Aborigines
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Aborigines believed spirits were specific to locations, not universally representative of all nature. This misconception became significant in cases such as the Hindmarsh burlesque
September 9, 2024
12 mins
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Pascoe invents Aboriginal farmers; Harney looked at Darwin and knew individuals who were trying to enter a white world: “Let them grow a garden and they soon felt the full weight of kinship ties when, at harvest time, their hosts of relations came to help them—not to gather, but to eat the crop.”
August 29, 2024
14 mins
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To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
August 20, 2024
24 mins
The latest
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The supposed torchbearers of the reconciliation project have played a significant role in platforming and promoting Aboriginal nationalism. It is relevant to ask to what extent the resilience of this ideology, writ large in the Uluru Statement and remote-area referendum results, is due to the reconciliation process itself
May 27, 2024
9 mins
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As he noted almost 70 years ago, with the possible example of Iceland there are virtually no nation states of the kind ethnic separatists demand when pushing the barrow of self-determinism. Where they have achieved their ends disaster has followed. It's a lesson taken to heart by Gary Johns in The Burden of Culture
May 11, 2024
4 mins
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The SCOTUS decision in Brown vs Board of Education rejected government-sponsored 'separate but equal' apartheid, insisting the law must be blind to skin colour and lineage. In Australia, however, the repudiation of equality before the law continues unabated. Indeed, it has only accelerated after the failure of the Voice
May 7, 2024
6 mins
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The 1937 manifesto of the New South Wales Aboriginal Progressive Association, which had sibling organisations in other states: 'We have no desire to go back to primitive conditions of the Stone Age. We ask you to teach our people to live in the Modern Age, as modern citizens' How times have changed!
April 28, 2024
23 mins
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Our governments gave you everything, and nothing. We worried for your young girls, your children, and ours. We took some away, you gave some to us. We did it with their well-being in mind, and did it well, and not so well. We were rarely as bad as some of you, and your white supporters, now want the world to believe
April 16, 2024
11 mins
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PwC was hired by the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commission to help determine who was an elder. After consulting 201 elders in 19 workshops, '80 per cent of those consulted wanted a way to challenge spurious elders'. This which not only turned out to be impossible, it called into question just how reliable were the 201 elders consulted in the first place!
March 12, 2024
17 mins
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The stolen generations is a myth, a gross insult to the nation and the people of Australia. But, increasingly, critical thinking has been replaced by critical theory, so count on Linda Burney's promotion of 'truth telling' to inscribe further volumes of exaggerations, misrepresentations and inventions
March 6, 2024
11 mins
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Senator Price’s grandfather. who first saw a white man as a teenager in the late 1920’s, did not imprint hate on his grand-daughter despite his own experiences. Neither did her parents, Bess and David Price. It is obvious that Jacinta was not taught to hate when young and, obviously, despite the abuse heaped upon her, unlike so many others she has not acquired that crippling flaw since.
February 17, 2024
8 mins
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Life for all Australians would be better had the High Court not allowed itself to be carried away with enthusiasm for the land-rights cause. The matters decided should have been contested by the Commonwealth as a matter of grave public importance, but that didn't happen. Just as it did in the more recent matter concerning the closure of state borders during the great Covid panic, passivity and acceptance were elevated to virues
February 9, 2024
13 mins