Category Archives: Australia Colonial history

Australia Colonial history, Culture, History, Left, Political Correctness

Scholars of the left debunk faux Aboriginal’s book of nonsense

Ever since Bruce Pascoe’s book first slithered from the press, it has had a thrashing over its inaccuracies, exaggerations, and baseless assertions. Because those slamming the book were perceived to be on the conservative side of politics, the criticisms were ignored or sneeringly dismissed. As expected, foremost among the critics of the conservatives’ view were ABC people. Their comments and support for Dark Emu showed they had uncritically swallowed Pascoe’s dodgy dish.

That grubby foul-mouthed Benjamin Law said, ‘Dark Emu will calibrate everything you know about Aboriginal architecture, engineering and agriculture on this continent.’ Political commentator Patricia Karvelas claimed that Dark Emu made ‘heavy use of primary extracts – it’s all there.’ Well, it wasn’t all there. It’s a mild criticism to say the book is a lot of rubbish. It deserves a lot more.

But now two academics of the left have written book to debunk the hoax (see below). But do you think the left will back down? Not on your life. Dark Emu is a massive propaganda tool. The left will not let it go without a struggle.

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Debunking Dark Emu: did the publishing phenomenon get it wrong?

In 2014, Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu revolutionised interpretations of Indigenous history, arguing that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, irrigation and construction prior to the arrival of Europeans. Now, in a new book, two highly respected academics say that there is little evidence for these claims.

By Stuart Rintoul, The Age, JUNE 12, 2021

The walls of Peter Sutton’s home in country South Australia are hung with ghosts – black-and-white photographs he has collected from second-hand shops over the years, the long-gone people he calls “poignant strangers”, staring out from the past, without families who want or remember them.

It’s a rambling old house of stone and timber, everything you would expect an anthropologist’s home to be: rooms filled with books, papers, a large volume of genealogies of Wik families from Cape York among whom he has spent much of his professional life, including some 2000 records of births and deaths. Sutton has spent many decades with the Wik people; danced with them, cried with them. There are other records, from western Arnhem Land, Daly River, the Murranji Track – ghost road of the drovers, Central Australia and the corner country of the Lake Eyre basin.

Sprawled across a dining room table is an almost-finished book about the early 20th century Queensland anthropologist Ursula Hope McConnel, who was brave and brilliant and solitary.

Sutton is one of Australia’s leading anthropologists. A gifted linguist, rigorous, sometimes controversial, a debunker of myths who stood, grief-stricken, in the little cemetery at Aurukun, on the west coast of Cape York, in September 2000 and began to think the thoughts that gradually formed themselves into his heretical essay and then book, The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the End of the Liberal Consensus, which exposed the gulf between progressive ambition and dysfunctional reality in Aboriginal communities.

Quietly spoken, with a restless curiosity, independent-minded Sutton is now almost 75 years old but doesn’t seem it. An outsider in many ways throughout his life, he was born in working-class Port Melbourne at a time when men in hats and shabby suits played two-up on the other side of his grandmother’s back fence.Advertisement.

Read the rest here…

Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture, History

LET’S TELL THE TRUTH

Stan Grant, well-known media figure, with his slightly olive skin and a thoroughgoing ‘colonial’ education, is an activist of relatively recent origin. He is foremost among those Australians of Aboriginal Ancestry (AOAA) calling for the truth about British settlement, meaning that existing historical accounts are a whitewashing of the violence inflicted on the many indigenous tribes the British found wandering around the countryside. I agree with Stan, with his educated accent, that the truth should be known. Bring it on, I say. Some of the truth is in an outstanding paper by Luke Power, addressing some of those very subjects Stan considers whitewashed.

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POWER AND POLITICS – TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT TASMANIAN GENOCIDE

By Luke Powell, The Daily Declaration.

Chris Kenny, in a recent article for the Australian, commented on the sobering truth about Australian history:

“Increasingly, reality does not matter so much in public debate as the narrative.”

