Thread: Invaded or settled?

Originally Posted by MrG

And what epic scale zoological experiment are you talking about...? Nobody mentioned interbreeding. Are you suggesting the Aboriginals belong in a zoo?

Well how should it have gone down?

I say leaving people in the stone age when the world has moved light years ahead is a bizarre and cruel sociological experiment. Are you proposing that we should have left them playing with sticks and stones or should we share the fruits of western scientific, engineering and medical progress with them?

Should there be a price or should we share it for free?

Originally Posted by Looper

Are you proposing that we should have left them playing with sticks and stones or should we share the fruits of western scientific, engineering and medical progress with them?

Yes, because western viral diseases like small pox, influenza, venereal disease and even the common cold killed more than other advanced western technologies like rifles and hanging.

Originally Posted by Looper

Are you proposing that we should have left them playing with sticks and stones or should we share the fruits of western scientific, engineering and medical progress with them?

Why you generous son of a gun.... So you advocate genocide to make way for sharing Western scientific and medical process?

Originally Posted by Looper

Should there be a price or should we share it for free?

Never mind, question answered.

Observation: you don't seem to know when you're digging yourself in deeper.

Originally Posted by Looper

Well how should it have gone down?

I say leaving people in the stone age when the world has moved light years ahead is a bizarre and cruel sociological experiment

Albeit one you were advocating not too long ago...

Originally Posted by MrG

Never mind, question answered. Observation: you don't seem to know when you're digging yourself in deeper.

I am not always following you MrG. I am interested to know: if you thought it should have gone down differently then how should it have gone down?

Was the big picture OK but some of the details were excessively gory or should the whole thing have been played in a radically different manner?

Originally Posted by DrB0b

Albeit one you were advocating not too long ago...

Sorry B0b I am not doing well today. You will have to help me here.

Originally Posted by Looper

Sorry B0b I am not doing well today. You will have to help me here.

Sorry mate, you're on your own.

Originally Posted by Looper

I am not always following you MrG. I am interested to know: if you thought it should have gone down differently then how should it have gone down?

They should not have perpetrated genocide.

Originally Posted by Looper

Was the big picture OK but some of the details were excessively gory

So you admit that "...some of the details..." were excessive. What was excessive about them. Gory, as in too much blood, or an excessive mass murder of men, women and children.

Originally Posted by MrG

They should not have perpetrated genocide.

But you accept that the settlement was inevitable and on the whole acceptable for its time in terms of its aims if not its means?

Originally Posted by MrG

So you admit that "...some of the details..." were excessive.

No that was an offer to you to define what you thought was not acceptable about the actions of the British in settling Australia. It is possible that some actions were excessive I don't really know without all the context details. But the big picture was inevitable and not something to have regrets over.

The outcome was for the best for the majority. The natives have not even done badly out of it ultimately.

Abo's will always call it invasion day.
To me it's just history we did treat them like shit,wasn't my generation.
Kevin Russ apoligised job done.
I've met some good ones and some bad,same as all nationallties.

Inside a small tent in a remote stretch of outback bushland, Australia’s prime minister Tony Abbott pulled his seat up to a portable wooden desk on which sat his laptop computer, deodorant, insect repellent and sunscreen.

It was an unusual choice of lodgings from which to govern the nation for a week: a khaki canvas tent, containing a hard, single mattress and a sleeping bag, in a eucalyptus forest considered sacred by the local Aborigines.

But Mr Abbott’s outdoor sojourn was no ordinary camping trip. In an unprecedented act by an Australian prime minister, he was trying to remove what he sees as an enduring stain on the national character: the unjust treatment of the Aborigines, that dates back to the earliest British settlers.

Speaking in a makeshift prime ministerial office in a nearby wooden pavilion, Mr Abbott told The Telegraph: “There is a discomfort in our national character. To this day we have not entirely come to terms with this side of the Australian reality.”

Mr Abbott, a conservative and staunch monarchist, was born in London, studied at Oxford and describes himself as an “incorrigible Anglophile”.



