The Indigenous Invasion of Aboriginal Australia

Culture is defined by Wikipedia as “an umbrella term which encompasses the social behaviour and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups”. So you could apply that definition to just about everything in any society and claim it to be cultural. However, I reckon that it is the literature and the poetry and the arts in any society which could be viewed (at least) as the vanguard of their culture.

I want to focus on our recent cultural (political) obsession with “diversity” and “identity” in literature and the arts, and ask the question: Are “Indigenous” Australian literature, poetry and the arts racist? Of course they are. Are they overwhelmingly hate speech directed against white fellas? Absolutely. Could we say they are all about entitlement and privilege? Yes, they are, because overwhelmingly (again) the authors and poets and artists have achieved publication and grants because of their race and not because of the quality of their work. Do “Indigenous” Australians view themselves as first-class Australians and the rest of us as second-class Australians? Well, you would be hard pressed to not agree—they consider themselves the “First Australians” and the rest of us as “invaders”.

So why are Australian taxpayer dollars being spent supporting what could well be described as this “Black Supremacist” reactionary ideology? Why do our governments, politicians and academics all support this clearly racist diatribe, this leftist black ideology? If it is payback for years of oppression, does such a primitive form of reactionary politics do anyone any good? I would argue it is not only bad for the white fellas and their children, it is also disastrous for the Aboriginal people. It is certainly disastrous for “art” and the quality of work we expect of our cultural experts. Are we creating a new class system here, where the woke “Indigenous” are suffocating the true Aboriginal people with their virtuous entitlement and privileged access, to create the fake narratives which define their people? Are we sponsoring a racist ideology in the name of compassion? Strangely, “racism” does not have a “race”—it is available to all equally. Stand up, Australia, and re-commit to the truth. Let’s take back our literature and poetry and art from these racists and re-commit to merit and excellence.

I recently found myself in an online battle with a performance poetry group in Adelaide about the poetry of Ali Cobby Eckermann. I found myself arguing that she was using her platform in poetry to further black-armband political issues which were still highly contested. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that all “Indigenous” poetry suffered from the same thing. That it was all (and I mean absolutely all, exclusively) about black-armband politics, the victimhood of the Aboriginal people, massacres, the Stolen Generation, genocide, systemic Australian racism.

Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River has spawned a legion of novels about massacre, including the highly-contested Bruce Pascoe book Convincing Ground. Poems about various levels of despair and disadvantage and victimhood; films about nasty white fellas from Rabbit Proof Fence to Samson and Delilah, but nothing about joy or hope or gratitude. The winner of the 2020 Archibald Prize was a naive portrait of the footballer Adam Goodes.

In this industry there is no work in novel or poem or film or painting about the wonderful freedoms of a fully functioning democracy operating well, nothing about self-discovery, of finding oneself in voice and spirit, nothing about the individual journey towards enlightenment. There is no novel about the overcoming of adversity, the discovering of oneself in a position to make a good living in a free society. No book approaching Bert Facey’s A Fortunate Life, nothing like A Room with a View or Voss or Cloud Street or Boy Swallows Universe; no poems dealing with a subject like “An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow”; no films like The Dish or Wake in Fright—nothing without black-armband politics and Indigenous virtue-signalling.

Poetry and literature and art are disciplines or vehicles to explore anything—anything at all. True, some writers focus on, say crime, or science fiction, or politics, or history, but they have rarely, traditionally, just focused on one race and one particular political stance, over and over again. Postmodern “woke” literature and art seem to want to call each identity group a “genre” of the art or literature or poetry it espouses. For example, we have Indigenous literature, gay art, women’s poetry or feminist poetry, and so on, as if each one is a whole new genre of the discipline, unique and separate from the traditional forms of the art.

These categories demand that no person who is not a member of that group be permitted to enter. For a white fella to make a comment or have an opinion about Indigenous issues is considered “cultural appropriation” and therefore inappropriate and even “racist”. For a man to talk about women’s issues is also verboten, just as it is for a straight person to speak about gay matters. Our literature has become categorised and closed off into identity groups which claim to provide “diversity”—yet ban most of the population from access to the form, and reduce the quality of the work accordingly.

Excellence is diminished and the possibility of genius and breakthrough works of great art is effectively extinguished. Indigenous literature and art are thus only available to Indigenous people. They are entirely based on “race”. As far as I know this is the very definition of the word racism: excluding people based only on the colour of their skin and completely ignoring the quality of their character, or merit or excellence.

