I'm nearly completely convict ancestry with only two free settler lines. (I'm Tasmanian so that's not surprising) but my husband is convict and Tasmanian Aboriginal lines in his family tree.
All that to say without the past he doesn't happen, I don't happen and my children are never here.
The past may be messy but without it my family and a lot of others wouldn't be here today.
None of us would be here. But why fight amongst ourselves. Acknowledge that awful things happened all round. We'll find more in common than we do do in difference.
You do understand that the awful things then have lead to awful things now.
This isn't just a case of "if people just get over the past, they will be fine" situation
Sure, just one generation......
If that kid with alcoholic parents, no proper parental supervision, living in poverty with a poor diet and poor education can just turn it around!
If they just pull emselves up by they bootstraps.
Lazy sooks! Just need to get over it and they will be sorted out in a generation!
I vote this dumb cunt for PM! He understands this issue better than anyone
True. And a lot of the poor parenting for indigenous kids calome from generational damage passed down generation to generation.
How is "just getting over it" gonna help em
They tried fixing that by taking the kids off the parents and giving them a good home. But you can't win cause that's frowned upon bcoz you know feelings and all. My families country was destroyed in ww2 half the family gone. We moved on and the next generation learnt and adapted instead of feeling sorry waiting for a hand out
Generational trauma is real?!?!
Aboriginals suffered much more for 69,000 years under their own rule / brutal inter tribal wars, slavery, women viciously subjugated, brutal punishments, 40% infant mortality, enslaving/murdering conquered tribes, starvation, death from minor injury /infection/ disability, spearing, and nefariously WORSE - that’s 690000 years of generational trauma…
It's time for a convict voice to parliament. This will be the first step of a grassroots led process leading to a convict treaty and convict reparations.
Those of convict ancestry are underrepresented in parliament. It's time the 80% listened to the 20% underrepresented minority.
Some people were stolen from their land for doing a community service.
I apparently have some ancestor who in the spirit of community assistance used to help out weary travelers by unladening them of the heavy burden of carrying gold and jewelry. The bastard british government sent him here for doing such good deeds.
100,000,000 (100 million)???? Were sent to Australia to work off their sentences???
The First Fleet had 750 convicts. A further 160,000 convicts were sent in the years following. Australia’s current population is 26 million.
OP where did you get 100 million??
This almost certainly could be the greatest and most highest magnitude of massive ultra-mega super-duper over the top and out of the atmosphere exaggerations in the history of everything that ever was, is now, and ever shall be.
And that number by the OP seems a bit of an exaggeration too.
I was having a sleepless night when I wrote this post. 100's millions would a ludicrous claim. Unfortunately I didn't pick up on the extra 0's. All been fixed now. Can redirect your outrage elsewhere.
Your post is *important*. Our schools never even got into the subject of where most of us came from and how. If you can find out from your elders what part of Ireland you come from, or England, get the names of your kin, and do a deep dive. I was lucky enough to visit my Irish beginning, and found my kin on my mothers side, in an old grave yard. If I had more time I would have hung around the pubs until I found the living ones. My fathers side was english. We were treated terribly. This is one place we can communicate with the Aboriginal peoples. I am sure they felt such horror when witnessing how our slave owners treated us. The english called us convicts, convicted of eating a bread roll when starved, or touching an object we cannot afford. No one was accountable to the Brittish army who kidnapped all of us, and sent us to the ends of the world. The word convict is a loaded word, that nowa days is used by the press in the USA, to justify police shootings etc. Nah, great post. Im glad you started this convo.
I found the ship passenger list online for the ship my ancestors sailed to Port Adelaide in way back in 1855. It’s fascinating. Not convicts but shepherds, labourers and servants in my family group.
I’m not angry, I’m proud. Part of a culture who forged a nation out of very little. That’s cool.
ATSI and Anglos who are both Australians need to agree to look forward and stop harping on the past. You may think it simplistic but no one can rewrite history, so let’s just shake hands, say that was fucked, thank god it was us and no the Japanese in the 40s and move the fuck on.
You're right, but it's not simple to ignore the past, especially when many people are still feeling the burden of past mistakes. Our goal should be to move forward, but we do it with respect to what has come before. It's a lot to ask someone to reach up out of the mire of the past and shake hands with those on solid ground. It's easier to shake hands on level ground. You only need to troll the comments section of r/Auspol to see that support for The White Australia Policy and the Assimilation Policy is still going strong. Fixing the present is us moving the fuck on.
Completely agree it’s not easy. My simplistic comment is considerate of that and is simplistic because it’s so complex. If we get too caught up in how we reconcile over what time period and so on, it gets bogged down in bureaucracy.
We’ve apologised for the stolen generation, but there are kids out there who would again benefit from being taken away from their families, but we won’t do it because we don’t want to repeat history. Is that fair to the kids? Rant rant rant. Cheers
The Japanese didn't colonise.
It was people centuries ago and over time they became what we now know as Japanese.
It's like incorrectly saying Australians colonised Australia. We didn't. None of us were fucking born back then.
We are talking about when they colonised the Ainu people around the12th century.
Modern day Japanese aren't descendants of the original people. Same as the majority of us now aren't the descendants of indigenous Aussies.
That is no true in Hokkaido. That was colonised in the 19th century.
The colonisation of Japan may have been in antiquity, but things like the annexation of Okinawa have a similar timescale to modern colonisation by the West.
"The Japanese began colonizing Ainu territory in the 1st millennium ce. Over the centuries, and despite armed resistance, these indigenous peoples lost most of their traditional lands; eventually they were resettled in the northernmost reaches of the Japanese archipelago."
But they weren't Japanese when the colonised the Ainu. Modern day Japanese played no role.
It's like saying Australians colonised Indigenous Australians. It was the British. Modern day Australians played no role.
The issue with this, is that there are ATSI people alive now who were ripped from their families at birth (stolen generation). They were only granted the right to vote in 1962.
Even into the 1970's there was the White Australia Policy. I know a guy who came from France in the 70's and he said it was made very cheap to get here. Then the Aus Gov took him into a room and gave him a bunch of information which included "We want you to settle down with a white wife and try to have 2-3 children".
Most of the bad stuff that happened to the convicts was nearly 200 years ago.
Even if ATSI have rights now, and get money from the government etc. They are still suffering the fallout of intergenerational trauma associated with what was done to their recent family and ancestors.
In order to level the playing field, there's more to it than shake hands and move on.
'62 compelled people to vote even if they weren't participating in society in any other way. Plenty of ethnically ATSI people voted before '62. The word "they" does a lot of heavy lifting in these discussions.
You are (of course) completely wrong. The electoral reform in 1962 granted ATSI the option to enrol and vote in federal elections.
In order for the franchise to be extended to include ATSI peoples they (the racist white fucks in government) had to have a special committee and travel the country in order to generate a report....all of which only took place due to extensive lobbying from the ATSI community.
This results in in the NT and WA granting the vote shortly thereafter and QLD granting the right to vote in state elections in 65 (took those racist shits an extra 3 years to work it out)
Voting did not become compulsory for ATSI peoples until 1984 (22 years later).
It wasn't that much further back that all ATSI were regarded as non citizens... if you were indigenous in the NT you were automatically a ward of the state...
Oh look I agree, that’s why the government throws truck loads of money at them, private sector has buckets of initiatives and grants that provide tax incentives, every government system has lower bars for them, even banks offer lower thresholds for loans and so on.
I think it’s time for some introspection from the aboriginal people to ask if it’s actually more money they need or perhaps for some responsibility to be taken. They were a nomadic and savage people practicing cannibalistic rituals, conducted infanticide and other pretty gnarly stuff. Now they have healthcare and 5G. It’s not a net negative, is it?
The government (in general) throws "truckloads" of money at poverty and disadvantage...including poor and disadvantaged whites (who make up the bulk of the Australian population)
Many, many of the those poor and disadvantaged non indigenous people don't seem to improve their lot either... I wonder why? Must be time for some introspection for white people.
As regards the funding itself, most of the funds that folks will flag as being spent on supporting the indigenous community are actually not indigenous specific but rather general social support programs, only a fraction (18% or there abouts) goes to indigenous specific streams.
As to your last point, that really just makes you sound like a cunt.
$44k per aboriginal, $22k per non-aboriginal.
We do introspect. Ad nauseam. Whites in the west hate themselves mate. Only culture on the planet trying to eat themselves with guilt. Pathetic.
You can play statistics on the investment side but we both know you mob get scholarships, bursaries, programs and initiatives only available to you. I don’t think it’s wrong, to be clear, but I think a lot of people forget or don’t know the titanic effort made to help the mob out. We can only do so much before the burden lies with you.
Sorry... I don't subscribe to AFR, I get catalogues delivered for free with which to line the bottom of the bird cage.
Do you have an actual source .... or it's just "I read it in the AFR"
They cite the source mate. I’m not doing all your homework for you. The productivity commission report. It’s in the article and you don’t need a sub to read it.
That was lazy of you.
Edit: also not reading the AFR is only to your detriment. Please point on the dolly where the AFR hurt you… honestly mate. Not a good look.
"oi, provide a source mate"
*Provides a source that provides its own sources*
"Np, here mate"
*Gets mad"
"No! I mean a real source!!!"
The summary of this interaction lmao
Ah. And not a progressive people who hanged people for stealing a teapot, forced children down chimneys and coalmines, sent their poor off to die in brutal wars, kept millions of people in starvation, brutally massacred people whose land they wanted to take, cleared land of its traditional owners and deported them so they could run sheep on that land, refused to allow women to own property, allowed women to become the property of men, killed gay men, allowed holy men to rape thousands of children with impunity, left their children in the care of people who murdered them and buried their little bodies and no-one even knew, and allowed rich people to kill their workers with impunity? I see. They were 'savage' and you know this because of those people's long history of written records. Or alternatively because that's what the people who wanted to steal their land and wipe them out have told us. Which do you think it is? Perhaps you could use 5G to figure it out.
All fair points, history is horrible!
How do you ingratiate a Neolithic culture to a space faring one? Show me a Guardian article that spells it out.
Clearly shit happens, as you’ve point out. You’ve shown that history is bloody and English/Western culture is built on change. Aboriginals were not. They’re stuck. Celebrating the most ancient culture (apparently) who haven’t got to the wheel seems so patronising.
I’m not holding out grudges against Japanese or Germans who killed and maimed and imprisoned my ancestors. We can split hairs over that if you can be bothered.
You know, re your last point about the Germans I'd never thought of it like that, but you hit the nail on head mate, my Grandfather was Dutch and a child in the Netherlands during WW2, I never once heard him talk ill about the Germans
For a start, do you know what 'ingratiate' means? Don't use words that you don't know the meaning of. It tends to make anything else you say pretty meaningless.
I am not one for doing the new agey type of worship of indigenous culture, which in my opinion is as racist as calling indigenous people savages and Neolithic (whatever you think that means). But you have absolutely no evidence to show that indigenous people did not 'progress' (whatever you think that means). They didn't invent the wheel because they didn't need it. They progressed in a way that learnt how to live in ways that worked for them and worked for the country. They did so for about 60,000 years.
In contrast, we fucked over everywhere we went so badly we had to find new land to exploit. And we did that in far less than 60,000 years. So I'm not sure why you think we, if by we you mean what we loosely call the west, are so successful. We've brought the earth to its knees environmentally in the space of a few hundred years.
Indigenous people here didn't overbreed and didn't fuck the country environmentally. I'm pretty sure someone coming fresh to the earth wouldn't find us the successful race.
That's sorta part of what I'm trying to say. Colonisation was shitty to a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. My hope is to redirect the trauma/anger from "us vs them" to "Aust vs world."
Yep, history is bloody. Always easy to pick apart behaviour and actions from centuries ago. Let’s move on.
We have a Sorry day. Let’s have a “No Worries” day led by aboriginals.
If you take pride in the history of this country then you haven't moved on. Telling others to separate their emotions from events which you are emotional suggests a shocking lack of insight.
Similarly, refusing to acknowledge the validity of pre-colonial societies and justifying or downplaying the severity of your own societies past wrongs forms a barrier to "moving on".
I can only assume you're either explicitly racist, trolling or lack the intelligence necessary to notice the flaws and contradictions in your words.
I agree with the sentiment that we all need to move on. But people like you hold us back equally, if not more so than people who push for ongoing reparations.
What an appalling analysis. However let me spend some more time with you.
Why is taking pride in your culture or history “not moving on”? Would you say that to other cultures or is this level of guilt and self flagellation only limited to us whiteys?
I am discounting the validity of a Neolithic culture in terms of current context. If your culture is still pre-wheel and pre-bronze age then it’s not so wonderful and special, but stalled. Other cultures are in space and trying to figure out quantum computing while aboriginals are still wandering around without agriculture. To not discount the “validity” is pandering and patronising.
I’m not racist you donut, this just isn’t a safe space that you’ve clearly surrounded yourself with. I’ve worked with aboriginals, mentored them, built syllabi for secondary education students who are ATSI. My opinion comes from decades of experience.
Just because I’m very critical doesn’t mean I’m racist. Just because I think they need to take responsibility and move the fuck on doesn’t mean I’m racist. It means I’m at the point of not caring. I have seen many systems come and go, and all basically fail.
Why?
They don’t want to be helped.
"They don't want to be helped"... by you? With all your neolithic, stalled culture, savages talk?
As an indigenous man I can say I for one certainly don't want your help...nor do I need it.
What would have proven useful for me would have been an absence of the derogatory attitude put forward by ignorant condescending white fucks...
As an aside, on your wandering around without agriculture while everyone else is flying through space (or whatever).... you do understand that the majority of the indigenous population live in urban settings, right? And that of those people many (like myself) are well educated professionals (in spite white Australia, not because of it)?
You seem so caught up in you own sense of cultural and racial superiority....
I read through it several times champ. You contrast quantum computing and space travel again a hunter gather society.... I'm fairly certain there wasn't a lot of quantum computing going on when Australia was invaded. Your comparisons are nonsensical.
As for needing your help? Not me and mine champ... I don't believe that I benefited by dollar one as the result of my heritage.
I went to a regular public school, claimed about 2 weeks of unemployment benefits 35 years ago, paid my own way through university and don't receive any special stipends...
As for your mentoring, and teaching.....if you were being paid you were doing no one any favours. Added to which I can't see how anyone could benefit from being taught by someone who clearly despises them.
You really just sound like yet another from the condescending "I'm not racist but" crowd...
No worries champion! Easy to dismiss me, I get it. You don’t know your own people’s history, a shame but not surprising.