This has certainly been the case with Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, which has recently been found out for sourcing incorrect material and fabricating information to present a Eurocentric noble savage account of aboriginal history. 

By rejecting truth and presenting aboriginal history as a narrative of good and evil, historians have gained political power as the saviours of an entire people group. Some such as historian Lyndall Ryan in her recent book, Passionate Histories, have argued in a chapter titled, ‘Hard Evidence’, that academics who focus on primary sources,

“Reflect the reluctance of many white Australians even today, to come to terms with incontrovertible evidence about our violent past and to seek reconciliation with Aboriginal survivors.”1

The evidence she provides should therefore be discounted by her own standards. In order to gain power in a politicised history, she makes the assumption that academics who search for hard evidence do not want reconciliation with aboriginals. 

This sinister political game has played out in the history of the Black Line. This period of time is arguably the most infamous event in Tasmanian, if not all of Australian history. By most accounts, it expressed the colonial intent to exterminate the Aboriginal population by sending a line of colonial soldiers across Tasmania.

Historian Henry Reynolds writes in An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History, that this action by the British government was tantamount to ‘ethnic cleansing’.2 Others such as anthropologist David Davies in The Last Tasmanians claims the Black Line played a major role in the extermination of the Aborigines.3

But what actually happened? What historical evidence is there? What follows are ten facts from Keith Windschuttle’s book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, that answer these questions by looking at the available ‘hard evidence’.4 Only by looking at the truth can we begin to achieve true reconciliation.

The Black Line did not Target all Aboriginals

The Black Line only targeted two violent tribes. In order to end the hostilities between these tribes and white settlers, Governor Arthur drew up a plan for the Black Line which focused on two groups: the Oyster Bay and Big River tribes. His goal was to put them into a safe reserve in the northern part of the Island away from settlers, to practise their traditional way of living. As Windschuttle writes:

There was no intention to treat the Aborigines as Bosnians and Kosovars were treated in the 1990s, and to kill them because of their race or religion. Even those to be removed from the settled districts were targeted not because of their race, but because of their violence. Other members of the same racial group deemed to be less hostile were not to be touched.5

Read the rest here…

Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture, History

White Aboriginals wish their existence away

It is a curious thing about many self-declared Aboriginals who bemoan the so-called invasion and the ravaging of their ‘indigenous’ culture. The majority of Aboriginals who pass before our eyes in news reports are in fact Australians of Aboriginal ancestry (AOAAs).

Their colour, from faded brown to full white with European features, gives them away. They all have the blood of other races (predominantly white) racing through their veins.

Do they realise that in bemoaning the invasion they are wishing their existence away? Does it not occur to them that they are alive because the fantastic, incredible voyage of eleven ships brought Europeans and their culture to the land mass now known as Australia?

It is not the only incoherence in the Aboriginal affair.

Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture, History

Aboriginal society was not a pretty sight

The first arrivals in Botany Bay and Sydney Cove wrote their impressions of the Aboriginals they came across in small groups. Among other observations, they noticed that the Aboriginal women showed signs of constant bashing. Indeed, it was no different from the bashing and child abuse presently witnessed among Aboriginal groups in central Australia. The indefatigable promoters of Aboriginal separatism see the history of Aboriginal society differently, Now Aboriginal society pre-settlement cannot be glorified too much. In all respects, they assert, Aboriginal society was superior to the white racists who established the complex society we see around us today. And to point out what the real first Australians achieved, is to earn the title of ‘white supremacists’. The history of Aboriginal society is either being rewritten or reinvented. Occasionally, a real historian will break through the fantasy and propaganda to state the truth.

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Life and Death in Pre-Contact Aboriginal Australia

William D Rubinstein, Quadrant, 18 November 2020

When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788, they encountered an Aboriginal society of almost incredible barbarism and violence. This was the reality of what they found. The reasons for the violence and barbarism of Aboriginal society derive entirely, or almost entirely, from one factor alone. All of the Aborigines of Australia were hunter-gatherers who had not domesticated livestock nor grown crops for food. As a result, the lives of the hundreds of small tribes that constituted Aboriginal society were engaged in a never-ending struggle to find what food they could from what little existed on this continent.

