Australia

Invasion Day and its Ardent Firebugs

Australia Day is here, so I’m absolutely confident of a few things about to occur: some throat-clearing about changing the date, a good deal of blather about ongoing colonial resistance, and Senator Lidia Thorpe’s utterance of something stupid and contemptible.

To round out this dispiriting list, I’d add the Institute of Public Affairs and their annual survey data on attitudes to January 26 and national pride. Although its spokespersons try to put a cheery spin on things, the trend seems pretty clear: support for Australia Day is diminishing, and this is unlikely to be reversed, given that antipathy to the date and the country itself is much greater among younger cohorts.

There is something else I’ve noticed of late, and it is much harder to measure in data, but certainly easier to feel: there is a new and more intense revulsion towards Australia and its history and it seems to be almost obligatory in certain media and academic circles. This kind of self-hatred is creative, too, and I’m often surprised by the new ways in which people denigrate themselves and their home.

Junkee, a lamentably popular news site for youth, is even embarrassed to call Australia by its name. In an editorial urging its readership to participate in Invasion Day rallies, you can learn that:

The anniversary of January 26 signals the beginning of the invasion, colonisation, slavery, and genocide of so-called Australia.

I hear so-called the most often nowadays, but otherwise named and stolen seem to be the fellow favourites, especially among university professors. Among virtue-signalling woke whites, there is also a new fondness for tagging their locations in their Instagram posts as Naarm or Gadigal, striking a powerful blow, apparently, against the colonies of Melbourne and Sydney.

I rather like the custom of the Acknowledgement of Country, but I certainly don’t like its most recent tweaks and extensions. It is no longer a one-off at the beginning of an event or panel discussion, but a secular and self-flagellating prayer that each panellist is expected to offer up. This is usually done in a creepily competitive spirit, and it usually goes something like this.

The first speaker would like to extend his respect to Aboriginal Elders, past and present and emerging. The second does this, too, but he also wants everyone to know that he knows this land has never been ceded. The third speaker mentions the Elders and the stolen land as well, but she would also like to make it clear that she, as a white settler, participates in a system of racist oppression, but is committed to being a better ally. The second speaker then wishes he had used that line. And so on and on and on.

You may think of all this as harmless stupidity, which is fair enough, at least at first glance. I wonder, though, if this well-meaning but unthinking lot is doing the bidding of those without the soundest of motives. I’ve also noticed that another element of the new revulsion is a more spirited style of activism, led by a few noisy enthusiasts for arson.

I would argue that that the defining Invasion Day moment occurred in 2018, when Tarneen Onus-Williams of the delightfully named Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) took to the stage at a rally outside the Victorian Parliament. There were a fair few expletives flung around, but the memorable moment was when she spluttered: “F**k Australia, hope it burns to the ground.”

When asked to explain my absence from these January 26 get-togethers, I like to cite this incident. WAR — and I wonder how many of the rally attendees know this — is the organising body behind the Invasion Day frivolities, and one can be fairly certain that changing the date isn’t on its list of priorities. After Ms. Williams’ tantrum, WAR took to Facebook to defend her and add a few clarifying remarks, which included the exhortation to “Abolish Australia, not just Australia Day.”

Tarneen Onus-Williams, however, seems rather charming compared to Nayuka Gorrie, another activist and a contributor at SBS, where she wrote in 2019:

“I will never celebrate Australia and I will never consider myself Australian . . . Australia shouldn’t be celebrated. It’s not worthy of celebration.”

That article didn’t get much attention, but her appearance in the same year on ABC’s Q&A certainly did. It was in that episode, as readers will recall, that Ms. Gorrie rejected the methods of persuasion and democratic debate as the means of effecting social change. She fantasised about a much more incendiary approach:

I wonder what our kind of tipping point in Australia’s history is going to be when people will start burning stuff. I look forward to it.

And in case viewers still didn’t get the message, she then added:

I think violence, yeah, is OK . . . if someone is trying to kill you, there’s no amount of ‘oh, but I’m really clever. I’m really articulate . . .’ — no amount of that will save you. So, yeah. Let’s burn stuff.

