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stui magpie Gemini

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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:48 pm
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K wrote:
Do high-school students actually study Australian history? I don't think they did in my school. I think in primary school, history was more of the Burke and Wills stuff, not details of citizenship acts. By 11th and 12th grades, studying (almost) any subject is optional, but of all the different history courses, Australian history was regarded as the "veggie" course.


Neither of my kids did it at school, the curriculum are all over the shop these days.

Back when I went to high school in the late 70's early 80's, apart from maths and English, yr 7 and 8 were like a taster plate. You'd do variety of different subjects for a term or 2, then you'd do something different. That gave you an idea of what the different subjects were so by yr 9 and 10 you could choose most of your subjects.

I've always had an interest in history but didn't like the rubbish they taught in yr 7 and 8 so never studied it further. Now I just research topics that interest me on the net.

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HAL 

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 5:53 pm
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Will that accomplish your objective?
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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 9:07 pm
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Here’s some rigorous and in-depth research into the nearly 300 Indigenous massacres (i.e. killings of six people or more in one go) that occurred in Australia between 1788 and 1930:

https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 9:16 pm
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OK, I'll read that later but can I ask what is your planned trajectory for this thread?
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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 9:24 pm
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This link relates back to my comment that Australia has a bloody history, which Mugwump disputed (essentially calling it self-hating propaganda). To be fair, I think a lot of Australians of previous generations would be surprised to learn about these mass killings, as it certainly doesn’t seem to have been taught or even widely known about until recent years.

As for my plans for this thread, I have nothing specific in mind. I only split these posts out because they were off-topic. But now it’s here, I don’t think it’s a bad opportunity to discuss the country’s past.

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stui magpie Gemini

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.


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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 9:48 pm
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OK, I get the thread split no dramas, and your "agenda" is that Australia had a bloody past. I get that too.

As I said, I'll read the link later (tomorrow) however I don't agree we had a bloody past if it's put in context with the time and compared to other colonised countries. We'll see how this plays out,. Wink

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thesoretoothsayer 



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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 9:58 pm
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David wrote:
Here’s some rigorous and in-depth research into the nearly 300 Indigenous massacres (i.e. killings of six people or more in one go) that occurred in Australia between 1788 and 1930:

https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/


Well the first 2 I randomly clicked on seem to be reprisals for the killing of white colonists:
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=1045
https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/detail.php?r=1232

Good on the indigenous folks for fighting for their lands but what exactly would you expect the colonists response to be?
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David Libra

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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 10:37 pm
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A great many were, sts. It says so in the introduction:

https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/introduction.php

Quote:
From their studies Clark and Gardner identified the key characteristics of frontier massacre.

- Usually takes place in response to the Aboriginal killing of a white person, usually a male who had abducted and sexually abused an Aboriginal woman, or the alleged Aboriginal theft of colonial property such as livestock which had occupied Aboriginal hunting grounds.
- Planned rather than a spontaneous event.
- Intention is to destroy or eradicate the victims or force them to submission.
- Assassins and victims usually know each other.
- Takes place in secret.
- Code of silence in the aftermath, makes detection extremely difficult.
- Witnesses, assassins and survivors sometimes acknowledge the massacre long after the event when fear of arrest or reprisal from the assassins is no longer an issue.

The characteristics matched those identified by international massacre scholar, Jacques Semelin in 2001.

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stui magpie Gemini

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Joined: 03 May 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 31, 2018 11:05 pm
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OK, I read your post above and decided to have a quick read. first thing I read was this.

Quote:
From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued until the 1960s massacres became a defining strategy to eradicate that resistance.


Nah, sorry, website content does not pass the test of being factual and unbiased. That bit alone tells me all I need ti know.

Ba Bow, fail, try again.

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Pies4shaw Leo

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:44 am
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So the Tasmanian Aborigines are therefore not dead? Is it only a massacre if it’s like some of the things that happened in Bosnia?

If, let’s say, some foreign invading force suddenly turned up to take your place and you resisted because you thought of it as yours (killing a couple of the invaders) and then the invading force decided to kill you and a dozen neighbours to make a point, would that not be a massacre? Like atrocities in war, massacres aren’t necessarily committed only by one side. But, to the extent that people are butchered, we tend to call it a massacre (unless we did it, in which case it was necessary, expedient, proportionate and clever).

