As a follow up to the recent thread on Keith Windschuttle’s Stolen Generations denialism, we’re very happy to be able to republish this piece from today’s Crikey with permission.
Dr Naomi Parry, author of “Such a longing: Black and white welfare in NSW and Tasmania, 1880-1940″, writes:
The Weekend Australian of 9-10 February brought news that the intrepid history warrior, Keith Windschuttle, bane of leftist historians, now has “the facts” about the stolen generations.
Like most conservative commentators, and the previous government, Windschuttle argues that the policies that led to children being separated from their families were benign in intent. Using the example of NSW, he says children weren’t stolen from their parents but apprenticed as adolescents, to give them “the opportunity to get on-the-job training, just like their white peers in the same age groups.”
This is another instance of Windschuttle taking information and skewing it to fit his particular political and cultural agenda, although he is kind of half correct when he says the focus of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board was apprenticeship. Where he’s wrong is in asserting that he’s discovered this fact; that it was a benign policy, or was in any sense equivalent to white children’s experience.
I’m in a position to comment with some authority on this subject. My PhD evaluated the intention of these policies, and compared the treatment of Indigenous children with their white counterparts in the state welfare systems of NSW and Tasmania. It involved eight years of immersion in the records that Windschuttle has [ab]used for these articles.
I found that Aboriginal children in NSW had a unique experience of welfare and schooling, with fewer safeguards than white kids. Black kids were never boarded out (fostered), which was considered best for white kids, because it was thought they could not fit in. “Aboriginal schools”, lauded by Windschuttle, offered only a dumbed-down grade three education. Although both black and white kids were apprenticed, by 1915 reformers complained apprenticeship condemned children to live as unskilled labourers. By World War II, fewer than 10% of white state kids were apprenticed and institutionalisation was declining, whereas apprenticeship (and institutionalisation) remained the norm for Aboriginal kids until the 1960s.
Windschuttle’s claims should not be ignored, if only because of his political agenda. When he published the first volume of the Fabrication of Aboriginal History he attacked the Tasmanian Aboriginal community’s right to control their cultural history. This time he lays down the gauntlet to Kevin Rudd, saying the Protection Board’s policies “could well be revived today to rescue children from the s-xual assault and substance abuse prevalent in the remote communities”. But the real history of Aboriginal apprenticeship in NSW offers no such promise.
Windschuttle presents apprenticeship as simple “on-the-job training”, but what it really meant was growing up many miles from family, usually in a strange house somewhere like Mosman or Beecroft. The workday started at dawn and ended after dinner, every day of the week. Most apprentices received just sixpence a week pocket money, with the rest supposedly banked in trust, although the reality was few got their full trust fund.
If you’ve ever spoken to someone who was sent away to work you’ll know those years of domestic service left scars, not just on the lives of the apprentices, but also their children. Note that the records show a pregnancy rate of 7% amongst underage girls – a figure unthinkable with white welfare agencies, but ignored by the Board, and many of the babies died, or were sent to child welfare homes.
The historians who work in this field know this story well. What interests us is the gulf between the Board’s stated objective, of rescuing and protecting little children from bad conditions, and its practices. Windschuttle says we are wrong that children were stolen in NSW, for two thirds of them were taken for teenage apprenticeship. But how can this not mean they were stolen?
Most had parents living, just five per cent of families consented to removal, and usually younger siblings in the same family were left behind. And, if such removals were justified, because Aboriginal families were as alcohol-dependent and neglectful as Windschuttle makes out, why did the Board take older kids and leave their siblings in the conditions it condemned?
Windschuttle also accuses the leading historian in this field, Peter Read, of overstating the fact that committal forms showed children were taken “for being Aboriginal”. He says only one form states this, but that is not true. In one quarter of the cases where a reason was given, Aboriginality was clearly denoted by terms like “camp life”, “surroundings” and residing on an “Aboriginal station”. A strong theme was girls’ morality, as when it was “deemed advisable to send girl away from camp influences owing to her age and the risk of her getting into trouble with any of the opposite s-x.”
The broad categories of neglect used by the Children’s Court, including being orphaned or destitute, were applied in just under half of known reasons, but in the remaining quarter the Board said, in so many words, that the reason was apprenticeship. Please be assured that it was unthinkable for white children to be taken from their parents simply because someone thought they should be put to work.
Windschuttle says historians are wrong to say that the Board intended apprenticeship to reduce the numbers of Aborigines in the state, even though the Board’s minutes and annual reports reveal just that desire. He says that the fact that 60% of Aboriginal apprentices went home shows how wrong we historians are. Yet he also asserts that Aboriginal apprenticeship “provided real jobs and skills and gave young Aborigines a way out of the alcohol-soaked, hand-out dominated camps and reserves of their parents.”
You can’t have it both ways – one cannot say that Aborigines found a way out through apprenticeship, when so many went home to the exact same conditions they had left. Neither is it logical to claim that, although children spent five years undergoing forced labour in the homes of white people, they weren’t stolen.
I look forward more twisted logic when Volume Two of the Fabrication of Aboriginal History hits the shelves, just as soon as I can figure out how to acquire it without actually buying it.
Great article, Naomi.
It occurs to me that Windy may have decided to focus on NSW because it was there he could put the best spin on what happened – this stuff about education and apprenticeship. In Queensland, by contrast, that pretence wasn’t even made. See Ros Kidd’s book “Black Lives – Government Liesâ€? based on intesive work in the state government’s archives. Similar story could be told about WA. As this website demonstrates, it’s quite hard to make the myths stick to Qld:
http://www.esjgws.org.au/issues/reconciliation/stolen.htm
I wonder if part of his polemical purpose is to disguise the reality of the policies in question across the country, and imply that it was all some sort of Mal Brough/Noel Pearson intervention thing. Would tie in with the mutterings from the Libs.
Who can ever guess what his motives are, but I am inclined to think you are right. I know that the Queensland records have had that effect on a number of researchers – one bloke I know of went up there to prove massacres were exaggerated, only to find that they were understated. He wrote an entirely different book as a result.
I guess what I’m thinking is that a lot of people would assume that the Stolen Generations was a matter of removing kids and fostering them to white families, or putting them in church or state institutions. In every bit of the country. Windy then comes out and says – “it was actually about giving kids apprenticeships”, without making it as clear as it should be that this was the NSW experience, and insinuates that people have been misled. I think he’s a cunning old bastard.
God, I love it when grown-up academics kick dilettante butt. Bravo Dr Parry. Time to take back the Enlightment! Go Team Elite! K-THWACK!!
*Strips down to (tasteful) cheerleader outfit, jiggles pom-poms*
Well, forgive me if I don’t juggle my pom-poms at you Jack. Elite schmelite.
There’s a very intricate story to child removal in NSW Kim, and what we know of it is shaped by the records we can access – they happen to be records of apprenticeship. For a number of reasons, both historical and bureaucratic, records that might allow a proper calculation of the proportions of black and white children taken from their families have been off-limits to researchers for nearly 30 years (if they still exist). And yes, it’s quite wrong to extrapolate NSW to the entire country.
Thanks Naomi – so in other words, we could infer that more black children may have been taken from their families absolutely (leaving aside this apprenticeship thing) based on what we know about the actions of the state and motivations but the evidence isn’t available. Is there oral testimony? For those of us who aren’t anal like Windschuttle for whom if something wasn’t written down, it never happened.
Here’s a link to another of Naomi’s pieces rebutting Windschuttle:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/85/parry.html
Here it is Windschuttle’s ‘Fabrication of Aboriginal History’ that is found wanting. Slightly off topic, I know, but relevant if put in the context of discussions that frequently take place on this blog about this particular polemicist/historian.
Thanks Klaus = yes, I’ve been a combatant in the Fabrication Volume I history wars. Being able to have a go at Windschuttle over Tasmanian Aboriginal history was happenstance and the whole time I really should have been working on my PhD on the stolen generations. So it’s kind of weird that it so happens I’ve got a bit to say about the debate that he’s started this week.
Naomi, this isn’t quite the same thing as saying that the policy was not benign in intent.
I take “benign in intent” to mean designed for the welfare of Aborigines, both singly and collectively. Certainly a project of racial or cultural genocide could not be viewed as benign in intent.
However, policies that are benign in intent can have disastrous and unexpected consequences in fact. And perhaps the NSW case is an example of this.
My larger criticism of Windschuttle, which I outlined in another thread, is that Windschuttle has implied that the Federal Government is liable for the acts and omissions of state governments. This argument is legal nonsense and designed to stir up resentment among the ignorant who may believe Windshuttle when he alleges that Aborigines may be in receipt of $50b as a consequence of the rudd apology.
This is ugly, immoral stuff, and also breathtakingly incorrect about the liabilities of the Federal Government.
Ah yes, I’m familiar with the experience of taking thesis time to do other things, not least of which, for me, has been commenting on blogs and ‘researching’ topics of no great relevance to said thesis. It’s all part of the process, I’m sure.
I’m glad that your PhD research turned out to be so timely.
I think the true benefit of a PhD is the time it gives you to pursue other interests …
Naomi,
As a researcher and someone who I presume has qualifications in history and indigenous studies, are you satisfied that the motives behind the policy of removing mixed-race children from their Aboriginal mothers was to breed out Aboriginal people?
Is there consensus on this in academic circles and university departments that specialise in History & Aboriginal studies?
kodwo, with respect, I think Naomi’s answered that question already in her article – in the affirmative.
She also points out that her expertise is based on her PhD in this area of history.
Kim,
I’m in no position to dispute what Naomi is saying and nor is it my intention to cast doubt on the crimes that have been committed against Aboriginal people. That includes the Stolen Generations.
I was just wondering if a broad consensus amongst academics and university departments that specialise in History & Aboriginal studies exists.
I’m not as well placed as a historian might be to answer that, kodwo, but I would say yes, although historians are often reticent to put a finger on motivation, intention or even suggest that certain causes are more fundamental than others, in part because evidence of stated aims and actual practices is much easier to locate than evidence of motivation – if that makes sense.
There is certainly some discussion in areas outside of history as to the cultural dynamics of settler-colonies such as Australia, especially around questions of ‘indigenization’ which suggests that there is a further preoccupation in some texts with ‘breeding in’ indigeneity into whites, or in other ways appropriating it. Whether these ideas were ever put into practice on a broad scale is a different question, better answered by historians.
There is also some thinking about the preoccupation of whites with the white ancestry of many of the stolen children, and also the well documented assumption in the early decades of the C20th (and heard by me again in conversation the other night, I might add) that Aborigines were dying out. Neither of these things contradict the other motivations necessarily, in fact the ‘doomed race’ idea works ideologically alongside the removal of children, and the idea of breeding out the colour.
Kodwo, it’s a fair question and the answer is yes. There is a rough consensus – there are debates about the extent to which that was the case, and where it varied or broke down across this broad country.
As far as stated aims go, well, I tend to think actions speak louder than words in most things (policy is only as meaningful as the practices it led to), but if you’ve got a public statement about the desire to breed out the colour, you do have to take that at face value.
We all agree that the policy failed! But this is not the same thing as saying that the intent was never there BECAUSE the policy failed, which is the Windschuttle line.
“Naomi, this isn’t quite the same thing as saying that the policy was not benign in intent.
I take “benign in intent� to mean designed for the welfare of Aborigines, both singly and collectively. Certainly a project of racial or cultural genocide could not be viewed as benign in intent.
However, policies that are benign in intent can have disastrous and unexpected consequences in fact. And perhaps the NSW case is an example of this.”
Katz, well intioned gestures go awry all the time, people are, after all, only human. If it was born of benign or even good intentions of a great number of people however, then surely those intentions would’ve or should’ve also shone through when people realised that such a program buggered up cultures, families and individual lives, and that any welfare imperative was clouded by social problems.
I was listening to an aboriginal man on radio this morning saying (in effect) that when you strip away all the talk about racism, the stolen generations were really about the guilt of white men, those who “took advantage” of black women, and didn’t want their wives or anyone else to know what really happened. Better to remove the burgeoning numbers of half-caste children, thereby removing the evidence of their crimes.
Is rape ever done with “benign intent”?
Another aboriginal man told how his mother survived the rapes but was so destroyed by the removal of her children that she bashed her head with a rock, died as a consequence and was buried in an unmarked grave that he has never been able to find.
It is notable that the stolen generation denialists never mention the terrible abuse inflicted on these women, the mothers, who were treated like animals and raped without compunction. Focus on supposedly beneficial “apprenticeships” for the stolen children and there is no need to talk about the preceding rapes. I am old enough to remember aboriginal women being referred to lasciviously as “black velvet”.
Today we should remember all those mothers too.
Genevieve, some very good points, and I agree with you in general, although it would be a mistake to suggest that all relationships between white men and Aboriginal women were abusive or coercive, even though such abuse was prevalent. There is a certain amount of diversity in the white fathers of these children. Some fought the various Aboriginal protection boards for their children and the families of their partners to be left alone.
It’s nice to know that the likes of Windschuttle are likely going to be marginalised completely in a political sense by the events of the next fifteen minutes or so.
Also Doctor Naomi, I’m keen to read the PhD if you could send me a copy!
Denial is an attitude of mind that is much underestimated as a motivating force. Policies take on a momentum of their own. They are often more difficult to stop than they are to institute. For example, by the late 1960s the Liberals knew that they were going to be punished severely for introducing conscription. Politically, the smart thing to do would have been to dump it, especially after the beginning o fthe troop drawdown in Vietnam at the end of 1970. Yet the Libs hung on to the policy because they could see any way of dumping it and maintaining respect.
Grace Pettigrew, of course rape is never perpetrated with benign intent. But as far as I know the State of NSW had no policy of encouraging or enabling the rape of Aboriginal women. The topic of this part of the thread is government policy not the private hatreds of white people.
It is probably true, however, that black women knew they had very little chance of legal redress in the white justice system, even if they were aware of how to get access to that system. The discriminatory operation of the police system vis a vis black women would probably be a very fruitful study. This conspiracy against Aborigines was probably carried out at the lower levels of the police system.
Guy, and anybody else who’s interested: Naomi’s thesis is available in the UNSW library. Also, if you search for it in the library catalogue online there’s a link to a PDF version, available through the Australian Digital Theses Program. Here is the library welcome page, you can go from there:
http://info.library.unsw.edu.au/Welcome.html
Direct link to Naomi’s thesis is http://www.library.unsw.edu.au/~thesis/adt-NUN/public/adt-NUN20071015.140031/ (I’ve put it in the “website” field above if that doesn’t become a hotlink
Excellent piece, Naomi.
And thanks very much to those linking to the thesis – libraries digitising them is such a good thing!
Does Windbag specify what apprenticeships were available to children aged between 2-12? Sorta makes his apprenticeship claims look pretty lame considering the number of very young children who were wrenched from their parents’ arms.
Namoi
I will provide a more considered commentary on your post on the morrow, but I am dying to know how you calculate that “the leading historian in this field, Peter Read?” I have found this to be a character trait among many History Warriors from Robert Manne to Dirk Moses and now you.
Please Explain
Naomi
Either way, you must agree that these apprenticeship schemes sure make the “genocide” crowd sound even nuttier?
Sheesh!
How hard is it for some people to understand that policies designed to remove children who were “half castes” in order to eventually “breed out” characteristics of “the race” – whether they were to be normalised in missions or foster homes or through “apprenticeships” were part of a conscious design to eliminate a minority, as Henry Reynolds said tonight?
Didn’t you hear what the PM said when he quoted those “Protectors” of “Natives”?
Btw, interesting that Windschuttle’s denialism is too extreme now even for the Libs. They’ve reverted to manicly repeating “best intentions”. I suppose that’s progress of a sort.
And the question at 27 makes no sense.
Well done Jane (26). Windbag deflated with one precisely-targetted pin!
Additionally, if these removals were effected with “best intentions”, where are the case-work studies that established a case for snatching infant A but not infant B?
On the contrary, policies of NSW and perhaps other states look like they gave maximum discretion to censorious and self-important busybodies at the very bottom of the “social welfare” hierarchy. These wowssers were given licence to grab who they wanted for whatever pretext would serve at the time.
One point Ive allways had trouble with. Why are (to use older language) half-castes automaticly assumed to be Aboriginal?
It was widely believed the Aboriginals as a distinct group would die off throughout the early 19th/20th century. It wasnt an opinion held by a few Evangelical zealots or genocidal maniacs. It was an idea that came about by looking at what was happening on the ground then. It may have been incorrect, but it appeared to be “factual”.
What possible reason would any govenment have to leave the half white children there?
The stolen generations whole thrust appears to be everyone involved in Aboriginal affairs, Church men and women, teachers, uni proffessors, politicans both conservitive and radical, all were working assiduously towards exterminating the Aboriginal people out of some sort of evil plan.
There was and is nothing romantic, nice or good about tribal life.
This is quite true. This projection was based on the evidence and argument of the most eminent scientists, anthropologists and missionary authorities of their era.
Until the 1950s spectators could anticipate with resignation and occasionally with some pleasure the approaching extinction of all Aborigines through perusal of population returns.
But what these spectators mostly did not know was that these statistics measuring Aboriginal population decline were themselves artefacts of the removal of children from their families. Very often these children were reassigned to another race. Sometimes this reassignment was to the race of their non-Aboriginal parent. Sometimes, however, these children were called Indians, Italians, Spanish, Filipino even though they had no association at all with any of these ethnicities.
Thus, the authorities were conspirators in lying to the taxpayers and implicated in genocide.
Surely that’s a matter of taste. I have long ceased to be surprised or offended by the fact that most people don’t agree with my opinion about a large number of topics.
So I take it that the author of the above supports the contention that up to 100,000 aboriginal children were removed from their families by deliberately racist government action with the motive being to extirpate aboriginals in Australia?
MarkL
Canberra
OK, time to weigh in. Please note, policies varied markedly across state jurisdictions. A big fault in Windschuttle’s argument is that he takes examples from NSW to argue that there was no genocidal intent elsewhere in the country. I don’t know how many people were affected across the country, because the records are so patchy, and I’m not going to hazard a guess, but this was a significant aspect of Aboriginal life in Australia.