Directly because of this central fact, it was absolutely necessary to keep the size of each tribe small enough for its members to be kept alive by what food and other sustenance they could find. It was therefore absolutely necessary for them to avoid adding any excess mouths to feed to the limited numbers who could be kept alive by the methods of hunter-gatherers in the Dry Continent. They did this by systematically eliminating the excess mouths.

Continue reading Aboriginal society was not a pretty sight →
Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture, Political Correctness

Working towards a system of apartheid

This is the Mornington Peninsula Shire’s mayor. Just elected she has not wasted any time in imposing her far-left green agenda on the unsuspecting people of the Mornington Peninsula of whom a large proportion are retired people, people who have absolutely no affinity with her mangled leftist views. Despi O’Connor has emptied herself of her Australian culture and in its place she has stuffed a reinvented and in some degree a fabricated version of Indigenous culture and history. The Mornington Peninsula Shire is yet another municipality the Green Left have taken without giving any indication beforehand of what they stood for. Despi and her council mates are for everyone except old Australians, those conscious of what Australia has achieved since 26 January 1788.

YOUTUBE VIDEO REMOVED

POSTSCRIPT:
There are some very sensitive people over there at Mornington Peninsula Shire Council. The Green far-left are true to style. Blot out anything that deviates from their tiresome leftist narrative. Despi does not want her propaganda exposed to the well-earned criticism on youtube, does she? So, like the fervent little collectivist she is, she removed it. But the video is still on the council’s website HERE, at least until she finds out unwelcome eyes can still view it.

Australia, Australia Colonial history, History

The Amazing incredible voyage of the First Fleet

The voyage of the First Fleet hardly has its equal in seafaring history. The idea of founding a colony on the other side of the world, of sailing a fleet of ships in uncharted waters below the 44th parallel to a destination 15,000 miles away, on the other side of the world, was thought preposterous in 1787. It would never work. It would turn into a farce and a disaster. But it did work. In chapter 13 of my book PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION, I provide some highlights of that astounding voyage of which two of my ancestors were a part.

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Prison Hulk to Redemption

Chapter 13

The Scarborough’s steward

Jonathan King, a descendant of Philip Gidley King, the third governor of the Australian Colony (1800-1806), opened the introduction to his book, The First Fleet: The Convict Voyage that Founded Australia 1787-1788, with this claim:

The founding of the Australia nation by the first fleet is one of the greatest stories of mankind. Thirteen hundred and fifty people, crammed into eleven tiny ships, sailed halfway round the world to transplant European civilisation and on a voyage that took eight months and one week they lost only forty-eight people, most of whom were sick or dying even before they left.

It was an epic achievement of navigation, use of the wind, ocean currents, and organisation—yet it is a story little known within, or outside, Australia.

No sober judgement of the facts could be at odds with this assessment. Despite the magnitude of the achievement, most Australians would have no idea that ‘the journals and diaries of at least eleven scribes have survived from the First Fleet along with reports and logbooks of others’. Those journals included that of author King’s ancestor Second Lieutenant Philip Gidley King RN on the fleet’s flagship HMS Sirius. Australians of all ancestries have at their disposal firsthand reports of that incredible sea voyage that against the odds, with never a navigational falter, led eleven ships into Botany Bay between the 18th and 20th of January 1788, after 15,000 miles and 252 days.

Those many Australians who today walk along the great avenues of Australia’s modern cities without a thought of where it all came from should rescue themselves from their ignorance. They should read with pride about the sea voyage from the civilised world that laid the foundations of their rich, vibrant, free nation. The eleven ships of the fleet consisted of two naval ships, the armed brig HMS Supply and the warship HMS Sirius; six convict transports, Alexander, Charlotte, Friendship, Lady Penrhyn, Prince of Wales, and Scarborough; and three food and supply transports, Golden Grove, Fishburn, and Borrowdale. Alexander and Scarborough took only male convicts. The Scarborough was loaded with the most vicious and incorrigible of criminals.