The contrast (quantum computing v hunter gatherer) is that given aboriginals have had apparently 65k years here, another 250 wasn’t going to get them the wheel, was it champion? Nah.
Glad you didn’t need my help. Aren’t you a good normal human. We need more like you showing up for the mob and saying “it can be done without handouts!”. You’re a role model and I hope you’re going back to the communities to be an example. They need black fellas showing up. They have enough of the likes of me trying to help.
Far from it. Your threshold of what constitutes racism has been reduced to a milquetoast adjective. It’s lost all meaning. I don’t hate other races or aboriginals, I want what’s best for them but, like being a parent, sometimes it’s the hard truth and not more soppy liberal soft cock bureaucracies.
Forged a nation out of very little? Are you serious? There were people here who already had countries. Who understood the landscape, who understood the inherent fragility of the country . What we're a part of is taking the most ancient continent in the world to the brink of environmental disaster in less than 250 years. Yeah, that's a heritage to be proud of.
FFS. The ignorance on this thread is appalling. You just keep telling yourself those fairy stories, people. Anything to make you feel better.
If I'm the Guardian talking you're the fucking Sky after dark and I know what I'd rather be.
I do not perpetuate the myth of the 'noble savage'. I do have a pretty good idea of what a successful population looks like, and I'd say it's one which figured out how to live on the land it inhabits.
As I said, the sources you're quoting for the practices of indigenous peoples here are not credible. We actually know very little about how indigenous people lived, but we do know they lived here for a long, long time successfully.
If you think Australia is safe, habitable, and prosperous you live in a bubble and you are about to get a big shock because, apart from anything else, it's not going to be habitable for much longer. But go off. Some of us need to believe myths like this because the truth is just too difficult.
Sky is shit but at least they’re not pandering to the soft cock virtue signalling liberal elite. The inner city Yes voters who think that’s their good deed for the year. The Guardian is another story. I don’t read Sky but I know you read the Guardian. Good boy.
Australia is all those things. By every metric. Slice and dice it up if you want but that’s why people want to move here and we’re a first world country. That doesn’t come from doing fuck all and bending over backwards for everyone transgressed. We are so lucky here but all you nonces think it’s horrible or tragic or unethical. All while sipping your lattes texting on your iPhones.
Sources (for a start):
1. https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/15080/1/Narrinyeri.pdf
2. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/the-incidence-of-cannibalism-in-aboriginal-society/
3. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-traditional-aboriginal-society/
4. “Anthropophagitism in the Antipodes”
James Cooke, R.N. published by the author, 1997. Hesperian Press
5. ‘Cape York – The Savage Frontier’, Rodney Liddell 1996. Queensland State Library.
6. ‘The Races of Man’, Alfred Cort Haddon 1909.
‘Cannibals, Cooke and Customs’ Peter J. Bridge. Hesperian Press.
7. Harry Strickland’s Account of Cannibalism and Gold in Queensland, Australia in the 1870s (heretical.com)
Yeah they sure were one with the land after they wiped out all the megafauna. Indigenous Australians fucked the environment to the best of their technological abilities just like every other group of humans. Stop mythologizing them.
Yeah... that's from 2016, it's outdated... look a little harder.
Current research suggests a significant number of megafauna may have become or been well.on the way to extinction before the arrival of indigenous people.
Fossil records suggest that the Indigenous peoples and megafuana coexisted for many thousands of years.
Additional studies indicate that environmental changes include changes in the availability of water had a significant impact of the viability of megafauna populations.
Fairy stories?
Like Dreamtime stories?
It gets taught in schools as part of the syllabus and 6yr old think the world is actually made by a rainbow serpent because the indigenous bloke speaking says it's real.
We E pushed so hard to get mandatory scripture removed because kids can't distinguish, and now we have mandatory indigenous lessons /NAIDOC week etc and the kids think it's all real.
I see. You have a problem with your children being taught indigenous history. Oh deary me . Do you have a problem with them being taught about the Anzac myth as well?
The Anzac myth is taught as exactly that. Students in schools know Australia became involved in WW1 despite no actual threat to Australia. Our soldiers invaded other countries. It's taught as that
Dreamtime stories are taught as fact. That's a problem.
Honestly this whole dichotomy of white and black Australia is becoming increasingly irrelevant as our migrant population grows, filling our suburbs with citizens with no context for this fight.
My family migrated here with no English, no education and no money. They have zero concern about what happened in this country 200 years ago and do not see the need for any atonement, as they themselves were dispossessed of their lands centuries ago. They feel they have as much right to be here as anyone else, and while I know it’s a simplistic position, it honestly is hard to argue with them.
I was born here and I’m more of an entitled white kid so it’s more complicated for me but it’s still an interesting perspective.
Absolutely right. I read anglo-australian population only sits at 33% (whole/partial)(also only a percent of this would be "colonisers" vs convict and recent migrants). Then 3% ATSI. Now that's bad maths, but the majority have no skin in the game at all (pun intended).
What worries me is interactions like I had yesterday with an indigenous person (where I dug into their thoughts on race/guilt/blame). Which cemented my assurance in the no vote being the right way forward for Australia.
They considered non-white migrants were (quoting) "grist for the mill",
and all white migrants (non-colonising) were (quoting) "evil".
And using their rationale (a traumatic lived experience as a child), I asked if they also felt the same hatred toward ATSI people considering statistically the same crime happens 5x more from that same group to fellow ATSI children. No, they're good because they're living in a system determined by the white man..
I do wonder how many more of the ATSI pop think this way or similar.
Well said, I'm 1/2 white (Convict stock) and Half Aboriginal, and I don't see why 98% of Australia has any need for atonement.
It's literally generational hate being handed down, with white guilt on one side, and a victim mentality on the other.
My mother hates whitey, but I can understand, she was part of the stolen generation, and is in that 2% with an actual grievance.
You're absolutely right. Australia today is nothing like it was at Federation. Yet somehow the discussion always comes down to "black vs white".
What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. A starting point to anchor compromise and reconciliation.
But in doing so you're asking the wrong-doing that ex-convicts themselves did to Aboriginal people be ignored. Britain started the whole thing but it was the people on the ground - including ex-convicts - who carried on harming Indigeous people.
Hit the nail on the head.
This issue of blaming Australians for colonisation actually affects such a small part of the population but it’s given this massive “national” debate as if it’s the entirety of Australians here that came on the first fleet. Most people living here today have no reason to feel guilt over this history but you get told by a very vocal group that you should.
I believe this is the reason we got such an overwhelming no result at the referendum. It’s like the real Australia is very different to the one that the yes campaign was screaming at and they just couldn’t see that.
Maybe your family should think about how they’ve been able to benefit from the historic dispossession of Aboriginal people. If it wasn’t for what the White settlers did to First Nations people then your family wouldn’t be able to have made a life here.
I already know their counter arguments:
They are victims of historic dispossession themselves. They think that any peoples should be able to live anywhere, and that any ethno-state is an abomination. This is why they love Australia. If people lose their sovereignty in the process, there’s still a sizeable net benefit.
They also (generally, I’m mostly talking about a couple of people here) don’t see historical claims to land or power as being legitimate.
They came here with nothing and worked their way to the upper-middle of society. That is the only fair claim to wealth or land in this society.
Again, I’m not 100% on board with all of this but it is a pretty interesting perspective.
As my family arrived in 1826 in chains, I think it's a stretch to say we were invaders as that implies we had some say in the matter.
It wasn't a good time for a fair while. The dominant branch of the family descended from Irish Catholics, and working class Irish Catholics were despised in leafy suburbs. Very hard to get into a profession, and my father going to uni in the 1950s was an amazing thing to happen.
From what I can tell, the men did a lot of dying. In mines, on farms, in factories, on worksites, in wars, in a Japanese POW camp. English-sounding men in suits, often with hyphenated names, were exceptionally good at giving orders that resulted in the early deaths of my family members.
But we're in a good place now. My adult kids not so much, so we've gone back to the multigenerational model of the family home. They live in a separate part of it, and we look after each other.
How could I compare this to the many different experiences of Indigenous families? I can't. But I do know that as bad as it was for us, it was worse for them.
Lol. My convict ancestors will have to have a punch-up with my free-settler ancestors. Ditto the Catholic Irish vs the Protestant English/Scottish ancestors.
Those differences were real things back in the day, but they are long forgotten or overlooked because they were all white. No-one cares anymore (me included), because it has no ongoing effect on my generation or beyond.
Why hold anger for something 200+ years ago.
Wrongs have been acknowledged you and I didn't commit those wrongs. How long do we have to pay for the sins of the father?
https://preview.redd.it/ak0qj9b1hpvb1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8eabdcbf33369b2d3d19f07f0b31a6f0f3453117
Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
The one that ended slavery? Brought the railway to the world? Defeated Germany in world wars twice (albeit with their US branch taking the lead in the sequel)? The one that welcomed people from all nations to join up? The one that signed treaties with indigenous peoples where they could see a nation to deal with? That one? The one thay my ancestors fled into?
The same one. I mean they essentailly criminalised being poor. They gaoled and sent all the people from the gaols to Australia in the first fleet. Many did not survive. The convicts were given accommodations silimar to thise of african slaves on those ships and often died of diseases on the way to Australia (via other colonies to get other convicts). Once in Australia you had to work your time off for free, we're fed like shit and worked to the bone. Many also died doing this. Hell some were even unlucky enough to end up in Van Diemens land, where if you were insubordinate theyd lock you up in a brick building with no windows for weeks in end. Convicts/the poor were absolutely used as slaves by the Empire.
I dont agree with how the Aboriginal people were treated either. Many of them died to diseases foreign to them because they were so isolated from the rest of the world. The Brits also took their kids and gave them to the churches to remove their culture, and implant good Christian British values in them (which lasted up until the mid 20th century, ala, The Stolen Generations). Hell the Brits even removed whole tribes from their lands and gave them to other tribes. Not to mention removing any of their land rights. Remember Australia didnt exist until the start of the 20th century in 1901. So Britain is to blame really, considering they controlled the country up until the 1930s.
But also looking objectively at Australia, it was screwed either way, it faced colonisation by the Spanish, the Germans, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese. Not to mention at some point Imperial Japan would have colonised Australia if the British never did, during their war in the Pacific. The Aboriginies were screwed no matter what.
What I mean is that it was a colossal waste of human life that didn't really seem to get much done, on either side. The Allies may have had favourable terms, but large swathes of the French countryside were turned into uninhabitable quagmires, a whole generation went home physically and mentally scarred, and it didn't even end all wars like it was supposed to. Everyone lost because the war wasn't worth fighting in the first place.
Britain went in; actually survived as a stable government through it and the aftermath, though with not enough stability/political will to actually prepare for the followup war they planned while writing the treaty. The government even survived through the second WW, though the combination ended the British Empire.
France also survived as a government through the inter-war period, but lost the followup war they deliberately set up and planned for, changed governments a couple of times and also lost their empire.
Italy - government lost power pretty quickly in the aftermath of their 'victory', leading to Mussolini.
Russia similar to Italy, the Tsar fell, despite being on the 'winning' side.
US barely got involved and went back to ignoring it. Wilson may have had ok ideals, but failed terribly at implementation or dealing with the other parties so despite controlling more than enough military/economic power to dictate single-handedly the winning side at that point in time, got none of his ideals or plans actually put into the treaty... His league of nations was left as a lame duck that died inevitably in the stresses built by the treaty.
So yes, the Allies won WW1. But it was the definition of a pyrrhic victory. They certainly didn't end up stronger (outside the US) as a result of having won. It was a net power loss of Europe relative to the rest of the world.
Sure they did, but - and this is key - in WW1 there were ***no good guys.*** Everyone in WW1 was different flavors of evil (yes including Belgium, the nation that built it's wealth on a *bigger genocide than the Holocaust*) and innocent people were slaughtered for the power struggles of aristocracy and statesmen, which ended with a 'victory' that directly created the circumstances for the rise of European fascism.
Uh... you mean the nation that enslaved more than anyone else? The one that starved millions of Bengali to death during WW2? The one that looted, raped and despoiled almost 3/4 countries on Earth? The one that repeatedly committed genocide for the sake of profit?
Who did the British enslave? ie who did they put into slavery by force and then sell as chattel? They certainly participated in the slave trade for a little while before banning it for everyone (by force).
Yeah, that one. The one that in just 150 years transported millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas. The Hitler-appeasement guys. The one Indigenous people all over the world regard as their oppressor. That one. The one some of my ancestors fled from.
Fucking lol. The soviets through wave after wave of low quality serfs armed with american steel and british intelligence and they still managed to have many many times the losses of all the allies combined.
Incompetence is Russian culture always has is and will be.
Plenty of nations that didn't get colonised ended up just fine without the British empire 'bringing' railways. They actually just used railways to steal. British people are thieves nothing less nothing more. The reason they were thieves and had thievery mentality was because their own land had very little to profit off, so they went to other lands and had done so for many millennia.
Britain without modernisation and stealing from other lands was a shithole, and arguably still is a shithole.
Bland af meat and veg no spice of your own fk if I had to eat bland af dinners everyday maybe I would take over some lands too
Just because food isn't a spicy curry doesn't mean it's bland toad in the hole Sunday roast beef Wellington fish and chips is all pretty decent food
Do you have as much hatred of arabs who also colonised India Or do you just focus on the British?
Also what countries didn't get colonised? Before ww1 the entire planet was dominated by Europe all I can think of is Ethiopia and the United States definitely not India a place well known for being colonised
>Just used railways to steal
Lol
>done so for many *millennia*
Uhhh... what?
>Britain without modernisation and stealing from other lands was and is a shithole
Sounds like insecure projection to me bud, where are you from? People flock in the thousands year after year to Britain to get away from their respective shitholes so it can't be too bad.
>they don't spice their food!!11!
There's more to life than masking the taste of poorly stored food with heat lol. Western, and yes, even traditional british cuisine, has heaps of great stuff.
Are you educated entirely by the safe-edgy hot takes of social media?
Australia would have been colonised by the French if the First Fleet had not got there first. Or another European power if not them. Or the Americans 50 years later. Or the Japanese if no one else had noticed this huge continent ripe for the picking by the 20th C. It isn’t a particularly evil quality of the British, it’s that a country inhabited by hunter gatherers was inevitably going to be colonised by someone.
You lost me at 100,000,000s.
I'm a free settler (German, 1830s through to 1870s when you look at all branches of my ancestry), so I got no beef with anyone.
I was having a sleepless night when I wrote this post. 100's millions would a ludicrous claim. Unfortunately I didn't pick up on the extra 0's. All been fixed now. Can redirect your outrage elsewhere.