The “Indigenous” have slowly but surely become an entirely different “race” from the “Aboriginal” race, whilst at the same time feeding off the traditional people’s culture and tragedies and concerns. The Indigenous are people like Bruce Pascoe who have intimate academic knowledge of Aboriginal culture but who have little or no actual genealogical connection. They are almost exclusively based in big cities and university-educated.

The Indigenous are also exclusively adherents of a Black Lives Matter, revolutionary, sovereignty-based, leftist politic, who fight for token issues such as “Invasion Day” and “Recognition” and “Makarrata”, mouthing slogans such as “Always was, always will be” and “Pay the rent”. These are the people who also make up Indigenous literature almost exclusively. I do not know of even one Indigenous author or poet or artist whose work is not entirely focused on black-armband political orthodoxy.

Let’s look at Vogue magazine’s list of “Essential Indigenous Australian Reading”. I start with Archie Roach’s autobiography Tell Me Why:

This memoir, which took home the award for 2020 Indie Book of the Year in the category of non-fiction, tells the story of celebrated Indigenous Australian musician, Archie Roach, who became a member of the Stolen Generations when he was forcibly removed from his family at just two years of age. Powerful and poignant, this read is a must.

Next we have the Anita Heiss diatribe Growing Up Aboriginal Australia, which advertises itself as “the colourful and confronting stories of family, country and belonging from the perspective of a number of First Nations individuals, including footballers and authors”.

Then we have Black Politics by Sarah Maddison:

Author Sarah Maddison interviewed a number or prominent activists, politicians and Aboriginal leaders including Mick Dodson, Tom Calma, Alison Anderson and Jackie Huggins, in an effort to put together a text that explores the dynamics of Aboriginal politics.

Then Jack Charles’s autobiography Born-Again Blakfella, which “chronicles the life of the musician and Senior Victorian Australian of the Year, who was stolen from his mother when he was merely a few months old”. And then Truganini by Cassandra Pybus, which:

sets out to tell the story of Truganini, one of the last full-blooded Aboriginal Tasmanian women who remains an important figure in Australian history. Filled with original eyewitness accounts, this read is one that will challenge your knowledge of the history of Tasmania.

Indigenous literature begins to look so similar that Jack Charles’s story could be Archie Roach’s, Anita Heiss could be Sally Morgan. All of Ali Cobby Eckermann’s poems seem to be the same poem. In fact it seems that there has only ever been one poem written by the new Indigenous poets—which is the same poem that Kath Walker wrote fifty years ago.

It seems that the “Indigenous” is not just a new race of people, but also a race which cannot yet emerge from their grief and resentment and payback—engendered by being enticed out of a dark primitivism into the light of freedom and individual agency. Indigenous literature (like much New Age white literature, if we must now speak in these racial terms) seems more like therapy than literature.

Now my reflection in the company of the Holy Spirit this morning asked me to check on my “white privilege” before continuing with my thinking around this subject. So I have spent my morning meditation contemplating the reasons why I’m writing this eminently dangerous and unpopular essay. The following few paragraphs try to explain why this is important.

Six Northern Territory Aboriginal children, each known by authorities to be at risk of severe harm, died in tragic circumstances from causes including suicide and petrol sniffing and without receiving “genuine assistance or support”, a coroner has found. — The Australian, December 17, 2020

This is not happening because of “structural racism”, it is happening because these children have not been educated properly and their abusers will get away with their murders and child abuse because they will claim clemency due to “traditional factors” and “cultural disadvantage”. The magistrates will let them off with light sentences because of these arrogantly virtuous reasons. If they do go to jail or a youth centre, they will claim further racist crimes are committed by their jailers and that they are over-represented in these institutions, and that they should be given special consideration because of their race.

This is why John Howard sent in the army when circumstances forced him to try the “Intervention”—yet even after all of that, here it is again. Young innocents are hanging themselves in lonely rooms in isolated Aboriginal communities after they have been sexually abused for years, and drifting into alcoholism, petrol sniffing and other drugs, while the ministers and the public servants responsible, hardly blinking, pass it off as a result of white “racism”. Here’s one such response:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar said the inquest highlighted how policies designed for Indigenous people were failing them. “It is clear that significant work needs to be done to overcome the structural racism and disadvantage that disproportionately affects our First Nations peoples around the country,” she said.