I don’t find genocide a useful word in the context of policy in NSW, because I think we can talk about the stolen generations, without plotting it on a scale of nastiness from Nazi Germany to Armenia. It’s enough to say that it was a nasty policy. I do however know that extirpation was the goal, because that’s what governments said at the time. And in NSW extirpation was exactly the word used.
They wanted to ‘eliminate the Aboriginal problem’ – that’s a direct quote from many of the annual reports to Parliament. The Protection Board, and the NSW Parliament, defined ‘the Aboriginal problem’ as a rapidly rising number of half-castes living on the reserves of NSW. Their hope was that by forcing the youths to leave the reserves they could train them in ‘habits of industry’, and that they would never return, thus stopping the growth in numbers on reserves. Girls were the focus, because of their reproductive power. Many at the time said that, once Aboriginal people were off the reserves, after a few generations they would blend into the white population, thus solving the problem.
Of course it didn’t work, but we should not resile from the intent, or the effects of the policies on those who were forced to leave their families.
It’s important to note that the government, at this time, passed a range of laws that actually made it bloody hard for an adult Aborigine with school-age children to live anywhere other than a reserve. Aboriginal people were identified on sight, and had no right of movement in NSW. They were hassled constantly by cops and magistrates. Any Aboriginal child could be excluded from school on the objection of any white parent (a right upheld until 1972), but any child not attending school was a truant and at risk of removal for neglect, meaning Aboriginal parents had to move to reserves to send their kids to school. Aboriginal single mothers were not eligible for boarding-out allowances, as white single mums were. Aboriginal parents were not considered fit to receive cash payments of family endowment for their kids, as all white families were, and it was doled out to them at a manager or policeman’s discretion, in the form of goods and services, provided only on reserves. Reserves were also generally located at some distance from towns, making it very hard for parents to work without leaving their kids unattended. If you couldn’t work, you had to take rations. If you were on rations you were bagged for being ration-dependent. Can you see how these policies actually increased the number of vulnerable Aboriginal kids in NSW?
And all this occurred while the state was earnestly thinking about ways to help destitute white families keep their kids with them.
Thanks Naomi.
That is a fascinating insight into how the web of different discriminatory laws administered by different state government departments added up to an almost watertight system for breaking down aboriginal communities.
Do you have any evidence of the different departments getting together to co-ordinate these policies, or did the system simply grow like topsy?
Either way, the story is chilling.
Values Australia has a Sorry Day post which includes an excerpt from a paper from Murdoch University. The authors say that because the prevailing wisdom was that the Aboriginal race was doomed to die out, and the policies of the states were eugenics and “social Darwinism”. Part of it says:
It was pretty clearly not “benign in intent”, nor in its effect for the most part, even in NSW.
What you have described is a set of policies, regulations and initiatives which may or may not add up to a coordinated policy of aboriginal ‘extirpation’. I used that word as I too have seen it in NSW state govt archives (and Victorian, interestingly). They were nasty by today’s standards, but less so by contemporary standards.
I have seen no evidence of an intent to ‘extirpate’ aborigines, but there is clear intent to ‘extirpate’ a set of problems associated with aborigines. For example, half-castes were an issue due to their not being accepted by full-bloods, resulting in considerable violence. The attempted solution’s intent appears to have been to remove them and assimilate them into the predominantly rural Australia of the time. If so, that was a hardly ‘nasty’ intent, although bungling could certainly create nasty outcomes.
Yes, they thought that full-blood aborigines would ‘die out’: but there is no evidence I have seen in archives of policies deliberately intended (ie, created, funded and actioned) to guarantee this. This demonstrably false claim lies at the heart of the ’stolen’ generations myth. Even the (historically) notoriously racist ALP and other socialists of the era had no such long term policy intent observable in parliamentary debates or cabinet decisions. Their actions look like well intentioned actions by people who “knew what was good” for others from their inner-city middle class viewpoint but who in reality had no clue about the reality of the situation.
Sounds rather familiar.
What we DO see is a set of short term focus policies to address specific problems, with the overall (and probably unintended) impact of those policies being adverse over the long term. Creation of aboriginal welfare-driven poverty traps is a case in point. The creators of these meant well…
This is exactly the system being continued now, by various ‘do-gooders’ with short term goals and a theoretical view. The results may well be equally adverse. For example, the asinine symbolism Krudd has carried out may extend victim culture while creating even less competent responses from various DOCS. After all, who wants to be retrospectively labelled a racist aboriginal child-stealer for removing at-risk children in accordance with current law? Easier to prevaricate, delay, or do nothing; and this will certainly result in deaths among such children.
This appalling and morally wrong outcome can be predicted now. I’ll bet that the future practical outcomes of this weeks grandstanding symbolism have not been assessed at all. I suspect it may return us to the failed 1980s style of ‘make aboriginal activists wealthy’ outcome which created such corrupt abominations as ATSIC.
I hope I am wrong.
MarkL
Canberra
Katz, the state governments all took inspiration from each other, as it suited them (eg. NSW followed Victoria’s lead in ‘protection’, WA and SA followed NSW’s lead in ‘apprenticeship’) but co-ordination only became a reality after the 1937 assimilation conference in Canberra.
MarkL, there are so many assumptions loaded into your comments. Firstly, I’ve never seen anything in the records of child removal that mentioned anything about violence between ‘full-blood’ and ‘half-caste’ people in NSW. Secondly, you assume all Aboriginal kids removed in NSW were neglected, but the Children’s Court didn’t think so. In fact, the Board had to come up with laws to get around the Children’s Court. If all the kids removed were neglected, why did the Board take 14 year olds, and leave their siblings behind, with their parents?
Neither were these short term policy initiatives. The NSW Board first asked for these powers in 1883, began doing it informally in the 1890s, got laws passed in 1912, refined them in 1915 and applied them until 1941. That’s nearly 60 years. In 1941 the stated goal was no longer absorption, but ‘assimilation’ and, under the guidance of people like Elkin, the government made a concerted effort to apply the laws and methods used on white children to Indigenous kids.
Don’t forget, there are clear correlations between a family history of child removal and poor parenting today. One of the reasons for higher rates of child abuse in indigenous communities these days is the history of child removal.
Let me say, I know that not every kid can grow up safely in its family of origin, and I believe any child at risk should be immediately removed from danger, but one of the good things about our 130 year history of child welfare laws is that we have finally gained recognition of kinship bonds. With community and family support it’s possible for them to grow up knowing their parents, their culture, and where they come from. That’s where governments can provide the support that such communities need. Safety, good housing, schooling and all the other resources white communities take for granted.
I don’t doubt that Naomi. But my question was about something different.
You have outlined a situation where discriminatory practices by a multiplicity of NSW agencies interlocked to create an inescapable system of cultural extirpation within NSW.
I was asking whether and to what extent these various NSW bureaucracies conspired to create this system.
Ah, sorry, now I get you and that’s an interesting question.
I actually think that the Protection Board came up with a system of child welfare based on older styles of philanthropy than the ideas pursued by the Child Welfare Department and it’s equivalents. But with that said, there was a definite set of shared beliefs about the inadequacy of Aboriginal parenting, about conditions on reserves, about schooling capability, and other things like the impossibility of Aboriginal children fitting into the mainstream, the undesirability of them being placed with white children in institutions, etc.
I am generally disinclined, when given a choice between conspiracy and cock-up, to use conspiracy as an explanation for historical movements. But I think there was enough of shared belief system in this instance to say that there was, at least, a multi-agency turning of blind eyes.
My word for this is:orchestration. I guess the word suggests some kind of control. So perhaps self-organizing orchestration as in self-organizing system.
>
Social Darwinism was pervasive in the Western world of the early 20th century. It featured amngst the Left and Right. Ideas can be virus-like at times. Obviously Germany adopted Social Darwinism and the results were terrible. They have dealt with it. We, on the winning side of WWII have not faced up to our iniquities. I suppose we’re beginning to.
>
The removal of Aboriginal children fits Section e of Article 3 on the definition of genocide as the UN states it. This involves criminal prosectution. I imagine that whether or no the removals of Aboriginal children will officially be defined thus will be a matter for the courts.
Thanks again Naomi.
I’d find it hard to believe that there were no inter-departmental conferences and policy coordination committees convened in NSW on the topic of “the Aboriginal Problem”. Perhaps some clues about an all-of-government approach to Aborigines may be found in the minutes of such a body.
And I take your meaning in the comment above that in the records of agencies assigned to seize children from their aboriginal parents there was no mention of the alleged danger that non-full-blood children faced from the full-blood population.
If that is correct then this information destroys the claim that non-full-bloods were being taken to protect them from this kind of violence.
As this claim has stood as a major justification for the removal of children, much of this pleading in mitigation is false.
I would also argue that much of the removal practices across all jurisdictions was certainly eugenic in origin. Kay Anderson’s Race & the Crisis of Humanism describes the shifting notion of race within C19th culture & governance, and the pre-occupation with “blood” as a definer. This then allows for the removal of “half caste” children, whether it was into apprenticeships, or to Cootamundra, Bomaderry or the other “homes” throughout NSW. This also then applied throughout Australia.
I would also argue that the economic role these children & adolescents would be trained to perform was to provide an underclass of unskilled or semi-skilled workers who could be forced to work in situations white workers would not accept, & in conditions & at rates of pay that white workers would refuse.
The importance of cheap Aboriginal labour to many enterprises, particularly remote agricultural situations, is most cynically revealed with the mass sackings that followed the referendum of 1967 & the subsequent successful struggles to gain equal wages for Aboriginal ag workers. Or the stolen wages issue which has yet to have resolution in any jurisdiction. Governments & relevant authorities again and again organised or allowed the exploitation of Aboriginal workers throughout Australia – deliberately and knowingly. It is interesting to postulate that the removal of children into homes for ‘training’ ensured a constant & fresh supply.
Naomi, what’s your opinion of this column by David Burchell in today’s Australian, in particular the following paragraphs?
I’d like to back up Grace Pettigrew at #19. I note with slow-growing astonishment that in these public debates the source of the Stolen Generations is almost never addressed as an issue, problem or right to be wronged, nor is that sexual landscape ever analysed, except by specialist historians and Aboriginal artists like Gordon Bennett. I speak as one of many, many Australians historically implicated: the old Narungga man who once saved my infant father’s life was probably his half-great-uncle.
Grace’s story at #19 the first time I’ve ever seen this point made explicitly in a public forum (and what a beautiful irony that it initially took an Aboriginal man to make it). The only response here to Grace’s point has been a stern slapping-down about being off-topic (which she wasn’t, particularly) a couple of comments later.
But I have always been gobsmacked, and clearly Grace is with me here, by the bland unspoken assumption built in to public debate that Aboriginal women were there for white men’s sexual convenience, and that any historical bad behaviour lay exclusively in the realm of official government policy for dealing with those men’s children.
How is this “bland unspoken assumption” “built in to” “the public debate”?
Do you have an example?
Adrien
As far as “Social Darwinism” goes, the West/Europe had absolutely nothing on eastern Eurasia. The Germans were amateurs compared to Marxists from Russia to China to Cambodia….
Don’t you mean WHERE IS TEH EVIDENCE???
The example, Katz, is the fact that it never gets mentioned. Nobody ever asks the question ‘How did these Stolen Generations get there in the first place?’ That, to me, suggests that an assumption is being made.
Perhaps that assumption is not that “Aboriginal women were there for white men’s sexual convenience”, so much as that illicit liaisons and rapes occurred, were to varying degrees deplorable/criminal, but shouldn’t necessarily form part of our view of or apology for the policies of forced removal.
Personally however, I don’t see how they could be separated in any meaningful analysis – holist that I am. It was probably one of a few things that were left unaddressed by the apology speech for the sake of not upsetting too many people.
There I agree with you absolutely, FDB; I don’t think it had a place in the apology speech, mainly for the reason you give.
On the contrary, PC, there is much historical writing about sexual relations between white and black on the frontiers.
For example, Richard Broome “Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance” discusses these relationships at length.
These relationships ran the whole gamut of emotional ties. Sometimes violent rape was perpetrated. Sometimes white-black cohabitation was mutually satisfying.
It is impossible to sustain a simple generalisation about “‘How did these Stolen Generations get there in the first place.
Sometimes TEH MORAL OUTRAGE can be a little premature.
PC
I am totally with you and Grace on this. My introduction to the cruelty often – though not always – involved in “miscegenetic” relationships was reading Katharine Susannah Pritchard’s Coonardoo in High School.
However, it does tend to conflict with Naomi’s argument that there was no rejection by “full-bloods” of children born to Aboriginal women and white men who were subesequently abandoned by white fathers.
However, my reading of the past tells me that “unprotected/vulnerable/poor/low status” women of all hews lived in a fraught and violent sexual economy since time immemorial
Yes, Katz, I’ve read quite a bit of it. Not only did I not say there wasn’t, I specifically mentioned that there was. And I used the phrase ‘public debate’ several times, and by that phrase I meant what gets said in the papers and on the telly and in online conversations and is readily accessible by the chap and chapette in the street.
I didn’t say anywhere that they didn’t or that it wasn’t. You are responding to some phantom point I haven’t been making.
Good thing I didn’t make one then, eh. (Apart from observing that it had been almost ignored in public debate and confined to the work of specialist historians, she said again.)
“Premature” to what? The wise Katz turning up and showing me the error of my ways? Give me a break.
I’m not morally outraged, merely providing a very basic-level feminist reading of an observed phenomenon. I have noticed you don’t like feminist readings one bit and can usually be relied upon to jump in and try to derail them, but the point has been made and I will leave it there.
JG:
Non sequitur and absolute balderdash. The observation that the high number of mixed-blood children would not have existed without the willingness of white men to sexually exploit aboriginal women (with whom most of the men had no intention of forming a family) is an entirely separate phenomenon from the response of other aboriginals to the existence of those children.
JG probably thinks logic is for “luvvies” or something, tigtog.
Fortunately, I’m not responsible for others’ misconceptions. I’ll leave it to others to decide what is and what is not a derailment of a discussion of NSW government policy in mistreating the offspring of Aboriginal and white parents.
How can your average chap and chapette get any conception of the formation of the stolen generations without some recourse to historians? Most of these events took place before living memory. And they took place as the frontier line passed over an entire continent over a period of 140-150 years. This story is too huge for the odd bit of anecdotal colour or some fallible, second-hand reminiscence.
The Cathy Freeman episode of “Who do you think you are?” was a superb keyhole view of this story and an indication of just how much labour is required to tell the story of one person (Freeman had both white and Chinese male ancestors). Freeman is in a better position than virtually all Aborigines to dig down to the unexpected truths of her parentage. Yet she knew nothing before embarking on her voyage of self-discovery.
Much more work of that kind is needed to rescue the truth from fable.
I think you and Pavlov’s Cat are actually more on the same page here with regard to historians than you appreciate, Katz. The facts are there, collected and readily available for those who care to do a bit of cursory reading, but most people can’t be bothered, and make do with received wisdom from the School of Everybody Says instead.
What is glaringly absent from the collected sayings of Some Bloke Down The Pub is the fact that aboriginal women were routinely exploited by drunken lustful whitefellas with no plan to take responsibility of any kind for any resulting children, and who colluded with the Respectable Folk in tut-tutting about how the aborigines were thoughtlessly overbreeding as if it had nothing to do with them.
I agree entirely with your characterisation of the self-serving fables of SBDTP, Tigtog.
Katz said – I’d find it hard to believe that there were no inter-departmental conferences and policy coordination committees convened in NSW on the topic of “the Aboriginal Problemâ€?. Perhaps some clues about an all-of-government approach to Aborigines may be found in the minutes of such a body.
There weren’t any. Inspector Donaldson did address a child welfare congress in either 1909 or 1915, but that’s the sum total. If there had been such a thing, one or other of the 20 or so historians who have been through these records would have found it.
Can I just say that I don’t see a lot of obsession about blood or levels of blood on reserves, although there was an earnest desire to reduce the number of half-castes/quadroons and octoroons (excuse offensive terms – they were the parlance of the day).
I don’t really see it as eugenics in NSW, as Bernice said, because eugenics was about race purity, not breaking down a racial group by intermixing them with others. A whole lot of social ideas related to eugenic beliefs actually led to significant reforms in child welfare, which were not extended to Aboriginal children. At all. Please know, I do think race mattered – fundamentally – but it’s a bit different to actual eugenic ideals. And I am also abundantly aware that eugenics encompassed a suite of nasty notions, which were not at all good for white kids, particularly those determined to be mentally deficient. I guess all I’m saying is, race does not equal eugenics. With that said, there were other jurisdictions in Australia where race and blood were measured very precisely. (Once Tindale arrived on the scene he applied his beliefs about blood to NSW Aborigines, but that didn’t affect policy.)
Sorry if this is a bit garbled – the discussion has become quite complicated. But then it’s a complicated story. Remember, I only speak about NSW.
PS: Paul – the Burchell column seems fair enough to me. It’s true that there was a disproportionate poverty. However, Aboriginal families were never, ever, given a fair go in NSW. They did not go to the same schools, enjoy the same rights of movement, the same right to control their earnings, the same access to family endowments or the same principles guiding interference in family life by the state.
Thanks again Naomi. Would you agree then that the NSW system was therefore quite ramshackle and slipshod?
There was a system, so it wasn’t slipshod. The Protection Board was VERY clear about what it wanted to do, although it never really had the funds to pull off what it wanted to do.
Now to throw a cat amongst the pigeons.
Debunking Parry.
On Dr Naomi Parry’s “Debunking Windschuttle’s benign interpretation of historyâ€?
Parry: Black kids were never boarded out (fostered), which was considered best for white kids, because it was thought they could not fit in.
Comment: If they were boarded out (fostered) it would have had to have been by white families predominantly as there would have been insufficient Aboriginal families in a position to do it. If they had done that, of course, the accusation would be that they were separated from the other Aboriginal apprentices as part of an insidious process of cutting them off from all things Aboriginal. Damned if they did and damned if they didn’t.
