDOC-ABC manifesto includes numerous e-links to ABC Education material.[4]

The material explicitly targets “early childhood and early primary educators“. Culture is Life exhorts classrooms to perform Acknowledgements of Country, not just weekly but daily:

Display an acknowledgement in your classroom and pay respects to the traditional lands and peoples as a class at the beginning of every day.[5]

I don’t know how much the teachers use the booklet to indoctrinate students. But it’s been keyed to the official curriculum, giving teachers every incentive.

This school “resource” is chock full of Aboriginal-industry lobbying and propaganda, swathed in virtue signalling and political axe-grinding. It’s a classic case study of how schoolkids from “Foundation” year (5yo) to Year 12 are told how and what to think. For example, Canberra’s squalid “Aboriginal Tent Embassy” is treated with reverence, and kids are told to read more in the Guardian about that “milestone for Black sovereignty in this country”.

To prevent wrongthink, class conformity is enforced through “Discussion Questions” with obvious woke answers:

♦ Discuss “the arrival of colonists, who only saw their own needs as superseding our existence and rights”. How did Imperialist mentality and British law impact First Peoples of this continent and peoples of lands globally? (p23).

♦ What are some of the impacts of stories, history and cultures being silenced and suppressed, and what do all Australians have to gain from this knowledge? (p25).

♦ What makes you proud of what you learnt about First Peoples’ culture? (p27).

The authors tout their own and third-party grievances dating from white settlement. Its much-quoted Aunty (Dr) Lynette Riley, comittee co-chair, writes of Australia as

…our own land, since Cook illegally staked a claim in Australia as being Terra Nullius. Our fight for equity continued with the arrival of colonists, who only saw their own needs as superseding our existence and rights, and who sought to wipe our cultures and ways of co-existing with our Countries.(p21)

The 60 per cent of parents who voted No don’t get a look-in. Indeed the 2023 Referendum result is flushed down the document’s memory hole. Instead, the booklet’s leftists hector kids with this guilefully loaded question:

How have past and current governments, corporations and policies suppressed the voice and decision-making of First Nations peoples historically and to date? (p25).

The Aboriginal/ABC text also prompts teachers (p13) to push a kids’ book by Uluru signatory and “Yes” handbook co-author Thomas Mayo, titled Finding Our Heart: A Story About the Uluru Statement for Young Australians” illustrated by Blak Douglas (2020). Roger Karge, of Dark Emu Exposed, has researched on Mayo’s Aboriginal ancestry and his findings make fascinating reading, see here. Mayo is on record paying his respects to communist elders and their support for his movements’ struggles. The Communist Party of Australia’s website, in an adulatory piece on Mayo published in May last year, said his Finding Our Heart “shares the long history of the MUA’s [Maritime Union of Australia’s] solidarity with indigenous peoples.”

Want more specifics? Zero in on how schoolkids are pressured to “honour” the late Galarrwuy Yunupingu AM.

Want more specifics? Zero in on how schoolkids are pressured to “honour” the late Galarrwuy Yunupingu AM. Yunupingu, by any objective standard, ranked as one of the Aboriginal industry’s most wealthy and effectively (if not criminally) corrupt maharajas.

The details of Yunupingu’s malign 23-year reign as chair of the Northern Land Council (total 28 years on its Council) were spelt out a year ago by Quadrant‘s Keith Windschuttle. The “big man” monopolised the $5 million a year bauxite royalties from the Gove Peninsular for himself and favoured members of his Gumatj clan, while leaving in squalor rival clans and out-of-favour members of his own.[6]

He kept a helicopter and pilot on long-term standby to ferry him from his waterfront mansion to any of his four wives scattered around the territory. Windschuttle mentions $1600 an hour for the chopper. A helicopter expert last week estimated for me in today’s terms $2000 an hour and $120,000 annual salary for the pilot. Yunupingu told a reporter that the Gumatj planned to substitute a purchased helicopter — a $600,000 bit of conspicuous- consumption hardware.