Meanwhile Aboriginal leaders issue press releases about the “Uluru Statement” and “The Makarrata”, and Anita Heiss gets another grant to write books like Am I Black Enough for You and Ellen van Neerven get grants to write Indigenous war-cry poetry about the trauma of invasion and Bruce Pascoe publishes books which claim Aborigines invented bread and democracy and astronomy. In a couple of weeks there will be another six or seven teenage suicides in isolated Aboriginal communities while Bruce Pascoe and his mates promote their new travel guide to Aboriginal Australia. I hope they include a visit for tourists to these isolated communities, and perhaps take them to the lonely rooms where these girls hanged themselves.

“Self Determination” and “Land Rights”, together with welfare—the progressive policies derived from left-wing human rights, Indigenous rights and UN conventions, over these last fifty years (since the end of the Wave Hill strike)—are still on track to produce the largest stolen generation of all time. Given the state of incarceration, death, violence against women, alcohol and drug addiction, child abuse and so on, “Self Determination” could also become known as the beginning of a line of government policies that led to the final Aboriginal genocide—genocide by suicide as it were. If the Aboriginal birth rate were as low as the white birth rate, and there were not quite so many Australians newly “identifying” as “Indigenous”, the Aboriginal population would be going backwards.

Just as well-meaning mission­aries attempting to assimilate Aboriginal children into white society through instruction in Christianity were vilified for “stealing” children and attempted genocide, so will future historians come to vilify the “welfare” period as an attempt to kill Aboriginal people with meaninglessness.

The “exceptionalism” that the progressive Left have framed the Aboriginal people within (like a noble savage in a cage) and then formed into the policies of “Self Determination”, “Reconciliation”, “Recognition”, “Pride”, “Sovereignty”, and any of the other virtuous advertising jingles that will keep the “Indigenous” Noel Pearsons and Mick and Pat Dodsons pleased, has turned out to produce nothing but idleness, resentment, alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, abuse and death in isolated Aboriginal communities.

The inner-city progressive Left have used Aboriginal people like a fetish for the narrative of “Primitivism”—proposed through Rousseau and others as the Garden of Eden. They mourn for the primitivism they have lost as if it were “innocence”. They claim that all narratives and all “cultures” are equal. Under this thinking, the Aboriginal people are encouraged to immerse themselves in “culture”, and by doing so, they are dying younger and at almost four times the rate of whitefellas. Land Rights have supplied land for Aboriginal funerals, and much of the business of many isolated communities revolves around constant funerals. Eventually, there will be only the “Indigenous” race left—and that is exactly what they want.

Their resentment is fuelled every day in Aboriginal communities via endless SBS and ABC documentaries and mea culpas, NITV war cries from the university-educated urban “Indigenous” who are more socialist than they are Aboriginal. “Look, they walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for us … look, Kevin Rudd’s Apology … look, New South Wales is paying compensation for the Stolen Generation.” Nothing will ensure a further stolen generation more than replacing Australia Day with Invasion Day, yet look, Ballarat City Council has already done it.

This massive failure of progressive politics over the last half-century should be remembered carefully, because history has become a very slippery thing. Government policies for Aboriginal people from “Self Determination” to “Recognition” have not just been an abject failure, but the outcomes constitute a form of genocide—genocide by isolation and exceptionalism.

A new race of people has been created in Australia over the past twenty or so years called the “Indigenous”, which is feeding off full-blood Aboriginal people just as a parasite feeds off its host. I say “full-blood” knowing that I will be called a “racist” for doing so, but I use it because I know that full-blood Aboriginal people have no objection to it, and in fact have grown to like it, because they too object to the genetically minute “Indigenous” takeover of their affairs. They view the “Indigenous” as invaders of their culture and the perpetrators of atrocity by virtue signal—which now kills their children.

Indigenous literature and poetry and art have now also invaded and come to dominate Australian culture. We have Indigenous art covering Qantas airliners flying all over the world, fake “Welcome to Country” ceremonies erasing our National Anthem at all our major events, BLM kneeling virtue-signallers in front of MCG crowds, barefooted cricketers begging for forgiveness before the world. Australia is now known for its Indigenous people, in places like France and Europe and the US. If you didn’t know better, you would think Australia was an Indigenous state without white fellas. Yet all we hear from the ideological media are constant calls for “Recognition”.

Patrick McCauley lives in Queensland.