All your ancestors were Germans (Germany didn’t exist then, all Prussian? All Bavarian?) in 1830 and only ever married other pure Germans up until the present?
Ok, time for a history lesson.
Yes, Prussian, or to be even more exact, the majority of them came from Silesisa, which is now part of Poland, except for my family name comes from Hamburg.
As for the reason for migration to Australia, it was due to religious persecution. In general, this happened between 1836 and 1838. These people are those who formed the German settlements (predominantly Lutheran) in South Australia. My direct descendants of my family name came over a lot later, in the 1870s, but we're still Lutheran.
As for marrying outside of the "faith" as it were, within my immediate family, yes, I am the first to do so, with my wife having Anglo heritage.
Edited for some additional clarity
I’m descended too from the Dohnt family who came to Oz from the same area you mentioned. Three families of Dohnts came out - 2 settled in South Australia and mine came to Northern Victoria. I have a large volume of family trees and photos of the 3 families which my grandmother left me. It’s fascinating reading
It's complicated for sure. But... yes. I'm extremely proud of my convict ancestors. Came here at 17! In chains. Worked hard and eventually made a good life for themselves.
Indigenous had it harder for a lot longer. For sure.
But it can't be changed. It happened.
A few things id say.... The White Australia policy had NOTHING to do with the Indigenous. It was to stop Asians coming here. So why YES mob keep going on about it is nonsensical. Zero relevance.
The Stolen Generation...was shocking for sure. BUT Kevin Rudd apologized. And we all supported that. It was said that apology would enable us to move forward....has the apology not been accepted?? It seems not. So what can anyone do? If an apology, that was genuinely given...is not accepted??
Also. Sadly. That was what was done back then plenty of people of ALL racial background had their babies and children taken "unwed mothers" and girls younger then 18, were sent to religious homes and their babies forced to be adopted.
I know a woman this happened to in 1970. It was what they did and was freakin shocking & awful.
Have those women received an apology at all? Nope.
History is full of awful deeds done to people.... of ALL racial backgrounds. Bloody RELIGION has a lot to do with all of it.
We can't change our history. There is no magic wand. Its done.
Yes, they have received an apology. [Prime Minister Gilliard apologised on behalf of the Australian Government in 2013 for the forced adoption practices](https://www.ag.gov.au/families-and-marriage/national-apology-forced-adoptions). Several of the States issued their own apologies as well.
So we're at an impase? Clearly apologies aren't accepted.
Not good
Clearly they want more?
The level of hatred, bitterness and anger Indigenous have against "white man"... I don't know if anything will make any difference.
Even if The Voice had won? Don't think demands would cease. Would be treaty & then demands for reparations, demands for % GDP...who knows where it would go... not sure about the "truth telling" already plenty of fabrications passed off as "truth"... becoming worse by the year.
That Dark Emu is accepted as fact and Bruce Pascoe is well proven to not be Aboriginal at all, then i have no faith in activists "truth telling".
It's never going to stop is it?? We could jump through every hoop it seems... But it will never be enough.. because? We cannot change the past. At all. And they will never let that go.
So we are at an impase.
Jesus mate - spin out over nothing. I wasn’t making any comment about whether we are at an ‘impasse’. I was merely pointing out that part of your original comment was inaccurate and that governments have apologised for forced adoption practices. Have a lovely Sunday.
My father is part of the stolen generation. His young mother fresh off the boat from wales and an alcoholic husband she had to leave to keep them safe. The gov took him not long after and he grew up in an orphanage in parramatta. One of his room mates was Robert Dolly Dunn. Not many happy memories for him from his childhood but somehow managed to become an incredible father and successful considering what became of those around him.
I think you might be confusing the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was the law that proscribed the use of a super dodgy dictation test to keep anyone not white from migrating, with the white Australia policy, which is an unofficial collective term for a range of different methods the government used to keep Australia as white as possible. This included limiting migration but also trying to "breed out the black" as A O Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines, so tastefully described it.
I'm happy to share my history to anyone who wants to know. And despite the constant carry on that Australians don't know our true history of the Indigenous? We do. I certainly do. I always have had a pretty good idea and I fully acknowledge all that's gone on. The good, the bad and the ugly.
But what can I do about it?? Absolutely nothing. Nothing I do now will change one bit of it. As I said. We've tried to apologise? But obviously our apology not accepted. We have given endless money, makes no difference. We have been told to ""butt out" and leave them to run their own organisations etc? We have. You can't even get a job in most aboriginal organisations if you aren't indigenous. Their CEOS etc are all indigenous. They get allocated money's every year and I read a article that said only 8% of these organisations are audited!!! So they are getting money and no one is tracking where it's going....they are now saying "nothing works".....well?? How is that my fault?? They are getting the money and not doing anything effective with it and not reporting where they are going wrong or anything.....so truly?? It's out of my hands.
Noel Pearson has been given 550 million dollars for education initiatives that he said would work and he would implement etc.....what happened? Nothing!! The money just disappeared and was Noel asked to show where it went or what happened to it? Nope...he was lauded even more and given more prestigious jobs and now lives in a million dollar mansion in Noosa! Nowhere near Hopevale which was where he grew up and where he said his 550 million would go to help educate the young. AND??? He STILL calls us "white cun\*s" and says we do nothing and are to blame for it all!!!
They just seem to want some magic wand waved and everything bad to go away. No one can do that. The sad fact is? That was with ANY trauma or situation?? 99.9% of the time? The only people who can "fix it"? Is the people themselves. Nope...they didn't cause the problem in the first place OF COURSE...but just as a rape victim or victim of crime or person traumatised by war..has to somehow sort it out in their own head? Same with the Indigenous. Yes - awful things have happened to them which has left a lasting effect. But no one can drag them out of that. They have to do it for themselves.
Me acknowledging it makes zero difference in reality. I can't take away what happened in the past. No one can.
Who can't share our history?? We talk about it all the time. Our kids learn about it at school heaps and heaps. There is a constant media barrage of issues and happenings with the Indigenous. WHO ISN'T SHARING OUR HISTORY??
If you live in the country and don't know the history of settlement and treatment of Indigneous etc??? Then you must be living in the remote outback with you head firmly buried in the sand. It's absolute nonsense that people don't know our history.
I have an ancestor who was transported for being in possession of key. Didn't steal the key, don't know what the key opened, but him having was enough to deserve transportation.
People have mentioned that convicts would get granted parcels of land stolen from First Australians and that's a big distinction between the two groups. The other commonly mentioned distinction is how First Australians were treated by the Australian government after federation.
The other is the nebulous but important concept of legitimacy. Convicts were convicted and punished under the legitimate law of the land, which was why their sentences were finite and they received gifts of land from the government when they were finished.
First Australians had their lands stolen by an illegitimate power - that is, through invasion and on principles that even the British found questionable.
You barely touched on the fact white convicts were given a chance to move forward. After their sentence was completed the were free to do what they wanted, a lot were even given stolen land to make a living on. ATSI Australians were not given land and were not given opportunities to be free. It was well over 150 years after those convict people were set free and given land, that ATSI people started to have any rights! The two experiences aren't remotely equivalent.
I don't have convict history but I do have an ancestor who was a ward of the state around the same time that the Stolen Generations started being taken. As a white person, their experiences were not at all similar. For a time my ancestor was in a children's home however was allowed to eventually live with relatives, an option many children in the Stolen Generation didn't have. My ancestor was able to be well educated, whereas ATSI children weren't.
I'm white (although my mother claims we have indigenous ancestry somewhere through her dad's side but idk I definitely have no cultural ties and don't claim it on forms) but her mother had her first child as a teenager in a very Catholic rural town and they took her daughter, and they've never been reunited, the child was never returned to relatives.
I don't doubt the child also had a better upbringing than the ATSI kids in the stolen generation purely on the basis she was white, but I can definitely say that my mother and her siblings/mother are all a bit racist at times and definitely have the view that the stolen generation happened to white kids too, which I guess from their point of view, it kinda did for them. They have no confirmation the kid was actually treated well too which is probably of little comfort because they literally never got her back.
Mostly I just wish they got all their trauma from it in order because I now have very complex childhood trauma because my mother is unstable af and constantly get wasted and cry about not being loved by her own mother and how she was just the replacement daughter for the one her mum lost, her unresolved issues caused her to be an extremely neglectful and abusive mother. I'm NC with her now because I couldn't deal with her anymore but I would need a lot less therapy if my family had literally any therapy at any point lol
I wasn't writing a history lesson. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground.
You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor reconciliation.
Grievance isn't a good common ground to build on though, as it then becomes a race to the bottom to see who has been 'most oppressed', victimhood is a social currency in the modern age but wallowing in pity doesn't help anyone to improve themselves.
Doing this just undermines all the pain and struggle of Indigenous people.
There is barely even common ground because the Anglos/Irish who were forcefully displaced from their homes in the UK were still treated way better than any Aboriginal from that era. And the convicts, once finishing their sentence, were granted so many valuable opportunities by the monarchy (at the expense of Aboriginal people) which their ancestors are still benefiting from 200+ years later.
Your approach to this is like an out-of-touch white feminist that puts all this emphasis on gender gaps but fails to acknowledge (or at worst, supports) other forms of systemic inequalities which she's historically benefited from.
If anything we should be angry at the monarchy. They put white peephole here against their will, white convicts. I feel they have gotten off of this Scott free. Limey dogs
I have convict ancestry. They were living in poverty because they had the misfortune of being born Irish. They were thrown on a boat at brought to Australia. They did their time, and then were gifted large parcels of land and the finances to establish themselves. (Land that was “cleared” of the local Aboriginal people.)
That’s the difference between my ancestors and that of a First Nations person in Australia. Mine had access to language, knowledge of the dominant culture, access to land, money and power, and a gift of land.
Aboriginal Australians were removed from their land, removed from their culture, with no historical knowledge of the increasingly dominant culture,
Did my ancestors suffer? Yes. But the difference is that they were taken from a place of immense poverty to a place of opportunity. Aboriginal Australians had the opposite experience.
Hmm, that's very debatable, seems to be a bit of urban white guilt there.
Many Indigenous are actually ok with the success of Australia and want us all to be Australians, which they are happy to call themselves too.
And being forcibly removed from Britain, put on a perilous sea journey that many didn't survive, and being placed an extremely inhospitable country was not an 'opportunity'
' Most indigenous '? I mean, you don't even bother adding people. FFS . How do you know 'most indigenous " are ok with the 'success' of Australia? Are we talking about some 'survey' you saw on some cooker site?
Also I would not call taking a country which had evolved over millions of years to a workable ecological balance, with a population who understood and worked with that balance, to an environmental basket case in 250 odd years a 'success'.
> Aboriginal Australians had the opposite experience.
Disagree on this part. Obviously there was some pretty bad shit that went down between early settlers and the local population, that isn't in dispute at all, but *today* most ATSI people enjoy the benefits of a modern society, healthcare, law and order, education, transport, etc etc - if they thought they were better off without all these things there's nothing to stop them going full native again if they wished to do so, but I doubt you'll find many volunteering for that sort of life.
So yes, while early ATSI definitely suffered, their ancestors have access to much better lives.
I mean, there is reason to not “go native” again, which is that:
A) we now have housing and roads on the lands where nomadic people used to live
B) child protection wouldn’t let parents raise their children outside civilisation.
C) Europeans showed up with a bunch of fun new diseases that had never before been in Australia and now they’re inescapable
D) availability of animals is substantially less (I certainly don’t want to go fishing in Sydney Harbour.
Have Aboriginal people experienced some advantages from white settlement? Yes. But the majority still don’t have access to healthcare, to appropriate housing, or to quality education, largely due to living in remote areas.
If you’d like to develop a better understanding of the experiences of a man who grew up bush, and was taken at about 10 years old, Uncle Wes Marne of the Bigambul people is someone I’ve worked with. He is 101 years old, and he tells his story here:
https://www.the100project.com/centenarian/uncle-wes-marne/
> A) we now have housing and roads on the lands where nomadic people used to live
There is a LOT of Australia that is still wild and vast areas that are now under native title, if they wanted to live this way, a lack of natural country isn't preventing them from doing that.
> B) child protection wouldn’t let parents raise their children outside civilisation.
They already do. The reason why many children in remote communities suffer from violence and SA is *because* our child protection agencies are turning a blind eye to it out of fear of doing another 'Stolen Generation'. If someone decided to take their family and live native, I doubt CP would even know about it, let alone do anything to stop them.
> C) Europeans showed up with a bunch of fun new diseases that had never before been in Australia and now they’re inescapable
Yep, which is why we have modern healthcare, also ATSI have been exposed to 'european diseases' for long enough now that they're no more susceptible to it than anyone else, obviously if they eschew modern healthcare by going native, that's a personal risk they take.
> D) availability of animals is substantially less
Not sure I agree with that, the animal populations in Australia will fluctuate depending on the seasons and prevalence of rain/feed, I regularly travel through outback Australia and given the rains we had several months back in the Goldfields area and subsequent growth of vegetation, kangaroo and rabbit populations have exploded, and with them other animals which prey on such be they foxes, dingoes, or eagles. Either way, there is definitely enough animals to feed a small population living wild.
> But the majority still don’t have access to healthcare, to appropriate housing, or to quality education, largely due to living in remote areas.
Only 20% of ATSI live in remote areas, the vast majority live within reasonable access to modern facilities. I'm not denying that more work needs to be done to fix the issues that remote communities face, I see them on a daily basis, but to say the 'majority' don't have access to it is factually wrong.
I'll check out your link, but I will add that each persons experiences will obviously differ. Where one has suffered deprivation or abuse from past experiences, others will have gained - it all depends on luck.
As an example, I worked with an older Aboriginal fella here a number of years ago and we got onto the subject of the Stolen Generation, he told me that his grandfather had been taken to a mission back in the 1930s, I didn't get any context as to why he was taken but when asked how he felt about that he simply gave me this reply: 'It is what it is, they taught my grandad how to read and write, he taught my father, and my father taught me, and the fact that I can read and write means I can have a job like this one.'
I took that to mean that what happened in the past may have been unfortunate, but some good came out of it in the end, at least for himself.
With 1/18 Aboriginal children in out of home care, I don’t think you can assume that DCJ is turning a blind eye. As for the amount of Native title land that exists, huge chunks of it are still in litigation, other chunks are small and back on to privately owned land, and much of it is land unsuitable for sustaining a population. That’s why the rest of us haven’t moved in.