That brings me back to Senator Thorpe and her impressive talent for bluster (in her Canberra workplace she faces tough competition.) In late December, when a merry band of Aboriginal agitators were next to Old Parliament House when it was set alight, Senator Thorpe took to Twitter to fan the flames:

Seems like the colonial system is burning down. Happy New Year everyone.

I can confidently say that I will never be adequately annoyed by all these people. Every day that Lidia Thorpe spends in the Senate is an embarrassment to our democracy, given that she is a cheerleader for the destruction of that democracy. Every time our national broadcaster showcases fanatics like Nayuka Gorrie I’m reminded that they also carefully ignore the thoughtful and honest insights of intellectuals and leaders like Quadrant contributor Anthony Dillon and Jacinta Price. And every Australia Day thousands of naive young marchers aid the cause of militant activists who hate them and hate the country we all share. Perhaps pointing all this out can dissuade a few from turning up to today’s rallies, but I don’t have quite as much confidence in that.

editor’s note: The Lidia Thorpe caricature atop this post is lifted from Pauline Hanson’s series of YouTube satires, some of which are very amusing

52 thoughts on “Invasion Day and its Ardent Firebugs

  • Peter OBrien says:

    As a push back against the invasion of our discourse by ‘Invasion Day’, perhaps conservatives could stop referring to ‘Australia Day’ and use ‘Enlightenment Day’ instead.

  • Katzenjammer says:

    What date on the traditional Aboriginal calendar should it be?

  • restt says:

    How about “Easiest invasion day in history day”. There was no conflict, war or resistance at the start of any colony. So maybe it should just be “Moving in day”

  • Brian Boru says:

    The expression “white invasion” is racist hate speech.
    .
    I don’t have any objection to changing the date of Australia Day, say to the last Monday in January. Make it a long weekend, that’s the Australian way. It would also make it more inclusive. We don’t need to give racists any excuses and let’s acknowledge that our history may be painful to some.
    .
    I am proudly a “first nations person” of the Irish, English and Scottish nations with probably some Viking in there somewhere. No more or less an Australian than anyone else born or naturalised here.
    .
    We are a land of migrants, from the very first in their canoes or who even walked here. Those who came in chains, those who fled famine, those who fled or survived genocide and war and it’s consequences. To those who came by jet plane yesterday. We acknowledge that in our past, as in most nations, bad things have happened. But we strive to be one people, equality of opportunity for all, no privilege by birth or class, truly one people. Happy Stralia Day to you all.

  • Ian MacKenzie says:

    Personally I favour Literacy Day, but there are many options, perhaps best summed up by Monty Python’s “apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

  • N. Strong says:

    The best thing any member of my family has ever done came when great-great-great-greatgrandfather Joseph (on my mother’s side) stole a sheet of canvas (probably a sail) and received a cost-free ticket to the other side of the world. That meant one of his kids was on hand to marry into my paternal side’s family when they arrived to pick nuggets off streets not quite so paved with gold as they imagined.

    God bless Australia. We could use a little Divine intervention right now.

  • Ian MacKenzie says:

    Speaking of welcome to country, I rather liked this from the near the back end of the latest IPA report – “AWI acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which our office sits: the CBUS people of the compulsory superannuation industry.”

  • STJOHNOFGRAFTON says:

    These are fake Aboriginals. They are blowing a lot of smoke. They are not worthy of attention.

  • Brian Boru says:

    I think I should review my first nations as I stated above. I should have put English first. My wonderful and saintly Mum (50% of me) was English and proud of it. Mum said “there’s good and bad in every lot” and I have noticed through the years just how right she was.
    .
    On another note; thank you Timothy for giving me in Lydia Thorpe another reason to dislike the Greens. I still can’t forget that the Liberals preferenced Greens ahead of Labor in many electorates and that’s how Adam Bandt got first elected. In my opinion the Liberals put themselves ahead of the good of Australia in doing that.
    .
    Thanks also Tim for mentioning Pauline Hansen’s Youtube videos, entertaining but also enlightening, particularly when she spoke in Parliament exposing the Aboriginal Industry to the chagrin of Lydia.