As incredible as it may seem, I have two ancestors on the First Fleet, Frederick Meredith on the Scarborough and convict Eleanor Fraser on the Prince of Wales, though it is probable Eleanor was transferred later to the Charlotte. Frederick Meredith was steward to John Marshall, the master of Scarborough. Eleanor Fraser and Frederick Meredith were my ancestors through the line of Frederick’s first child, Frederick Jr (who married Eleanor’s daughter Sarah) and Frederick Jr’s daughter Ann. That line led to my mother via her father.

Continue reading The Amazing incredible voyage of the First Fleet →
Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture, History

Celebrating the convicts who built Australia

I pay tribute to the Manly Daily for its articles on Australia’s colonial history, specifically about those who settled the Manly to Palm Beach peninsula. These articles are especially appreciated because of the Marxist left’s project to erase the history of white settlement and its magnificent achievements. I wrote in my first family history book PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION (see below) that many Australians can look back on a family history similar to mine, with convicts who made good and contributed to the building of a brilliant new nation. It was their exclusive achievement.

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Humble origins didn’t stop James Jenkins becoming the largest landholder on peninsula

FROM arriving as a convict in 1802, by 1825 James Jenkins and his family owned all of the foreshore land from what is now Mona Vale Hospital to southern end of Dee Why Beach (NSW). John Morcombe looks back.

John Morcombe, Manly Daily, 20 November 2020

ONE of the best examples of how a person convicted of a petty crime in England and transported to Australia could rise to become highly regarded and comparatively wealthy is James Jenkins.

From his convict origin he rose to become the largest landholder on the northern beaches, consolidating valuable grazing land and opening up the area by building the first significant road from North Harbour to Collaroy.

But the complex web of legal disputes for the disposition of his estate following his death tended to obscure the magnitude of Jenkins’ contribution to the history of the northern beaches.

Then local historians Ken Muir and Shelagh and George Champion gradually unpicked the web in the 1990s to reveal the contribution Jenkins and his family made to the history of the region.

When James Jenkins and his brother William arrived in the colony as convicts aboard the Coromandel in 1802, they had less than two years left to serve of their seven-year sentences for allegedly stealing seven sheep.

Read the rest here…

Australia Colonial history, Conservatism, Culture, History

Australia did not exist before 26 January 1788

The historical detail for the reasons I claim Australia did not exist before the 26th of January 1788 is in chapter 2, Foundations of a Nation of my book PRISON HULK TO REDEMPTION SECOND EDITION. 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. Both should be in read in combination to appreciate the full argument.

Prison Hulk to Redemption

Chapter 2

Foundations of a new nation

On 28 April 1770, the then Lieutenant James Cook steered his ship, the 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 the 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 the order 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 later the English in the person of William Dampier (1688 and 1689).  Dampier added little to the findings of the Dutch seamen.

Until Cook’s voyage, the most successful effort to map what was south of present-day Indonesia and New Guinea was the voyage of Dutchman Abel Tasman in 1642 and1643. This eight-month voyage on the order of the Governor of Batavia to find the South Land took Tasman west from Batavia (today’s Jakarta). Keeping the Indonesian islands to the north of him, he eventually turned and sailed far to the south before turning directly east. After navigating a great distance, he hit landfall. He followed the shoreline south, mapping it as he went, turned east, then north, but left the coast to head east again. He named this bushy landmass Anthoni Van Diemens Landt after Batavia’s governor. After some days, he made landfall again. Thinking the land he had come across reached as far as Tierra Del Fuego in South America, he noted Staten Landt in his logbook. Staten Landt was the Dutch for the Spanish name of Argentine’s Isla de Los Estados.