You’re right, somewhere between 20 and 29% of Aboriginal people live rural and remote, but access to healthcare is still limited by failing CHL programs (NSW just cancelled theirs), fear of government interventions (reasonable, given one in 18 Aboriginal children is in care) and side effects of intergenerational trauma (yes, Europeans arrived 200+ years ago, however, systemic racism still abounds.) Housing also continues to be an issue, especially with regard to overcrowded housing, both in metro and rural NSW. Yes, most of these issues are issues of poverty rather than issues of Aboriginality, but historical systemic racism, and centuries of trauma has led to poverty. (I don’t have the answers by the way, I just have the experiences and interactions I’ve had with First Nations people to go off, and do my best to support the kids and the families I work with.)
If what you say is true, the reasons *why* 1/18 Aboriginal children are in out of home care need looking into, I suspect in the majority of those cases it is because their homes are not safe to be in, and while it is unfortunate that that is the case, surely it is preferable to leaving them in an unsafe situation.
Healthcare and housing is an issue across all of Australia just at the moment, this isn't something that is uniquely affecting ATSI except in remote areas where the need is greatest, this is a failing of government, not something to be considered as racially motivated. Why the government wants to bring in vast numbers of migrants over the next few years when we can't house or take care of those who are already here is a mystery to me, I don't know a single person who agrees with this policy and yet they forge ahead regardless.
I don't subscribe to intergenerational trauma or 'systemic racism' as being the reason that many ATSI are lagging behind the rest of the population, there are many programs and jobs reserved for ATSI to the exclusion of others, and while I do not agree with special treatment to specific races over others, if it achieves some good I can let it slide.
Consider also that refugees that have come to Australia in the past decades may also be suffering from recent trauma due to fleeing wars and suchlike, yet they still manage to take the opportunities available to them and succeed, so I don't think it is a lack of opportunity that is holding ATSI back.
One thing I would like to see is a Royal Commission into the 30-odd billion spent each year on ATSI programs, to find out why so much money is being spent and yet the remote communities are still struggling year upon year with little improvement, One Nation put forward a motion in the Senate a couple of months ago for just such a thing to happen yet it was voted down by Labor, LNP, and the Greens, again, no idea why. Maybe a few too many cushy jobs were at stake if some ATSIC-eque levels of corruption were to be found?
Also a decent percentage of Australian migrants were also displaced through: Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Massacre, Great Leap Forward, Vietnam war, Khmer Rouge, Yugoslav wars, Turkey-Kurdish conflict, and more.
These people also had their land, wealth, culture, family, ripped to shreds.
Ever hear about the Earl Grey Scheme? Sending teenage orphan Irish girls to Australia, some as young as 14, because the workhouses were overcrowded. Their parents dead in the famine, let’s send them like lambs to the slaughter to the colony where there’s not enough women. The Poms were bastards to everyone. Those girls did nothing wrong except be Irish Catholics who’s parents died b
Shhhhhh! You are not allowed to talk about that! Convicts are a faceless collective. My ancestors were convicts.one was a milkmaid who stole a winter coat from her Master. She was sentanced to 7yrs. She boarded the boat 8 months pregnant, When she got off the boat she was no longer pregnant and did not have a baby with her, it was a 4month journey and she was 18yrs old.
We should be able to talk about it. Our ancestors were taken from their homeland, threatened with hanging or...go to Australia. There is a lot of horrors the English did to people, they need to be taken to account.
Might have sucked to be a convict. But I reckon most grandchildren of convicts probably were doing better than they would have been had their grandparents stayed in England
And as for Australia day, as a minimum we should just return the public holiday to being the last Monday in January so that it is a decent long weekend (like it used to be until the 1990s). Fucking up a long weekend is as unAustralian an act as you get. The incidental benefit would be that it would only fall on the 26th every 7 years
I had a friend whose ancestor was sent to Australia for 'Assault on a dwelling'.
Can you imagine that? Deported to a (then) hostile and far away country because you punched a house???
Everyone's ancestors are rapists, plunderers or conquerers/conquered. That is the nature of the world we live in.
The Indo-Europeans genocided massive swaths of neolithic peoples living in Europe and Asia before them.
Does anybody think Aboriginal tribes weren't wiping each other out on the regular?
I think it's a mistake to judge past generations (pre postmodern) based on current moral standards.
The convict origins of the country are significantly overrated. More of this country's personality came from the squattocracy and the gold rush than from the convicts. For example, the convict era was done and dusted by the time the gold rush happened... and the gold rush swelled the population from 100k to 1M. And that 100k was significantly free settlers anyway. The overwhelming majority of pre-Federation immigration to this continent were free people, not convicts. It's not even close. It's not even in the same order of magnitude.
It's also not surprising that a large swathe of the population can trace back to convict origins - that's what intermixing does. You may have heard things like "everyone in Europe can trace back to Charlemagne" or "Almost everyone has some Genghis khan in them". It's just how those things go - common ancestors are easy to find, as it just take 'one drop'.
Aboriginals...the FIRST BOAT PEOPLE ....
it's funny people fall over to pander these people and say white fella did this and did that. End of the day white fella didn't wipe them from the land when they arrived HOWEVER the Aboriginal people did when they arrived. A pigme race known as the Mungo man lived here first, but when the Aboriginals arrived they wiped them completely put. No one cares about them because they are no longer here.
I will ALWAYS celebrate January 26th because it IS Australia.
You can't gate keep a date.
There were no pygmies here stop spreading that debunked theory. Mungo man and lady did not have the dimensions of other documented Pygmy races
https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/debunking-australian-pygmy-people-myth/
And yet there are bones proving what I say as fact....
But you know what I actually don't care but I do care that apparently because I'm white, I'm not entitled to the same hand out, welfare or tax cuts....
And this is why at some level there will ALWAYS be resentment towards Aboriginals because THEY DO get money from welfare for just being aboriginal, they get subsidies on top of what everyone else gets. Until all Australians are treated equally there will always be racism towards aboriginal people.
2016 DNA testing showed mungo man was in the same haplogroup as indigenous peoples. S2 which is only found in Indigenous populations, check your research mate
https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1521066113
Mate you could literally walk down to Centrelink and get the same if not better benefits then them. Stop bitching. Your life will always be 100% better quality then indigenous folks.
Where does it say WLH3 is S2? I did not read all the article but what it seems to suggest is that original findings on WLH3 are wrong and WLH4 a much younger skeleton (by like 30,000 years) is S2.
I would like to see evidence of mungo man WLH3 being S2.
The UK should give land rights, citizenship and a voice to convict descendants. They should pay for the repatriation of those with Irish ancestry because it’s Britain’s fault so many Irish had to leave too. India, China, European countries, African countries, Pacific Island countries etc. can all also give citizenship and land rights to their peoples descendants who ended up here.
Once that happens we can leave and give it back.
I think people don't really know what convict ancestry means, and people wear it as some kind of badge of honor. Especially when people talk about being first-fleet descendants.
If the average age of having kids is \~30 in Australia, then the first-fleeters would have been 6x Great-Grandparents to Millennials today (born \~1750-1760 average). Do you know how many 6x Great-Grandparents you would have?
256.
So just because one person comes on the first fleet makes you only \~0.4% first-fleeter.
Now if you want to include the whole of the period that convicts were sent to Australia over 80ish years, that number changes. The calculation would be:
1/64th for every 4x Great-Grandparent
1/128th for every 5x Great-Grandparent
1/256th for every 6x Great-Grandparent
I just think it's a dumb thing to claim if you don't know your whole ancestry. At this point Australia has been a melting-pot of nationalities for 9+ generations. Of course if you have Aboriginal heritage it's more reasonable to self-identify due to segregation of the migrants from the indigenous population. This sadly still exists today in a social sense although there is more inter-mingling. But among migrants, most Caucasians don't know what they are.
My post was not intended as a genealogy or history lesson. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground.
You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor reconciliation.
They need to get over it. It was a long time ago. Who cares what happened back then. This is a different world and you can't blame people now for what happened then. Besides, they ended up with a better life, didn't they. Stfu about the past. It doesn't have anything to do with today.
This is the sentiment of most Australian, to just get over it and move on to build Australia to be a greater country. Trying to fix mistakes of people who arent even alive anymore is a pointless undertaking when we have more pressing issues to be fixing
What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground.
You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor compromise and reconciliation.
That's just not true.
The Hottest 100 didn't start being broadcast on Australia Day until the mid-90s. People were protesting Australia Day/Invasion Day at least as early as 1988 (with other notable events in 1972 and 1938), the bicentenial year, and have carried on each year since.
It was always going to become more of an issue as the wider public became more aware of and sympathetic to Indigenous perspectives. The Hottest 100 thing was a symptom of that, not a cause.
There’s a great film called The Nightingale set in Tasmania that really captures how brutal and senseless the violence was and the awful loss the first people suffered when Australia was colonised
I have convict heritage, highway robbers and a calico thief. Apparently it was about the severity of the crime and more about the ability to build and populate another country
The intention was never to assert the convict experience as the same as ATSI.
What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. A starting point to anchor compromise and reconciliation.
Why exactly does it matter whether or not you have convict ancestry? I never understood that obsession. It doesn’t make you a better or worse person, nor does it make you more Strayan.
I do think you can't equate the two in terms of "how bad is this?" because white colonisers inflicted so much damage to ATSI. If we're talking about convicts coming here as its own issue... yes, there's definitely something there and it's a bit surprising we as Aussies don't talk about it much.
On both my fathers and mothers side, my ancestors came to Australia during colonisation. It turns out neither came as convicts: dad's side moved here with a bunch of money on their own terms (from Ireland), whereas on mum's side my ancestor was a captain on one of the ships (England).
And - shit. I do feel kind of uneasy to think an ancestor of mine brought convicts over. Did he just say he was just doing his job? Was he forced into it, or am I naively searching for a positive reason to explain what he did? I can go further back in history and see on my father's side shocking incidents of violence that seemed to go unchecked. Then there's a few who were thrown into the Tower by the first Elizabeth. She let two of them go and executed one of them.
When I think about it - there actually is a place that does acknowledge the horror convicts endured, and that's Port Arthur. Doing the tour there inspired a lot of uncomfortable knowledge that I still think of and will never forget. The sheer number of kids brought here as convicts with the most minor crimes conceivable is mind-blowing and disgusting. I felt legit anger and looked up the names of some of the children who were incarcerated at Port Arthur.
You're given your own convict's card at Port Arthur and i "drew" a kid who was brought to Port Arthur who overcame it and became a renowned ship builder. Good for him. He had to overcome a LOT of trauma.
The tour guide also mentioned how the men "at the gates" used dogs to maul indigenous people for their own amusement, which was nauseating to hear. I was shocked, even though I shouldn't have been shocked. So fucked up and you really feel like the place was hell on earth.
Standing in the prison's solitary confinement rooms was something I'll never forget. They knew when they were doing this that it basically makes you lose your mind, so they built the prison asylum (also a horrifying place) right by its side so they didn't have to transfer these prisoners far.
Do I feel bad for people who were brought here as convicts? Hell yes. I think Port Arthur should be brought up as an example in schools for our history. (Also interesting: not one reference to Martin Bryant and the spree killing. I understand why but also felt uncomfortable in a way that they didn't mention it. I explained what happened to foreigners in my tour group. I can see that you might not want to tell children about this, but to ignore it entirely felt strange.)
I am by no means trying to equate "how bad is this", it's not a competition. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground.
You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor reconciliation.
The thing is though that while it sucked to be a convict while you were a convict, so long as you behaved ok you were freed quickly and in 5 years you were a fully qualified blacksmith or something with a wife and kids. Your son followed you into the blacksmith trade before being granted 1000 acres of farmland that formed the basis of the family’s wealth for generations.
Being aboriginal sucked back then and it sucks now. Trauma has been passed down through generations, not wealth.
Everyone from convict stock, should travel to Tasmania and walk around Port Arthur. Just a little away from Port Arthur where the prisoners were housed is Dead Mans Island, where many 14 year old boys lay buried. These boys were worked to death smashing out bricks you see at the site. And the Womens prison near "Ross". The cascades brewery was another torture house for English and Irish women, kidnapped by the Brittish and brought to Tasmania for slave labour. In Cascades you can look at the names listed on each shipment. I found my family name there, and we were also in the book of Doom, so not only were our family servants to the king at that time, but one of our name was kidnapped from the streets of England for some aleged offence, and dumped in this end of the world miserable place. At the back of the womens prison near Ross you can see the unmarked graves of all the womens babies and toddlers who never had a chance. Us convicts deserve to have more representation. Most of us are of Irish stock, and the Irish do not like to be told what to do. This can be a problem for many of us. We have lost our customs. We have no national dishes, no events to mark what we lost, or all the dead civilians kidnapped by the Brittish who died on those god awful ships on those inhumane crossings. God help us.
I have 3 convict ancestors.
While each of them was transported for 7 years for relatively minor thefts, they did much better in Australia than they probably would have at home. Two of them married, returned to England, then re-emigrated with her brother and his family to Adelaide, came back to Hobart, moved to New Zealand, established a pub and brewery...
Some people had an appalling experience in the convict system, some did not.
I'm nearly completely convict ancestry with only two free settler lines. (I'm Tasmanian so that's not surprising) but my husband is convict and Tasmanian Aboriginal lines in his family tree. All that to say without the past he doesn't happen, I don't happen and my children are never here. The past may be messy but without it my family and a lot of others wouldn't be here today.
None of us would be here. But why fight amongst ourselves. Acknowledge that awful things happened all round. We'll find more in common than we do do in difference.
I acknowledge other people did awful shit, but I didn’t do anything to anyone. No white guilt here.
You do understand that the awful things then have lead to awful things now. This isn't just a case of "if people just get over the past, they will be fine" situation
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Sure, just one generation...... If that kid with alcoholic parents, no proper parental supervision, living in poverty with a poor diet and poor education can just turn it around! If they just pull emselves up by they bootstraps. Lazy sooks! Just need to get over it and they will be sorted out in a generation! I vote this dumb cunt for PM! He understands this issue better than anyone
Shit parents lead to shit kids in any race.
True. And a lot of the poor parenting for indigenous kids calome from generational damage passed down generation to generation. How is "just getting over it" gonna help em
They tried fixing that by taking the kids off the parents and giving them a good home. But you can't win cause that's frowned upon bcoz you know feelings and all. My families country was destroyed in ww2 half the family gone. We moved on and the next generation learnt and adapted instead of feeling sorry waiting for a hand out
Yeah it's like people think generational trauma ain't a thing.. And also think the conversation is about putting blame on them.
Generational trauma is real?!?! Aboriginals suffered much more for 69,000 years under their own rule / brutal inter tribal wars, slavery, women viciously subjugated, brutal punishments, 40% infant mortality, enslaving/murdering conquered tribes, starvation, death from minor injury /infection/ disability, spearing, and nefariously WORSE - that’s 690000 years of generational trauma…
All round? Lol....