The life experiences of the Aboriginal kids would most likely have been very different to that of the white kids. Isn’t it just possible that the originators of such schemes thought it would be easier for the black kids if they were accommodated together with other kids who could relate to them, in institutions run by people who may have gained some experience in dealing with the various issues that would arise? Or does Dr Parry believe that the authorities should have assumed it to be a good idea to simply take an Aboriginal kid from a remote station, hand him over to Mr & Mrs Average White Australian to foster and say, right, you deal with the fact that he knows very little English, has never seen a bus, let alone learned how to buy a ticket and catch one to work, etc, etc? (Even today it is pointed out that many aboriginal kids from remote settlements speak two or more Aboriginal languages fluently but little or no English.)
Parry: “Aboriginal schools”, lauded by Windschuttle, offered only a dumbed-down grade three education.
Comment: Excuse me, but where did Windschuttle ‘laud’ these schools? He made comments about what the intent was, not how well it was actually done. Parry shouldn’t try to confuse ‘intent’ with ‘execution’. Governments quite often have good intentions but then under-fund those given the job of implementing the grand plan and sometimes those doing the implementing have their own ideas of what they can and should do.
The accusation of a dumbed-down education has been made about Aboriginal education much more recently. It seems that the reason for it is that many Aboriginal kids simply can’t cope with a more advanced course. Not that there is anything wrong with their intelligence but unfortunately for many, their home environments aren’t conducive to study at home (remember the recent stories about kids trying to do their homework at night out on the street under a street light?). Also many aboriginal kids have such poor attendance records that they are years behind their ‘white’ age equivalents. Of course, Parry also fails to mention that many Aboriginal children who did show academic ability were granted scholarships to study in schools with more advanced curricula.
Parry: Although both black and white kids were apprenticed, by 1915 reformers complained apprenticeship condemned children to live as unskilled labourers. By World War II, fewer than 10% of white state kids were apprenticed and institutionalisation was declining, whereas apprenticeship (and institutionalisation) remained the norm for Aboriginal kids until the 1960s.
Comment: And yet apprenticeships are still offered today to black and white kids and are thought highly desirable opportunities, tickets to a well-paid trade! Could it be that these reformers were the kind of snobs who think manual labour demeaning and that all kids should aspire to go to university and careers as doctors, lawyers and social workers? Could it be that Parry is also such a job snob?
Parry: Windschuttle’s claims should not be ignored, if only because of his political agenda. When he published the first volume of the Fabrication of Aboriginal History he attacked the Tasmanian Aboriginal community’s right to control their cultural history.
Comment: He what? What he attacked was the ‘right’ of almost exclusively white academic historians to publish false history. He attacked historians who cited evidence that actually didn’t exist and documents that in fact said completely different things to what the black armband historians said they did. He attacked historians who used false footnotes to conceal the fact that they had no real evidence to back up their claims. Dr Parry’s claim is just more ideologically inspired nonsense.
Parry: Windschuttle presents apprenticeship as simple “on-the-job training”, but what it really meant was growing up many miles from family, usually in a strange house somewhere like Mosman or Beecroft. The workday started at dawn and ended after dinner, every day of the week.
Comment: I assume that she is referring to life in domestic service here. It’s a fairly accurate description; she just doesn’t mention that large numbers of ‘white’ Australians worked as domestic servants too and, yes, their workday started at dawn and ended after dinner, every day of the week (with the occasional day off). That was the reality of life as a domestic back then. Plenty of other Australians had what were effectively seven day a week, dawn till dusk jobs. Does anyone really think that Windschuttle is proposing the revival of domestic service and apprenticeships under typical late 19th and early 20th century conditions?
Parry: Most apprentices received just sixpence a week pocket money, with the rest supposedly banked in trust, although the reality was few got their full trust fund.
Comment: the theft of wages held in trust for Aboriginal workers, by governments (the Queensland Government apparently being the worst offender) and by corrupt public servants, is a true outrage and one that should be apologised for and full compensation paid (and if any of the offenders are still alive they should be tracked down and flogged). But that wasn’t the original intent of holding the wages in trust; it was an aberration from what was supposed to happen.
Parry: If you’ve ever spoken to someone who was sent away to work you’ll know those years of domestic service left scars, not just on the lives of the apprentices, but also their children. Note that the records show a pregnancy rate of 7% amongst underage girls – a figure unthinkable with white welfare agencies, but ignored by the Board, and many of the babies died, or were sent to child welfare homes.
Really? Exactly where does Dr Parry get her comparative figures for pregnancy in underage white female domestic servants and what are those figures? She gives no evidence of actually having any, of course. It is no secret, at least not now, that young ‘white’ female domestic servants were also sexually abused and exploited and that, as a result, many children were put up for adoption or put into homes. Some babies were adopted into the family of the abuser. There also used to what were known as ‘baby farmers’, who, for a fee, would look after illegitimate children. They were sometimes paid by the mother but often were paid by the family of an abuser to look after an illegitimate baby fathered by a member of the family. Having to go away to work from a young age did, unfortunately, leave scars but if you looked at white domestic servants you would have found similar psychological scars. At the time this was happening though, sexual abuse was swept under the carpet and not spoken about as was other forms of abuse by employers such as violence. A person with a job as a domestic servant in a ‘respectable’ home was assumed to benefit by the employment and the training. There was not an automatic assumption that they were being abused or exploited.
Parry: Most had parents living, just five per cent of families consented to removal, and usually younger siblings in the same family were left behind. And, if such removals were justified, because Aboriginal families were as alcohol-dependent and neglectful as Windschuttle makes out, why did the Board take older kids and leave their siblings in the conditions it condemned?
Comment: More blatant misrepresentation of what Windschuttle said. He talked first about the younger children that were removed and stated that most of the younger children taken “were welfare cases, orphans, neglected children (some severely malnourished), and children who were abandoned, deserted and homeless�. He then said that two thirds of all children “removed� were teenagers, 13 to 17 years old who were sent off to be apprentices. It was two separate categories of removal, young kids removed for their protection and those sent off to be apprenticed. Nowhere does Windschuttle say that all the kids who were apprenticed were from the alcohol-dependent or neglectful families, that is a Parry ‘invention’. Parry, in typical black armband fashion, is twisting what Windschuttle actually said and then commenting on her twisted version.
Parry: Windschuttle also accuses the leading historian in this field, Peter Read, of overstating the fact that committal forms showed children were taken “for being Aboriginal”. He says only one form states this, but that is not true. In one quarter of the cases where a reason was given, Aboriginality was clearly denoted by terms like “camp life”, “surroundings” and residing on an “Aboriginal station”.
Comment: Windschuttle didn’t say that the forms never mentioned that the children were Aboriginal just that Read had misrepresented the reasons given for removal. Read had claimed that:”Some managers cut a long story short when they came to that part of the committal notice ‘Reason for board taking control of the child’. They simply wrote ‘for being Aboriginal’.” How is it not accurate for Windschuttle to point out that this was the reason given for removal in only one case (actually three as Windschuttle fairly points out that he found two forms which simply said “Aboriginalâ€?). Inexcusable, but still three cases not hundreds or thousands. As for the words and phrases that Parry seems to think are code for “For being aboriginalâ€?; could it be that these were part of a general description of the children’s circumstances and perhaps some comments on the quality of life being ‘enjoyed’ by the children before removal? Of course, in typical black armband style, Parry only gives us carefully selected excerpts from the forms rather than the full details. So we can’t see for ourselves what the full reasons are. For all we know they could be: “Child is in extremely poor health and will die if continues in camp lifeâ€?, “The squalor of the child’s surroundings is beyond believe and is unequivocal evidence of neglectâ€? and “Child is residing on an Aboriginal station and is being regularly sexually abused by other residentsâ€?. Full disclosure, Dr Parry, not carefully trimmed excerpts.
Parry: A strong theme was girls’ morality, as when it was “deemed advisable to send girl away from camp influences owing to her age and the risk of her getting into trouble with any of the opposite s-x.”
Comment: Morality, schmorality, despite the coy phrasing, a strong theme was the prevention of sexual abuse and exploitation. A very large percentage of the girls removed were the offspring of Aboriginal women and absent white men. They were often not accepted in the tribe because they were of mixed race as well as being fatherless and so prime targets for sexual abuse and exploitation. Well-known example: Molly of “Rabbit-proof Fence� fame. In the past couple of years it was in the newspapers that in the Northern Territory, when men in at least one of the Aboriginal communities there run out of beer money, they drag one of the young girls from the community into town and exchange her sexual services for alcohol. Does anyone really think that they were doing this to a girl with a father around to protect her?
Parry: Please be assured that it was unthinkable for white children to be taken from their parents simply because someone thought they should be put to work.
Comment: Frankly, no one had to with white kids. When they got old enough, one of the accepted duties of a parent was to prepare them for working life in the modern world, just as Aboriginal parents used to teach their kids what was needed for survival in a Stone Age hunter-gatherer culture. Fathers and mothers actually went out and helped find jobs or apprenticeships for their kids. If you knew someone who was a plumber, electrician or in another trade, you’d be buying them a beer every Friday, asking them round to barbeques and regularly saying to them: “When you are ready to take on another apprentice, remember my lad, will you mate? He’s keen.� Parents would be up early reading the papers looking for likely jobs or apprenticeship opportunities for their kids, phoning to arrange interviews on their behalf, getting mates to write references for them and driving them to the interview. And where the parents didn’t do any of the above, white kids still had it easier in terms of access to job opportunities and apprenticeships.
Isn’t it likely that the reason that the government stepped in with Aboriginal kids was that the only choices and opportunities that Aboriginal parents still living in remote settlements could offer their children were pretty limited and that it took government intervention to give them opportunities away from ‘camp life’ and working on a station for rations?
Parry: Windschuttle says historians are wrong to say that the Board intended apprenticeship to reduce the numbers of Aborigines in the state, even though the Board’s minutes and annual reports reveal just that desire.
Comment: Let’s see the documents (the minutes and annual reports) to back that up please, not just Dr Parry’s unsupported word, oh, and not just carefully selected quotes, the full text please. Just a guess but I suspect that if we were to look closely at the wording in the full text we’d find that the ‘desire’ of the Board may have been to reduce the number of Aborigines living on in remote settlements on handouts in the State and instead have them in decent jobs away from the soul-destroying remote settlements.
Parry: He says that the fact that 60% of Aboriginal apprentices went home shows how wrong we historians are. Yet he also asserts that Aboriginal apprenticeship “provided real jobs and skills and gave young Aborigines a way out of the alcohol-soaked, hand-out dominated camps and reserves of their parents.”
You can’t have it both ways – one cannot say that Aborigines found a way out through apprenticeship, when so many went home to the exact same conditions they had left.
Comment: Firstly Windschuttle did not say that Aborigines “found a way out through apprenticeship�, those are Dr Parry’s words. He said it “gave young Aborigines a way out�. It’s a subtle difference but important. Just because you give someone something valuable doesn’t mean that they actually make best use of it. You can teach young Aboriginal people the skills necessary to hold down a job in the outside world and give them the chance at a better life but if after you have finished teaching them, they make a free choice to return to the “alcohol-soaked, hand-out dominated camps and reserves�, well, whose mistake is that?
It seems that 40% of the Aboriginal apprentices did make use of the gift of the skills that an apprenticeship provided. It’s to be hoped that of the 60% who went home at least some did try to make use of the skills they’d acquired by trying to make life better for their families and community.
Windschuttle wasn’t “trying to have it both ways�. He was just pointing out that the apprentices were free to return home and that many of them did.
Parry: I look forward more twisted logic when Volume Two of the Fabrication of Aboriginal History hits the shelves, just as soon as I can figure out how to acquire it without actually buying it.
Comment: Whose twisted logic? And it’s called a library card, Dr Parry.
No. In the institution model it’s cheaper to warehouse the kids in one spot. The idea was to train them to perform unskilled or semi-skilled labour for white families or employers, such as cattle droving for the boys and domestic service for the girls. Some basic numeracy and literacy was thrown in along with liberal doses of Christianity.
And most of the staff employed in such places for both indigenous and non-indigenous institutions were untrained in any areas that we would now recognise as pertinent to child welfare and wellbeing.
On what evidence do you base that statement? Where is your data?
Your other throwaway comments apply to all disadvantaged children whose home conditions are not conducive to supporting success at school. The independent variable is poverty, not ethnicity.
How many is “many”? Where did they study? Your statement conflicts with your previous statement where you assert that “many Aboriginal kids simply can’t cope with a more advanced course”
Are you not aware that apprenticeships have changed greatly since 1915? The “apprenticeships” for indigenous children described by Naomi Parry were in many instances little more than indentured serf labour. No TAFE or group training component, no award protection, no OH&S.
White girls with families like my mother, who was born in 1912, had a choice as to whether they worked as domestics or not. Wards, both indigenous and non-indigenous, did not.
White Australians had the protection of an active and strong union movement. No one of my parents’ generation that they knew of worked longer than 40 hours. Then again they did not know any indigenous people.
Oh really…how disingenuous of you.
Your whole passage on sexual abuse is odd. Of course official statistics were not kept of physical or sexual abuse. The attitude of police and others to whom it might be reported was to bury it under the carpet and to blame the victim. Most girls in that situation kept quiet, and it has taken a lot of work by researchers over time to uncover their stories, which emerged only after the revelations of physical and sexual abuse by clergy were surfacing in the 80s and 90s .
Unfortunately many of these girls are now dead. They will never receive the justice that is their due.
But if you would like to extrapolate..in Australia in 2008 at least one in four girls under 16 and one in seven boys under 16 is subject to abuse, either physical or sexual or both. I didn’t make these figures up. Reputable authorities agree with me. They also agree that even now child abuse is under-reported.
In 2008 we have extensive child protection laws, mandatory reporting and harsh penalties for perpetrators. We no longer routinely dump neglected children in institutions.
How much worse then must it have been when we did not have those laws and when children were taken from their parents arbitrarily and placed in institutions. And remember that indigenous people were not even counted as part of the population until 1967.
It seems you have now entered the realms of fantasy land. Because you really want to believe that you and your hero Windschuttle are right and just about every other historian and sociologist in the country is wrong, you are now presenting us with a total fiction in the form of “reports”.
Of course, but no blame or opprobium was ever attached to the white men. And in situations where the relationship was consensual, and often the parents were married to each other, children were still removed. I remember Evonne Goolagong’s story of how she and her friends in rural NSW used to fear the coming of “the Welfare”. It resonates more honestly than do your scribblings.
Not for a large part of the 19th and 20th centuries they didn’t.
So I take it that you’ll be the only person purchasing Windschuttle’s Volume 2 then?
First pigeon heard from: Sorcerer, it’s perfectly true that the institutions model was cheaper. I didn’t say that it wasn’t but I’d like to see some EVIDENCE that this was the sole reason and that considerations as to special difficulties faced by Aboriginal kids were never taken into account. I’m really not prepared to take the unsupported word of Dr Parry for that, or yours.
It’s also true that the staff were not trained in areas that we “now know are pertinent to child welfare and well-being�. Perhaps you hoped that no-one would notice that you avoided the fact that I never mentioned ‘training’, I mentioned ‘experience’. Staff who worked in one of those institutions may never have had a day’s actual training but they would get experience. Over time you would hope that they’d learn that they simply couldn’t assume that an Aboriginal kid from way out West would know how to use the public transport system, for example.
Also perfectly true that most of the kids were prepared for unskilled or semi-skilled work like cattle droving and domestic service. Anyone with even a most basic knowledge of the way State and Church run institutions for children operated would know that the children of any race they housed were almost invariably only given training for base level jobs. You had to show unusual ability to get help towards anything better, like a scholarship. The institutions simply didn’t have the budgets for anything else. The attitude of the times was that, yes, we had a responsibility towards these children, but it wasn’t to pay for expensive clothes, fine food or a university education. It stopped at providing the basics including training them for a base level job, enough training to earn a living.
Agricultural labour and domestic service were two of the major areas of employment for black and white back then. They were thought particularly suitable for rural Aboriginal kids because these were pretty much the only jobs available in the areas where they lived. Kids in city institutions were pushed towards jobs as factory workers, council workers and as shop assistants. For many people, these base level jobs were a stepping stone to better things.
The passage where I said; “It seems that the reason for it is that many Aboriginal kids simply can’t cope with a more advanced course� along with what you described as “throwaway comments�, is a reference to relatively recent newspaper reports (it assumed that everyone who would reading my post also read the newspapers, my mistake), printed in the past year or so, that a lot of the curriculum in remote aboriginal schools has been dumbed down. The teachers explained that they had no choice; if they made the work any tougher the kids simply did not come to school and their parents didn’t make them come. When they do attend, the children’s home environments “are not conducive to supporting success at school� not because of their ethnicity but because of poverty. The link between their poverty, ethnicity and poor school outcomes is, of course, that if you are living in one of these remote Aboriginal settlements, which you would only do because of your ethnicity, you are pretty much absolutely guaranteed to be living in poverty because there’s no employment to be had out there. The poor school outcomes just flow from there. Note: we are talking current day curriculum here but I don’t imagine that the standards would have been higher in the past.
I am well aware of the fact that apprenticeships have changed and that today there are many more protections and much better training provided. Why else would I write: “Does anyone really think that Windschuttle is proposing the revival of domestic service and apprenticeships under typical late 19th and early 20th century conditions?� It ties in with what I was saying about the conditions under which people both white and black worked way back then. Long hours and extremely hard work weren’t limited to Aboriginal apprentices and domestic servants, which is one reason why they weren’t viewed, at the time, as being as oppressed as we do consider them today.
If your parents never met any white people who worked longer that 40 hours a week perhaps they should have got out more. I know from my own family history of working weeks of easily double that. As for your mother having a choice as to whether she worked as a domestic servant or not, well it must have been nice to have been an independently wealthy domestic servant, able to pick and choose whether she worked and who she worked for. You’ll find if you ask around a bit that a lot of people looking for work at the time your mother would have been, couldn’t afford to be so choosy. It was work or go hungry and you took what work was available. For a lot of people, not starving meant putting up with tough conditions and sometimes psychological or physical abuse.
Does your argument that “White Australians had the protection of an active and strong union movement� mean that no white apprentices or domestic servants got abused? I’m impressed, I wasn’t aware that they had done much at all to stop it.