  • Peter OBrien says:

    It’s officially Australia Day. So why are the words ‘invasion day’ in capitals? Just asking.

  • Daffy says:

    I wonder if we could extend ‘Invasion’ Day to encompass the invasions of tribes’ invasions of each other’s stamping ground, stealing their women and making mayhem? Or was all that just good clean fun?

  • DougD says:

    Katzenjammer – I don’t know what date on the traditional Aboriginal calendar it should it be. But the Torres Strait islanders still have 1 July as a public holiday to celebrate The Coming of the Light. It recognises the adoption of Christianity through island communities during the late nineteenth century. following the arrival on Darnley Island of the Reverend Samuel MacFarlane of The London Missionary Society in July 1871.
    But I suppose that would not travel too well in Carlton, Woollahra or West End.

  • NFriar says:

    Over the years Australia Day has been celebrated on varying dates.

    In 1988 the bi-centenial of the arrival of the First Fleet was celebrated in Sydney Harbour on January 26 1988.
    (My daughter’s birth certificate is very colourful with a depcition of the arrival in 1788).

    To stop all this angst from the blaktivists and virtue signallers – why don’t we celebrate ALL Australians becoming Australian Citizens Jan 26, 1949?

    Still calling it Australia Day.

    We were no longer an outpost for the British Empire but an independant Nation.

  • Delphi says:

    What these muppets fail to realise is that unless they are full-blooded Aborigines, they wouldn’t be here. Oh the irony!

  • padraic says:

    Anyway, I’m going to a relative’s place to have a lamb chop family barBQ this evening to celebrate our great country while the self loathers mentioned in the article and posts above can get lathered up and work on their hypertension and what they are going to inhale/inject/ ingest to soothe their angst..

  • Adam J says:

    I favour Civilization Day. Or perhaps Science and Civilisation Day.
    I made the mistake of clicking over to that Junkee website. If that’s how kids are getting news then God help us. They were also advocating for a new paper called The Sunday Paper which is a protest paper for Aborigines and ‘Palestinians’. Funny if it were not sad…

  • Peter OBrien says:

    Adam J,

    I defer to your name. Spot on!

  • mgldunn says:

    Long live Australia Day, change neither the date nor the name. I note that some indigenous spokespeople are now saying ‘changing the date is not my priority right now’. Good. The statue fight over Capt Cook seems to have calmed down. Good. Next stop: the ‘Voice’. However, the shame about our history certainly needs tackling as it is a big problem. Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with strangers would make a good recommendation for friends, both left and right.

  • Michael says:

    Lidia Thorpe is an embarrassment to the Senate and it’s no surprise she’s not been elected, but rather was nominated by the Greens to replace Richard Di Natale on his retirement. She disgraces herself, her party, and our Parliament almost every time she appears or speaks.

  • Blair says:

    DougD
    Are Torres Strait Islanders still First Nations people?

  • Biggles says:

    Have you noticed that the ‘Invasion Day’ protesters are invariably poorly-educated, self-hating, hysterical young women on government support who couldn’t run a cold bath, let alone a business? Broken-down Australian society and the education system has failed these people.

  • Blair says:

    Sadly Biggles, many of today’s young are flooded with data, but with little information and even less knowledge.

  • IainC says:

    Somewhat OT. I quite like this Australia Day lamb add that manages to include every Aussie trope and caricature in a fun and gently playful manner (no way it’s made by a leftist cell). Sadly, I couldn’t spot Sam Kekovich, but the vegan brouhaha is artfully referenced. It must have cost a fortune. It was a relief not to have heavy handed “first settler” separatist/apartheid hard right nationalism (aka left wing Aboriginal activism) thrust in my face for once.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBXdpg-ExyE

  • geoff_brown1 says:

    Can one of the bush lawyers on this site enlighten me? My understanding is that, as part of the Mabo judgement, the High Court declared Australia was “settled” and not “invaded.” “Invasion” would not have allowed the establishment of “Native Title” and “Land Rights” and the Aborigines would have been treated as a “conquered people” with the blessing of International law, and, indeed, the United Nations? Thank you, in advance, to anyone who can cast some light on the matter.