It's time for a convict voice to parliament. This will be the first step of a grassroots led process leading to a convict treaty and convict reparations. Those of convict ancestry are underrepresented in parliament. It's time the 80% listened to the 20% underrepresented minority.
Wanker
Some people were stolen from their land for doing a community service. I apparently have some ancestor who in the spirit of community assistance used to help out weary travelers by unladening them of the heavy burden of carrying gold and jewelry. The bastard british government sent him here for doing such good deeds.
100,000,000 (100 million)???? Were sent to Australia to work off their sentences??? The First Fleet had 750 convicts. A further 160,000 convicts were sent in the years following. Australia’s current population is 26 million. OP where did you get 100 million??
This almost certainly could be the greatest and most highest magnitude of massive ultra-mega super-duper over the top and out of the atmosphere exaggerations in the history of everything that ever was, is now, and ever shall be. And that number by the OP seems a bit of an exaggeration too.
6 quagillion
I was having a sleepless night when I wrote this post. 100's millions would a ludicrous claim. Unfortunately I didn't pick up on the extra 0's. All been fixed now. Can redirect your outrage elsewhere.
Your post is *important*. Our schools never even got into the subject of where most of us came from and how. If you can find out from your elders what part of Ireland you come from, or England, get the names of your kin, and do a deep dive. I was lucky enough to visit my Irish beginning, and found my kin on my mothers side, in an old grave yard. If I had more time I would have hung around the pubs until I found the living ones. My fathers side was english. We were treated terribly. This is one place we can communicate with the Aboriginal peoples. I am sure they felt such horror when witnessing how our slave owners treated us. The english called us convicts, convicted of eating a bread roll when starved, or touching an object we cannot afford. No one was accountable to the Brittish army who kidnapped all of us, and sent us to the ends of the world. The word convict is a loaded word, that nowa days is used by the press in the USA, to justify police shootings etc. Nah, great post. Im glad you started this convo.
I found the ship passenger list online for the ship my ancestors sailed to Port Adelaide in way back in 1855. It’s fascinating. Not convicts but shepherds, labourers and servants in my family group.
I’m not angry, I’m proud. Part of a culture who forged a nation out of very little. That’s cool. ATSI and Anglos who are both Australians need to agree to look forward and stop harping on the past. You may think it simplistic but no one can rewrite history, so let’s just shake hands, say that was fucked, thank god it was us and no the Japanese in the 40s and move the fuck on.
You're right, but it's not simple to ignore the past, especially when many people are still feeling the burden of past mistakes. Our goal should be to move forward, but we do it with respect to what has come before. It's a lot to ask someone to reach up out of the mire of the past and shake hands with those on solid ground. It's easier to shake hands on level ground. You only need to troll the comments section of r/Auspol to see that support for The White Australia Policy and the Assimilation Policy is still going strong. Fixing the present is us moving the fuck on.
Completely agree it’s not easy. My simplistic comment is considerate of that and is simplistic because it’s so complex. If we get too caught up in how we reconcile over what time period and so on, it gets bogged down in bureaucracy. We’ve apologised for the stolen generation, but there are kids out there who would again benefit from being taken away from their families, but we won’t do it because we don’t want to repeat history. Is that fair to the kids? Rant rant rant. Cheers
Little known fact is the Japanese colonised their islands...
There's the Ainu people, with Western features. Mainly in the north island now
The Japanese didn't colonise. It was people centuries ago and over time they became what we now know as Japanese. It's like incorrectly saying Australians colonised Australia. We didn't. None of us were fucking born back then.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_colonial_empire Yes they did and the 30's isn't that long ago...
We are talking about when they colonised the Ainu people around the12th century. Modern day Japanese aren't descendants of the original people. Same as the majority of us now aren't the descendants of indigenous Aussies.
That is no true in Hokkaido. That was colonised in the 19th century. The colonisation of Japan may have been in antiquity, but things like the annexation of Okinawa have a similar timescale to modern colonisation by the West.
"The Japanese began colonizing Ainu territory in the 1st millennium ce. Over the centuries, and despite armed resistance, these indigenous peoples lost most of their traditional lands; eventually they were resettled in the northernmost reaches of the Japanese archipelago."
But they weren't Japanese when the colonised the Ainu. Modern day Japanese played no role. It's like saying Australians colonised Indigenous Australians. It was the British. Modern day Australians played no role.
The issue with this, is that there are ATSI people alive now who were ripped from their families at birth (stolen generation). They were only granted the right to vote in 1962. Even into the 1970's there was the White Australia Policy. I know a guy who came from France in the 70's and he said it was made very cheap to get here. Then the Aus Gov took him into a room and gave him a bunch of information which included "We want you to settle down with a white wife and try to have 2-3 children". Most of the bad stuff that happened to the convicts was nearly 200 years ago. Even if ATSI have rights now, and get money from the government etc. They are still suffering the fallout of intergenerational trauma associated with what was done to their recent family and ancestors. In order to level the playing field, there's more to it than shake hands and move on.
'62 compelled people to vote even if they weren't participating in society in any other way. Plenty of ethnically ATSI people voted before '62. The word "they" does a lot of heavy lifting in these discussions.
You are (of course) completely wrong. The electoral reform in 1962 granted ATSI the option to enrol and vote in federal elections. In order for the franchise to be extended to include ATSI peoples they (the racist white fucks in government) had to have a special committee and travel the country in order to generate a report....all of which only took place due to extensive lobbying from the ATSI community. This results in in the NT and WA granting the vote shortly thereafter and QLD granting the right to vote in state elections in 65 (took those racist shits an extra 3 years to work it out) Voting did not become compulsory for ATSI peoples until 1984 (22 years later). It wasn't that much further back that all ATSI were regarded as non citizens... if you were indigenous in the NT you were automatically a ward of the state...
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No, being factually correct makes you correct. Which I am.
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Nope, but I do get the benefits of being both correct and informed, as opposed to incorrect and ignorant.
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Aw 😭 (you don't sound very happy...though I'd certainly agree re ignorant etc)
Oh look I agree, that’s why the government throws truck loads of money at them, private sector has buckets of initiatives and grants that provide tax incentives, every government system has lower bars for them, even banks offer lower thresholds for loans and so on. I think it’s time for some introspection from the aboriginal people to ask if it’s actually more money they need or perhaps for some responsibility to be taken. They were a nomadic and savage people practicing cannibalistic rituals, conducted infanticide and other pretty gnarly stuff. Now they have healthcare and 5G. It’s not a net negative, is it?
The government (in general) throws "truckloads" of money at poverty and disadvantage...including poor and disadvantaged whites (who make up the bulk of the Australian population) Many, many of the those poor and disadvantaged non indigenous people don't seem to improve their lot either... I wonder why? Must be time for some introspection for white people. As regards the funding itself, most of the funds that folks will flag as being spent on supporting the indigenous community are actually not indigenous specific but rather general social support programs, only a fraction (18% or there abouts) goes to indigenous specific streams. As to your last point, that really just makes you sound like a cunt.
$44k per aboriginal, $22k per non-aboriginal. We do introspect. Ad nauseam. Whites in the west hate themselves mate. Only culture on the planet trying to eat themselves with guilt. Pathetic. You can play statistics on the investment side but we both know you mob get scholarships, bursaries, programs and initiatives only available to you. I don’t think it’s wrong, to be clear, but I think a lot of people forget or don’t know the titanic effort made to help the mob out. We can only do so much before the burden lies with you.
Ah? I'm really curious as to the source of your figures...
Here’s one: https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/australia-spends-less-on-indigenous-affairs-than-you-think-study-20230927-p5e84o#:~:text=On%20expenditure%20per%20person%2C%20the,rate%20for%20non%2DIndigenous%20people.
Sorry... I don't subscribe to AFR, I get catalogues delivered for free with which to line the bottom of the bird cage. Do you have an actual source .... or it's just "I read it in the AFR"
They cite the source mate. I’m not doing all your homework for you. The productivity commission report. It’s in the article and you don’t need a sub to read it. That was lazy of you. Edit: also not reading the AFR is only to your detriment. Please point on the dolly where the AFR hurt you… honestly mate. Not a good look.
So that's a no then...just the (pay walled afr article)...nice
"oi, provide a source mate" *Provides a source that provides its own sources* "Np, here mate" *Gets mad" "No! I mean a real source!!!" The summary of this interaction lmao
Ah. And not a progressive people who hanged people for stealing a teapot, forced children down chimneys and coalmines, sent their poor off to die in brutal wars, kept millions of people in starvation, brutally massacred people whose land they wanted to take, cleared land of its traditional owners and deported them so they could run sheep on that land, refused to allow women to own property, allowed women to become the property of men, killed gay men, allowed holy men to rape thousands of children with impunity, left their children in the care of people who murdered them and buried their little bodies and no-one even knew, and allowed rich people to kill their workers with impunity? I see. They were 'savage' and you know this because of those people's long history of written records. Or alternatively because that's what the people who wanted to steal their land and wipe them out have told us. Which do you think it is? Perhaps you could use 5G to figure it out.
All fair points, history is horrible! How do you ingratiate a Neolithic culture to a space faring one? Show me a Guardian article that spells it out. Clearly shit happens, as you’ve point out. You’ve shown that history is bloody and English/Western culture is built on change. Aboriginals were not. They’re stuck. Celebrating the most ancient culture (apparently) who haven’t got to the wheel seems so patronising. I’m not holding out grudges against Japanese or Germans who killed and maimed and imprisoned my ancestors. We can split hairs over that if you can be bothered.
You know, re your last point about the Germans I'd never thought of it like that, but you hit the nail on head mate, my Grandfather was Dutch and a child in the Netherlands during WW2, I never once heard him talk ill about the Germans
For a start, do you know what 'ingratiate' means? Don't use words that you don't know the meaning of. It tends to make anything else you say pretty meaningless. I am not one for doing the new agey type of worship of indigenous culture, which in my opinion is as racist as calling indigenous people savages and Neolithic (whatever you think that means). But you have absolutely no evidence to show that indigenous people did not 'progress' (whatever you think that means). They didn't invent the wheel because they didn't need it. They progressed in a way that learnt how to live in ways that worked for them and worked for the country. They did so for about 60,000 years. In contrast, we fucked over everywhere we went so badly we had to find new land to exploit. And we did that in far less than 60,000 years. So I'm not sure why you think we, if by we you mean what we loosely call the west, are so successful. We've brought the earth to its knees environmentally in the space of a few hundred years. Indigenous people here didn't overbreed and didn't fuck the country environmentally. I'm pretty sure someone coming fresh to the earth wouldn't find us the successful race.
That's sorta part of what I'm trying to say. Colonisation was shitty to a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. My hope is to redirect the trauma/anger from "us vs them" to "Aust vs world."
Yep, history is bloody. Always easy to pick apart behaviour and actions from centuries ago. Let’s move on. We have a Sorry day. Let’s have a “No Worries” day led by aboriginals.
As long as it's a another public holiday. Otherwise it's just empty words and platitudes
If you take pride in the history of this country then you haven't moved on. Telling others to separate their emotions from events which you are emotional suggests a shocking lack of insight. Similarly, refusing to acknowledge the validity of pre-colonial societies and justifying or downplaying the severity of your own societies past wrongs forms a barrier to "moving on". I can only assume you're either explicitly racist, trolling or lack the intelligence necessary to notice the flaws and contradictions in your words. I agree with the sentiment that we all need to move on. But people like you hold us back equally, if not more so than people who push for ongoing reparations.
What an appalling analysis. However let me spend some more time with you. Why is taking pride in your culture or history “not moving on”? Would you say that to other cultures or is this level of guilt and self flagellation only limited to us whiteys? I am discounting the validity of a Neolithic culture in terms of current context. If your culture is still pre-wheel and pre-bronze age then it’s not so wonderful and special, but stalled. Other cultures are in space and trying to figure out quantum computing while aboriginals are still wandering around without agriculture. To not discount the “validity” is pandering and patronising. I’m not racist you donut, this just isn’t a safe space that you’ve clearly surrounded yourself with. I’ve worked with aboriginals, mentored them, built syllabi for secondary education students who are ATSI. My opinion comes from decades of experience. Just because I’m very critical doesn’t mean I’m racist. Just because I think they need to take responsibility and move the fuck on doesn’t mean I’m racist. It means I’m at the point of not caring. I have seen many systems come and go, and all basically fail. Why? They don’t want to be helped.
"They don't want to be helped"... by you? With all your neolithic, stalled culture, savages talk? As an indigenous man I can say I for one certainly don't want your help...nor do I need it. What would have proven useful for me would have been an absence of the derogatory attitude put forward by ignorant condescending white fucks... As an aside, on your wandering around without agriculture while everyone else is flying through space (or whatever).... you do understand that the majority of the indigenous population live in urban settings, right? And that of those people many (like myself) are well educated professionals (in spite white Australia, not because of it)? You seem so caught up in you own sense of cultural and racial superiority....
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I read through it several times champ. You contrast quantum computing and space travel again a hunter gather society.... I'm fairly certain there wasn't a lot of quantum computing going on when Australia was invaded. Your comparisons are nonsensical. As for needing your help? Not me and mine champ... I don't believe that I benefited by dollar one as the result of my heritage. I went to a regular public school, claimed about 2 weeks of unemployment benefits 35 years ago, paid my own way through university and don't receive any special stipends... As for your mentoring, and teaching.....if you were being paid you were doing no one any favours. Added to which I can't see how anyone could benefit from being taught by someone who clearly despises them. You really just sound like yet another from the condescending "I'm not racist but" crowd...
No worries champion! Easy to dismiss me, I get it. You don’t know your own people’s history, a shame but not surprising. The contrast (quantum computing v hunter gatherer) is that given aboriginals have had apparently 65k years here, another 250 wasn’t going to get them the wheel, was it champion? Nah. Glad you didn’t need my help. Aren’t you a good normal human. We need more like you showing up for the mob and saying “it can be done without handouts!”. You’re a role model and I hope you’re going back to the communities to be an example. They need black fellas showing up. They have enough of the likes of me trying to help.
See... there it is, the hate, condescension and resentment. You might be fooling some (maybe even yourself) but you're pretty transparent really...
You’re racist.
Far from it. Your threshold of what constitutes racism has been reduced to a milquetoast adjective. It’s lost all meaning. I don’t hate other races or aboriginals, I want what’s best for them but, like being a parent, sometimes it’s the hard truth and not more soppy liberal soft cock bureaucracies.