But he believes the arrival of British settlers on the First Fleet proved devastating for the Aborigines.
“Initially the impact [of British settlement] was all bad - disease, dispossession, discrimination, at times wanton murder,” he said.
“While justice was colour-blind, there was still the enormous discrimination. There was not a lot of official respect in the early days. There was even less popular respect.”
Mr Abbott, 56, a fitness-obsessed former boxer and trainee Catholic priest, is not known for his sentimentality: Australian voters have looked on for years as he subjected himself to feats of endurance, worked as a volunteer firefighter and life guard and completed 600-mile bicycle rides and a 14-hour iron man contest.
But before he became prime minister a year ago he regularly visited Aboriginal communities and his decision to shift the seat of government to the outskirts of Yirrkala, an Aboriginal township with a population of 843, a 16-hour drive from Darwin, the nearest city, was intended to deliver a symbolic message.
“This is, I think, an appropriate way of saying to Aboriginal people, you should be and are first class citizens of your own country,” he said.
“Indigenous people’s concerns every so often should be front and centre in the minds of our national leaders because they are, after all, the first Australians. They were, to our discredit, ignored and at times mistreated for much of the first couple of centuries of our national existence.”
Such remote Aboriginal communities, scattered across regional Australia, are notorious for high rates of infant mortality, disease, unemployment and crime and drug problems; Australia’s 700,000 Aborigines on average die some 10 years younger than non-Aborigines and are 15 times more likely to be in prison.
To help counter this, Mr Abbott proposes rewriting the constitution, formally to recognise Aborigines as the nation’s first peoples - a change which, he argues, would help to complete the national journey towards reconciliation, 226 years after the first settlers arrived.
He discussed with local elders a plan for a national referendum to do so, likely to be held in 2017. That is the 50th anniversary of a landmark referendum in which Australians voted overwhelmingly to consider Aborigines as part of the Australian population.
The Yolngu people, who are believed to have lived in Arnhem Land for 40,000 years, claim to be the inheritors of the world’s oldest living culture. His camp was on a site where, Aborigines believe, an ancestral spirit named Ganbulabula once passed through and created the didgeridoo, the well-known indigenous wind instrument.
“We have seen prime ministers come and go,” said Djawa Yunupingu, a local elder. “In the past, they let us down. This one is the first one to come and stay with us. In the past, prime ministers did not really stick up for the indigenous people.”
Mr Abbott’s attempt to interact with local children was met by muted blank stares, however, as they had yet to learn English and could not understand what he was saying.
Some of Mr Abbot’s top civil servants travelled with him to Yirrkala, installing a secure phone and video lines for cabinet meetings and to consult with his security advisers.
During his stay, he oversaw the deployment of troops and fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates ahead of likely combat with Islamic jihadists in Iraq - a global threat he describes as unprecedented.
But as he prepared to fly back to Canberra to resume business as usual he was insistent that the mistakes of the past must be rectified.
“The reality is that long before the First Fleet arrived, Aboriginal people were here,” he said.
“It was a very different society to enlightened Britain. Nevertheless, it had its own strengths, it had its own patterns, it had its own relationship with the environment. It was worthy of respect and recognition...
“Now there’s enormous pride in [local] Yolngu culture, and a fierce determination to preserve it, as there should be. There’s a deep commitment to acknowledgment of the place of Aboriginal people in modern Australia - -and that’s right too.

Loopy's posts on topics and issues like this always read to me as though he has started with a conclusion and is working backwards from there to justify it.

The result is some pretty twisted and convoluted feats of logic gymnastics, a lot of baseless and pointless conjecture and supposition, some contradictions, and, to be perfectly frank, a load of cobblers.

Francis Grose (c. 1758 – 8 May 1814) was a British soldier who commanded the New South Wales Corps. As Governor of New South Wales 1792-1794, he established military rule, abolished civil courts, and made generous land-grants to his officers. He failed to stamp out the practice of paying wages in alcoholic spirits, with consequent public drunkenness and corruption. Although he helped to improve living conditions to some degree, he was not viewed as a successful administrator.


