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Joined: 17 Mar 2003


PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:53 pm
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What is it like growing up there? How did you get in there?
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thesoretoothsayer 



Joined: 26 Apr 2017


PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 2:19 pm
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I also find the word "strategy" problematic.
In the context of the surrounding sentences it does come across, to me at least, as meaning:
Massacres were part of a coordinated plan by "the British" to "eradicate" aboriginal resistance.

Even "eradicate" strikes me as a politically-charged word in this context. Why eradicate? Why not "overcome", "subdue", "suppress", "eliminate"? Sounds a bit genocidy doesn't it.
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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 4:17 pm
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stui magpie wrote:
These are all isolated incidents with common themes and causes. Deeply regrettable yes, but understandable if seen through the lens of that time.


I like to think that all criminal acts are understandable, in some sense (and if we can't understand them, then we're not trying hard enough). But I would be concerned if 'understandable' were to become 'dismissable' in this context, because ultimately it doesn't really matter how understandable the acts were – the fact is that they happened, that they were brutal and unjust, that the result was a great deal of suffering, loss of life, grief and fear for Indigenous people, and that that bloodshed forms part of the bedrock upon which this nation has been built.

What should we do with that info? I guess the starting point is to acknowledge it and not try to dismiss it, minimise it or justify it. I don't think guilt or shame are useful responses (and I suspect that much of the tendency to deflect from this history is motivated by a desire to avoid those feelings), and neither do I think it is helpful if it becomes part of a narrative of ongoing victimhood (which only serves to increase disenfranchisement). What I think is most needed is an acknowledgement that this is what Australia was, and that, because history inevitably shapes us, it is also a part of the story of what Australia is. Ultimately, people are free to feel however they like about this, and there is no reason people can't still experience a sense of (perhaps, at least, slightly tempered?) national pride if they are so inclined – but there's no excuse not to know, and there's no excuse to not teach future generations about what really happened here.

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stui magpie Gemini

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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 5:31 pm
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I tend to like how you framed that approach.

Without dismissing it, or taking it as a guilt trip, acknowledge but also like you said we don't want to feed the victimhood beast. That beast needs to be slayed so we can move on.

I also think it's important to teach this, and put the context in place that these were not government sanctioned, planned attacks, but a number of specific isolated instances coming about because of a clash of cultures and exacerbated by the culture of society at that time.

Without resorting to whataboutism, consider the example of the US settlers moving west and encountering Native Americans.

Similar conflicts occurred but, maybe because the Native American tribes were far larger in number and better armed, the response was totally different.

In the US, the army was sent in, wars were fought, the natives not killed were subjugated and forceably relocated .

In Aus, the battles were between settlers and natives. No army called in, no systematic attempts at subjugation or removal (Tassie being an exception) and the people involved generally faced court action even if the results were a tad dubious.

I think when discussing these things it's important to remove the emotive terms as far as practical and try to hold onto a truthful account of history that builds in the context of the times and acknowledges how both sides actions had contributory effects without apportioning blame.

Edit, I just spotted the bit about national pride.

I see no reason why people should not feel national pride in this country.

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 11:46 am
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Here's a good insight into what life was like for many rural Aboriginal people up until the 1960s:

http://insidestory.org.au/the-hospital-for-bare-life/

Quote:
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, Aboriginal Western Australians, like other Indigenous people, had been considered, at least theoretically, British subjects. But as Australia moved towards Federation, they were progressively disenfranchised by a series of Acts that, as historian Peter Biskup has pointed out, made voting dependent on land ownership, as understood in the European sense, and on race.

In 1893, “Aboriginal natives” were excluded from voting unless they owned a certain amount of property. In 1899, the wording of the law was tightened to make it clear that insufficiently propertied persons of “the half-blood” were locked out too. And in the 1907 Western Australian Electoral Act, all Aboriginal people and persons of “the half-blood” were excluded regardless of property. Further legislation meant Aboriginal people in Western Australia could also be subject to forced medical examinations, have their children abducted, have their money and property taken by the state, and be imprisoned in an institution like the Wyndham Native Hospital.