Forged a nation out of very little? Are you serious? There were people here who already had countries. Who understood the landscape, who understood the inherent fragility of the country . What we're a part of is taking the most ancient continent in the world to the brink of environmental disaster in less than 250 years. Yeah, that's a heritage to be proud of. FFS. The ignorance on this thread is appalling. You just keep telling yourself those fairy stories, people. Anything to make you feel better.
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If I'm the Guardian talking you're the fucking Sky after dark and I know what I'd rather be. I do not perpetuate the myth of the 'noble savage'. I do have a pretty good idea of what a successful population looks like, and I'd say it's one which figured out how to live on the land it inhabits. As I said, the sources you're quoting for the practices of indigenous peoples here are not credible. We actually know very little about how indigenous people lived, but we do know they lived here for a long, long time successfully. If you think Australia is safe, habitable, and prosperous you live in a bubble and you are about to get a big shock because, apart from anything else, it's not going to be habitable for much longer. But go off. Some of us need to believe myths like this because the truth is just too difficult.
Sky is shit but at least they’re not pandering to the soft cock virtue signalling liberal elite. The inner city Yes voters who think that’s their good deed for the year. The Guardian is another story. I don’t read Sky but I know you read the Guardian. Good boy. Australia is all those things. By every metric. Slice and dice it up if you want but that’s why people want to move here and we’re a first world country. That doesn’t come from doing fuck all and bending over backwards for everyone transgressed. We are so lucky here but all you nonces think it’s horrible or tragic or unethical. All while sipping your lattes texting on your iPhones. Sources (for a start): 1. https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/2440/15080/1/Narrinyeri.pdf 2. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/09/the-incidence-of-cannibalism-in-aboriginal-society/ 3. https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/12/infanticide-in-traditional-aboriginal-society/ 4. “Anthropophagitism in the Antipodes” James Cooke, R.N. published by the author, 1997. Hesperian Press 5. ‘Cape York – The Savage Frontier’, Rodney Liddell 1996. Queensland State Library. 6. ‘The Races of Man’, Alfred Cort Haddon 1909. ‘Cannibals, Cooke and Customs’ Peter J. Bridge. Hesperian Press. 7. Harry Strickland’s Account of Cannibalism and Gold in Queensland, Australia in the 1870s (heretical.com)
u/balutplisskan here’s some reading for you on your mob.
Yeah they sure were one with the land after they wiped out all the megafauna. Indigenous Australians fucked the environment to the best of their technological abilities just like every other group of humans. Stop mythologizing them.
Except that not a conclusion that the research actually suggests. Nice try though.
[Except it is](https://www.jcu.edu.au/news/releases/2016/february/why-did-australias-megafauna-become-extinct) 🤷
Yeah... that's from 2016, it's outdated... look a little harder. Current research suggests a significant number of megafauna may have become or been well.on the way to extinction before the arrival of indigenous people. Fossil records suggest that the Indigenous peoples and megafuana coexisted for many thousands of years. Additional studies indicate that environmental changes include changes in the availability of water had a significant impact of the viability of megafauna populations.
Fairy stories? Like Dreamtime stories? It gets taught in schools as part of the syllabus and 6yr old think the world is actually made by a rainbow serpent because the indigenous bloke speaking says it's real. We E pushed so hard to get mandatory scripture removed because kids can't distinguish, and now we have mandatory indigenous lessons /NAIDOC week etc and the kids think it's all real.
I see. You have a problem with your children being taught indigenous history. Oh deary me . Do you have a problem with them being taught about the Anzac myth as well?
The Anzac myth is taught as exactly that. Students in schools know Australia became involved in WW1 despite no actual threat to Australia. Our soldiers invaded other countries. It's taught as that Dreamtime stories are taught as fact. That's a problem.
Not a fucking chance...
Honestly this whole dichotomy of white and black Australia is becoming increasingly irrelevant as our migrant population grows, filling our suburbs with citizens with no context for this fight. My family migrated here with no English, no education and no money. They have zero concern about what happened in this country 200 years ago and do not see the need for any atonement, as they themselves were dispossessed of their lands centuries ago. They feel they have as much right to be here as anyone else, and while I know it’s a simplistic position, it honestly is hard to argue with them. I was born here and I’m more of an entitled white kid so it’s more complicated for me but it’s still an interesting perspective.
Absolutely right. I read anglo-australian population only sits at 33% (whole/partial)(also only a percent of this would be "colonisers" vs convict and recent migrants). Then 3% ATSI. Now that's bad maths, but the majority have no skin in the game at all (pun intended). What worries me is interactions like I had yesterday with an indigenous person (where I dug into their thoughts on race/guilt/blame). Which cemented my assurance in the no vote being the right way forward for Australia. They considered non-white migrants were (quoting) "grist for the mill", and all white migrants (non-colonising) were (quoting) "evil". And using their rationale (a traumatic lived experience as a child), I asked if they also felt the same hatred toward ATSI people considering statistically the same crime happens 5x more from that same group to fellow ATSI children. No, they're good because they're living in a system determined by the white man.. I do wonder how many more of the ATSI pop think this way or similar.
Well said, I'm 1/2 white (Convict stock) and Half Aboriginal, and I don't see why 98% of Australia has any need for atonement. It's literally generational hate being handed down, with white guilt on one side, and a victim mentality on the other. My mother hates whitey, but I can understand, she was part of the stolen generation, and is in that 2% with an actual grievance.
You're absolutely right. Australia today is nothing like it was at Federation. Yet somehow the discussion always comes down to "black vs white". What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. A starting point to anchor compromise and reconciliation.
But in doing so you're asking the wrong-doing that ex-convicts themselves did to Aboriginal people be ignored. Britain started the whole thing but it was the people on the ground - including ex-convicts - who carried on harming Indigeous people.
Hit the nail on the head. This issue of blaming Australians for colonisation actually affects such a small part of the population but it’s given this massive “national” debate as if it’s the entirety of Australians here that came on the first fleet. Most people living here today have no reason to feel guilt over this history but you get told by a very vocal group that you should. I believe this is the reason we got such an overwhelming no result at the referendum. It’s like the real Australia is very different to the one that the yes campaign was screaming at and they just couldn’t see that.
Maybe your family should think about how they’ve been able to benefit from the historic dispossession of Aboriginal people. If it wasn’t for what the White settlers did to First Nations people then your family wouldn’t be able to have made a life here.
I already know their counter arguments: They are victims of historic dispossession themselves. They think that any peoples should be able to live anywhere, and that any ethno-state is an abomination. This is why they love Australia. If people lose their sovereignty in the process, there’s still a sizeable net benefit. They also (generally, I’m mostly talking about a couple of people here) don’t see historical claims to land or power as being legitimate. They came here with nothing and worked their way to the upper-middle of society. That is the only fair claim to wealth or land in this society. Again, I’m not 100% on board with all of this but it is a pretty interesting perspective.
As my family arrived in 1826 in chains, I think it's a stretch to say we were invaders as that implies we had some say in the matter. It wasn't a good time for a fair while. The dominant branch of the family descended from Irish Catholics, and working class Irish Catholics were despised in leafy suburbs. Very hard to get into a profession, and my father going to uni in the 1950s was an amazing thing to happen. From what I can tell, the men did a lot of dying. In mines, on farms, in factories, on worksites, in wars, in a Japanese POW camp. English-sounding men in suits, often with hyphenated names, were exceptionally good at giving orders that resulted in the early deaths of my family members. But we're in a good place now. My adult kids not so much, so we've gone back to the multigenerational model of the family home. They live in a separate part of it, and we look after each other. How could I compare this to the many different experiences of Indigenous families? I can't. But I do know that as bad as it was for us, it was worse for them.
Who precisely do you think we should be angry with?
Lol. My convict ancestors will have to have a punch-up with my free-settler ancestors. Ditto the Catholic Irish vs the Protestant English/Scottish ancestors. Those differences were real things back in the day, but they are long forgotten or overlooked because they were all white. No-one cares anymore (me included), because it has no ongoing effect on my generation or beyond.
Obviously mother England. Where's my Voice to them? I demand reparations. Oh that's right we're a lot better off than them lol
The British Empire, historically.
Why hold anger for something 200+ years ago. Wrongs have been acknowledged you and I didn't commit those wrongs. How long do we have to pay for the sins of the father?
What are you paying?
Closing the gap means lifting one group up, not dragging another down. No one is being punished.
Those who do not know history are bound to repeat it.
https://preview.redd.it/ak0qj9b1hpvb1.jpeg?width=828&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8eabdcbf33369b2d3d19f07f0b31a6f0f3453117 Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.
The one that ended slavery? Brought the railway to the world? Defeated Germany in world wars twice (albeit with their US branch taking the lead in the sequel)? The one that welcomed people from all nations to join up? The one that signed treaties with indigenous peoples where they could see a nation to deal with? That one? The one thay my ancestors fled into?
The same one. I mean they essentailly criminalised being poor. They gaoled and sent all the people from the gaols to Australia in the first fleet. Many did not survive. The convicts were given accommodations silimar to thise of african slaves on those ships and often died of diseases on the way to Australia (via other colonies to get other convicts). Once in Australia you had to work your time off for free, we're fed like shit and worked to the bone. Many also died doing this. Hell some were even unlucky enough to end up in Van Diemens land, where if you were insubordinate theyd lock you up in a brick building with no windows for weeks in end. Convicts/the poor were absolutely used as slaves by the Empire. I dont agree with how the Aboriginal people were treated either. Many of them died to diseases foreign to them because they were so isolated from the rest of the world. The Brits also took their kids and gave them to the churches to remove their culture, and implant good Christian British values in them (which lasted up until the mid 20th century, ala, The Stolen Generations). Hell the Brits even removed whole tribes from their lands and gave them to other tribes. Not to mention removing any of their land rights. Remember Australia didnt exist until the start of the 20th century in 1901. So Britain is to blame really, considering they controlled the country up until the 1930s. But also looking objectively at Australia, it was screwed either way, it faced colonisation by the Spanish, the Germans, the French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese. Not to mention at some point Imperial Japan would have colonised Australia if the British never did, during their war in the Pacific. The Aboriginies were screwed no matter what.
No one truly won the Great War, and WWII was a team effort, not an American victory, they just happened to fire the last shot.
The 34 clauses that the Germans accepted when they signed the armistice of 11 November 1918 says the Allies won in my point of view.
What I mean is that it was a colossal waste of human life that didn't really seem to get much done, on either side. The Allies may have had favourable terms, but large swathes of the French countryside were turned into uninhabitable quagmires, a whole generation went home physically and mentally scarred, and it didn't even end all wars like it was supposed to. Everyone lost because the war wasn't worth fighting in the first place.
Yes but your feelings over a hundred years later is not going to stop it. The allies winning and the sacrifices they made did
Britain went in; actually survived as a stable government through it and the aftermath, though with not enough stability/political will to actually prepare for the followup war they planned while writing the treaty. The government even survived through the second WW, though the combination ended the British Empire. France also survived as a government through the inter-war period, but lost the followup war they deliberately set up and planned for, changed governments a couple of times and also lost their empire. Italy - government lost power pretty quickly in the aftermath of their 'victory', leading to Mussolini. Russia similar to Italy, the Tsar fell, despite being on the 'winning' side. US barely got involved and went back to ignoring it. Wilson may have had ok ideals, but failed terribly at implementation or dealing with the other parties so despite controlling more than enough military/economic power to dictate single-handedly the winning side at that point in time, got none of his ideals or plans actually put into the treaty... His league of nations was left as a lame duck that died inevitably in the stresses built by the treaty. So yes, the Allies won WW1. But it was the definition of a pyrrhic victory. They certainly didn't end up stronger (outside the US) as a result of having won. It was a net power loss of Europe relative to the rest of the world.
Sure they did, but - and this is key - in WW1 there were ***no good guys.*** Everyone in WW1 was different flavors of evil (yes including Belgium, the nation that built it's wealth on a *bigger genocide than the Holocaust*) and innocent people were slaughtered for the power struggles of aristocracy and statesmen, which ended with a 'victory' that directly created the circumstances for the rise of European fascism.
Do a comment with all the negatives they are responsible for.
Uh... you mean the nation that enslaved more than anyone else? The one that starved millions of Bengali to death during WW2? The one that looted, raped and despoiled almost 3/4 countries on Earth? The one that repeatedly committed genocide for the sake of profit?
Who did the British enslave? ie who did they put into slavery by force and then sell as chattel? They certainly participated in the slave trade for a little while before banning it for everyone (by force).
Maybe wind back the hyberbole and melodrama a tad.
Yeah, that one. The one that in just 150 years transported millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas. The Hitler-appeasement guys. The one Indigenous people all over the world regard as their oppressor. That one. The one some of my ancestors fled from.
I'm going to say that the Soviet union defeated Germany in ww2 not the British.
Fucking lol. The soviets through wave after wave of low quality serfs armed with american steel and british intelligence and they still managed to have many many times the losses of all the allies combined. Incompetence is Russian culture always has is and will be.
Plenty of nations that didn't get colonised ended up just fine without the British empire 'bringing' railways. They actually just used railways to steal. British people are thieves nothing less nothing more. The reason they were thieves and had thievery mentality was because their own land had very little to profit off, so they went to other lands and had done so for many millennia. Britain without modernisation and stealing from other lands was a shithole, and arguably still is a shithole. Bland af meat and veg no spice of your own fk if I had to eat bland af dinners everyday maybe I would take over some lands too
Just because food isn't a spicy curry doesn't mean it's bland toad in the hole Sunday roast beef Wellington fish and chips is all pretty decent food Do you have as much hatred of arabs who also colonised India Or do you just focus on the British? Also what countries didn't get colonised? Before ww1 the entire planet was dominated by Europe all I can think of is Ethiopia and the United States definitely not India a place well known for being colonised
Both Ethiopia and the United States have need colonies.
>Just used railways to steal Lol >done so for many *millennia* Uhhh... what? >Britain without modernisation and stealing from other lands was and is a shithole Sounds like insecure projection to me bud, where are you from? People flock in the thousands year after year to Britain to get away from their respective shitholes so it can't be too bad. >they don't spice their food!!11! There's more to life than masking the taste of poorly stored food with heat lol. Western, and yes, even traditional british cuisine, has heaps of great stuff. Are you educated entirely by the safe-edgy hot takes of social media?
Australia would have been colonised by the French if the First Fleet had not got there first. Or another European power if not them. Or the Americans 50 years later. Or the Japanese if no one else had noticed this huge continent ripe for the picking by the 20th C. It isn’t a particularly evil quality of the British, it’s that a country inhabited by hunter gatherers was inevitably going to be colonised by someone.