  • Claude James says:

    Too many non-marxists get into a knot and label Australia’s earlier days as an outpost of Britain.
    That a wrong way to describe the actual reality, viz.
    Australia was founded by Britain, and all people on Australian territory today should be very, very grateful for that founding.
    We must expect the marxist-inspired, anti-Westernist parasitic hordes to be displeased by our British founding.
    But the non-marxists would do well to get with actual reality and be grateful for it.

  • Citizen Kane says:

    I wonder how many of the ‘Invasion Day’ crowd who are not Aboriginal (discounting all the ‘Elizabeth Warren’s out there) will walk the talk and pack their kit tomorrow, gift their inner city house to a NT full bloodied aboriginal and leave for other shores that are less racked with faux guilt tripping for them? Answer- zero. Just more rank hypocrisy.

  • Peter OBrien says:

    I watched the ABC coverage of Australia Day celebrations and, as expected, Aboriginal themes dominated- the first fifteen minutes (at least) being totally devoted to our ‘first nations’ culture.
    And in Melbourne we had the mindless activists pushing the invasion day narrative.
    So conservative (even mainstream) Australians are caught in a pincer movement.
    The Australia that I celebrated yesterday owes virtually nothing to Aboriginal culture or to Aboriginal people as a group, notwithstanding that many individuals from that group have contributed significantly, mainly by grasping the advantages that colonization bestowed.

  • Macspee says:

    26 January 1949 is the day Australian citizenship arrived and British nationally left.
    The cultural appropriation by aboriginal persons and persons with an aboriginal ancestor of “stuff” invented by non-aboriginal persons is to be resisted and possibly withheld.
    As I identify with my Scandinavian, Celtic (of the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and Gallic kind) and probably Roman and Middle-eastern forbears all who felt the wrath of invaders, I feel the pain but not the desire for cash payments. Does that make me a bad person.?

  • andrew2 says:

    I kind of like the way that Australia Day evokes different thoughts and emotions in people. The history of the world is complex. The nation with the best weapons and military strategies usually won and took over land. It’s a complete fantasy to think that aboriginal people would have held onto this continent for any length of time from any force in the world. Even if we handed it back to them and departed these shores there would be a frantic scramble from today’s world powers to claim it. So they, and we all have to grapple with a sense of dispossession, identity and living in an imperfect situation. Australia Day is a good day for that. It can handle multiple points of view.

    For my identity, I would not even be alive if not for World War II, for how else would a Polish mother and a Slovenian/Dutch father meet if not for the war which saw them both relocate to England, marry and then migrate together to Australia to create a family. As my father escaped communist Yugoslavia in the snow he was put into a displaced persons camp in Austria that previously held Australian POW’s and also hung up advertisements for people to emigrate to England for work in coalmines.

    So do I thank the bloodiest war in history for my existence? My life owes a lot of debt to the war, to England for offering my parents an attractive home, and to Australia for offering our family hope for a good standard of living through the coalmines of the Central Tablelands. Australia Day can cope with these complex thoughts.

    We aren’t ever going to be fully united. In a multi-cultural society, people will naturally preference their own people if they can, whilst hopefully living in goodwill with everyone else. The stability of this will depend on commitment to “goodwill”. Glory to God in the Highest, and on Earth peace to people of Goodwill.

    Human beings seem to suffer from two big problems. The first is the desire to want other people to think and act like they do: a desire for power and control over others. The second is to attempt to create permanence in this temporary place, this always leads to problems. One example I often think about is the building of St Peter’s Basilica, the financing of which directly lead to the Protestant reformation. This was an attempt to make beauty permanent when everything that surrounds us tells us that beauty is temporary – a sunset, a song, a particular cloud formation, a rainbow. The consequences for the Church was disastrous disunity.