Continue reading Australia did not exist before 26 January 1788 →
Australia, Australia Colonial history, Culture, History, Political Correctness, radicalism

Combatting the myth-building about Aboriginal society

The ever-increasing glorification of Aboriginal society and culture has gone deep into myth-inventing mode. The glorification is paired with the disqualification of everyone not ‘indigenous’. The ABC with its billion-dollar budget is at the forefront of myth-invention and delegitization of the people who built Australia. One wonders how far the madness will go. It is a tribute to Quadrant magazine and online that it is offering strong resistance with series of articles based on the evidence. The article below focuses on how brutal and barbaric Aboriginal society was.

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Life and Death in Pre-Contact Aboriginal Australia

William Rubenstein, Quadrant, 18 November 2020

When Europeans first settled in Australia in 1788, they encountered an Aboriginal society of almost incredible barbarism and violence. This was the reality of what they found. The reasons for the violence and barbarism of Aboriginal society derive entirely, or almost entirely, from one factor alone. All of the Aborigines of Australia were hunter-gatherers who had not domesticated livestock nor grown crops for food. As a result, the lives of the hundreds of small tribes that constituted Aboriginal society were engaged in a never-ending struggle to find what food they could from what little existed on this continent. Directly because of this central fact, it was absolutely necessary to keep the size of each tribe small enough for its members to be kept alive by what food and other sustenance they could find. It was therefore absolutely necessary for them to avoid adding any excess mouths to feed to the limited numbers who could be kept alive by the methods of hunter-gatherers in the Dry Continent. They did this by systematically eliminating the excess mouths.

Probably the most important method of eliminating these excess mouths was infanticide, as Ludwik Krzywicki detailed in his 1934 anthropological study Primitive Society and Its Vital Statistics.1 Deliberate infanticide existed throughout Aboriginal society, and it was practised by nearly all of the Aboriginal tribes in Australia. “Horrible tales were told about it. R. Oberlander was shown a woman who had murdered ten children.” Elderly women from the Dieri (Diyari) tribe admitted to South Australian mounted policeman Samuel Gason “of having disposed in this manner of two to four of their offspring: in this way, about 30% of new-born infants perished at the hands of their mothers in the Lake Eyre district”. Among the Narrinyeri (Ngarrindjeri) of the lower Murray district, “more than one half of the children fell victim to this atrocious custom”; the Congregationalist missionary George Taplin “knew several women who had murdered two or three of their new-born children”. Mounted policeman William Henry Willshire:

says of the parts of Central Australia known to him, that at least 60% of the women committed infanticide. He tells of one woman that she had five children, three of whom she murdered immediately after birth, and she explained in her broken English: “me bin keepem one boy and one girl, no good keepem mob, him to[o] much wantem tuckout!” Therefore the women of the bush daily murder their children and do not wish to raise more than two.2

The ostensible reasons for widespread infanticide varied. Victorian government surveyor Philip Chauncy saw a young woman, shortly after her child’s birth, scratch “a hole in the sand behind her hut and having given it a ‘little’ knock on the head, laid it in the hole and kept on crying, the child crying too, till she could bear it no longer, and she went out and gave it another little knock which killed it”. Asked by Chauncy how she could do such a thing, she “replied pointing to the bag on her back that there was room only for one child, and she could not possibly carry another”. When Albert Alexander Le Souef, son of the protector of Aborigines in the Goulburn district, asked a young woman “why she had dashed her infant’s brains out against a tree” she “replied coolly: ‘Oh! too much cry that fellow’”.3

Frail and malformed children were murdered, among other reasons, just because they were frail. A twin was killed (and sometimes both) because the mother could not suckle it … When a mother died while suckling a child, the infant was buried with her, and death often awaited the babe when its father, who as a hunter maintained the family, departed this life.4

Moreover, “sometimes an infant was murdered and cooked for its elder brother or sister to eat, in order to make him or her strong by feeding on the muscle of the baby”. Superstitions regarding twins often resulted in the murder of one or both. There were occasional cases of infants being killed to enable their mothers to suckle orphaned dingo pups instead.5

Read the rest here…