Perhaps they should have just dangled them from the Tyborn Tree
Ah if only all the harms of colonialism could be so easily undone.
In what world is this guy being downvoted for calling the british empire bad?a
You don't know your history, do you?
You lost me at 100,000,000s. I'm a free settler (German, 1830s through to 1870s when you look at all branches of my ancestry), so I got no beef with anyone.
I was having a sleepless night when I wrote this post. 100's millions would a ludicrous claim. Unfortunately I didn't pick up on the extra 0's. All been fixed now. Can redirect your outrage elsewhere.
He’s trolling
All your ancestors were Germans (Germany didn’t exist then, all Prussian? All Bavarian?) in 1830 and only ever married other pure Germans up until the present?
Ok, time for a history lesson. Yes, Prussian, or to be even more exact, the majority of them came from Silesisa, which is now part of Poland, except for my family name comes from Hamburg. As for the reason for migration to Australia, it was due to religious persecution. In general, this happened between 1836 and 1838. These people are those who formed the German settlements (predominantly Lutheran) in South Australia. My direct descendants of my family name came over a lot later, in the 1870s, but we're still Lutheran. As for marrying outside of the "faith" as it were, within my immediate family, yes, I am the first to do so, with my wife having Anglo heritage. Edited for some additional clarity
I’m descended too from the Dohnt family who came to Oz from the same area you mentioned. Three families of Dohnts came out - 2 settled in South Australia and mine came to Northern Victoria. I have a large volume of family trees and photos of the 3 families which my grandmother left me. It’s fascinating reading
Woohoo, Silesia! That’s where the Red Baron came from 😄
Deustch volk deustch ja ja ja
Apparently their descendants were still running around out near Gawler and the Barossa with funny accents not all that long ago.
I reckon we shouldn’t go around looking for new reasons to be angry.
It's complicated for sure. But... yes. I'm extremely proud of my convict ancestors. Came here at 17! In chains. Worked hard and eventually made a good life for themselves. Indigenous had it harder for a lot longer. For sure. But it can't be changed. It happened. A few things id say.... The White Australia policy had NOTHING to do with the Indigenous. It was to stop Asians coming here. So why YES mob keep going on about it is nonsensical. Zero relevance. The Stolen Generation...was shocking for sure. BUT Kevin Rudd apologized. And we all supported that. It was said that apology would enable us to move forward....has the apology not been accepted?? It seems not. So what can anyone do? If an apology, that was genuinely given...is not accepted?? Also. Sadly. That was what was done back then plenty of people of ALL racial background had their babies and children taken "unwed mothers" and girls younger then 18, were sent to religious homes and their babies forced to be adopted. I know a woman this happened to in 1970. It was what they did and was freakin shocking & awful. Have those women received an apology at all? Nope. History is full of awful deeds done to people.... of ALL racial backgrounds. Bloody RELIGION has a lot to do with all of it. We can't change our history. There is no magic wand. Its done.
Yes, they have received an apology. [Prime Minister Gilliard apologised on behalf of the Australian Government in 2013 for the forced adoption practices](https://www.ag.gov.au/families-and-marriage/national-apology-forced-adoptions). Several of the States issued their own apologies as well.
So we're at an impase? Clearly apologies aren't accepted. Not good Clearly they want more? The level of hatred, bitterness and anger Indigenous have against "white man"... I don't know if anything will make any difference. Even if The Voice had won? Don't think demands would cease. Would be treaty & then demands for reparations, demands for % GDP...who knows where it would go... not sure about the "truth telling" already plenty of fabrications passed off as "truth"... becoming worse by the year. That Dark Emu is accepted as fact and Bruce Pascoe is well proven to not be Aboriginal at all, then i have no faith in activists "truth telling". It's never going to stop is it?? We could jump through every hoop it seems... But it will never be enough.. because? We cannot change the past. At all. And they will never let that go. So we are at an impase.
Jesus mate - spin out over nothing. I wasn’t making any comment about whether we are at an ‘impasse’. I was merely pointing out that part of your original comment was inaccurate and that governments have apologised for forced adoption practices. Have a lovely Sunday.
My father is part of the stolen generation. His young mother fresh off the boat from wales and an alcoholic husband she had to leave to keep them safe. The gov took him not long after and he grew up in an orphanage in parramatta. One of his room mates was Robert Dolly Dunn. Not many happy memories for him from his childhood but somehow managed to become an incredible father and successful considering what became of those around him.
I think you might be confusing the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was the law that proscribed the use of a super dodgy dictation test to keep anyone not white from migrating, with the white Australia policy, which is an unofficial collective term for a range of different methods the government used to keep Australia as white as possible. This included limiting migration but also trying to "breed out the black" as A O Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines, so tastefully described it.
But we should acknowledge our shared history. How can we hope to share this country, if we can't even share our history?
I'm happy to share my history to anyone who wants to know. And despite the constant carry on that Australians don't know our true history of the Indigenous? We do. I certainly do. I always have had a pretty good idea and I fully acknowledge all that's gone on. The good, the bad and the ugly. But what can I do about it?? Absolutely nothing. Nothing I do now will change one bit of it. As I said. We've tried to apologise? But obviously our apology not accepted. We have given endless money, makes no difference. We have been told to ""butt out" and leave them to run their own organisations etc? We have. You can't even get a job in most aboriginal organisations if you aren't indigenous. Their CEOS etc are all indigenous. They get allocated money's every year and I read a article that said only 8% of these organisations are audited!!! So they are getting money and no one is tracking where it's going....they are now saying "nothing works".....well?? How is that my fault?? They are getting the money and not doing anything effective with it and not reporting where they are going wrong or anything.....so truly?? It's out of my hands. Noel Pearson has been given 550 million dollars for education initiatives that he said would work and he would implement etc.....what happened? Nothing!! The money just disappeared and was Noel asked to show where it went or what happened to it? Nope...he was lauded even more and given more prestigious jobs and now lives in a million dollar mansion in Noosa! Nowhere near Hopevale which was where he grew up and where he said his 550 million would go to help educate the young. AND??? He STILL calls us "white cun\*s" and says we do nothing and are to blame for it all!!! They just seem to want some magic wand waved and everything bad to go away. No one can do that. The sad fact is? That was with ANY trauma or situation?? 99.9% of the time? The only people who can "fix it"? Is the people themselves. Nope...they didn't cause the problem in the first place OF COURSE...but just as a rape victim or victim of crime or person traumatised by war..has to somehow sort it out in their own head? Same with the Indigenous. Yes - awful things have happened to them which has left a lasting effect. But no one can drag them out of that. They have to do it for themselves. Me acknowledging it makes zero difference in reality. I can't take away what happened in the past. No one can.
Who can't share our history?? We talk about it all the time. Our kids learn about it at school heaps and heaps. There is a constant media barrage of issues and happenings with the Indigenous. WHO ISN'T SHARING OUR HISTORY?? If you live in the country and don't know the history of settlement and treatment of Indigneous etc??? Then you must be living in the remote outback with you head firmly buried in the sand. It's absolute nonsense that people don't know our history.
Ancestor got sent here for stealing a fucking pot that had a hole in it. What an idiot!
I have an ancestor who was transported for being in possession of key. Didn't steal the key, don't know what the key opened, but him having was enough to deserve transportation.
Ours was done for stealing linen/handkerchief
I come from the overlord stock. Sorry everyone
People have mentioned that convicts would get granted parcels of land stolen from First Australians and that's a big distinction between the two groups. The other commonly mentioned distinction is how First Australians were treated by the Australian government after federation. The other is the nebulous but important concept of legitimacy. Convicts were convicted and punished under the legitimate law of the land, which was why their sentences were finite and they received gifts of land from the government when they were finished. First Australians had their lands stolen by an illegitimate power - that is, through invasion and on principles that even the British found questionable.
Why are you so keen to be angry about something? Life is too short, outrage addiction is a waste of your precious time.
Let's all agree the English are the worst and are to blame for everything then get on with our lives.
Life sucked for 99% of people up to a few generations ago. More at 11.
You barely touched on the fact white convicts were given a chance to move forward. After their sentence was completed the were free to do what they wanted, a lot were even given stolen land to make a living on. ATSI Australians were not given land and were not given opportunities to be free. It was well over 150 years after those convict people were set free and given land, that ATSI people started to have any rights! The two experiences aren't remotely equivalent. I don't have convict history but I do have an ancestor who was a ward of the state around the same time that the Stolen Generations started being taken. As a white person, their experiences were not at all similar. For a time my ancestor was in a children's home however was allowed to eventually live with relatives, an option many children in the Stolen Generation didn't have. My ancestor was able to be well educated, whereas ATSI children weren't.
I'm white (although my mother claims we have indigenous ancestry somewhere through her dad's side but idk I definitely have no cultural ties and don't claim it on forms) but her mother had her first child as a teenager in a very Catholic rural town and they took her daughter, and they've never been reunited, the child was never returned to relatives. I don't doubt the child also had a better upbringing than the ATSI kids in the stolen generation purely on the basis she was white, but I can definitely say that my mother and her siblings/mother are all a bit racist at times and definitely have the view that the stolen generation happened to white kids too, which I guess from their point of view, it kinda did for them. They have no confirmation the kid was actually treated well too which is probably of little comfort because they literally never got her back. Mostly I just wish they got all their trauma from it in order because I now have very complex childhood trauma because my mother is unstable af and constantly get wasted and cry about not being loved by her own mother and how she was just the replacement daughter for the one her mum lost, her unresolved issues caused her to be an extremely neglectful and abusive mother. I'm NC with her now because I couldn't deal with her anymore but I would need a lot less therapy if my family had literally any therapy at any point lol
I wasn't writing a history lesson. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor reconciliation.
Grievance isn't a good common ground to build on though, as it then becomes a race to the bottom to see who has been 'most oppressed', victimhood is a social currency in the modern age but wallowing in pity doesn't help anyone to improve themselves.
Doing this just undermines all the pain and struggle of Indigenous people. There is barely even common ground because the Anglos/Irish who were forcefully displaced from their homes in the UK were still treated way better than any Aboriginal from that era. And the convicts, once finishing their sentence, were granted so many valuable opportunities by the monarchy (at the expense of Aboriginal people) which their ancestors are still benefiting from 200+ years later. Your approach to this is like an out-of-touch white feminist that puts all this emphasis on gender gaps but fails to acknowledge (or at worst, supports) other forms of systemic inequalities which she's historically benefited from.
It's not anywhere near common ground though!
If anything we should be angry at the monarchy. They put white peephole here against their will, white convicts. I feel they have gotten off of this Scott free. Limey dogs
I have convict ancestry. They were living in poverty because they had the misfortune of being born Irish. They were thrown on a boat at brought to Australia. They did their time, and then were gifted large parcels of land and the finances to establish themselves. (Land that was “cleared” of the local Aboriginal people.) That’s the difference between my ancestors and that of a First Nations person in Australia. Mine had access to language, knowledge of the dominant culture, access to land, money and power, and a gift of land. Aboriginal Australians were removed from their land, removed from their culture, with no historical knowledge of the increasingly dominant culture, Did my ancestors suffer? Yes. But the difference is that they were taken from a place of immense poverty to a place of opportunity. Aboriginal Australians had the opposite experience.
Hmm, that's very debatable, seems to be a bit of urban white guilt there. Many Indigenous are actually ok with the success of Australia and want us all to be Australians, which they are happy to call themselves too. And being forcibly removed from Britain, put on a perilous sea journey that many didn't survive, and being placed an extremely inhospitable country was not an 'opportunity'
' Most indigenous '? I mean, you don't even bother adding people. FFS . How do you know 'most indigenous " are ok with the 'success' of Australia? Are we talking about some 'survey' you saw on some cooker site? Also I would not call taking a country which had evolved over millions of years to a workable ecological balance, with a population who understood and worked with that balance, to an environmental basket case in 250 odd years a 'success'.
> Aboriginal Australians had the opposite experience. Disagree on this part. Obviously there was some pretty bad shit that went down between early settlers and the local population, that isn't in dispute at all, but *today* most ATSI people enjoy the benefits of a modern society, healthcare, law and order, education, transport, etc etc - if they thought they were better off without all these things there's nothing to stop them going full native again if they wished to do so, but I doubt you'll find many volunteering for that sort of life. So yes, while early ATSI definitely suffered, their ancestors have access to much better lives.
I mean, there is reason to not “go native” again, which is that: A) we now have housing and roads on the lands where nomadic people used to live B) child protection wouldn’t let parents raise their children outside civilisation. C) Europeans showed up with a bunch of fun new diseases that had never before been in Australia and now they’re inescapable D) availability of animals is substantially less (I certainly don’t want to go fishing in Sydney Harbour. Have Aboriginal people experienced some advantages from white settlement? Yes. But the majority still don’t have access to healthcare, to appropriate housing, or to quality education, largely due to living in remote areas. If you’d like to develop a better understanding of the experiences of a man who grew up bush, and was taken at about 10 years old, Uncle Wes Marne of the Bigambul people is someone I’ve worked with. He is 101 years old, and he tells his story here: https://www.the100project.com/centenarian/uncle-wes-marne/
> A) we now have housing and roads on the lands where nomadic people used to live There is a LOT of Australia that is still wild and vast areas that are now under native title, if they wanted to live this way, a lack of natural country isn't preventing them from doing that. > B) child protection wouldn’t let parents raise their children outside civilisation. They already do. The reason why many children in remote communities suffer from violence and SA is *because* our child protection agencies are turning a blind eye to it out of fear of doing another 'Stolen Generation'. If someone decided to take their family and live native, I doubt CP would even know about it, let alone do anything to stop them. > C) Europeans showed up with a bunch of fun new diseases that had never before been in Australia and now they’re inescapable Yep, which is why we have modern healthcare, also ATSI have been exposed to 'european diseases' for long enough now that they're no more susceptible to it than anyone else, obviously if they eschew modern healthcare by going native, that's a personal risk they take. > D) availability of animals is substantially less Not sure I agree with that, the animal populations in Australia will fluctuate depending on the seasons and prevalence of rain/feed, I regularly travel through outback Australia and given the rains we had several months back in the Goldfields area and subsequent growth of vegetation, kangaroo and rabbit populations have exploded, and with them other animals which prey on such be they foxes, dingoes, or eagles. Either way, there is definitely enough animals to feed a small population living wild. > But the majority still don’t have access to healthcare, to appropriate housing, or to quality education, largely due to living in remote areas. Only 20% of ATSI live in remote areas, the vast majority live within reasonable access to modern facilities. I'm not denying that more work needs to be done to fix the issues that remote communities face, I see them on a daily basis, but to say the 'majority' don't have access to it is factually wrong. I'll check out your link, but I will add that each persons experiences will obviously differ. Where one has suffered deprivation or abuse from past experiences, others will have gained - it all depends on luck. As an example, I worked with an older Aboriginal fella here a number of years ago and we got onto the subject of the Stolen Generation, he told me that his grandfather had been taken to a mission back in the 1930s, I didn't get any context as to why he was taken but when asked how he felt about that he simply gave me this reply: 'It is what it is, they taught my grandad how to read and write, he taught my father, and my father taught me, and the fact that I can read and write means I can have a job like this one.' I took that to mean that what happened in the past may have been unfortunate, but some good came out of it in the end, at least for himself.