You suggest that it is disingenuous of me to say that it wasn’t the original intention of the legislation requiring the Aboriginal wages be put in trust, that those wages would later be stolen. Are you seriously suggesting that the Parliament passed those laws just so that the local police sergeant (who doubled as the Protector in many areas) could pocket those wages? I know that the Police Unions are politically influential but I didn’t realize it went that far.
Sorcerer, if you’d read what I posted a little slower and paid better attention, you wouldn’t have made so many basic misinterpretations of what I wrote. If the whole of my passage on sexual abuse seems odd to you, perhaps you need to read it again. Dr Parry had made an unsupported claim that the pregnancy rate amongst underage black domestic servants was significantly different to that of whites. My point was that we know for a fact that underage white domestic servants were sexually exploited and we know that the babies who resulted were ‘disposed of’ in various ways. Parry provided absolutely zero evidence that there was any significant difference in the rate of sexual abuse of underage black domestic servants. Though you may not have understood it, much of what I was saying was a reference to the fact that sexual abuse of white domestic servants could sometimes be more easily covered up. Babies born to white domestic servants sometimes had better outcomes because they were not of mixed-descent. They were more likely to be adopted into the family of the abuser. If not adopted into the family, it was more likely that the abuser or his family would provide for a ‘white’ baby in some way, such as by having it privately adopted, fostered out or placed with a baby farmer.
I think you are the one being disingenuous when you refer to the section where I gave imaginary expansions to the carefully selected phrases that Dr Parry quoted, such as “camp life�, “surroundings� and residing at an “Aboriginal station�. My point is very clear; unless we get to see the full text from which Dr Parry pulled these phrases, we can’t know what the truth is. My imaginary ‘examples’ showed that how easy it would be to misrepresent what someone has written by trimming away important bits of it. Anyone who has been following the History Wars knows that Windschuttle proved, beyond any doubt, that one of the tactics of the black armband historians has been to selectively quote from documents; presenting to their readers only what seems to support their arguments and trimming away anything that doesn’t. So my request stands: the full text please, Dr Parry, not carefully selected bits of it.
In the context of what I was saying about girls being removed because of the risk of sexual abuse, it was pretty much irrelevant that “no blame or opprobium (sic) was ever attached to the white men�. It would have been great if every white man who raped an Aboriginal girl was hunted down and put in prison for it. That wouldn’t have changed the fact that the mixed-descent girls that resulted from it were particularly at risk. It’s a completely separate issue.
As for the fact that girls were taken from families where the parents were married, also true. That doesn’t mean that the family was ideal. It doesn’t mean that the children weren’t neglected or abused. Once again, let’s see some EVIDENCE as to the reasons for removal in these cases, not just opinion.
Your comment on “Fathers and mothers actually went out and helped find jobs or apprenticeships for their kids� was: “Not for a large part of the 19th and 20th centuries they didn’t.� You’ve got to be kidding. You seriously think that ‘for a large part of the 19th and 20th centuries’ parents didn’t try to help their kids find gainful employment? Posting that didn’t embarrass you even a little bit? In my work, I’ve had the opportunity to look at the records of various businesses that have operated in Australia going back to the early 1800’s. Time and time again, I’ve come across letters from parents enquiring about job and apprentice opportunities for their kids. Time and time again, I’ve come across notes about appointments that parents have attended to personally request that the business take their child on. You’ve really got to be kidding!
And for a lot of kids put into apprenticeships and domestic service, they wouldn’t have had any control over for whom, when or where they worked. Their parents arranged it all for them and they were made to go, rather like the Government did for Aboriginal kids.
Lastly, I will be buying the next volume that Windschuttle published, just as I have purchased work by Reynolds, Ryan, Read and others. I don’t let the opinions of a self-appointed elite decide for me what I read. I find that by reading both sides of the argument you quickly find who is talking nonsense and who isn’t. I’ve been discussing the History Wars with people for years, in person and on-line. I’ve found that most of the people who express negative opinions regarding Windschuttle’s work haven’t actually read it, although many of them have pretended to me and/or others that they have. It rapidly becomes obvious that they have only read commentary, articles or reviews written by his opponents such as Robert Manne or Henry Reynolds and the illustrious Naomi Parry. When they are talk or write about Windschuttle’s writings on any particular point, what they impart is what Manne, Reynolds or the like have said that Windschuttle has written, blissfully unaware that those parties routinely provide their readers with a misrepresented and distorted version of what Windschuttle actually said.
You clearly haven’t read Richard Broome’s demolition of Windschuttle’s methodology (and intellectual honesty).
http://kooriweb.org/foley/news/story28.html
So before you make sweeping and unsupported statements like the above, perhaps you should have done what you have boasted you have done.
That’s one effective way of disproving any accusation that you are a boring little blowhard.
I read Broome’s article when it first came out, as a demolition of Windschuttle, it was a joke. Basically it relied on untested death totals, carefully selected passages from various diaries and other documents along with Broome’s calculations. My personal experience is that the people who think it proved anything are so overcome by the language and the intricate detail that they don’t realize it’s just empty theorising. When asked, they can’t actually explain how it proved Windshuttle wrong, it just sounded so complex and impressive it must be right. And of course it suited their personal prejudices so it must be right. All flash and no substance in other words; judging by your previous posts, a bit like you, Katz.
From the Legislative Assembly New South Wales: Report of Board for the Protection of, for Year 1910
and people, both indigenous and non-indigenous, knew full well even back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, that the policy would be harmful.
From the Bringing Them Home Report.which I suggest you read:
and
I said that, and of course most people did not really have access to full educational provision until the 60s and 70s for a variety of reasons (approximately 1% of students finishing the final year of secondary school went to University). However as far as wards were concerned this was deliberate policy to the extent that white wards often did not attend normal public schools in NSW (as distinct from classes in the institutions) till some time in the 50s. Indigenous wards under the Protection Boards regime often never did.
Not the same thing, and we see the consequences in the lives of their surviving charges.
Which reports? And in what papers?
Where’s your evidence?
My mother was never a domestic servant, nor were her friends. She did however come from a single-parent family, as my grandmother was widowed in her twenties and left with three children. Mum worked for a short time in a stationers, went to tech as it was then and did shorthand and typing. She worked as a comptometrist and stenographer (today she’d be doing data entry and book-keeping) till she married and had to chuck it in, as women were forced to in those days.
My point was in mentioning her was that as a white girl with a parent, albeit from a poor family, she had choices. The wards didn’t. Especially if they were indigenous.
Often not much better. But the records which uncover the destinations of white babies, where they exist, are still sealed for the most part, as Dr Susan Gair has observed.
Couldn’t agree more
You are more correct than you appear to be aware that you are.
I note that you have not explained how these records should have been used. Instead on analysing and critiquing you preferred to sneer. Is this a habit of yours?
Yes, indeed, these figures came from unsytematic sources. They are the best sources available because, believe it or not, the colonial coroner was not called out to prove each of these deaths.
These deaths left very feint records for very good reasons.
One of the reasons why feint records were left is that there was no genocidal policy followed by colonial authorities. At least in Port Phillip District the authorities were as earnest as they could be in following up on reports of killings. The task was beyond the most earnest law enforcement officer.
Specifically, what do you find wrong with the following from Broome?
We have quite accurate figures on white deaths. These were reported to the overworked authorities. Should the ratio of white to black homicide be much higher than Broome estimates? Much lower? Why?
Broome again:
How do you explain Windschuttle’s failure to address the point specifically mentioned by Broome? How does Windschuttle avoid the charge of intellectual dishonesty?
Katz
It seems you are once more sticking your bib into this debate, even though you – like most on this thread – still have not read Windschuttle’s book!
Katz
There is no point in linking to another orthodox historian’s critique if you, yourself, are not capable of evaluating that critique, because you are not familiar with the source.
Sorcerer: your quote from the Legislative Assembly New South Wales: Report of Board for the Protection of, for Year 1910 is irrelevant to the point at issue. I say again, show me some EVIDENCE that COST was the sole reason for housing Aboriginal kids in institutions and that considerations as to special difficulties faced by Aboriginal kids were never taken into account.
Having said that don’t bother trying as it would take a full examination of all the records relating to the creation and continued operation of said institutions to produce convincing evidence one way or the other and I doubt you have the resources to do it. Someone should, though. Maybe Dr Parry will take it on? Just pulling a quote off the Net doesn’t cut it.
I have read the Bringing Them Home report and I consider it worthless. They heard testimony from over 500 people and didn’t allow cross-examination of any of them. They relied on the work of Professor Robert Read and didn’t test anything of his that they used to see how accurate it was. Evidence that isn’t tested and scrutinised, checked for accuracy and verified is worthless and any report based on such so-called evidence is worthless, too. The prime example of just how worthless it was is the case of Lorna Cubillo. She was practically the poster child for the report as a stolen child; thereafter she lost her High Court case because as soon as scrutiny was applied, the claim of having been stolen fell apart.
The Hon P McGarry may have been absolutely right then again he may have been just another politician with a big mouth. Exactly how much weight am I supposed to give to a two line excerpt from one politician’s opinion?
It seems we have some sort of agreement on education. Yes, wards didn’t get access to a full education because pretty much no-one thought that the Government or Church was obligated to supply more than a very basic education and vocational training.
Training vs experience: Still studiously avoiding the issue that I raised, I see, which was that it’s possible that at least part of the reason for housing Aboriginal apprentices together long after it was rare to do so with white kids had something to do with keeping them with people with experience of their special needs. I’m not saying that it was, just that it’s possible and I’d like to see sufficient credible EVIDENCE one way or the other, not just someone’s unsupported opinion. Back in the days this was happening, experienced personnel were relied upon because there weren’t degree courses for everything. Unfortunately as you pointed out earlier, it wasn’t until revelations of abuse by priests, Christian Brothers and other workers in these large institutions started coming out in the 80’s and 90’s, that people started to realise that some of the people running these institutions shouldn’t have been allowed near children. Until then people generally regarded life in an institution like a Boys Home as a tough life with few comforts or luxuries but there wasn’t the suspicion of abuse.
Which reports? And in what papers? Well, I saw it in the Courier Mail and also at least one report in the Australian; the issue seems to keep bubbling up every now and again. If you want more detail than that try Googling with various combinations of the words ‘dumbed down’, ‘Aboriginal’, ‘remote’, ‘community’, ‘schools’ and similar relevant keywords. You’ll find thousands of references and I really don’t have the time to sort through them all for you.
Evidence regarding white kids, apprenticeships and jobs and their control over it: My evidence is a lifetime of experience, it’s having known and talked to people who were apprenticed or sent out to work as teenagers in the 1920’s, 1930’s and later. Whose parents picked their apprenticeships or jobs for them, arranged accommodation for them and signed on their behalf. Some of them didn’t particularly want to do it at the time but quite literally had no choice other than to run away from home and find some other way to support themselves and in the times before the our present Welfare state, that wasn’t easy. No fronting up to CentreLink, saying that you can’t go home because your parents abuse you and getting housing and an allowance in those days. I mean, do you really not know how it was? If you were 14 and your parents said we’ve got an apprenticeship arranged for you, you went where they told you, there were NO other options for a lot of kids.
As for your mother having a choice because she was white. She was lucky to have choices. As I said before; in the days before unemployment benefit and all the various allowances, for a lot of people, black and white, it was take what work was on offer or starve.
No disagreement over your comment on babies born to white domestic servants.
I’ll get to you in a while, Katz. But for now, yes, when people produce garbage like Richard Broome’s article, I do sneer. It always seems the appropriate response.
A ratio of 20 to 1 is either a reasonable estimate of the kill ratio of Aborigines to whites in violent confrontations on the 19th century frontier, or it is not.
If not, why not?
Firstly there is a huge problem with ratios of white to black homicide per se when there is no basis provided for the ratio but pulling it out of someone’s, let’s say ear, to keep it clean.
Certainly if you could establish that some sort of rational systematic analysis had been done and it was found that, say, when Aborigines came into conflict out on open plains with little cover with white settlers who were armed with certain types of weapons say single-shot muskets, casualties typically averaged out to x number of Aborigines killed per white settler, fine then maybe you can use that ratio for conflict elsewhere in similar circumstances. Even then you would expect the ratio to change under different circumstances, say in fighting in forested areas with lots of cover or when the weapons changed, for example, when settlers acquired repeating rifles. But in Broome’s case all he did was use Reynolds and Loos’ ten to one ‘Queensland’ ratio and that ratio had no basis in any sort of analysis. It was simply pulled out of the air. So why not 1 to 1, why not 20 to 1, why not 3 to 1, why not 2.2046226 to 1. None of it has any scientific basis except for the last and that’s because it’s the ratio of pounds to kilograms, not very helpful in the issue under discussion. You can talk about ratios until the cows come home and speculate whether the ratio should be lower higher or the same and it is all totally meaningless if the ratios have no basis that can be validated. It proves absolutely nothing. Saying it’s POSSIBLE that a 10 to 1 or a 20 to 1 ratio is accurate is just another way of saying it’s possible that it’s not.
Unfortunately it seems that a lot of historians don’t try to do any sort of analysis, they just go with whatever suits the particular axe that they want to grind.
It would take a lot more than the fact that Windschuttle may have missed one sentence, which in of itself says virtually nothing about black massacres of whites to support a charge of intellectual dishonesty. You could change what Windschuttle said to: ‘completely omits any MEANINGFUL mention of the mass killing of Europeans by Aborigines’ and it would be difficult to say he’s wrong, wouldn’t it.
Incorrect.
Broome reviewed a wide range of writing, especially that of PPD, with which he is especially familiar, to arrive at that tentative ratio.
If the kill ratio were, let us say, one order of magnitude less than Broome’s estimate, (i.e., 2 to 1) then that would make the Aborigines quite a potent killing force, far more capable than the Vietnamese in relation to the US in the period 1965-1972.
If such were the case, then the nature of frontier conflict would have to be considered in an entirely different paradigm.
If, on the other hand the kill ratio were, let us say, one order of magnitude greater than Broome’s estimate, (i.e., 200 to 1) then that would make the 19th century Australian frontier a veritable killing field, with white on black homicides amounting to something like 200,000!
Yet we are deeply suspicious of the 2 to 1 just as we are utterly disbelieving of the 200 to 1.
Thus, the 20 to 1 ratio, while still meriting great scepticism, does accord with what we know about black/white relations on the frontier.
I’m willing to accept anything between 10 to 1 and 30 to 1 as reasonable enough.
These figures serve a larger purpose: that is to prevent us from over-estimating the military prowess of Aborigines, or grossly to overestimate the total number of Aborigines who lived in Australia at the time of the coming of the whites.
Ahh, you’re willing to accept something between 10 to 1 and 30 to 1 as reasonable. Well, I guess that settles all debate on the issue. Katz has spoken, everybody! No need to do any kind of verifiable statistical analysis. We now know what’s acceptable to Katz.
Broome reviewed ‘a wide range of writing’ and then settled on 10 to 1. Whoopee! However I’d be more impressed if he demonstrated some kind of scientific or statistical analysis was used to reach that but he didn’t. If you examine what he says in the article, the only deaths that were in any way quantifiable were the deaths of white settlers and even those were pretty fuzzy. He tried to get some idea of known Aboriginal deaths and finds it unquantifiable. While there are questionable figures and other people’s guesses at ratios for some areas at some times there are only gross generalisations available to fill in the gaps and cover the continent. So he used a figure of 1,800 to 2,000 settler deaths and somehow found that he was comfortable with an Aboriginal death toll of 18,000 to 20,000. Which funnily enough works out to be 10 to 1, which just happens to be the same ratio as others have used, so it must be right.
Take a few classes in statistical analysis, Katz. And when you are there, get the lecturer to look over Broome’s article. If he is at all competent he’ll tell you that, yes, 10 to 1 is feasible on the available information. So is 9 to 1, 8 to 1, 15 to 1…….. It’s all feasible, Katz, it’s just doesn’t prove anything.
The truth is that we will probably never be able to quantify the number of Aborigines killed in some kind of conflict with white settlers. It may have been around 20,000; it may have been higher or lower. If clinging to some kind of ratio helps you out, feel free to do so but don’t embarrass yourself by trying to convince anyone that a particular number or ratio is provable.
and
I see your problem! It seems you don’t understand the difference between “provable” and “reasonable”.
And with this statement, which explicitly puts the lie to Windschuttle’s assertions, you have debunked Windschuttle’s tendentious denialism.
Thank you. That is all.
I understand the difference between ‘provable’ and ‘reasonable’, it seems however that you’ve completely forgotten what we were arguing about. Reread your own posts. You were arguing that Broome’s work ‘demolishes’ Windschuttle’s methodology. Clearly it doesn’t, since none of Broome’s claims are provable. All flash, no substance.
Your next claim that my statement about 20,000 deaths being possible “explicitly puts the lie to Windschuttle’s assertions” just proves that you haven’t actually read Windschuttle’s work (or if you did, you can’t have being paying attention). To paraphrase Windschuttle’s position, it’s that it is wrong for historians to claim that there were a particular number of Aboriginal deaths as a direct result of some sort of conflict with white settlers, be it the 20,000 figure or 50,000 or 100,000, without some kind of verifiable methodology behind them. He attacked, for example, Reynold’s use of questionable ratios and then the treatment of the figure obtained as being anything that you can hang your hat on. You really need to actually read Keith Windschuttle’s work before you try debating it. You just wind up looking foolish when you don’t actually know what he said and as I’ve said before, you can’t rely on what other people say that he said because, frankly, they lie.
In fact no-one has said that cost was the only factor in institutionalisation, except for you. In fact there is ample evidence that it was not. For instance, take the career of one Robert Donaldson, MP and Protector of Aboriginals, whose Australian Dictionary of Biography entry revealingly states:
From The Lost Children (Edwards and Read(eds), 1989)
If you are going to eliminate the “undesirable” by some sort of attrition, it is handy to have them all concentrated in a few places, is it not? Other more sinister proponents of theories like Donaldson’s would later support that view.
Quoted in the Bringing Them Home Report:
Well now what does that sound like to people brought up like most of us were on stranger danger?