It is striking that this disenfranchisement, the reduction of Western Australian Aboriginal people to less than citizens, occurred alongside the birth of the modern Australian nation as though it were the precondition for the new Federation. It was as though, as W.E.H. Stanner wrote in 1963, “The primary axiom of settlement, or at least of development [was] that Aboriginal and European society could not or must not be allowed to coexist.” Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr argue, in their 2007 book Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, that all nation-building is inherently utopian because it tries to create a unity that has never existed. Australian nation-building was doubly utopian in that, as many eugenics scholars have pointed out, the new Commonwealth tried to design a future population by locking out races and individuals seen as, in the language of the day, dysgenic or defective. The tools of design, identified by Alison Bashford in Imperial Hygiene: A Critical History of Colonialism, Nationalism and Public Health (2004), were those immigration restrictions known as the White Australia policy and “the widespread use of segregation of those deemed outside the civic body.”

Theories of social Darwinism, biological racial difference and eugenics, which had begun to take hold in the decades before Federation, would have a devastating effect on who was to be included as a citizen in the young Australia.

[...]

“Second-class citizen” is a term often used to describe the position of Aboriginal people in Australia, but it’s way too generous. In a widely quoted observation in his 1942 book Black Australians, Paul Hasluck described the legal status to which Aboriginal Western Australians were confined after the state’s 1936 Aborigines Act Amendment Act as being closer to the status of a “born idiot than of any other class of British subject.” Giorgio Agamben might have described it as “bare life.”

The first appearance of bare life, Agamben writes in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), was a figure in ancient Roman law known as the homo sacer, or sacred man. The ancient Greeks had separated life into “zoe,” or simple biological life, and “bios,” the life of social participation, but the homo sacer was another category of life again. This individual could not be sacrificed, but was exposed to death because the sovereign would not punish anyone that murdered him. The homo sacer was set outside human jurisdiction and yet did not come under divine jurisdiction either. His was a life stripped of rights and exposed to death.


Really recommend the Inside Story website, by the way – its news articles and op-ed pieces often come up in my work inbox a lot (a former editor must have subscribed us to it), and they're often insightful and worth reading.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 12:16 pm
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It is an interesting and in parts shocking read.

It would be interesting to compare how the different states and localities legislated and treated the natives. Whether WA was an outlier or representative.

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 1:24 pm
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It does seem to me that WA (perhaps along with Queensland) was by far the worst. Certainly, that's where a lot of these 1950s/early 1960s stories seem to come from.
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Mugwump 



Joined: 28 Jul 2007
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:19 pm
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I think David and Stui’s conversation above is a good, balanced discussion.

I am not surprised about the WA thing, though I did not know that specific bit. I lived in Perth for a year, in 1987, and was out driving with a bloke I met at work - graduate in business, educated (though those two things are not really connected). He was a nice bloke, and we chatted on several subjects amiably enough. He commented that part of the tribe in a certain area had been killed by settlers. When I expressed sorrow, he breezily remarked that “they hadn’t gone far enough.” So this stuff is, and was, very real and ugly. I don’t think there was ever really a conspiracy to hide it. I was taught about the Tasmanian aboriginal “clearance” in state primary school in the 1960s. Each generation loves to think that it discovered something that its forefathers were hiding.

On the question of shame and guilt, I doubt that these underlie push-back against contemporary discussion of that history. Most normal people, self included, are incapable of feeling shame or guilt about things that were done by other human beings long ago. Shame and guilt, when sincere, can only really be about things that you have done personally. We could do with rather more of that, I think, and perhaps if we spent less time outsourcing our personal moral responsibility to society, we would be a kinder people. In any event, if I felt possessed through inheritance of things stolen from others, I would feel the desire to make restitution, but I don’t feel that. My family came from just a notch above poverty.

The reason we push back is because other people push simplistic and one-sided narratives so that they can make claims against us in the present. Throughout history, people were dispossessed of lands that they could not defend. It happened to the Saxons after the Viking and Norman invasions, it happened to the Sudeten Germans in 1945. It is important to understand that, and to write it as true , balanced history ; but using what happened hundreds of years ago to make claims against the present (eg the present call for a “treaty”) seems to me a dangerous, schismatic kind of politics. We would do well to resist all those who wish to divide our modern nation along the fault lines of race. It’s another gambit of those who hope to rule over the ruins.