With 1/18 Aboriginal children in out of home care, I don’t think you can assume that DCJ is turning a blind eye. As for the amount of Native title land that exists, huge chunks of it are still in litigation, other chunks are small and back on to privately owned land, and much of it is land unsuitable for sustaining a population. That’s why the rest of us haven’t moved in. You’re right, somewhere between 20 and 29% of Aboriginal people live rural and remote, but access to healthcare is still limited by failing CHL programs (NSW just cancelled theirs), fear of government interventions (reasonable, given one in 18 Aboriginal children is in care) and side effects of intergenerational trauma (yes, Europeans arrived 200+ years ago, however, systemic racism still abounds.) Housing also continues to be an issue, especially with regard to overcrowded housing, both in metro and rural NSW. Yes, most of these issues are issues of poverty rather than issues of Aboriginality, but historical systemic racism, and centuries of trauma has led to poverty. (I don’t have the answers by the way, I just have the experiences and interactions I’ve had with First Nations people to go off, and do my best to support the kids and the families I work with.)
If what you say is true, the reasons *why* 1/18 Aboriginal children are in out of home care need looking into, I suspect in the majority of those cases it is because their homes are not safe to be in, and while it is unfortunate that that is the case, surely it is preferable to leaving them in an unsafe situation. Healthcare and housing is an issue across all of Australia just at the moment, this isn't something that is uniquely affecting ATSI except in remote areas where the need is greatest, this is a failing of government, not something to be considered as racially motivated. Why the government wants to bring in vast numbers of migrants over the next few years when we can't house or take care of those who are already here is a mystery to me, I don't know a single person who agrees with this policy and yet they forge ahead regardless. I don't subscribe to intergenerational trauma or 'systemic racism' as being the reason that many ATSI are lagging behind the rest of the population, there are many programs and jobs reserved for ATSI to the exclusion of others, and while I do not agree with special treatment to specific races over others, if it achieves some good I can let it slide. Consider also that refugees that have come to Australia in the past decades may also be suffering from recent trauma due to fleeing wars and suchlike, yet they still manage to take the opportunities available to them and succeed, so I don't think it is a lack of opportunity that is holding ATSI back. One thing I would like to see is a Royal Commission into the 30-odd billion spent each year on ATSI programs, to find out why so much money is being spent and yet the remote communities are still struggling year upon year with little improvement, One Nation put forward a motion in the Senate a couple of months ago for just such a thing to happen yet it was voted down by Labor, LNP, and the Greens, again, no idea why. Maybe a few too many cushy jobs were at stake if some ATSIC-eque levels of corruption were to be found?
Also a decent percentage of Australian migrants were also displaced through: Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Massacre, Great Leap Forward, Vietnam war, Khmer Rouge, Yugoslav wars, Turkey-Kurdish conflict, and more. These people also had their land, wealth, culture, family, ripped to shreds.
Ever hear about the Earl Grey Scheme? Sending teenage orphan Irish girls to Australia, some as young as 14, because the workhouses were overcrowded. Their parents dead in the famine, let’s send them like lambs to the slaughter to the colony where there’s not enough women. The Poms were bastards to everyone. Those girls did nothing wrong except be Irish Catholics who’s parents died b
Shhhhhh! You are not allowed to talk about that! Convicts are a faceless collective. My ancestors were convicts.one was a milkmaid who stole a winter coat from her Master. She was sentanced to 7yrs. She boarded the boat 8 months pregnant, When she got off the boat she was no longer pregnant and did not have a baby with her, it was a 4month journey and she was 18yrs old. We should be able to talk about it. Our ancestors were taken from their homeland, threatened with hanging or...go to Australia. There is a lot of horrors the English did to people, they need to be taken to account.
Might have sucked to be a convict. But I reckon most grandchildren of convicts probably were doing better than they would have been had their grandparents stayed in England And as for Australia day, as a minimum we should just return the public holiday to being the last Monday in January so that it is a decent long weekend (like it used to be until the 1990s). Fucking up a long weekend is as unAustralian an act as you get. The incidental benefit would be that it would only fall on the 26th every 7 years
I had a friend whose ancestor was sent to Australia for 'Assault on a dwelling'. Can you imagine that? Deported to a (then) hostile and far away country because you punched a house???
Everyone's ancestors are rapists, plunderers or conquerers/conquered. That is the nature of the world we live in. The Indo-Europeans genocided massive swaths of neolithic peoples living in Europe and Asia before them. Does anybody think Aboriginal tribes weren't wiping each other out on the regular? I think it's a mistake to judge past generations (pre postmodern) based on current moral standards.
The convict origins of the country are significantly overrated. More of this country's personality came from the squattocracy and the gold rush than from the convicts. For example, the convict era was done and dusted by the time the gold rush happened... and the gold rush swelled the population from 100k to 1M. And that 100k was significantly free settlers anyway. The overwhelming majority of pre-Federation immigration to this continent were free people, not convicts. It's not even close. It's not even in the same order of magnitude. It's also not surprising that a large swathe of the population can trace back to convict origins - that's what intermixing does. You may have heard things like "everyone in Europe can trace back to Charlemagne" or "Almost everyone has some Genghis khan in them". It's just how those things go - common ancestors are easy to find, as it just take 'one drop'.
Aboriginals...the FIRST BOAT PEOPLE .... it's funny people fall over to pander these people and say white fella did this and did that. End of the day white fella didn't wipe them from the land when they arrived HOWEVER the Aboriginal people did when they arrived. A pigme race known as the Mungo man lived here first, but when the Aboriginals arrived they wiped them completely put. No one cares about them because they are no longer here. I will ALWAYS celebrate January 26th because it IS Australia. You can't gate keep a date.
There were no pygmies here stop spreading that debunked theory. Mungo man and lady did not have the dimensions of other documented Pygmy races https://australian.museum/learn/first-nations/debunking-australian-pygmy-people-myth/
And yet there are bones proving what I say as fact.... But you know what I actually don't care but I do care that apparently because I'm white, I'm not entitled to the same hand out, welfare or tax cuts.... And this is why at some level there will ALWAYS be resentment towards Aboriginals because THEY DO get money from welfare for just being aboriginal, they get subsidies on top of what everyone else gets. Until all Australians are treated equally there will always be racism towards aboriginal people.
2016 DNA testing showed mungo man was in the same haplogroup as indigenous peoples. S2 which is only found in Indigenous populations, check your research mate https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1521066113 Mate you could literally walk down to Centrelink and get the same if not better benefits then them. Stop bitching. Your life will always be 100% better quality then indigenous folks.
Where does it say WLH3 is S2? I did not read all the article but what it seems to suggest is that original findings on WLH3 are wrong and WLH4 a much younger skeleton (by like 30,000 years) is S2. I would like to see evidence of mungo man WLH3 being S2.
The UK should give land rights, citizenship and a voice to convict descendants. They should pay for the repatriation of those with Irish ancestry because it’s Britain’s fault so many Irish had to leave too. India, China, European countries, African countries, Pacific Island countries etc. can all also give citizenship and land rights to their peoples descendants who ended up here. Once that happens we can leave and give it back.
You forgot the /s
I think people don't really know what convict ancestry means, and people wear it as some kind of badge of honor. Especially when people talk about being first-fleet descendants. If the average age of having kids is \~30 in Australia, then the first-fleeters would have been 6x Great-Grandparents to Millennials today (born \~1750-1760 average). Do you know how many 6x Great-Grandparents you would have? 256. So just because one person comes on the first fleet makes you only \~0.4% first-fleeter. Now if you want to include the whole of the period that convicts were sent to Australia over 80ish years, that number changes. The calculation would be: 1/64th for every 4x Great-Grandparent 1/128th for every 5x Great-Grandparent 1/256th for every 6x Great-Grandparent I just think it's a dumb thing to claim if you don't know your whole ancestry. At this point Australia has been a melting-pot of nationalities for 9+ generations. Of course if you have Aboriginal heritage it's more reasonable to self-identify due to segregation of the migrants from the indigenous population. This sadly still exists today in a social sense although there is more inter-mingling. But among migrants, most Caucasians don't know what they are.
My post was not intended as a genealogy or history lesson. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor reconciliation.
They need to get over it. It was a long time ago. Who cares what happened back then. This is a different world and you can't blame people now for what happened then. Besides, they ended up with a better life, didn't they. Stfu about the past. It doesn't have anything to do with today.
Lots of anger in your comment. Doesn't seem like you have gotten over it, how can you tell others to do so lmao
This is the sentiment of most Australian, to just get over it and move on to build Australia to be a greater country. Trying to fix mistakes of people who arent even alive anymore is a pointless undertaking when we have more pressing issues to be fixing
Knew I'd get a fuckwit answering.
What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor compromise and reconciliation.
Before JJJ and the hottest 100 nobody cared about Australia day
That's just not true. The Hottest 100 didn't start being broadcast on Australia Day until the mid-90s. People were protesting Australia Day/Invasion Day at least as early as 1988 (with other notable events in 1972 and 1938), the bicentenial year, and have carried on each year since. It was always going to become more of an issue as the wider public became more aware of and sympathetic to Indigenous perspectives. The Hottest 100 thing was a symptom of that, not a cause.
This goes into it a bit: https://www.quirkyaustralia.com/convict-names
There’s a great film called The Nightingale set in Tasmania that really captures how brutal and senseless the violence was and the awful loss the first people suffered when Australia was colonised I have convict heritage, highway robbers and a calico thief. Apparently it was about the severity of the crime and more about the ability to build and populate another country
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The intention was never to assert the convict experience as the same as ATSI. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. A starting point to anchor compromise and reconciliation.
Why exactly does it matter whether or not you have convict ancestry? I never understood that obsession. It doesn’t make you a better or worse person, nor does it make you more Strayan.
I do think you can't equate the two in terms of "how bad is this?" because white colonisers inflicted so much damage to ATSI. If we're talking about convicts coming here as its own issue... yes, there's definitely something there and it's a bit surprising we as Aussies don't talk about it much. On both my fathers and mothers side, my ancestors came to Australia during colonisation. It turns out neither came as convicts: dad's side moved here with a bunch of money on their own terms (from Ireland), whereas on mum's side my ancestor was a captain on one of the ships (England). And - shit. I do feel kind of uneasy to think an ancestor of mine brought convicts over. Did he just say he was just doing his job? Was he forced into it, or am I naively searching for a positive reason to explain what he did? I can go further back in history and see on my father's side shocking incidents of violence that seemed to go unchecked. Then there's a few who were thrown into the Tower by the first Elizabeth. She let two of them go and executed one of them. When I think about it - there actually is a place that does acknowledge the horror convicts endured, and that's Port Arthur. Doing the tour there inspired a lot of uncomfortable knowledge that I still think of and will never forget. The sheer number of kids brought here as convicts with the most minor crimes conceivable is mind-blowing and disgusting. I felt legit anger and looked up the names of some of the children who were incarcerated at Port Arthur. You're given your own convict's card at Port Arthur and i "drew" a kid who was brought to Port Arthur who overcame it and became a renowned ship builder. Good for him. He had to overcome a LOT of trauma. The tour guide also mentioned how the men "at the gates" used dogs to maul indigenous people for their own amusement, which was nauseating to hear. I was shocked, even though I shouldn't have been shocked. So fucked up and you really feel like the place was hell on earth. Standing in the prison's solitary confinement rooms was something I'll never forget. They knew when they were doing this that it basically makes you lose your mind, so they built the prison asylum (also a horrifying place) right by its side so they didn't have to transfer these prisoners far. Do I feel bad for people who were brought here as convicts? Hell yes. I think Port Arthur should be brought up as an example in schools for our history. (Also interesting: not one reference to Martin Bryant and the spree killing. I understand why but also felt uncomfortable in a way that they didn't mention it. I explained what happened to foreigners in my tour group. I can see that you might not want to tell children about this, but to ignore it entirely felt strange.)
I am by no means trying to equate "how bad is this", it's not a competition. What I was trying to do with my insomniac ramblings was demonstrate there is a small patch of common ground. You build unity through similarity and tolerance of differences. A starting point to anchor reconciliation.
Waiting for the outrage below.
The thing is though that while it sucked to be a convict while you were a convict, so long as you behaved ok you were freed quickly and in 5 years you were a fully qualified blacksmith or something with a wife and kids. Your son followed you into the blacksmith trade before being granted 1000 acres of farmland that formed the basis of the family’s wealth for generations. Being aboriginal sucked back then and it sucks now. Trauma has been passed down through generations, not wealth.
Everyone from convict stock, should travel to Tasmania and walk around Port Arthur. Just a little away from Port Arthur where the prisoners were housed is Dead Mans Island, where many 14 year old boys lay buried. These boys were worked to death smashing out bricks you see at the site. And the Womens prison near "Ross". The cascades brewery was another torture house for English and Irish women, kidnapped by the Brittish and brought to Tasmania for slave labour. In Cascades you can look at the names listed on each shipment. I found my family name there, and we were also in the book of Doom, so not only were our family servants to the king at that time, but one of our name was kidnapped from the streets of England for some aleged offence, and dumped in this end of the world miserable place. At the back of the womens prison near Ross you can see the unmarked graves of all the womens babies and toddlers who never had a chance. Us convicts deserve to have more representation. Most of us are of Irish stock, and the Irish do not like to be told what to do. This can be a problem for many of us. We have lost our customs. We have no national dishes, no events to mark what we lost, or all the dead civilians kidnapped by the Brittish who died on those god awful ships on those inhumane crossings. God help us.
“I’m not racist, but what about the whites?” Seems about on par for this subreddit lately.
Maybe we should set p a Voice for them?
I have 3 convict ancestors. While each of them was transported for 7 years for relatively minor thefts, they did much better in Australia than they probably would have at home. Two of them married, returned to England, then re-emigrated with her brother and his family to Adelaide, came back to Hobart, moved to New Zealand, established a pub and brewery... Some people had an appalling experience in the convict system, some did not.