The various State and Federal Governments do not, nor do relevant professionals. Perhaps you would like to inform Kevin Rudd of your dissent? Perhaps you should revisit what Peter Read recently wrote.
he was one of many expressing concern. And it was not just politicians. Many rural residents were equally concerned. That you would know if you had read Bringing Them Home properly.
Yet another careless throwaway line. You will have to do better than that.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if anyone could attempt to pass oneself off as a researcher with that as the only criteria. Using your logic, or lack thereof, I for instance could become a wealthy TV chef on the basis of having cooked meals for a long time.
What period are you talking about? During the Great Depression for instance? It seems that even in that time of great hardship for all, indigenous people were again doubly disadvantaged.
From Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation: Reconciliation and Social Justice Project
I probably do but I won’t.
In any case Dr Naomi Parry, Peter Read, Dr Susan Gair and others have produced considerable and more than adequate research.
The NSW Index for example is here You can go and look it up if you are a serious and qualified researcher. Other states have similar collections.
I will leave Katz to argue with you on frontier deaths. He is more than adequate for the task.
Don’t have time to deal with all your misrepresentations now, Sorcerer, but for a start: you say: “In fact no-one has said that cost was the only factor in institutionalisation, except for you.�
In a previous post on this page YOU said when I raised the issue: “No. In the institution model it’s cheaper to warehouse the kids in one spot.â€? Those are your exact words, Sorcerer. Certainly sounds like you were dismissing all other considerations as possibilities, doesn’t it? Either you were very sloppy in your choice of words or you’ve changed your mind and now you admit that there could have been other factors considered. You keep dodging and weaving but you’re not coming up with anything credible, Sorcerer.
On the issue of the newspaper reports about the dumbing down of the curriculum in schools on Aboriginal remote settlements: no I don’t have to do better, I don’t work for you. As I said before, if you Google on the right keywords, you’ll find thousands of references, 27,000 on my last try. I don’t have the time to sort through them all for you and find the particular articles that I read. If you really don’t remember the issue being raised recently I’m sure there are other people out there who do and can tell you all about it if you ask them nicely. As a test, this morning I asked two people I work with about it and BOTH of them remember it. Perhaps it’s just you, not paying attention again.
Yates, you may have a good line in pomposity, but the above response to sorcerer’s reasoned and linked post clearly indicates that you have neither the wit, nor the intelligence to deal with the complexities of an issue in which you claim some expertise.
Who do you work for?
Broome proves that Windschuttle has refused to count instances of homicides by whites upon Aborigines on the basis that the evidence of those homicides is inadequate. Broome has proven that Windschuttle’s methodology for disqualifying this evidence is not historically sound.
Windschuttle is about to enter historical territory that Broome knows much about (Victoria). Already, Windschuttle is signalling that he denies the factuality of one of the early notorious episodes of white homicide at the Convincing Ground near Portland in 1839. Is there better evidence for this massacre than the journal reference in George Augustus Robinson’s journal? No. Would this evidence stand up in a court of law to convict the alleged perpetrators? No. Are historians bound by the same strict laws of evidence that pertain in criminal cases? No.
On the balance of probabilities the Convincing Ground massacre occurred, as supported by the best evidence available, as corroborated by the observed fact that the local band of Aborigines were reduced in number from about 150 to 2 in two years.
This is a particularly clumsy attempt at semantic legerdemain.
Windschuttle’s position isn’t that he doesn’t know the precise number. His position is that quoted numbers are too high. He has never entertained the possibility that these numbers may be too low.
Moreover, Broome and the others have never asserted a precise number. They have all quoted a range, sometimes a wide range, the middle of which is a number that has their highest but by no means absolute level of confidence.
We all do something of the sort at the football. How big is the crowd? About 50,000, but we wouldn’t be particularly surprised if it were 40,000 or 60,000. We would, however, be gobsmacked were it to be 500 or 500,000.
And as I suggested earlier any estimate done in good faith isn’t an end in itself. Rather it is a check on the relation of frontier violence to other observable facts.
For example, martial law was declared around Bathurst in the late 1820s. Such a measure is not taken lightly. But on the other hand, this measure was quite unusual. In most of Australia for most of the time Aborigines did not present a problem of huge military urgency. Whatever violence there was could be dealt with at the local level by private persons who were, initially at least, outnumbered by neighbouring Aborigines.
Only a minute for a quick comment. Once again Katz, you are proving that you haven’t actually read Windschuttle’s work on the issue of frontier violence. Here’s a direct quote for you, Windschuttle: “How many Aborigines, then, died in frontier violence? Until we have much better evidence, it is impossible to say and historians should eschew the temptation. To guess at or make up the figures is irresponsible. To do so it to fail the historian’s duty to his profession, to his readers and to the people whose lives he is portraying.” Yes, he does go on the say that if a final accurate assessment of Aborigines killed in actual violent conflict with whites is made, he expects it will be lower than 20,000 for a number of reasons, largely because the black armband historians have overestimated the level of frontier violence, in particular by promoting the idea that Aborigines everywhere engaged in warfare against the white settlers and by applying numbers and estimates taken from areas where there was significant violence to areas where there wasn’t. He’s not claiming to know the number, just to know that the black armband historians have been consistently exaggerating the level of frontier conflict. So if the black armband historians argue that the number is 20,000, logically it IS likely to be lower if there wasn’t as much frontier conflict as they claim.
” He’s not claiming to know the number, just to know that the black armband historians have been consistently exaggerating the level of frontier conflict.”
So, Windschuttle claims he doesn’t know what the number of deaths are. He just knows that the “Black armaband historians” (and doesn’t that silly little phrase place you precisely) have got it wrong.
Is this not complete and utter nonsense? He doesn’t know, therefore other estimates must be wrong. Who do you work for, again?
Yates
I share your pain. Despite the venom these people spit at Windschuttle, and despite Fabrication being published FIVE years ago they still have not read it, and are still getting their bitch-fodder by non-historian op-ed bloviators.
The reason of course is that from what they have picked up in the op-eds they fear W is bang on correct. The only way this issue is going to get a fair airing is for Windschuttle’s book to be compulsory for all High School Australian History classes.
Shorter Windschuttle: “No one knows who many Aborigines died, but it was less than the black armbanders said.”
It’s not difficult to perceive the gross inconsistency and internal contradiction in this.
Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Any methodology that drives that poor excuse for a conclusion deserves the repudiation that Broome metes out.
And on a more general point, exactly what is the class of question to which historians should not hazard an answer? Are there any other examples? (I suspect that this class of questions consists of questions that Windschuttle does not like people to ask.)
Well well well, how much did you pay your clone to jump on board, Yatesy?
Now do you get it? Catallaxative and Tim Bore’s blogs are thataway…
The point, TA or whatever your real name is (though from your unquestioning acceptance of Windy’s assumption that all historians are male, I’m guessing you are too), or rather one of the many points, is that you don’t know where there was or wasn’t significant violence (what do you call ‘insignificant violence’, anyway? Picking them off in twos and threes?), and neither does Windy, because both of you refuse to accept the fact that ‘evidence’ is not always already there.
I was always taught that in the rural area I grew up in, the estimated (nobody ever said by whom) 800 Narungga people mostly ‘ran away’ (nobody ever said where to). It wasn’t until a few years ago that stories began to surface about Aborginal people being murdered and their bodies dumped near cliffs and rocks where they would eaten by crabs and crayfish in short order. And it wasn’t until last Friday that I discovered there’d been clear and undeniable evidence of an Aboriginal massacre discovered 60 or 70 k’s southwest of where I grew up. The bones were buried in shifting sandhills along a bush track. Nobody had ever projected any numbers for that massacre.
Err…excuse me
Who is a “non-historian bloviator” again?
No need to insult your mate Yates like that Jage
Sam Tyler
Excuse me, but being left-wing does not mean (or at least it shouldn’t) that one rejects data, evidence, and logic!
Being intelligent means that you understand the distinction between historical standards of evidence for events which occurred in the 19th century, and legal standards of proof of murder, John Greenfield. (What’s with the new moniker?) It also means that you don’t approach the evidence with a predisposition to believe that no killings took place.
Kim
Don’t you think you should get back in your box until you have, you know, actually read the book being debated?
That was Sam’s point. That’s why there’s no point mentioning Windschuttle in the same sentence as data, evidence and logic unless you want an oxymoron.
The second syllable of that word of course is always applicable to you.
Thought you’d be around Greenspittle. School finished for the day? Did the bullies bash you again at big lunch?
How do you know I haven’t Greenfield?
Why don’t you piss off back to Catallaxy? What’s the problem? Not getting enough attention round there among all the “bloviators”?
Greensleeves, where do you get all this
blatherfantasy about nobody ever having read Windy but you? How could you possibly know? If you are inferring as much from people’s comments, has it occurred to you that perhaps they have merely been reading Windy moreintelligentlycritically than you?Oh good grief Miss Hathaway, you DO live in a filing cabinet, don’t you? By this stage it is obvious when a hiveminder has visited Wikipedia immediately before posting on LP, or when they have parroted from one of the HV’s stable of op-ed Culture Warriors. When they are on their own terra firma they swarm out buzzing with page numbers, block quotes and demands for same from their interlocutors. But in YOUR particular case the type of analytical thinking required with evidence, data, and sociological/historical processes and relations is totally alien to the way your brain has been trained. You are the type who uses “feminist readings” to deduce evil actions by ‘racist white males’ and so on and so forth. Katz, is a lazy serial C&Per, while Kim just chants her Madame Mao chant.
And I suppose we all know who YOU really are now, don’t we? Are you employed by the University of Newcastle, per chance? Will your next book feature footnotes to ’stories that began to spring up in my local area?’ Perhaps you might even embellish some of the ’stories you were taught growing up?’ After all, “historians are always making things up” aren’t they?
You really don’t have a clue, do you, Greenfield?
Ever heard of projection? You’re the cut and paster, dude.
We know you’re not employed and that you have to have people skills to get a job. Lonely night time wanks don’t cut it.
On your bike son. Go back to your minders.
TA Yates – my word is supported by teh 100,000 words I wrote in my thesis. The link is all the way up there if you want to take a look. One of the advantages of doing a thesis is that you get the room to make your case – in an op ed you don’t. But, you now, I’ve done the work, and I’ve thought very carefully.
Just to address the most egregiously dim bit of that icky little spit, Greensleeves, the whole point of the childhood-story story was precisely that it was untrue.
Kim, could we hear some of the “Madame Mao” chant please?
The heroic proletariat demands a vigorous denunciation of the denunciations of the Gang of Four in order to proceed with heroic confidence for the glorious future.
Ok, well just a limerick then?
They used to swarm under our bed
But communism is stone dead
Madame Mao
Has lost her wow
It’s now the West that’s in the red
“And I suppose we all know who YOU really are now, don’t we?”
Well YOU could be:
“leftist Queers”
“John Greenfield”
“Harried Hermonie”
“Jage”
I think there’s nothing wrong with using a net de plume, provided you’re consistent about it. Or occasionally breaking out a new one for humorous purposes.
But to keep chopping and changing blog names without a joke in sight while obsessively dwelling on the same few points over and over again is to me the mark of someone with the emotional IQ of a hyena and the social intelligence of a serial flasher.
No wonder you keep hysterically referencing your active social life. No one else will they? Unless they’re Leftist Queers, John Greenfield, Hermonie, Jage or the rest of your imaginary playmates.
Get a life why don’t you? Preferably an real one for starters.
“You are the type who uses “feminist readingsâ€? to deduce evil actions by ‘racist white males’ and so on and so forth.”
This is quite funny, because those of us who know a little of Dr Cat’s work know that she is about as far from this kind of reductive thinking as you could get.
Why, thank you, Klaus K.
Your cheque is in the mail. It’s quite big.
Thanks, Dr Cat, but the experience of responding to these ludicrously over-reaching assumptions was its own reward.
So are the History Wars still over?
Yep. Here at any rate. Baygon works wonders.
Well, I’m tempted to argue that as long as Windschuttle and pals think they’re still on, they aren’t over, as much as the other side (justifiably, imo) might want to move on already. Though they’re likely to lose a huge chunk of relevance and patronage for the next ten-fifteen years I wonder what’s to stop them dusting themselves off, changing some of the targets and starting it all again in 2021 or whatever.
“While the elitist Gen-X academics and their Ruddist-Gillardist Gen-Y disciples like Prof. Worthington-Delaney weave their spell over our impressionable youth like never before the bilge that spreads from their datacasts is contradicted by primary sources…“
*claps*
Hi Naomi, nice to hear from you. Don’t feel that I am targeting you, in particular, regarding your “wordâ€?. Prior to the ‘History Wars’ I wouldn’t have been inclined to doubt, when a historian quoted from a document or some other source, that it was anything other than an accurate quote which fairly represented the information contained in the full text (though I might not have agreed with their interpretation of what it meant), if for no other reason than I’d have expected that if a historian did misrepresent quotes or use false footnotes, his or her colleagues/rivals would soon point out the ‘error’ and the historian, hugely embarrassed at being caught out making such a ‘mistake’, would then have to scurry to make a timely correction in an article or in the next edition.
Fairly obviously, this hasn’t been happening.
We all took it for granted that if we were to follow a historian’s evidence back through the footnotes to the original document, that (a) it would actually exist and (b) that any quote would be an accurate representation of what it said. Since the History Wars, there are a lot of people, including myself, who will no longer be taking for granted anything that a historian claims about his or her ‘evidence’.
A historian’s ‘word’ just isn’t going to be good enough.
I think you’ll find that a lot more people are going to expect to see the full text of a document so that they can read it ALL for themselves and make up their own minds as to whether it means what the historian claims it does. Fortunately, technology has made it possible. Where once I’d have to get on a plane, fly to Hobart or wherever and get permission to access the archives and then spend days trawling through them to be able to check a source document, digital photography and the Internet mean that a historian can take a high resolution digital photograph of a original document that they are citing and post it on a website or email it around the world. All historians may find people starting to ask questions like: “Why won’t you post copies of your source documentation where anyone can check them when it is so easily done? What are you trying to hide?�
As for your 100,000 word thesis, I’m sure it would make interesting reading but then I remember that Lyndall Ryan’s thesis got turned into her book The Aboriginal Tasmanians and as I recall, KW spent something like 60 pages in Fabrication listing references in it to documents that never existed such as editions of newspapers supposedly printed before the newspaper actually started operation, to at least one document that disappeared long before she could possible have examined it and misleading and misrepresented quotes from a host of others. So perhaps her Professors should have put a little more time checking into her footnotes before they passed that thesis. To quote Ryan when a journalist caught her out misrepresenting another source document: ‘historians are always making up figures’. Well, if they are, we are going to need to check their work more closely.
Though if they’re as lazy as Yatesy here maybe the whole thing has pretty much run it’s course.
putting out a 500 ramble about how you aren’t going to read a historian’s thesis and capping it off with “we are going need to check [historians] work more closely” … priceless.
He wouldn’t know a paragraph if it bit him on the arse…no, wait, maybe that’s the idea.
Ok youse have had your fun. Please address the substance of the discussion and refrain from unnecessary sledging.
Yatesy, your idea of putting a web archive up of sources is interesting, but not really practical. But I can assure you, modern indexing techniques, data storage and record management and wonderful library programs like Endnote make it possible to be very, very accurate, unlike the old pencil, paper and index card system Dr Ryan relied on (and her alleged mistakes were minor).
My footnotes are very fine indeed. But this is beside the point, for the key role of the historian is to digest primary sources and turn them into narrative – a narrative scaffolded on footnotes and technical writing techniques that reveal sources. You will never be able to get around the fact that the historian is telling you a story. The story I tell you is different to Windschuttle’s. You can make your own mind up as to the truth.
But any way, Windschuttle’s op ed wasn’t footnoted and you take his claims at face value. You are jumping to conclusions if you think I am anything other than a most particular individual, or willing to be part of any received line of thought.
Kim
Being intelligent means that you understand the distinction between historical standards of evidence for events which occurred in the 19th century, and legal standards of proof of murder
Straw. But extremely ironic straw. For you see the entire black armbandit edifice rests on only two pillars, both of which are post-WW2 legal concepts, and very rubbery legal concepts at that: genocide and terra nulluis. Indeed this whole thread is devoted to judging 18th and 19th century white males by – grossly misunderstood – post WW2 legal standards.
If/when you read W’s book (and/or Ryan’s and Reynolds, Attwood, Moses, Curthoys, Docker, blah), you will see that the issues are about the way professional historians use evidence. W is not confined by the very strict protocols regarding what evidence is and is not admissible in a murder trial. Professional history is always about corroborating and contextualising each piece of evidence.
The tendency for many above to C&P a passage from a document from the 18th, 19th, or early 20th centuries as if it speaks for itself and in a 21st century context is what we call “bad History; very bad.”
It also means that you don’t approach the evidence with a predisposition to believe that no killings took place.
Actually this has nothing to do with intelligence. But what a good historian will do is start a research process with SCETICISM as the guiding principle. Your point should be directed to your fellow black armbandits who begin their work already “knowing” that “genocide” took place. Thus, their histories are compromised by their confirmation bias.
I hope this helps.
No, not really.
Asceticism? Septicism?
He must have got Julia’s laptop already, Kim. Or school’s out early today.
Oops. Sorry Miss Hathaway’s Girl Friday!
That should be SCEPTICISM.
To paraphrase The Verve
And I hope you’re thinking of meeeee
As you lay down on your side
Now the drugs don’t work
They just make me worse
But I know I’ll see your face again
Stalking + obsession…must be the drugs
Hello again, Naomi, just a quick note on the run. 1. As for the idea of capturing documents on digital photographs so that the evidence is available for any ’sceptic’ to view, it’s not only practical but currently in use in many endeavours. It’s very simply done. In my work, if I’m reviewing a document from which I am going to take evidence or draw conclusions, I just take a very small 8 megapixel camera out of my briefcase, lay the document out in good light (I usually don’t have to use a flash if the available light is good enough) and take photos of each page. The resolution is good enough that you can zoom in and easily distinguish between, say, “mare killed” and “more killed”. (Those of you who’ve actually read ‘Fabrication’ will get the reference.) If anyone wants to challenge what I’ve claimed the original document said, the photos can be uploaded onto a computer, put on a website if appropriate, printed out or we can email the photos directly to them anywhere in the world. Quick, easy, cheap and very practical. Give it a try. It has the added virtue that I can double-check my own work just by looking at the photos, I don’t have to physically go back to the original document wherever that may be stored.
