Bruce Pascoe’s claims about Indigenous society and history rejected by historian Geoffrey Blainey.
Category Archives: Australia Colonial history
AUSTRALIA DID NOT EXIST BEFORE THE 26TH OF JANUARY 1788
The historical detail for the reasons I claim Australia did not exist before the 26th of January 1788 is in chapter 2 of my book Prison Hulk to Redemption. The philosophical arguments about what it means to be a people are in my essay Edmund Burke on what it means to be a people. (See previous post) Both should be read in combination to appreciate the full argument. Below is the relevant section of chapter 2 of my book.
Chapter 2
A brief account of the early years of the Colony
On the 28th of April 1770, the then Lieutenant James Cook steered his ship, Endeavour, into a broad open bay and dropped anchor at its southern shore. He named it Stingray Bay because of the abundance in its waters of stingrays on which his crew gorged. He later crossed out Stingray Bay in the ship’s logs and entered Botany Bay in tribute to Botanist Joseph Banks, the ship’s eager scientist. Banks had put together an impressive collection of specimens of unknown plants and animals after trekking around the land bordering the bay’s shores.
Cook and Endeavour were on their way back to England after carrying out the official task of observing the transit of Venus from the island of Tahiti. There were also unofficial tasks one of which was to investigate the existence of the South Land whose ancient mythology promised great riches of all kinds. From Roman times, it had been called Terra Australis Incognita – Unknown South Land. The search for the mysterious land of the south had occupied the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, and lately the English in the person of William Dampier (1688 and 1689). Dampier added little to the findings of the Dutch seamen.
Read on…
How Aboriginals are abused by the new PC paternalism
by J.D. Morecambe
This article appeared in the August issue of Spectator Australia. The author has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here. There are few issues more important in Australia than the traitorous plan to set up a system of apartheid in which a superior class of Australians become the pensioners of the slaving majority.
But know, that I alone am king of me.
I am as free as nature first made man,
Ere the base laws of servitude began,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.
Dryden
From the Roman historian Tacitus’ praise of the barbarians in the first century AD to Rousseau’s Treatise in the eighteenth, the idea of a pure and morally unsullied savage, existing in a state of nature, free from the decadent moral baseness of civilisation, has saturated the western intellect for millennia. Despite our academic pretensions to cold objectivity, we moderns are no less prone to such romantic forgeries; we continue to lament the comfort and success of our civilisation to this day, and have slipped into worshipping the ‘Noble Savages’ of our own continent – the Australian Aboriginals.
The Australian Aboriginal population’s remarkable achievement of surviving on this hostile continent for tens of thousands of years is what Geoffrey Blainey called the ‘Triumph of the Nomads’, and is rightly studied and applauded. Yet, today, a confected, Arcadian image of Aboriginal culture has come to dominate the academies of the nation. This image is the driving force behind millions of dollars in funding for indigenous studies centres, research, courses, colleges and more, and has given rise to a new pseudo-aboriginal culture that carries with it all the pomp and circumstance of a fledgling nation; its own ceremonies, its own cultural values and its own political goals. Yet it is a caricature as false as J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
Continue reading How Aboriginals are abused by the new PC paternalismThe Epicentre of Our History
By Keith Windschuttle, Quadrant 12 November 2019
Inventing and Manipulating History
When Julia Gillard was Minister for Education in the Rudd government in 2008 she appointed a committee to rewrite the national schools curriculum from primary school to year 10. When the curriculum’s compulsory Aboriginal content was published it became a controversial issue. The Coalition opposition under Tony Abbott called it “political correctness run riot” and a ”black armband” view of Australian history, saying it placed too much emphasis on indigenous perspectives and very little on the nation’s British and European political and cultural heritage.
Nonetheless, indigenous studies still remain a core concept within the national curriculum. The academics and bureaucrats responsible never gave up their objective to make it compulsory for all Australian schoolchildren. Today, much of the content set in place by Gillard is now being updated to accommodate the arrival of a new and far more radical set of ideas about traditional Aboriginal culture and society. This is largely the result of an acceptance within the education system of the book, Dark Emu, by the self-described indigenous author Bruce Pascoe.
Read on…
Total Control: The Ever-Predictable ABC
By Peter O’Brien, Quadrant 15 November 2019
Inventing Aboriginal History with the help of Australia’s government funded ABC
Propaganda is most persuasive when it is pervasive. Right now we are being subject to a massive propaganda campaign designed to advance the Aboriginal sovereignty, agenda and it is being masterminded and largely paid for by Their ABC.
I have spent the best part of six months writing a review of Bruce Pascoe’s bestseller Dark Emu, which postulates that Aborigines were not nomadic hunter-gatherers but a sophisticated, sedentary, agricultural society with a pan-continental system of government. The ostensible aim of Dark Emu is to correct a purportedly mistaken view of Aborigines so that we can all move forward together. But the real aim is to foment a sense of grievance among Aborigines, and a sense of guilt among whites, that will enhance the chances of a referendum to enshrine an Aboriginal advisory body into the Constitution. If that happens it will pave the way for judicial activists to continue the work they commenced with the Mabo decision and grant some form of sovereignty to Aborigines. As part of the propaganda campaign, Dark Emu, will become a two-part ABC documentary sometime next year I will speak more of my book Bitter Harvest in the December edition of Quadrant.