Grose did not leave England until late in 1791, arriving in Sydney on 14 February 1792 on board the convict transport Pitt. The voyage was not an easy one as fever killed a large number of people on board, seaman, soldiers, convicts, wives, and children.
Grose became colonial administrator when Governor Arthur Phillip, whose health had been poor for some time (probably due to poor diet), received permission to depart. The European population of New South Wales when Grose took over was 4,221, of whom 3,099 were convicts.
Grose immediately abandoned Phillip's plans for governing the colony. A staunch military man, he established military rule and set out to secure the authority of the Corps. He abolished the civilian courts and transferred the magistrates to the authority of Captain Joseph Foveaux. After the poor crops of 1793 he cut the rations of the convicts but not those of the Corps, overturning Phillip’s policy of equal rations for all.
In a connived attempt to improve agricultural production and make the colony more self-sufficient, Grose turned away from collective farming and made generous land grants to officers of the Corps. They were also provided with government-fed and clothed convicts as farm labour, whose products they would sell to the government store at a good profit.
Phillip had realized that unless there was some control over the sale of alcoholic spirits, great evils would follow, but Grose made no efforts in this direction and great abuses such as the payment of wages in spirits became common. The custom of officers trading in spirits was almost universal and in the interregnum before the arrival of Captain Hunter, the colony was rife with drunkenness, gambling, licentiousness and crime.
How far Grose was responsible for this state of affairs it is now impossible to say. There is, however, no reason to doubt the statements of the chaplain, the Rev. Richard Johnson, that he could get no support from the lieutenant-governor and no assistance in building a church. On the other hand, the charges against Grose of making indiscriminate grants of land to his friends and fellow officers appear to be without foundation, as the grants made were in accordance with his instructions and to those officers who requested them.[1]
In spite of the low state of morality and the drinking habits of the people, the position of the colony had improved very much when Grose left for England on 17 December 1794. However, most of the credit for this cannot be given to Grose. His substitution of military for civil power was not for the good of the state and he showed no foresight or real strength in his government.
The improvement probably came from better farming methods, for which credit can largely be given to the two chaplains, Johnson and Samuel Marsden. Grose did, however, increase the rations and improve the housing conditions of his troops.[1]

Originally Posted by chassamui

It was an unusual choice of lodgings from which to govern the nation for a week: a khaki canvas tent, containing a hard, single mattress and a sleeping bag, in a eucalyptus forest considered sacred by the local Aborigines.
But Mr Abbott’s outdoor sojourn was no ordinary camping trip. In an unprecedented act by an Australian prime minister, he was trying to remove what he sees as an enduring stain on the national character: the unjust treatment of the Aborigines, that dates back to the earliest British settlers.

Now there's a man with a pair of brass ones.
Can you imagine an American President pitching his tent in the Black Hills of the Dakotas until the treaties made with the Native Americans were recognized. (I believe that not a single treaty the US Govt. made with the native population was kept).
I hope that, whatever Australians thought of the rest of Mr. Abbot's politics, they gave him big cheers for that move.

I commend this link which detail the attempts to realign aboriginal and settler disputes with well intentioned, but largely ineffective methods of indiginous integration.

http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/re...inalpolicy.pdf

Extract:
15
Williams sees the only way Aboriginal people can move towards some engagement with theever-present historical anniversaries of European settlement is through a fullacknowledgement by non-Aboriginal people of the enduring legacy and devastating impacts of European settlement on Aboriginal society. He argues that ‘whites are very good at...sanitizing history...refuting massacres...that Abori
ginal children were taken for their own good...They’re the sorts of arguments that are absolutely offensive to Aboriginal people.’ He
isn’t intent on inducing guilt among non-Aboriginal Australians...’ but you can’t forget about the past either. The past informs how we interact with one another today and how we do things in the future...Unless people are willing to acknowledge what happened, I can’t see why Aboriginal people would want to engage.’

He acknowledges that Macquarie, ‘in his own way...did try to reconcile with us in some cases’, but, like Karskens, he is looking for a more balanced assessment of the legacy of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie—one that includes their Aboriginal policy—in the
celebratory focus of their bicentennial.

Originally Posted by bobo746

Abo's will always call it invasion day.

Kevin Russ apologized job done.

Liberal Government always told them to ram the Apology up their arse.

Labor gets in, Rudd gets up their and sucks cock for the good of the Nation he reckoned.

What happened. ?

Fuk all happened. Abo's just carried on their destructive way as usual.