2. The reason I am inclined to accept Windschuttle ‘at face value’ is that I didn’t accept him at face value. When this all blew up a few years ago, I and a group of friends (all history tragics, of course) checked what Windschuttle claimed against copies of various original documents that we either already had or were able to obtain (like the journals of George Augustus Robinson). In every instance that we could get our hands on the appropriate document, his claims stood up, his oppositions’ didn’t.
3. I know that Lyndall Ryan claimed that the errors Windschuttle found were minor. They weren’t. They completely undermine the theme of her book, i.e. that Tasmanian Aborigines were subject to deliberate genocide.
Naomi
My experience was the same as T.A. Yates. I had just returned from living o/s when KW’s articles appeared in Quadrant. Prior to that I was a black armbandit type as that was what had been shovelled to me at school. Reading KW and then checking Reynolds and Ryan I was gobsmacked. When I caught up on Keating’s Culture War in the years I had been o/s, I said “WTF has been going on in this country?” It was KW’s exposes that motivated me to get a degree in History, where the whole Culture/War catastrophe revealed itself..
Fallacy of the excluded middle watch!
Proving Lyndall Ryan incorrect or even dishonest ≠proving Windschuttle’s counterthesis correct.
No one in this thread has come close to asserting that there was a program of deliberate genocide in VDL/Tasmania.
In other words, Windschuttle can be absolutely correct about nailing Ryan, while at the same time attempting to defend an absurd methodology.
But the choices in this debate do not devolve down to choosing ether Ryan or Windschuttle.
The can both be egregiously incorrect.
As indeed they both are.
#86 –
Very true and it’s a problem that an historian who knows this would then proceed to break the rule. That ‘they did it so I have to’ is not an excuse. Your comment is an excellent outline both of the procedure and folly of the History Wars.
#90 -
Yes now if everyone had the same perspective wouldn’t that make for an interesting
agitprop debriefingdiscussion.Katz
Quite wrong. W’s work has only one level of ultimate significance: He showed that the hegemonic orthodox thesis of Reynolds, Ryan, etc. was based on non-existent evidence; indeed “fabricated.” End of story.
Spot the sophomoric tautology.
Nevertheless, a slight improvement in Greenglass’s rhetoric.
One day he may achieve both conviction and logicality.
I hope I live that long.
There’s a difference between the few genuine conservative posters (like Andrew Reynolds) with whom one can have genuine debate and the hydra-headed sub-pontine entities like Greengob constantly derailing threads with their drivel.
‘Sub-pontine’, I love it.
Trip-trap, trip-trap, trip-trap.
Hell hath no fury like a hivemind exposed.
What a marvellous turn of phrase Saucy. I dips me lid.
Greenfield – anyone who has spent any time in archives knows only too well the exquisite pain of the failures of reproduction evident in microfiche, microfilm, digital scanning and photography. I don’t know how many times I have been stumped by an illegible letter, word or page.
Who’s to say your 8 megapixel camera image has not been photoshopped?
Myself, I make judgements based on a range of sources. And I can also show you where Windschuttle’s Fabrication falls down.
Hi again, Naomi. Firstly, I’m pretty sure that you meant Yates not Greenfield but anyway:
I’ve experienced the problems you mention with various media including microfiche, microfilm etc but digital photography presents some advantages over them. Firstly, you can review your photograph immediately in the screen on the camera so if there is a problem with the quality of the picture, you can take another one immediately rather than have to wait till prints come back for review, find that there is a problem and then return to the storage location. Secondly, there is no cost of development or printing involved so you can take as many repeat photographs of a document as you need to be confident that you’ve captured it. I’ve taken thousands of photographs of various documents using hand-held digital cameras over the past 5 years or so. I’ve always wound up with at least one clear usable photo of each page of each document and as the pixel capacity of the cameras I’ve been using increased from 2 megapixels to 8 (at present), the quality and detail captured has improved.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t take conventional notes when I review documents, I do. But one of the other advantages of also coming away with a digital photograph of a document is that sometimes you later find that your notes are not as complete as you need them to be; you may later realise that there was something else in the document that you would have made a note of, if you’d known then you’d need it. Having digital photos means that you don’t have to return to the location to re-examine the document, you now have your own full copy to examine at your leisure, check that your notes are accurate and extract any additional data that you can. With conventional notes, you also have the situation where your notes can go astray, as mine did once when my bag was stolen from an airport luggage carousel. Having taken digital photos of the relevant documents, I had already uploaded them from the camera to my laptop, and emailed them ‘home’. So by then all the information needed to recreate and substantiate what was in the notebook in the stolen bag existed in 3 places, the camera memory, the laptop’s hard-drive, and on the server holding my email. Pretty hard to ‘lose’ all 3 at once. The upshot was that I didn’t have to get back on a plane and go ‘redo’ my notes at the premises.
Saves a lot of time and expense, especially if the original document is a long way from where you currently are.
As for ‘photoshopping’, only a complete fool would photoshop a photograph of a document that he or she knows others have access to, especially if he or she knows that others may challenge their findings. It would only take one person to produce a copy of the real document to expose the idiot who’d try such a thing as a fraud, forever unreliable. Someone committing that kind of fraud certainly wouldn’t be able to get away with the old excuses relating to conventional notes such as saying that they took their notes from one document but must have ‘mistakenly’ cited another as the source or that the notes got water damaged and they interpreted the damaged notes as best they could. A photoshopped photograph of a document would be undeniable evidence of the intent to deceive.
My personal experience with photoshopping is fairly limited, but I’m pretty confident of this. It really only works when you relying on a printed copy of a photograph. In, say, a 6 x 4 or 8 x 10 printed photograph, alterations may be undetectable to the naked eye if done skilfully. If, however, you have the actual digital photograph, say sent by email, you could zoom in and detect the alterations. It is apparently not possible to produce perfect digital forgeries this way, as it’s not possible to perfectly match colours and shades and blend your alterations in. If it was, we’d be hip deep in apparently genuine (or impossible to prove to be faked) photographs of all sorts of things: Fidel Castro in a dress, George W. stuffing ballot boxes, Hillary Clinton smiling, aliens, etc, etc.
I found your article interesting. I’m pretty sure I’ve read it or perhaps an earlier draft before. My chief problem with it is that, on the principal issue, I disagree with both you and Windschuttle. You regard the actions of Aborigines and in particular, men like Musquito in taking part in raids and attacks on British settlers as ‘patriotism’ and acts of resistance. Windschuttle regards it as mere criminality. I think you are both misinterpreting the actions and behaviour of effectively Stone Age tribal people by viewing through it through different aspects of our own cultural perspective.
I think we need to understand the cultural attitudes of people living in tribal societies. They rarely viewed taking something of value from a person outside their own tribe as a criminal act (though it may have been considered inadvisable if it invited reprisals against the tribe). Anyone not a member of the tribe is generally regarded as either an enemy or potential enemy. A similar attitude towards killing someone outside the tribe has long been a feature of many tribal societies. Not all, but many. It simply wasn’t regarded as a criminal act. The concept that it is as much a crime to take something of value from or to kill a stranger, as it would be to do the same to a member of your own tribe is largely a Western construct. I think it is a mistake for Windschuttle not to look beyond mere criminality as an explanation for aboriginal raids but I don’t think that they amounted to acts of patriotism or resistance either. The intent wasn’t to drive settlers out of an area that the Aborigines required exclusive possession of. Rather the white settlers became a resource to be exploited. I suppose the point is that Windschuttle doesn’t have to be correct about the motivation, to be correct on his overall theme; i.e. that Tasmanian Aborigines were not subjected to a deliberate attempt at genocide.
Prior to the arrival of white settlers we know that the various tribal groups in Australia interacted in various ways. They traded between tribes whenever it suited. They raided other tribes whenever it suited. They expected that other tribes would raid them when they got the chance but it didn’t amount to what we’d consider warfare, with one tribe having a defined objective of conquering the other, just raiding for what could be had and perhaps for the excitement involved.
The great tragedy of many indigenous peoples is that when white settlers arrived, the indigenous peoples started to interact with the settlers as they had interacted with other tribes. They traded with them sometimes; they raided them sometimes. Three things were different however. One, white settlers had things which were extremely desirable and otherwise unobtainable for the indigenous people (‘exotic’ foods, alcohol, metal tools, tobacco, blankets, cloth, etc). That made white settlers more attractive targets for such raids. Two, of course, white settlers had superior weapons. Thirdly, the Western attitude to such raids was very different. The Comanches of the South-Western United States are a good example. Prior to European settlement, it is known that they used to raid other tribes, kidnap women and children and then sell them back to their families (payment would be in the form of whatever the other tribe had of value; hides, clothing, weapons, tools, food, etc). Kidnap for ransom was a lucrative business for them, not warfare. When the Spanish moved into the area, they learned how the game was played and when the Comanches would raid, they’d go and buy back the captives, though by then the price usually included horses. When the Americans moved into the area, however, they took a very different attitude to such raids, i.e. Comanches were ‘fiends’, bring in the Texas Rangers and/or the Army to defeat them, kill them and confine them to reservations.
My point being that such raiding and attacks on settlers lack the nature of either crime or patriotic resistance. It was simply them doing what they had always done, this time against the new white ‘tribe’ because they had such great stuff to take.
Musquito attacked and raided white settlers in New South Wales, then he apparently worked, quite happily, for white settlers, then he attacked and raided white settlers in Tasmania? Patriot? Criminal? Opportunist? Violent bloke who just liked spearing people when he was in the mood?
That’s really quite nuanced, T A Yates.
You view of Aboriginal perceptions being the case, it is somewhat mystifying that you’d have any truck with the crass oversimplifications of Windschuttle.
Moreover, your discussion of Aborigines regarding interlopers as a resource sets the scene for the violent confrontations which would likely end in deaths, both in open fights and in massacres.
So my question is: how can you keep your views about Aborigines, the way they order their understanding of their world and their behaviour which you concede arises from their understanding of their world, with Windschuttle’s view that in all likelihood there was very little frontier violence resulting in aboriginal death in Tasmania (and by extension, presumably elsewhere)?
And one further point: protection of resources is not contradictory to patriotism. Rather, it can be seen as the core of patriotism. European romantic nationalists, for example, asserted the belief of an elemental connection between blood and place that could not be shared with anyone of another blood, and which should be defended to the death.
And is this organic rather than (modern Western) proprietary connection not the core of indigenous beliefs about land and country, and of their relationship to their land?
No, not exactly sorcerer, although there are some similarities. As I understand it – and I’m prepared to be corrected, because my knowledge is minimal – ‘blood and soil’ in its modern European sense is not the same as indigenous connection to land, which is a custodial relation that can be legitimately passed to anybody capable of undertaking the correct procedures and looking after the land according to tradition. One example I’m aware of is, in places where there is nobody left to inherit, elders will pass custodianship to a third party who has lived there and is willing to take on that responsibility, and who has a family or group willing to carry on those observances. Also, restrictions on who you can marry are a part of indigenous traditions, but these don’t have any strict correlation with the modern concept of ‘race’.
Blood and soil is a wonderful, powerful image that sums up nationalism. Sometimes I think that the stories of European blood spilt on this land serve exactly that purpose – to show that the land was earned, not just appropriated (always an acute area of sensitivity in Tasmanian history writing). Of course, the only blood that counts was white blood – the Aborigines weren’t seen to be defending their soil with their own blood, because their sovereignty was dismissed. And this is the crux of the problem I have with Windschuttle.
Yates (and yes, you were who I meant, sorry), I see Musquito as someone who tried on a number of different methods of dealing with the invader. And I have developed my arguments in a recent article published by ANU e-press. See here. It’s that nuance that is missing in Windschuttle’s work. He thinks Aborigines could only be seen one way – the worst possible – and that their passing was inevitable and complete. He also presents them as static over time – he admits no possibility that an Aboriginal person might change over time. This is written, as the latter chapters of his work shows, to undermine the political claims of contemporary Tasmanian Aborigines.
His overall point, that there was no systematic genocide, is undermined by the fact that he is utterly credulous about the motives of white people. He actually states that, as Christians, they could not have done it on purpose. He also believes wholeheartedly in the word of Governor Arthur, claiming that because Arthur told the Colonial Office it was all an accident, and the fault of sealers and bushrangers, that must be true. On the ground, I think that genocide was the intent. At a policy level, no. But the administration of Tasmania was not controlled very closely by those who set the policy, for they were far away in London. They were stroppy about being obliged to sanction the removal of the Aborigines, but did it – pragmatic Pontius Pilates that they were.
I guess that comes down to an argument about the point at which ‘the system’ begins and ends. My belief, and this I have developed through analysing the administration of child welfare, is that you cannot consider policy without also evaluating practice. And those who set policy but fail to ensure it affects practice are culpable. The practices in Tasmania resulted in the extirpation of an entire people – that some survived was a miracle. The practices of the Aborigines Welfare Board resulted in a generation of people separated from their families. The fact some stayed home, or returned home, was despite the Board’s most ardent intentions.
Hi Katz, Naomi, et al: Just another brief note. There are times when hitting people over the head with a club is what it takes to get a change of attitude. Windschuttle has been a pretty effective club and I always enjoy a good bash. Of course, sometimes he paints with a broad brush, sometimes he simplifies things to get people’s attention and, in my humble opinion, he has made a few mistakes (his opinion of the fire-making abilities of Tasmanian aborigines being another of them, but there he was lead astray by his source of information). But his principal virtue in my eyes, is that he’s been blunt enough to call other historians use of carefully selected misquotes and false footnotes to support their view of history FABRICATION, and to do so loudly and publicly and not quietly murmur it over drinks after work. He’s not the first historian to say that the black armband historians (and yes, I do like that phrase) were exaggerating and distorting things for political motives but fortunately, unlike many of the others, he’s been belligerent enough to take them on head on, publicly, and not let the issue drop when people started attacking him and calling him names like ‘racist’. He’s a stirrer, like some others who’ve done good things. He’s definitely not flawless.
There are a lot of historians who, from now on, whenever they consider using false footnotes and carefully selected misquotes to support their (ideologically motivated) claims, will be looking over their shoulders for the ‘ghost’ of Windschuttle, come to haunt them. For this meritorious act alone, he should get a medal for services to ‘Australian History�. (Probably shouldn’t have used the word ‘ghost’, it may have got some people unduly excited at the thought that he might have died. He hasn’t, tough luck, deal with it.)
He also has had the benefit of owning his own publishing company so he can get his own work published whenever he wants. Not a small thing, in itself, when you consider how difficult it can be to get publishers to publish alternate points of view, especially if it contradicts what their established stable of authors say.
The way he’s phrased things has offended some people. He refuses to conform to the ‘convention’ that all indigenous people must be characterised as ‘noble savages’: wise, caring, deeply spiritual, peaceful except when justifiably provoked, and of course, environmentally responsible. Amongst other things, Windschuttle offends against that ‘convention’ by citing contemporary accounts of extreme brutality by Tasmanian aboriginal men towards their women. For British and European men born and raised in the 18th and early 19th century to even remark on the mistreatment of aboriginal women by aboriginal men is an indicator of how severe it was.
He has been accused of being ‘cold’ and ‘callous’; some comparing the dispassion of his writings with the compassion contained in the work of two 19th century writers. Most rational people are, however, able to understand that a historian writing about people who have been dead for 150 years or more is going to be more dispassionate, indeed, is required by the discipline of history to be more dispassionate, than contemporaries writing about people whose plight that they had actually witnessed. Ostentatious compassion, just like ostentatious consumption, is a way of asserting a claim of superiority. ‘I am a much better person than Windschuttle because I weep bucket-loads over the deaths, over 150 years ago, of people I have absolutely no significant connection with. Windschuttle writes about them without soaking the pages in saltwater, the monster!’ Spare me, please! I can feel sympathy for, and empathy with people who died thousands of years ago especially if something about their lives or their deaths strikes a chord within me. I may even get a little moist around the eyes but, really, how far should a historian go?
With regard to conflict between white settlers and Aborigines over territory or ‘land’:
1.
One of Windschuttle’s arguments was that they did not have any concept comparable to ‘ownership’ of land, as Western society understands it. They were nomadic people. There were no land boundaries and no exclusive use of land in aboriginal ‘law’. They migrated across the countryside as they pleased, depending on the time of year, and had no objections if other Aboriginal tribes made use of the territory that they had departed (though there would, inevitably, have been fights over competition for wild game). They did not object to the arrival of white settlers, instead seeing them as sources of desirable goods. Their interest was in what might be called the ‘fruits of the land’ such as the game that they hunted. This they did object to the settlers taking. This put them in conflict yet again with Western attitudes because in Western thought ‘wild game’ has no owners and is there for anyone to hunt.
The black armband brigade saw Windschuttle’s definition of aboriginal attitudes to land as a threat to one of their most ‘sacred’ causes, Aboriginal land rights. If Windschuttle’s argument stands, how do you ‘return’ a particular piece of land with defined boundaries and exclusive use to a particular tribe when they never ‘owned’ it in that manner in the past? This was seen as very dangerous to the whole land rights agenda, so Windschuttle’s ‘attacks on land rights’ must be portrayed as a racist attempt to overturn the Mabo decision and destroy Aboriginal rights. Windschuttle must be crushed! Of course, Windschuttle hadn’t attacked land rights; he had simply tried to accurately define the Aboriginal attitude to land in the context of claims that there was a war over that land between Aborigines and settlers. If this definition has any effect on a legal concept of land rights (and it’s unlikely that it will, it’s all in motion now), that is merely incidental. It is not the job of a historian to provide support for any particular cause or legal argument; this being exactly the opposite of the view taken by black armband historians. They wrote false Aboriginal history to do just that.
2.