    We have fights because some people want to destroy what others have spent a lot of human blood building. Notre Dame cathedral anyone? The Old Parliament house anyone? Throwing red paint on statues. Why fight over statues?

    I like the American holiday of Thanksgiving because it represents a spirit of goodwill between people of different cultures. Australia Day should similarly be able to be transformed into such a day of Goodwill, though the issues involved are more complex.

  • andrew2 says:

    I slightly correct what I said above. I like the “idea” of the American holiday of Thanksgiving. It should be able people from different backgrounds getting together in a spirit of goodwill. The reality is more that you invite your closed off family over for a big meal including a turkey.

    Australia Day could embrace the idea of “Thanksgiving”. It was a pivotal point where two cultures came together. So we can use it to determine if we are to act in goodwill toward each other, live side by side in hatred or go to war. I choose Goodwill.

  • Peter Marriott says:

    For me, Australia Day remains as it has always been, and always will be, because even though some types rewrite history, that rewriting remains what it has always been and always will be…a lie. The 26th of January marks the day Governor Phillip raised the union flag in Sydney Cove thereby starting the nation of Australia which is why we still have the union flag on our one and only Australian flag, which is as it always has been and always will be. The statues we have are important memorials, even sacred memorials, as they are in all countries and those that would deface them are beneath contempt.

  • andrew2 says:

    But Peter, the defacing of a statue is an interesting symbol. A country is defended with military force and diplomacy. Australia was colonized because the aboriginal people did not have the ability to defend it with superior weapons or an understanding of what the intentions of the colonizers were. Might is right.

    So Australia was created but now you have people attacking it’s symbol, a statue, it’s flag. The statue is not defended and so it is defaced.

    I’ve thought about it as I’ve seen Catholic churches burned to the ground in Canada and France and Catholic statues defaced all over the world. The first thought I have is that it shows the reality that we live in divided societies where people do not respect other people’s property and are willing to break laws to destroy it. So the answer is to guard it if it is important and if you are willing. If you are not willing, you have to expect the reality that someone will eventually smash it or burn it to the ground. And maybe we deserve what we get if we have let our Church congregations drop to 15 people. The people who built these churches let their children and grand children desert their churches, and so the plunder begins.

    It is alarming to see these Invasion Day rallies get bigger every year because they appear to fuelled by hatred and division. But if there is not an alternative narrative which is stronger, one of building cohesion and goodwill, that actually attracts more people to it, then the Invasion Day mentality may actually reach the tipping point where it wins. Hatred and violence are magnetic motives. Raising the union flag in Sydney Cove at one point in history does not settle the matter for all time. It is a call to vigilance and to constantly work for the Australia you want to see.

  • Rebekah Meredith says:

    U.S. Thanksgiving can be seen as a positive coming-together of different cultures working together, and it was. Above all, however, it was a time when the Pilgrims gave thanks to God for His blessings on their harvest (hardly an original or American idea). It is meant to be a time to remember history and, more importantly, give thanks to God. This is no doubt part of the reason that decorations, retail, etc. in America jump from Halloween to Christmas while almost skipping Thanksgiving. The heathenism of gorging on far too much food, then running out to fight with fellow-citizens for more “stuff”–now starting on Thanksgiving night, in some places–annually chips away at what the day should be about.
    It is interesting that Thanksgiving has never been picked up in Australia, but Black Friday and Cyber Monday have, apparently, become firmly established in less than a decade (in WA, at least). Materialism, yes; giving of thanks, no.

  • John Cook says:

    IainC, I think I found Sam at or near the 1:30 min mark, just prior to Gilly appearing. Sam is in an Asian cap.
    Can we stop using First Nations, a North American term. Here, there were tribes & clans, more than 300 of them.

  • John Cook says:

    First peoples sounds right.

  • Doubting Thomas says:

    JC, there is considerable doubt that they actually were the “first peoples”. Isn’t this the basis of the demand that the recently discovered remains in Lake Boga(?) be buried in a secret location to prevent further research? Current Aboriginal activists would hate it to be confirmed that others preceded them.