Rudd just wasted Australia's oxygen supply exactly the same as the Abo's do.

Originally Posted by chassamui

He isn’t intent on inducing guilt among non-Aboriginal Australians...’ but you can’t forget about the past either. The past informs how we interact with one another today and how we do things in the future...

Views such as yours have been prevalent since the 70s Terry. The quote above seems to be much more sensible, and would allow all concerned to move on together.
Your views just prolong the way people feel about the indigenous people in such a disparaging way.

^

Na, that will never work Chas,

It sounds great in theory but in practice it does not work at all.

We have tried everything with these wasters but nothing ever changes with them, actually they just get worse.

If they keep going the way they are they will exterminate their race. Up to them.

This debate ain't worth a pinch of shit, It's in the past and today is today.

Can't change history.

Fukers should just get on with it.

Originally Posted by Looper

Are you proposing that we should have left them playing with sticks and stones

Not just any sticks. Some were very special sticks.

And some of those sticks could be used to make music.

The reason why efforts to solve the aboriginal issue have failed, is because all the solutions are presented by white middle class politicians. Let the elders and aboriginal leaders decide how that pot of money is spent, and allow them to decide if they want to share the spoils of the 21st century, or return to their own cultural lifestyle.
There is certainly no shortage of land for a nomadic existence if that is what they aspire to.

Originally Posted by MrG

Originally Posted by chassamui

It was an unusual choice of lodgings from which to govern the nation for a week: a khaki canvas tent, containing a hard, single mattress and a sleeping bag, in a eucalyptus forest considered sacred by the local Aborigines.
But Mr Abbott’s outdoor sojourn was no ordinary camping trip. In an unprecedented act by an Australian prime minister, he was trying to remove what he sees as an enduring stain on the national character: the unjust treatment of the Aborigines, that dates back to the earliest British settlers.

Now there's a man with a pair of brass ones.
Can you imagine an American President pitching his tent in the Black Hills of the Dakotas until the treaties made with the Native Americans were recognized. (I believe that not a single treaty the US Govt. made with the native population was kept).
I hope that, whatever Australians thought of the rest of Mr. Abbot's politics, they gave him big cheers for that move.

Tony Abbott has also been criticised for making statements implying that there was nothing but bush before 1788 and the creation of the modern nation of Australia in such a short time-frame is a great achievement.

I agree that looking through our modern moral prism the historical events are sad and unfortunate. Even for the time they occurred they were sad. No-one actually wants bloodshed and conflict.

This situation where we have truly modern empire builders displacing indigenous peoples to build a modern habitat has only happened a few times in history so it is not like you can hold up the events and compare them to all the other occasions it has happened and judge them to be excessive or not.

The aim of settlement was to build a new country. That involved displacing some natives. That was sad but the creation of the nation of Australia is a great achievement so it is hard to say how much suffering can be justified to achieve the end goal but I agree it is fair to look back and say that it was sad that the conflict and deaths had to be part of the process.

I think with the native title acts and all the support that the aboriginals get these days that these things have been recognised and reparations have been made.

There is no objective way to say whether or not all the acts of violence were reasonable or excessive. All we can do is agree that it was a sad thing to happen even though it was part of a useful overall process and to try and make reasonable reparations which we have done and are doing.

Originally Posted by Looper

The aim of settlement was to build a new country.

I thought the main aim was to provide a place to send convicts - establish a penal colony.

Originally Posted by Neverna

I thought the main aim was to provide a place to send convicts - establish a penal colony.

Correct. Even Lachlan Macquarie who governed from 1810 to 1821 was investigated by the British colonial office for appointing emancipated ex cons in government posts, and excessive public works expenditure on what the English parliament still considered a penal colony. It was still considered as such during the tenure of Macquarie's successor Ralph Darling.

That is one of the reasons why invasion is not an entirely appropriate term.

The land was nominally claimed for the empire but they could not see much use for such a desolate place at the end of the earth so it was only deemed fit for penal colonies in the first instance. The initial settlements would not have involved a lot of encroachment on the natives.

Eventually the opportunity became clearer and development of other kinds began to spread. But the gradual pace is another factor against the appropriateness of the term invasion.