The communities overseen and subsidised by Yunupingu were plagued by killings, suicides, addictions, and prostitution of 13yo girls in the dysfunctional settlements. Some of Yunupingu’s close male relatives were implicated in domestic violence and one was convicted of manslaughter of a Yunupingu niece. Yunupingu himself was accused by his youngest wife of assaults but not convicted. Meanwhile millions poured into his control as, feudal-like, he tossed pittances to his subjects.

The NAIDOC document, however, calls on kids literally to honour Yunupingu and three other Aboriginal leaders for having “blazed the way”. It says, “Proud Gumatj clan leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu AM was one of Australia’s most influential Aboriginal leaders and a trailblazing land rights fighter.” Teachers are told (p15) to

…read the short biographies [of Yunupingu and the other three] below with your class…You can also print these and display them in your classroom… While reading through their stories, reflect on the discussion questions to guide conversations about how each individual kept their own fire burning within themselves and their community, and how they advocated for change across the country in various areas… Learn more [from the ABC’s 2023 obituary] about the legacy of Aboriginal land rights champion Yunupingu.[7]

The Discussion Questions include

♦ What gave each person the “fire” in them to dedicate their lifetime to the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people?

♦ What does it mean to be a leader, role model, trailblazer or change maker?

Kids are told to

Write a letter to one of the four Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, and tell them why they have inspired you and what you will do to continue their legacy.

Kids are also supposed (p19)

to add these significant individuals to your ‘deadly wall’ in your classroom or in your school. You may also like to share what you’ve learned about these inspiring individuals with your buddy, class or at your school assembly.

The other three trailblazers cited are Dr Alice Rigney, Dr (honoris causa) Lowitja O’Donoghue and Eddie Mabo of Mabo case fame. The document’s short biography of Mabo does not of course mention his secret membership of the Australian Communist Party, about which he lied repeatedly.

The text … consign[s] conservative Aboriginal leaders such as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine to the same memory hole as the “No” vote.

The text wants kids to honour dozens of past and present Aboriginal Industry stalwarts but they consign conservative Aboriginal leaders such as Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine to the same memory hole as the “No” vote.

Youngsters are coached to read books and sing songs about official child-stealing perfidy, like Archie Roach’s Took the Children Away – constituting “the sad and traumatic truth of the Stolen Generations”. Culture is Life quotes him, “It’s something that happened in this country and it’s still happening.” Archie was right about that — current rates of official “child stealings” of Aboriginal kids by “the welfare” dwarf anything that occurred in Australia’s supposed dark ages. See here, here and here.

Culture is Life says, “Facing the truth of violent and disruptive histories since invasion is not easy, whether we are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the descendants of the colonisers or more recent migrants [why should they feel remorse?] The violence and loss needs to be faced to be healed.” [8]

Under the header, “Explore Further”, the joint document recommends Rachel Perkins’ SBS three-part film The Australian Wars, adding (p23)

Further research the global domination of the British and other empires and their impacts on First Peoples’ lands, cultures and survival.

While teachers’ unions complain about their members’ workloads, document co-author Culture is Life wants teachers (registration required) to take each of the three parts of the Australian Wars “across a double lesson (90 minutes or more), where you can unpack the episode with a class discussion and/or journal entries before your class leaves your care.” Or they can submit their kids to half an episode in each of two 60-minute class sessions. That would consume in total six class lessons, in lieu of my former staples circa 1940s, readin’ writin’ and ‘rithmetic. Whether inculcated in three or six classes, Australian Wars would have the teachers flat out inculcating the “key themes — Colonisation, Frontier Wars, Resistance and Resilience, Knowledges and Cultural Practices, and Truth Telling/Healing Shared History.”

Curious, I watched the three-hour film and was much impressed by its technical quality, artistry and research. Its material on Tasmania, northern Australia and the Kimberleys was disquieting and Perkins’ re-enacted killings and massacres were sickeningly graphic. At the same time, it’s a polemic designed to lay an enormous guilt trip on today’s adults and kids to soften them up for the Aboriginal Industry’s agendas of treaties, reparations and sovereignty. (Its immediate demand is conversion of the Australian War Memorial to an anti-colonial edifice).