On that note, the article above is interesting, but its agenda is so clear that I don’t think it’s in any danger of making a balanced assessment. I am always struck by the fact that most on the right acknowledge the fact that some atrocities undoubtedly happened, and terra nullius was a flawed concept. But those on the other side never even begin to admit that many people in this history acted with benign intentions and tried to apply British law to a fluid, formative situation in six different nation-colonies.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 10:40 am
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Just to put some emphasis on the times. I've been watching the reaction to the Mark Knight cartoon of Serena Williams having a dummy spit, and how many US pundits are calling it racist. The US looks at these things differently than we do because of their cultural history.

Just over 150 years ago, in the 1860's, the US fought a civil war largely over the right to keep Black African's as slaves

Around the same time, the last convict ships landed in Australia from the UK.

That's a comparatively short time span, yet the world was a very different place.

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think positive Libra

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Joined: 30 Jun 2005
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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 10:56 am
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stui magpie wrote:
Just to put some emphasis on the times. I've been watching the reaction to the Mark Knight cartoon of Serena Williams having a dummy spit, and how many US pundits are calling it racist. The US looks at these things differently than we do because of their cultural history.

Just over 150 years ago, in the 1860's, the US fought a civil war largely over the right to keep Black African's as slaves

Around the same time, the last convict ships landed in Australia from the UK.

That's a comparatively short time span, yet the world was a very different place.

nothing racist about it, I love Serena but that was a truly disgusting display, deserves to be made fun of.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 11:54 am
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I don't think the cartoon is racist, and it certainly wasn't the intent of Knight, but I can also see how some in the US would think it was.

Their radar to racism is tuned differently to ours.

I didn't want to make this about the cartoon or racism, it was just the to the thought about how recently things were so different.

In thinking about the reaction to the cartoon, I got thinking about how different US culture really is to ours, and that got me thinking about this thread and the statement I often make about looking at things through the lens of the time.

A bit over 150 years ago, the US fought a civil war over whether Africans should be kept as slaves.

As recently as 50 years ago, parts of the US actively practised racial segregation.

During all this there were many means of having a laugh at the expense of the blacks, painting them as inferior, stupid etc.
Painting your skin black seems like a logical way to impersonate a black person, but it's considered seriously racist because of it's history. Likewise, I can see why Knight's cartoon would strike a nerve with many Americans.

Compared to the US, Aboriginals in Australia were treated better than their Natives and Africans. Yes there was racism, but more paternalistic (in my view) in general.

We've been discussing events that happened in Australia 80 to 150 years ago, and through the lens of the present day they're pretty hard to condone. But look back at what the world was like at those times, it's easier to understand.

While we had pastoralists having skirmishes with nearby Aboriginal tribes over the land, in the US they were having race wars in the northern cities as blacks moved north en masse. White gangs lynching black men in Chicago, because they were black.

I know it's Wiki, but this is a pretty good summary guide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_the_United_States

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 2:46 pm
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Americans may be more sensitive about racism, but it doesn't mean that it's less of a problem here. I'm not sure about the Serena cartoon (it's a cartoonist's job to exaggerate features, of course; some have pointed out though that he drew Osaka, a dark-skinned Japanese/Hawaiian woman, as a white blonde, as if to emphasise Williams' otherness), but the one he drew a few weeks ago with stick-figure black youths destroying a train station was pretty shockingly dehumanising, and perhaps a sign of, if not malicious intent on Knight's part, then at best a certain naivety about the history of racist imagery depicting black people.
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thesoretoothsayer 



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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 3:54 pm
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Quote:
some have pointed out though that he drew Osaka, a dark-skinned Japanese/Hawaiian woman, as a white blonde, as if to emphasise Williams' otherness


What colour was Osaka's ponytail in the final?
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David Libra

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 4:48 pm
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Correct. Approximately 1/10th of her hair was blonde, just like her portrayal in the cartoon. Shocked
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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Wed Sep 12, 2018 7:17 pm
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Again, I didn't bump this thread to discuss whether the cartoon is racist or not, the point was about the general culture at the time and how that shapes a culture.

At the time where Australia had farmers fighting Aboriginals and the government here taking a paternalistic approach, Blacks in America went from being slaves to actively discriminated against. In many places they still are.

Compared to the African Americans and Native Americans, the Australian Aboriginals were treated a lot better, notwithstanding the bad things that did happen.

Context is important.

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