  • colin.white18 says:

    I will never tolerate a welcome to country. This is my country.

  • Rebekah Meredith says:

    Well said, Colin!

  • Brian Boru says:

    colin.white18
    Right on Colin. Don’t forget to loudly say “I don’t agree”.
    .
    And if you get the opportunity also say something like my “We are a land of migrants” as I wrote above.

  • Adam J says:

    Given that there were 300+ peoples, how can they all be first? It is a fiction. They are Aborigines – the peoples that inhabited the land originally from the British perspective, Aborigine being Latin for Ab (from) and Origine (beginning). See also the words origin and original, etc.

  • Peter Marriott says:

    I don’t need to be welcomed to my own country, in fact no one needs to be welcomed to their own country…… only Home. The whole thing is a rather sick joke. I also notice our charming Federal Gov. has paid the ‘aborigines’ or someone $20 million to allow free use of their so called “flag”. Doesn’t anyone in authority know where the switch, or lever is, to finally, once and for all, turn off, or bring down the curtain on this expensive, publicly funded soap box opera , I ask myself ?

  • Adelagado says:

    Never forget. Every Welcome to Country ceremony is exactly the opposite.

  • Jon Reinertsen says:

    How about Jan 1st, the day the federation was formed! The founding of the NSW colony is no longer relevant. As for Invasion day, one ship arrived and then went away.

  • Claude James says:

    Both commemoration and celebration of the first arrival by the British are fully relevant in the extreme and entirely necessary.

  • padraic says:

    You are right geoff_brown1 to say that the High Court declared that Australia was “settled”and not “invaded”. In the 1992 Mabo No 2 case the judges Brennan J, Deane and Gaudron JJ, and Toohey J all rejected the concept of Australia as terra nullius – i.e. land inhabited b y people who did not have a social or political structure recognised by International Law at the time (as I understand it) . This Mabo No 2 judgement, applied only to the presence of Aborigines in relation to land status prior to settlement but did not apply to an Aboriginal sovereignty which was acquired by the Crown upon settlement in 1888 (affirmed in the Mabo No 2 judgement) and thus the underlying title to Australia by the Crown, but the judgement acknowledged that the Aboriginal people retained their (possessory) titles to land and resources until expressly extinguished by the Crown, under the common-law rules for extinguishment. This means that various titles of land tenure (freehold, leasehold, native etc) for everyone in Australia stem from a Crown grant.

    But if the Court had accepted that arguments of activist groups that Australia had been acquired by conquest following an “invasion” then it may have led to a mess. Justice Brennan explained that any alteration to the concept of Crown sovereignty would ‘fracture the skeleton of the principle that gives the body of our law its shape and internal consistency’. He noted that while the legal system of Australia ‘can be modified to bring it into conformity with contemporary notions of justice and human rights… it cannot be destroyed.” And, for me, that explains why the activists want Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to be recognised in the Constitution so they can become an independent sovereign polity, complete with their own land. The activists and various university faculties have never accepted this Mabo No 2 judgement and since 1992 have been researching and writing books trying to convince everybody that Australia was “invaded”. If “invasion” was accepted this would allow a spineless Commonwealth Government to adopt (using the External Affairs Head of Power in the Constitution) to adopt one or more of the UN Conventions that promote the rights of Indigenous people. If “invasion” is legitimised it will give the activists what they want.