Perkins’ and SBS’s rationale for their exercise is that the teaching of Australian history  is suppressing the narrative of frontier violence and killings and, therefore, the film is a counterweight to all the celebratory treatment of the Australian settlement story. However, I do wonder if any celebratory Australian history whatsoever is taught in schools these days, given their dominance by the green/blak/left crowd, the far-left teachers’ unions and contracted-in woke fanatics like Damon Gameau and Cool Australia. “Australia Day”? It’s “Invasion Day”!

Australia Day”? It’s “Invasion Day”!

So kids in class can watch Australian Wars and enjoy their subsequent nightmares, provided they are also shown a three-hour documentary about outback missionaries devoting their lives to nursing stricken Aborigines and rescuing small girls from violence and sexual slavery by their tribal elders. Why not make one episode about the Derby leprosarium and the Sisters of St John of God? There could be another series on the struggles of the cash-poor South Australia, for example, to deploy hundreds of bullock  wagons with supplies to ration-stations that kept whole communities alive during droughts.[9]

The Aboriginal/ABC resources of course push the contentious line that whatever dysfunction might exist in the outback communities (think Alice Springs today, one of hundreds), it’s all due to colonisation and certainly not to welfare dependency and violent vestigial norms of the original culture.[10] Senator Jacinta Price of course begs to differ.

It’s not common that we get such insights into school days via documents like Blak Loud and Proud from the NAIDOC/ABC/Culture is Life axis. Referendums regardless, these people are playing the long game.

Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] NAIDOC stands for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee

[2] ABC submission a year ago: ” The ABC’s ability to play this important democratic role is underpinned by its independence from political, business and other interests. That independence is enshrined as a foundational principle in the ABC Charter.”

[3] Culture is Life: “We join together with others to create meaningful lives for all our young people with a special emphasis on those experiencing vulnerability and who are at risk of self-harm and suicide.”

[4] The ABC describes those items as a “treasure trove … led by and respectfully created with First Nations peoples.”

[5] The booklet says (p6), “This [activity] can be a part of your week by asking students to also share an Acknowledgement of Country before moving through activities.”

[6] Windschuttle considered him a contender for the media’s Rich List of the era. Jennifer Sexton of the Weekend Australian wrote (June 11-12, 2005): “Many in his own clan live in squalid and impoverished conditions while Mr Yunupingu has the use of a helicopter, four houses and a fleet of cars, including a Range Rover.” She interviewed his fourth son, Sammy Yunupingu, his sister Gayili Marika Yunupingu and cousin Dhanjah Gurruwiwi, who said only some chosen members from his immediate and extended family had benefited from Yunupingu’s distribution of Gumatj clan royalties.”

[7] The obituary quotes the Yothu Yindi Foundation, of which Yunupingu was a past chair, “[Yunupingu] returns to where he began, born on sacred Yolngu country in northeast Arnhem Land, not knowing Europeans until his early childhood, living with the rhythm of life, the balance of the land, the water, the sacred winds and the ceremonies – he returns now to his ancestors. A giant of the nation whose contribution to public life spanned seven decades, he was first and foremost a leader of his people, whose welfare was his most pressing concern and responsibility.”

[8] Culture is Life makes a strange admission about its educative model: “We ask audiences to respect the young people’s courage in sharing their perspectives, and acknowledge that their reflections on what they have been taught in schools may not be factual.”

[9] See Voices from the Past, by Alistair Crooks and Joe Lane, Hoplon Press, Adelaide, 2016. “Extracts from the annual reports of the South Australian Chief Protectors of Aborigines, 1837 onwards”.

[10] The booklet quotes the Aboriginal cross-curriculum priority itself as ensuring the histories and cultures encourage “all students to engage in reconciliation, respect and recognition of the world’s oldest continuous living cultures…against the historic and contemporary impacts of colonisation.”