Though Windschuttle hasn’t publicly made as much of it yet as perhaps he should, we also need to look into the effects of introduced disease on the level of frontier conflict. He does so fairly effectively in Fabrication, Vol 1 for Tasmania. Introduced diseases, many of which were mere inconveniences to a resistant population, could be lethal to people isolated from the rest of the world as long as the Tasmanian Aborigines had been. Though apparently smallpox and typhoid never made it to Tasmania, it was inadvertently introduced (principally respiratory but also venereal) diseases for which they had little or no resistance that were the main culprits in the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines. Of course, some people say what difference is there between deliberate genocide by violence and the extinction of a race by introduced diseases? The answer is, of course, a great deal of difference; the differences between ‘deliberate’, ‘inadvertent’ and ‘accidental’, especially when you consider that at the time the Western world had very little idea about the true nature of disease and its transmission or of immunity and resistance. The notion of disease being caused by ‘noxious vapours’ was still prevalent at the time. Bloodletting was still a popular remedy for all ills. They had no idea that a race isolated from the rest of humanity for perhaps 10,000 years would die in large numbers due to diseases that were much less harmful to the British settlers.
If most of the indigenous population had been, or was being, wiped out by disease (or rendered infertile by venereal disease or effectively infertile [if you’ve ever seen pictures of persons with advanced cases of venereal disease, you’ll know what I mean by ‘effectively’], note the extremely low birth rate on Flinders Island), their societies disrupted, how much resistance could they offer, especially against ‘invaders’ who obviously were pretty powerful, with ships and cannon, guns and bayonets?
When we get to the mainland, we will have to look at the effect of smallpox on the level of frontier conflict. There is no doubt that 3 major smallpox epidemics hit the Aborigines. The first in the 1780s, killing up to half of the Aboriginal population, and pretty much coincided with First Settlement. It was followed by a second in 1824 – 1831, which may have again killed up to half of the Aboriginal population. The third epidemic ripped through much of the tropics and remote outback in the 1860s, again wiping out a significant percentage of the Aboriginal population. All of which goes to my point, how much resistance could or did Aborigines offer when large areas had been depopulated by the epidemics?
And before anyone starts blaming the British settlers for the smallpox, they should read Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780 – 1880, by Judy Campbell, Melbourne University Press. This pretty much conclusively shows that smallpox epidemics amongst the Aborigines spread south after Aborigines in the far north of Australia contracted it from ‘visitors’ from Macassar, on the island of Sulawesi, now part of Indonesia. Fishermen from this area started visiting Australia in the 1720’s, looking for trepang, mostly. Who knows how many epidemics they kicked off before the 1780’s, in the absence of literate settlers in Australia to record them?
3.
Take a look at any invasion at any time in history, particularly where there is a massive imbalance of power (numbers, technology, etc) between the invaded and the invaders. The invasion of Celtic Britain by the Romans, later by the Anglo-Saxons and later still by the Normans, the invasion of India by the British East India Company, the invasion of France by Nazi Germany, the invasion of Nazi Germany by the Allies.
Most people, including the Aborigines, did not fight to the last man, valiantly resisting the invasion. They may not like that their territory has been taken over by others but they recognise that getting themselves slaughtered fighting an enemy with a massive advantage is just pointless. The majority of people do make an accommodation; they do wind up working for, trading with and even being assimilated into the invaders’ society or assimilated the invader into theirs (i.e. China). Unless there is some real hope of success, armed resistance is conducted by a very limited percentage of the population; often it is driven by the old ruling elite who have the most to lose. Occupied France is a pretty good example. While the Germans were in power, the majority of the population either just kept their heads down or actively collaborated. The Resistance was a very small minority of people and they only had as many as they did because there was some hope that Britain (and eventually the US) would bail them out. When the Allies landed and the Germans were forced to start to withdraw, people then jumped onto the winning side and joined the Resistance (once it was obvious that the Germans were on the way out). After the war however, the size of the Resistance really boomed. Everyone claimed to have been in it.
In Australia, for many Aborigines, for a long time life went on as it had before the whites arrived. For others, relatively small changes in the Aboriginal lifestyle ‘accommodated’ them to life alongside whites. Pastoralists, in particular, have gotten a rum deal from the black armband brigade. Portrayed as bloodthirsty racists eager to kill as many Aborigines as they could, in fact, many offered what was the most desirable option for Aborigines at the time. Aboriginal groups or ‘bands’ were able to continue their traditional nomadic lifestyle, moving from place to place, living in the open, camping by billabongs but substituting work as stockmen for hunting kangaroos and other game to provide for themselves and their ‘mob’.
Plus they could still go hunting if they wanted, as cattle and sheep farming did not wipe out the wild game as some ignorant city-dwellers have suggested. A persistent ‘complaint’ of pastoralists has been that there are often more kangaroos eating ‘their’ grass and drinking the water in their dams than cattle or sheep. Fences don’t stop kangaroos; they just bound right over them. Clearing the land for grazing stock and increasing the water supply with dams and bores creates a kangaroo ‘heaven’. Hunting by whites had a negligible impact on their numbers especially considering that for much of the time period we are talking about, white settlers had, at best, either single–shot or double-barrelled muzzle loading guns; limited range and very slow to reload.
When an aboriginal band chose to move on or ‘go walkabout’, often at the drop of a metaphorical hat and without feeling the need to tell anyone, the station owner or manager would look for another nearby band and persuade them with offers of presents, rations and pay to move in and take up the jobs. Sometimes, they didn’t have to do that much; word would pass and another band would just turn up ready to fill the gap. Aboriginal bands didn’t have to work for the pastoralists to be able to share land owned or leased by them. Very few pastoralists cared if a passing band of aborigines camped by a creek or billabong in some corner of the station so long as they hunted native game and didn’t spear cattle or sheep (or no more than the occasional discreet one for a little variety in the diet).
An old-time aboriginal stockman whom I knew well some years ago lamented the passing of the days when aborigines had almost a monopoly on work as stockmen. As he told it, it was a good life on the stations, with usually just the aboriginal ‘mob’ living a pretty traditional life down by the billabong and the station owner or manager, his family and perhaps one or two white workers at the station homestead. The aboriginal stockmen were respected for their work and many were famous locally for their skills with horses, ropes and cattle. There was little or no interference with their movements, they went walkabout and moved from station to station and often had intervals where they ‘went bush’ and just lived off the land and didn’t take on station work. Living out on the stations, they were far away from the ‘bad influences’ in the towns, as he put it. Then a law was introduced requiring equal pay for aboriginal workers and rightly so but the law had an unintended effect. If they had to pay equal wages, then white workers who didn’t go walkabout and therefore didn’t need to be replaced at short (or no) notice, or perhaps as often, were economically a better deal for many pastoralists. Later, mechanisation such as the use of motorbikes, four-wheel-drives, light planes and helicopters in locating, rounding up and moving stock instead of men on horseback reduced the need for stockmen in general, including aboriginal stockmen.
Were there some pastoralists who killed aborigines in situations other than in genuine self-defence? Yes. I can think of at least one who should have ended up on the gallows for what he did. Were they as universally homicidal towards aborigines as some have painted them? When thinking of mainland Australia, ask yourself: Is it likely that pastoralists, in many areas almost totally dependant on aboriginal labour to run their sheep or cattle properties, routinely went around massacring the local aborigines? How then did they get their workforce (nomadic people to start with) to come and work for them; considering that you can’t chain your workforce up and at the same time have them out on horseback in the far reaches of your property, working with the livestock?
Naomi, Windschuttle does not state “that, as Christians, they could not have done it on purpose�. I have seen where he argues that people and societies are broadly influenced by certain factors including philosophical and religious standards. For example, he argues that Christian standards and Enlightenment philosophy influenced colonists and colonial administrators. He never argued that every colonist, everywhere, at all times, lived up to those standards.
Windschuttle isn’t ‘against Aborigines’ and he doesn’t ‘vilify Aborigines’ as some have implied or said outright. He just doesn’t put them on a pedestal. He is ‘against’ people, mostly white academics, who have made careers out of misrepresenting and fabricating the history of relations between Aborigines and whites. He asks the obvious question: why invent false history that causes Aborigines to believe that British colonists and later Australian society attempted the genocide of Aboriginal people? How does this help them? Of course, it doesn’t help Aboriginal people but it has helped academics build careers as the experts on Aboriginal ‘history’ and it gives activists and political ideologues ‘weapons’ to use against whomever they see as their enemies.
With regard to the difference between the intent of a policy and its implementation, it’s obvious that there can be a big gap. For example, I don’t think that anyone would seriously argue that those who set up large institutions for accommodating children intended for them to become havens for sadists and paedophiles, though in some cases that’s how it worked out. It’s a mistake to tar the originators of a policy with the actions of some of those who wound up implementing it. I still think it’s important to acknowledge good intentions even if we disagree that the plan was the best way to go about whatever they were trying to achieve.
Followed by 5,550 words. If that’s your idea of brevity I’d hate to see it when you decided to be prolix.
Still, I’d like to see Naomi’s response.
Until I see some evidence that the people who keep banging on about ‘black armbands’ actually know (i) who coined the phrase, (ii) when and in what context he coined it, (iii) who popularised it and what their motives were, and (iv) what actual black armbands actually do signify, I’ll go on having about as much respect for their opinions as I do for those of people the who don’t realise that Donald Horne was being ironic when he called his book ‘The Lucky Country.’
As a devoted empiricist, no doubt you would be able to name these individuals. And how many is “a lot”? Two? Three?
Again, I presume you can name names.
Is this a direct quote? Source?
This is an accurate enough precis of Windschuttle’s simplistic understanding of territory. As has been quite exhaustively demonstrated, “tribe” is an incomplete characterisation of the important communities to which Aborigines belonged. Sacred sites were claimed by some clans and were respected by others. Windschuttle never uses the term “clan” or “moiety” in the sense understood by generations of anthropologists. Windschuttle thus commits a serious falsification of Aboriginal perceptions of custodianship and ownership.
Classic bait and switch. Windschuttle denies what never existed.
No serious scholar denies that more Aborigines died of introduced diseases than from violence. This isn’t an either/or proposition. Both happened.
Source?
Fallacy of question-framing.
Could do better.
Pavlov’s Cat…what an appropriate name. Just bang in the right phrase and your salivatory glands start working.
Black armband.
Black armband.
Black armband.
That’s why I posed it as a question rather than as a statement.
It could be argued (probably not in this thread) that as “race” is a very recent (in historical terms) concept, and largely of European origin (though not without parallel constructs in other settled societies) it is not a factor from the indigenous viewpoint in contacts between the colonisers and the first people.
The incest taboo exists in most societies and its roots go right back in antiquity, and indigenous groups had ancient, elaborate and strictly-enforced rules about who could marry whom.
Though these strictures related to marriages only, and did not necessarily extend to other relationships between different communities, or for that matter relationships with the foreigners they encountered, such as Malay fishermen.
So while colonised peoples (not just our indigenous people) were aware that settlers were “different” they did not attach any innate value judgements to such differences, any more than they would to differences between themselves and another neighbouring indigenous group. They would have been more concerned about what the invader’s actions were rather than who the invaders were.
Now for Tony Yates, whom I know has been defending his hero over at Red Rag
Tony says:
Led astray?
From Shayne Breen’s Criminals and pimps: Keith Windschuttle and Tasmanian Aborigines
It is well-known and has been for that fire originated with Homo erectus, our direct ancestors. A High School kid could tell you that. So why wouldn’t Tasmanian Aborigines have had fire if their African ancestors did. So why wouldn’t Windschuttle know that? So why would he make such a stupid mistake?
Or did he choose not to know?
Which makes one suspect the motivations and intentions behind much of whatever else he has written on Aborigines.
Agreed. Hence one can take with a grain of salt this claim from Windschuttle as quoted by Breen:
Breen then quotes Governor Arthur, who despite being a 19th Century coloniakl governor and conventionally Christian, is clearly ahead of Windschuttle:
So much for Windschuttle’s “mindless criminals”.
So as you are now attempting to make up for Windschuttle’s shorcomings, maybe you might like to tell us which diseases were prevalent and how many Tasmanian Aborigibnes were wiped out. Applying of course the same rigorous standards that you and Windschuttle expect of others but do not practice yourselves.
Sorcerer: With regard to the diseases that were prevalent and indicators that they were killing Tasmanian Aborigines in very large numbers, Windschuttle doesn’t have any ’shortcomings’ as you put it. Read Fabrication Vol 1. It’s all there. Pay particular attention to the references contained in the journals of George Augustus Robinson as to the death toll from introduced diseases in the Aborigines during his time on Bruny Island. As a example of how fast diseases were decimating the Aboriginal population, what happened on Bruny Island is enlightening.
Also on the issue of the fire-making skills of the Tasmanian Aborigines, it was a very small part of Windschuttle’s discussion on the fact that there was considerable evidence that Tasmanian Aborigines were less technologically advanced than mainland Aborigines and that there is archaeological evidence that, over generations isolated in Tasmania, they had gone backwards in, for example, their spear and other tool-making technology and in the diversity of their diet. He made reference to reports that Tasmanian Aborigines had lost the skill of fire-making and so were dependant on obtaining it from natural sources such as bushfires started by lightning strikes. It seems likely that the sources were wrong on this minor issue. It’s of no significance to the overall weight of evidence in the book.
I’m not going to waste my time retyping what Windschuttle has extensively covered in his book into this blog for your edification. Do yourself a favour and actually read the book and if you already have, why try to pretend that Windschuttle hadn’t already addressed the issue of the diseases prevalent in Tasmania?
It’s because people try to mislead the public over what Windschuttle has written or said and what he hasn’t, that I occasionally feel the need to point out that they are lying.
You obviously don’t know anything about cats either.
Fire-making is not a “minor issue”. People do not lose the art of fire-making or any other technological skills just because they are isolated from a parent population. Otherwise the Maori, the ancient Japanese and other Polynesian seafaring colonists groups would have done so.
What does happen with pioneers who travel and settle in other places is that they adapt their parent culture to the environment of their new home. This would include any building and construction activity, fishing, hunting practices, agriculture and food-gathering. Maybe you and your hero should study some prehistory before you make your sweeping claims.
Such an error with a fact so easy to check made by an historian who is loudly proclaiming himself a champion of accurate use of sources worryingly speaks of someone who perhaps wants to wrestle and wrangle the source material into a shape which fits his purpose.
Maybe you need to read Geoffrey Bolton’s review which takes a fairly balanced look at Fabrication 1.
As for your disease theory, if the remaining Aborigines were corralled on places like Bruny and Flinders Island, it is quite likely that any infectious diseases present are going to spread rapidly among them, especially given conditions immediately before and after their incarceration.
Even Protector of Aborigines George Augustus Robinson noted in his journal of the conditions for the Tasmanian Aborigines at Flinders Island: “it is cruel not to provide abundantly for this remnant of the aboriginal race having placed them on an isolated spot. The least we ought to do is to abundantly supply their wants”
In other words, people used to an abundance of wild food which could be easily sourced were now having to rely on their captors. And if the Protector of Aborigines, a servant of the Crown, saw fit to mention their privation, it is quite possible that he dimly realised that part of what was occurring in incarceration was slow demise by attrition.
Poor nutrition and enforced inactivity will cut fertility as well as ensuring an early death.
I will leave you and others to read Gregory D B Smithers and his comprehensive review of Fabrication 1.
Sorcerer: If you are going to supply links to ‘comprehensive reviews’ of Fabrication, at least supply working links. But then again don’t bother because I already know that if you want to hunt around you can always find some clown who’ll have said something that suits your purposes. One of the ‘joys’ of the Internet.
The Bolton review wasn’t bad though. I do like the last bit: “I think that in several places Windschuttle goes too far, but he is right to invoke Sir Paul Hasluck, who wrote: “There have been two colossal fictions in popular accounts of the treatment of the natives in Australia. One suggests that settlers habitually went about shooting down blacks; the other, framed as a counterblast, is that every settler treated natives with constant kindness. There is no evidence to support either statement.”"
Unless Bolton actually failed to read Fabrication (and that really wouldn’t surprise me) that last bit can’t have been aimed at Windschuttle as Fabrication contains many instances where Windschuttle does discuss occasions where settlers did commit acts of violence against Aborigines.
As for it being ‘my’ disease theory, neither I nor Windschuttle can claim the credit for it. It was the generally accepted theory for the demise of the full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines up until Ryan and others started fabricating. A lot of people had the sense never to abandon it.
I also like your carefully selected quote from Robinson. You’ve obviously been studying at the feet of Ryan and friends. Of course, I am well aware that when he referred to ‘their wants’, he was not referring to the adequacy of the food supply which was perfectly capable of keeping them healthy. They weren’t being starved on Flinders Island, in fact if you look at the records left by those who had some contact with Flinders Island, several of the inhabitants became obese largely because they expected the whites there to do everything for them and just lay around eating.
Aborigines didn’t have to be herded together to catch diseases off white settlers. There was abundant contact between the settlers and the Aborigines in which Aborigines could catch diseases and then carry them back to the rest of the tribe. The lack of natural resistance meant that the diseases then spread like wildfire through the tribe and to any other tribe that they had contact with.
As for the fire-making and the fact that Windschuttle relied on a source that did claim that Tasmanian Aborigines had lost the skill. The source actually existed and it actually did say what he said it did, which is more than can be said for some of the sources of the other side. If the standard required is that someone writing a work of history can’t make any mistakes then there will be very few history books written. Once again, the issue doesn’t damage the overall theme of the book and pretending that it does gets you nowhere.
Claiming that Tasmanian Aborigines lost the ability to make fire is as egregious a misstatement of fact as claiming that the US lost the ability to make automobiles because the Studebaker Corporation closed down in the 1950s.
The historical record is full of references to Tasmanian Aborigines’ use of fire. When Windschuttle ignores these references he is committing a flagrant falsification of the lived reality of Tasmanian Aborigines.
Think of how absurd this statement is: “The US lost the ability in the 1950s to make automobiles after the 1950s.” Think of all the ways by which this statement can be disproved. Think about how foolish the person who makes this statement looks.
Well that is how idiotic Windschuttle is over the fire issue. And that proof of idiocy must cast a shadow over his understanding of everything to do with Tasmanian Aborigines.
