It’s that time again, Australia Day, some will celebrate it’s unity, inevitably others will use it to divide us. Those people will make the usual calls to move the day, and some will hold ceremonies to mourn the passing of Aboriginal culture. I pose the question, what is Aboriginal culture ?
If you were to read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, then he would have you believe it to be some sort of utopian paradise, Aboriginals living a permanent settled life in beautifully constructed houses. Raising crops, living in harmony. A sophisticated people who invented democracy 120,000 years ago, and were the first to bake a loaf of bread.
If you have read this book, and believe it to be the most wonderful and enlightening book you have ever read, then you plainly have never read anything else on the subject. Dark Emu is little more than a fantasy, wishful thinking from Pascoe, and it takes very little checking of his misquoted, and at times unsourced material. I would go so far as to say that this book is deceitful at best. Critical thinking does not appear to be in the grasp of some people.
Some of you reading this will be frothing at the mouth by now, eager to jump onto your keyboards and slay me as much as you can. Before doing that however, I challenge you to do some research of your own. There are a plethora of works on how early life was for Aboriginal people prior to white settlement, their first hand accounts have not been doctored as Pascoe suggests.
If you enjoyed Dark Emu, then you must read: Bitter Harvest, by Peter O’Brien, which is a direct rebuttle of Pascoe’s book. Well researched, well referenced. Other books include, but are no limited too: I, The Aboriginal, by Douglas Lockwood, A particularly interesting read about the life of an Alawa Aboriginal man by the name of Waipuldanya. In one particular passage he mentions a people called the Burgingin, a pygmy people who appear to have inhabited the area from the Roper river in NT, all the way into Queensland. I have since found another reference to these people from another source, which appears to indicate that their land was taken by Aboriginal people before the dreamtime.
Other good reads are: Patrol in the dreamtime, by Colin Macleod, River of Gold, by Hector Holthouse, My Natives and I, by Daisy Bates and The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, by Kieth Windschuttle. Of course there are the many first hand accounts of the early settlers and explorers which are widely available.
Reading only one source on perhaps any given subject will sell you short on the information required to reach an informed opinion, only by reading from many sources, and weighing the information from those sources, can you form an opinion on the balance of probabilities of what is most likely the truth of the matter. This can be especially so today in the study of history, where new age historians have the strange idea that history is a fluid animal, always open to interpretation.
Today, we, through media and interested parties with a particular agenda, are taught a very much sanitised version of Aboriginal history. In reality, Aboriginal culture was just as dark and violent as any of the worlds ancient cultures.
Australia was never going to be left lone. The modern world was always destined to come here, there is simply no argument against that. One could say that the Aboriginal people were simply minding the country until the modern world decided to show up. I do no wish to play down any atrocities which may have been committed by white settlement, but it could also be said that the Aboriginal people were lucky that it was the English who colonised this continent, and not some of the other powers lurking around the world at the time. Indeed, Aboriginal woman in particular may have some cause to celebrate. Before colonisation, or invasion, depending on your viewpoint, women, were merely chattels to the men, incubators who were betrothed to older men at their birth, who, at the time of puberty were sent to that man for his pleasure. Their life was often one of a never ending cycle of violence. If not for the white people, as hard as some of that was for them, they would still be in that cycle of violence.
Even today some of those old customs are still practiced in areas out of sight of the well healed Australian, who mostly turns a blind eye, save for the feigned indignance they occasionally show, between sipping their café latte’s. They certainly would not have the voice and freedoms which they have the opportunity to enjoy today. Which culture would they prefer ?
Last year was supposedly the year of truth telling, but I did not hear much in the way of truth about the type of culture which Aboriginal people, and their hangers on are fighting for. I do not wish in any way to denigrate their culture, but what I do want is to hear the truth, to see the good and the bad. This modern version of culture which is being pushed unrelentingly, is failing Aboriginal people. Without balance, without acknowledging the sometimes brutal culture of the past, we let it continue to be visited upon the present.
All those who soak up Dark Emu, as if it is an elixir for Aboriginal ills, are complicit in condemning present, and future generations of Aboriginal people to violence and sexual abuse. You shut your eyes to it, you pretend that it does not exist. You swallow the collective narrative shown to you by lazy journalists, and the politically correct socialista’s of our time.
I have included a link to but some of the accounts of Aboriginal culture which many would prefer to imagine do not exist. It is not to denigrate, there are many great aspects of Aboriginal culture to be celebrated, but to move forward to a better existence, one must acknowledge all of the past, good and bad.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/bennelong-papers/2016/04/genuflecting-savagery/
Any opinion expressed above is mine alone, the facts however speak for themselves.
Truthinhistorymatters 