Australian History X

[stui magpie]

This Wiki article is actually a quite good summary of what happened in Tassie, including the background, the actions and the attempts by the governor of the time to control the situation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War

As far as the numbers of Tasmanian Aboriginals goes,

[Pies4shaw]

The away team seems to have won most of those encounters: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php

[Wokko]

[Wokko]

[HAL]

[David]

[Pi]

[stui magpie]

[Pies4shaw]

[stui magpie]

But it is to re-write history and teach falsehoods to others

[Pies4shaw]

[Mugwump]

Many are in the bitter, bilious article from the young lady in the Guardian which started this digression. Let me use two examples from the “Strength through guilt” youth propaganda arm of the modern Left, ie pop music:

“ Beds are Burning” by Midnight Oil - “It belongs to them/ Let’s give it back”.

“Solid Rock” by Shane Howard/Goanna :
“Don't tell me that it's justified, 'cause somewhere, someone lied
Yeah well someone lied, genocide...”

I often ask young adults emerging from today’s Australian school system about our history, and they know relatively little of the 19th century other than the evils of white colonialism, and “massacres”, which they relay with a clear sense of being far superior to their great-grandfathers. They are often surprised to hear that white settlers were - justifiably enough - sometimes attacked by Aboriginal people first in those massacres, or that aboriginal tribal customs might not fit their modern morals either. They show, in short very little historical awareness. They know next to nothing about the complicated tensions between 18th Centuriy imperialism, settlement, British law, security and development which were navigated by people who managed the successful emergence of the modern, free, tolerant and prosperous nation they now enjoy.

The actual history has been reduced to a cheap, smug morality play, and that, taken all together, is a grave falsehood.

[pietillidie]

^As hyperbolic as a Beds are Burning is, it was a reaction against a good few centuries of genuinely racist ideology which pervaded common thought and institution, and which largely went unquestioned until genuine space for alternative critique was created from, say, the 1970s forward. Further, the racism of those centuries was so thorough, its menace lives on even today even though its original purveyors have long passed on.

So, to get upset by a contemporary over-correction in the light of such genuine racism, when the dominant institutional and academic position assumed rather than critiqued it right up until the 1990s, is to decontextualise the problem. Not too long ago, there was virtually no protest at all; that, it seems, is the vastly greater horror which was, and still should be, the starting point of discussion.

The matter of whether anyone at all can escape history, whether be a colonial racist or a teenage socialist, is quite a different question.

[David]

[stui magpie]