In response to sorcerer: indeed, and you make some interesting points. I hope you didn’t take the way I framed my response as anything more than an attempt to answer the question you posed. I didn’t intend for it to come across as ‘conspicuous correction’
Technical glitch fixed.
Here it is again.
Mate, I study at no one’s feet. I leave apologetics to others.
I don’t know about Bolton, he could be just an erudite journalist, but Smithers is an academic at the University of California, one of the better US schools. You don’t get tenure there from cereal packets. It’s highly competitive.
Most of which are challenged by both Smithers and Naomi Parry. Remember the victors always get to write the history. I’d be dubious anyway given Tasmania’s less than bejewelled past under white settlement about any official figures.
Divine creation was the generally accepted theory for the origin of species for a long time too.
Of course disease was a large factor. But disease does not put a bullet in your brain, nor does it malnourish you.
Anyone would become obese if they were forcibly removed from an environment where fresh food, including forest fruits, lean meat and seafood, was relatively abundant and could be freely gathered, and given a diet largely consisting of the likes of white flour, sugar, hard tack and bully beef. Scientists knew as far back as the 60s that one of the main factors contributing to poor indigenous health outcomes was the poor diet of white man’s food imposed on Aborigines living on reserves and missions.
What does that mean?
How about venereal disease…to whose effects the Aborigines were particularly vulnerable, since it did not exist prior to white settlement, hence no population immunity ? You don’t get VD from casual passer-by contact.
No problems Klaus…I wish I had your gimlet eye and fearless forensic ability for accuracy.
Sorcerer: just a quick comment on your last point about venereal disease as I don’t have time for much more. Unfortunately, Tasmanian Aborigines did get VD from some pretty casual contact. One of the unfortunate ‘cultural practices’ of Tasmanian Aboriginal men was their common practice of approaching white men (including convict shepherds in remote areas) and offering sex with Aboriginal women in return for ‘presents’ sometimes as trifling as a loaf or two of bread (an exotic, luxury food to Aborigines). This provided multiple gateways into the Aboriginal population all over Tasmania for venereal diseases as well as the other diseases that they picked up from such contact like influenza. In non-resistant Tasmanian Aborigines, influenza led to pneumonia and death in days, sometimes hours.
And on the food supply on Flinders Island, once again, read the records left by those who were connected with Flinders Island. The administrators there tried to teach the Aborigines how to grow fresh vegetables and tried to get them to fish. The Aborigines wouldn’t fish and weren’t prepared to work on vegetable gardens; they expected the whites to deliver their food to them and the foodstuffs they preferred, the rations they demanded from their white ‘servants’ were white flour, sugar and beef.
And now, it’s the beach for me.
You don’t catch VD from walking past someone, from non-contact day-to-day interaction or from brief physical contact like handshakes, despite what your mother might have told you.
You catch it from sexual intercourse with people who carry the disease.
Err…who exactly were the main vectors for VD? Certainly not the Tasmanian Aborigines. It did not exist in Australia until white settlement.
And the Aborigines would not have known that the ensuing illnesses which plagued them later were caused by sexual contact with disease-ridden promiscuous white men.
And often the disease-ridden promiscuous white men were fairly careless with the notion of informed consent. In fact many dispensed with the notion of consent altogether, and were none to fussy as to the age of some of their conquests.
I wonder how they were expected to fish? With fishing poles, when their custom was to use netting or fish-traps, or to spear them?
Same with vegetables…why grow them when they were abundant in the wild waiting to be picked.
Western agriculture developed from the innovations in the increasingly arid regions of the Middle East around 10,000 years ago. It made sense in a variable climate to hold back seeds from wild food and to cultivate them in one place using irrigation or hand-watering to ensure they grew, rather than relying on the vagaries of the seasons.
No such problem in Tasmania.
Tasted nice, that’s why the Aborigines liked them. That’s why there are obese white people, because this is a cruder version of the foods we know now you shouldn’t eat, but they taste nice and are somewhat addictive.
The Aborigines could watch the white man run sheep and cattle on their old country, while the habitats of the wild fruits, berries, nuts and tubers were destroyed, the rivers polluted and fauna disappear.
Cheviot??
There would have been no need to create a dependency relationship had the Aborigines been left undisturbed in their traditional hunting grounds.
Well, Sorcerer, the beach was great, fewer Chinese submarines around than the last time I went swimming.
On your issues: firstly it seems that the Tasmanian Aboriginal men were pretty casual about who they let have casual sex with their women.
Wasn’t denying that white settlers were the source of disease, ground zero as they say, rather that WAS the point. But once it was introduced it went through the Aboriginal population like wildfire, that’s what happens with contagious diseases and non-resistant populations.
Also not denied that there was also rape. Same effect. Some of the white Tasmanian colonial population were nasty people but they’ve been dead for over a hundred years. Not a lot we can do to them about it, now.
But I’m saddened to have to say that you’ve made an ‘egregious’ misstatement of fact, which under ‘Katz rules’ disqualifies you from having any credible opinion on Tasmanian Aborigines, henceforth and forever.
You stated, regarding Tasmanian Aboriginal fishing practices, “their custom was to use netting or fish-traps, or to spear them�. Actually Tasmanian Aborigines didn’t eat fish, that is, scaled fish, at all. It was one of the strange things about them that the early settlers noted. They ate seals, seabirds, lobsters, oysters and mussels but if you offered them fish, they became fearful, ran away or became violent. Which is why when the white administrators tried to get the Aborigines on Flinders Island to learn to fish, they failed (actually they did try getting them to use fishing poles and nets, a total waste of effort).
There is an interesting theory that surfaced a few years ago, which may be an explanation as to why they were afraid of fish and also may explain why their technology took a big step backwards about 3500 years ago, curiously at the same time that the archaeological evidence indicates they stopped eating fish. By a technological step backwards, I don’t mean that they just abandoned tools and skills that didn’t suit their environment or weren’t needed, they lost technology that would have been very useful and desirable in the Tasmanian environment, like spear-throwers, boomerangs and fine bone needles for sewing fur clothing (particularly useful and desirable given the climate).
The waters around Tasmania are sometimes prone to blooms of toxic algae. These algal blooms can kill fish in large numbers. The theory is that one summer about 3500 years ago there were a lot of algal blooms. The blooms killed a lot of fish that then washed up on the shore all around Tasmania. The Tasmanian Aborigines of the time thought it was Christmas, so to speak, and people came from miles around, including the inland, to feast on all the ‘free’ fish, rushing to get to it and eat it before it rotted. The fish, poisoned by toxic algae, caused food poisoning and death. Most of the adult population died off as a result leaving behind orphaned children. It has been suggested that there would have been a disproportionate of children as survivors for a number of reasons, such as the custom of adults eating first, the number of children being weaned and the possibility that, especially in the case of tribes living inland, when word of the free fish got to them, children weren’t allowed to make the trip to the coast because they travelled too slow and were left behind, perhaps in the care of a few adults who themselves weren’t up to fast travel due to age or infirmity or that of older children.
The results of a die off of most of the adult Tasmanian Aborigines about 3500 years ago as a result of the fish kill would firstly have been the development of powerful taboos against eating fish. Secondly, it would have resulted in a massive loss of skills and technology. There may simply have been too few adult survivors left to pass on more than rudimentary tool-making knowledge to the next generation, especially considering the fact that few adults there would have lived to the sort of ripe old age that we get to today.
Also on the foods available on Flinders Island, there were wallabies and wombats and other quite considerable sources of ‘native’ food. It’s been calculated that it could have independently supported a population of about 400, but the Aborigines there made no use of its resources; as previously stated, they expected the whites to deliver food to them.
As for there being “no need to create a dependency relationship had the Aborigines been left undisturbed in their traditional hunting grounds�. Actually it looks like disease would have got them wherever they were. Now if the British had never colonised Tasmania…..the French or someone else would have, same result.
And it’s just a theory, though it is reported here in these terms:
So from where did Simoons obtain his information?
Jared Diamond reports this phenomenon also:
But neither can give a duration to the practice of not eating scaled fish, nor is there any evidence to suggest that it was of either short or long-standing duration.
Simoons is a biologist, and Diamond would be the first to admit he was not an expert on Tasmanian Aborigines.
Enter Dr Rebe Taylor, who has conducted a detailed study of the Westlake Papers, which she describes thus:
The important point here about Taylor’s research is that it contradicts your theory.
And further:
So I would surmise that Simoons, who was in Tasmania in the 70s, after having observed the intermittent arrival of Dinoflagellatae with its potential for toxicity, unquestioningly took his information from the work of Rhys Jones who proposed the theory in 1978 and again in 1982.
You seem to forget there are any number of native Tasmanian freshwater fish including Paragalaxias mesotes and Galaxias johnstoni which could have been fished and even farmed. They were no doubt abundant prior to the introduction of European species which acted as competition.
So you or your hero were there were you? I know now you are writing fiction, and not good fiction at that.
Are you sure about that?
It is the type of evidence that is often posited, then tends to take on a life of its own. Probably like the “evidence” which unequivocally stated back in my schooldays that the last Tasmanian Aborigine was Truganini, or Trukanini.
We know differently now.
So such diverse sources as Jared Diamond and the FAO, among others, have repeated that claim about ocean fishing. None of these people would regard themselves as experts on the Tasmanian Aborigines.
The evidence for scaled ocean fish not being eaten was supposedly contained in articles by paeleo-archaeologist Dr Rhys Jones in 1978 and 1982. Jones based his findings on two pieces of evidence. The first was the lack of artefacts such as the bone fish hooks which were fairly common on the mainland. The second was documentary evidence from colonial times, where some coastal Aborigines showed an abhorrence for the idea of eating scaled ocean fish, though no one denies that other seafood was an integral part of their diet.
Jones is a much-loved figure in Australian prehistory and has done important work with that other doyen of Aboriginal prehistory, Professor John Mulvaney. However Jones would be the last person to see his conclusions as the last word on the subject, because so often prehistory, which relies on artefacts rather than on the written word, is always a science of the “gaps”, the possible and the probable.
Prehistorians attempt to reconstruct an ancient society based on evidence from non-perishable artefacts. Those artefacts which are ephemeral (because they are made of perishable material, such as nets and fish traps) do not figure in the reconstruction unless there is clear evidence for their previous existence. For instance, in a culture which it was theorised that they hunted animals where no physical evidence remains or has not been found, a cave or rock painting showing people both hunting and fishing using implements would be strong evidence that these activities took place.
So there is no reason not to think that perhaps communities of Aborigines did continue to fish in the ocean and to consume the fish. Also a taboo on ocean fish does not preclude freshwater fish, which were abundant in pre-European Tasmania. Nor does it preclude the farming of freshwater fish, which does not require advanced technology.
A superstitious taboo can remain long after the real-world reasons for its existence have gone. And in her study of the Westlake Papers Dr Rebe Taylor has demolished the supposedly universal embargo on scaled sea fish consumption. She writes:
There is also evidence that Tasmanian Aborigines slowly switched to other more reliable and easier to obtain sources of food such as plant species, marsupials and seals. Such factors as climate change or deliberate practices such as firestick farming may have made these alternatives easier to obtain.
Hunting and fishing are time-consuming, labour-intensive and sometimes dangerous, especially when you factor in how a frail canoe or raft would fare even a few metres from shore in the weather of the Southern Ocean. They take time away from more pleasant activities such as singing, story-telling, lovemaking and cultural activities. The ancestors of modern Europeans spent a lot of their own history trying to minimise the amount of time they spent on hunting for food. They continue to do so, if you regard working as the modern equivalent. So why not the Tasmanian Aborigines?
And now, for your edification, the Annotated Fabrication.
Apologies folks for the seeming repetitive posts. I thought the first had not gone up since it did not appear this morning.
Sorcerer, as for writing fiction, it is self-evident that I was describing a theory of what may have happened, not claiming to be describing actual events. Pretending otherwise just makes you seem, shall we say, disingenuous.
I am pretty confident that there has been no evidence presented that conclusively ‘demolished’ the observations of colonial settlers that Tasmanian Aborigines didn’t eat scaled fish. In the linked document, Dr Rebe Taylor certainly didn’t say that the evidence ‘demolished’ the claim just that it ‘challenged’ it. I suspect I know the reason why. As the article states, the artefacts were collected from 1908-1910. By that time there had been plenty of cultural contamination going on. The ‘Aboriginal’ community in Tasmania (which, at that time, didn’t regard themselves as being Aboriginal; it was before special benefits/allowances for Aboriginal people, you see) were all of mixed descent, many the descendants of white sealers and Aboriginal women whom they had ‘purchased’, enticed away or kidnapped from Tasmania and taken to off-shore islands where their own communities developed. These communities developed their own customs that included fishing and, of course, eating fish. I very much doubt that the Aboriginal women taken into such communities, dominated by non-Aboriginal males, were allowed to observe their own taboos.
Added to that we know that, after British settlement, an unknown number of mainland Aborigines (like Musquito) were brought to Tasmania and it’s possible, even likely, that some also made it to some of the off-shore island sealer communities. They would have brought their own customs with them that did include fishing and eating fish.
As far as I know, none of the artefacts said to challenge the no fish ‘rule’ can be positively attributed to culturally uncontaminated Tasmanian Aboriginal sources nor have they been positively dated to the time of the Flinders Island ‘experiment’ or before. The Flinders Island Aborigines certainly weren’t keen fishermen.
‘Perhaps’ there were some culturally uncontaminated communities that did eat fish. ‘Perhaps’ someone someday will present convincing evidence of that.
On your point on freshwater fish: if there had been deaths from eating ocean fish after algal bloom poisoning and especially if there had been a devastating loss of adults due to the kind of mass feasting on poisoned fish posited, I think it’s very unlikely, since they’d have no understanding of the cause, that the survivors would make any distinction between ocean and freshwater fish. All fish would be off the menu.
As for the Annotated Fabrication, small-scale nitpicking and differences in opinion on certain aspects doesn’t impress, show me some major errors, show me something significant.
We have. All of us. Every serious poster who has contributed to this thread. Many of whom are from a diverse range of disciplines. Many of whom are experts in the field.
Why don’t you share it with us then?
Sounds like the idiocy being kicked around at the time of Pauline Hanson’s campaign. And it was never a good idea for light-skinned Aboriginal people to identify themselves thus, because they would then encounter that sort of idiotic bigotry and worse from morons like her.
Even now some teenage school students and job-seekers will not, even though it entitles them to Commonwealth benefits and special assistance. Obviously something that has been passed on by their parents and grandparents who had suffered, often grievously, for being Aboriginal. Sometimes an attitude that even now is justified, given the abysmal level of ignorance in some sections of the white community.
Perhaps, but this does not nullify what I said before.
But you don’t know for sure that the rumours from the coast had spread inland or even to the other side of Tasmania. Even Rhys Jones would not be that unequivocal.
It’s far more than that. The level of inaccuracy, careless use of source material and non-use of source material might be excusable in the work of a first-year student, or in a blog. It is inexcusable in the work of someone who calls himself an historian, who is employed as such, who teaches others and who trumpets his qualifications as a way of influencing the political process.
Why don’t I share the reason with you, Sorcerer? OK, it’s obvious that you are skimming through my post so fast you are not actually taking it in. So once again, read slowly this time: none of the artefacts said to challenge the no fish ‘rule’ can be positively attributed to culturally uncontaminated Tasmanian Aboriginal sources nor have they been positively dated to the time of the Flinders Island ‘experiment’ or before. They were gathered in 1908 – 1910 from communities with heavy cultural contamination, from communities that were created and dominated by non-Aboriginal men. Got it now?
Rubbish!
And what is the reason and why are you being so coy about it? How do you back up your thesis? Does anyone else?
Or is it you just don’t like your hero to be doubted, and you came here (why here?) in the faint hope that your evangelism would be appreciated by we Great Unwashed of the Left, who still regard Windschuttle with extreme scepticism. It seems your efforts have done nothing to change that.
The main source of your thesis is Rhys Jones. Jones as a meticulous prehistorian may well have been concerned with possible cultural contamination. However, as someone principally looking at a pre-literate culture of great antiquity, he was perhaps not concerned with written records or anecdotal records.
So Jones wrote an account of what he thought had occurred in the late 70s and again in 1982, using the archaeological evidence (or lack thereof) as is proper in his field and it was seized upon, coming as it did from an expert with no apparent ideological axe to grind, and it became an accepted fact as far as the likes of Jared Diamond was concerned.
The author of the Westlake Papers whose provenance you so question, also had no axe to grind. He was an Englishman. And lacking primary source documents, but with access to the Tasmanian collection at Pitt Rivers, he interviewed surviving Aborigines, again a legitimate research technique.
I think Taylor would have been very conscious of the risk of what you call “cultural contamination”. Historians who use oral histories are.
Are you being deliberately dense, Sorcerer? Artifacts created by and practices engaged in by the sealer communities, adopting the practices of the dominant non-Aboriginal males, do not prove that Tasmanian Aborigines of the 1830’s and earlier ate fish. By the time Ernest Westlake, started collecting artifacts and interviewing people, in 1908 – 1910, there were no uncontaminated sources left he could talk to. How many different ways, do I have to say that?
Ah, Sorcerer; someone has just pointed out to me what I should have realised myself. You ARE being deliberately dense. Having someone come up with arguments that you have no real, substantive answers to makes you uncomfortable. So you and your friends go on with the nonsense that you do until the ‘interloper’ gives up in frustration. Then you get your little closed-mind world back all to yourselves. Fine. It matters naught to me. I’ve made the comments about Parry’s article that I wanted to. Why waste my time further?
Ah the ad hominem argument of desperation.
Nor do they disprove it.
No one here has done that except for you. I am still puzzled as to what you expected by coming here.
I suggest you read some real history.
And folks, I’ve made the arguments I wanted to. But Rebe Taylor’s work shows that you do need to widen the net (excuse the fishing pun) beyond chasing other people’s footnotes – precisely the point I made when I first attacked Windschuttle in Labour History.
Of course Missy Higgins is a lipsniger.
…
…I’m on the wrong thread aren’t I?