    Where we are at present has been a long time in the making. Initially Aboriginal policy making was controlled by UK legislation up until it was given to the colonies when they became self-governing – in 1856 in NSW, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania, 1859 in Queensland, and 1890 in Western Australia, with the Governor usually having a major say in Aboriginal policy. When the Federation was formed in 1901 the States retained control over Aboriginal Affairs with the Commonwealth having that responsibility for the ACT in 1901 and later for the Northern Territory which it took over in 1911. This remained the situation until the 1967 referendum which changed the Constitution so that the Commonwealth could make special laws for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. That meant that the Commonwealth could override State laws with which it did not agree. To have a basis to justify such an “over-riding”, in 1975 under Whitlam, the Commonwealth passed the Racial Discrimination Act 1975. Commonwealth Acts have to have a basis in a Head of Power defined in the Constitution. There is no Head of Power relating to racial discrimination per se in the Constitution, so normally one would expect that they would have had a referendum to insert a new Head of Power in the Constitution relating to racial discrimination, but in our democracy, referenda are difficult to win, so they used the “External Affairs” power was used to adopt the UN 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. This enabled them to bypass a referendum and down the track pass laws relating to Native Title. Pathetic. The Aboriginal activists et al are hanging their hats on a Labor/Green government using the same External Affairs Head of Power to adopt other UN Conventions that will give them what they want, without the messy business of a referendum. As mentioned previously, the 1975 Act could not be used to challenge the sovereignty of the Crown although the activists tried. They were stymied by the High Court decisions that there can be only one sovereignty in Australia and that is the sovereignty of the Crown (1975 – Coe v. Commonwealth, 1994 – Walker v. NSW ). Nevertheless the High Court ruled that that Act could override State law in the Koowarta case (1982), and later on the Court found that the 1975 Act could be used as the basis for the protection of native title as a property right in the Mabo No 1 (1988) and Mabo No 2 (1992). In 1994 the activists et al were still arguing at the High Court that indigenous criminal law and political jurisdiction had survived along with land ownership. The Court in Walker v. NSW confirmed the non-justiciability of Crown sovereignty and rejected that indigenous criminal law and jurisdiction should be recognised as having survived. Similarly, in relation to indigenous sovereignty – the High Court in the 1979 case Coe v. The Commonwealth – the claim to some form of residual Aboriginal sovereignty was decisively rejected on the basis that from moment of formal annexation, the Crown’s power covered all parts of the claimed territory and that the assertion ‘that there is in Australia an Aboriginal nation exercising sovereignty, even of a limited kind, is quite impossible in law to maintain.” So despite all the past High Court rulings that the Australian nation state is a sovereign state the activists et al are still pushing in 2022 that there is still a residual Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island sovereign nation, with an “Embassy” in Canberra and a body in Redfern that can issue passports. At some point a line has to be drawn. They are not joking. It’s even worse in Canada.

  • Brian Boru says:

    padraic
    Thanks for your learnered explanation of the tactics being used to try and divide our country.
    .
    I did not realise the full significance of my preferring the word “inhabitants” and my inherent dislike of “custodians”. I now see “custodians” as yet another divisive anti-Australian tactic.

  • Peter Marriott says:

    Thank you padraic; good exposure, well explained.

  • geoff_brown1 says:

    padriac, thank you for your explanation. Much obliged.

  • abrogard says:

    everyone talks too much. trying to be kind. trying to be sensible. trying to be reasonable, clever, wise, etc. etc…
    the thing is all these nasty people are contemporary australians is what they are, not blackfellows of any kind at all.
    and they are simply irrational opportunists riding what looks like a good bandwagon to them.
    and it is made good by those amongst us who get on it and ride it too – profiting by perhaps selling articles to journals for instance… convening committees….doing research…. on and on…
    It is simple: it is bullshit.
    No ifs and buts. Bullshit.

  • Watchman Williams says:

    As Winston Churchill said; “When the eagles are silent, the parrots jabber”. But it should be remembered that the anti-Australian jabberers are largely funded by cowardly governments misusing taxpayer funds for purposes that are clearly not in the national interest.
    That should not surprise anyone really; it was Napoleon who observed that “in politics, stupidity is not a handicap”. Indeed, a successful political career in these dark days seems to be built upon a foundation of mendacity, compromise and cowardice.
    The day of the eagle is long gone.

  • padraic says:

    Oops! I just noticed – 1888 should have been 1788 in the post above. It was a bit late when I wrote the post. It is a worry that the media and educators and academia go along with the activists’ agenda.

  • NFriar says:

    @John Cook – 27th January 2022

    “First peoples sounds right.”

    Contemporary aborigines were not the original or first inhabitants in New Holland.

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