I don’t understand why people can’t accept the obvious. I don’t feel responsible for anything my ancestors did to the indigenous inhabitants here but neither do I feel any desperate urge to pretend that the past didn’t happen.

I accept, of course, that it is important for genuine reactionaries to gloss over such things (because the preference for an idealised “gentler” past over the nasty present is somewhat undercut by acknowledging the true horror and barbarity of life before the invention of blockchain) but unless people are actually stuck in an idyllic past thinking about how awful things have been since electricity, I don’t see the attraction.
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Mugwump 



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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 8:52 am
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David wrote:
This link relates back to my comment that Australia has a bloody history, which Mugwump disputed (essentially calling it self-hating propaganda). To be fair, I think a lot of Australians of previous generations would be surprised to learn about these mass killings, as it certainly doesn’t seem to have been taught or even widely known about until recent years.

As for my plans for this thread, I have nothing specific in mind. I only split these posts out because they were off-topic. But now it’s here, I don’t think it’s a bad opportunity to discuss the country’s past.



Thanks for splitting the thread, David.

Actually what I disputed was the statement that Australia’s history “was no more or less bloody than most nations”. I realise it was just a throwaway line, and it’s not entirely fair to pick one line out of a complex post and go to town on it, as I did. I reacted because my experience with anyone under 30 is that they have a reflex view that Australia's history is mostly a catalogue of violence from white people toward aboriginal people. There is plenty of blood in Australia’s history, of course, as there is plenty of blood in our cities today, and I think this thread has canvassed reasonably the battles that happen when a vastly technologically superior system comes into conflict with a stone age civilization, in a period of history when racism and international competition was the default mindset. In truth, given those facts, the colonization of Australia was not terribly bloody. That is because British law tried to bridle many of the worst excesses of settlers with government, and because of the relative peaceableness and sheer simplicity of Aboriginal people at that time. Indeed,one of the things I fear about the now prevalent, untrue “genocide and massacre” narrative is that it is probably a matter of time before a few idiots start to use it as a pretext for terrorism.

My point is not that no blood was shed, or that what happened was generous and kindly. It is simply that Australia’s history, by world standards, has been relatively peaceful and law-based. Yet that is not the message that our young people, or (ref Stui’s corporate speaker example), mainstream culture now receives.

The Aboriginal people were going to be overtaken in the age of empire because their isolation for so many years meant that their level of technology was so primitive. That they were overtaken by the British, with their tradition of law and a liberal idea that stretched back to the Bill of Rights of 1688 , was relatively - the word should be stressed - fortunate for them. We do not have to whitewash what happened. But nor should we pretend that it was nothing but a catalogue of official brutality.

Really being grown up about history means facing the many bad things that happened, and weighing them simultaneously with the many positive. It also means realizing that people in the distant past acted without foresight, without telephones, without the internet, without international laws and institutions, without many aspects of the modern mind at all. It also means not reading modern morality into history. History is not a bank where you can claim credits and cash cheques against the present. It is, at best, a museum where you try to sift complex truths and learn things that may help you do better next time.

It is indeed time we faced Australian history as it really was.

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David Libra

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Joined: 27 Jul 2003
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 11:53 am
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stui magpie wrote:
OK, I read your post above and decided to have a quick read. first thing I read was this.

Quote:
From the moment the British invaded Australia in 1788 they encountered active resistance from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owners and custodians of the lands. In the frontier wars which continued until the 1960s massacres became a defining strategy to eradicate that resistance.


Nah, sorry, website content does not pass the test of being factual and unbiased. That bit alone tells me all I need ti know.

Ba Bow, fail, try again.


The resource, from what I can gather, is a methodically and carefully researched project, and – apart from the reference to the 1960s, which seems late to me (elsewhere on the site they refer to the 1930s as the endpoint of the study) – I don't see anything in that quote to suggest that the project isn't factual or unbiased. It also reports killings of white colonists by Aboriginal people, carefully explains its terms of reference and is rigorously referenced.

If there were nearly 500 (not 300, as I incorrectly wrote in a previous post) mass killings of Aboriginal people in around 150 years, with a combined death toll of over 12,000, that does suggest that these were a fairly commonplace punitive response (albeit one generally committed by vigilantes) and a means of eradicating resistance to white settlement.

Here's one story of a massacre from 1928, in which between 60 and 100 Aboriginal men, women and children were slaughtered in response to the murder of a white Australian:

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

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 12:20 pm
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The facts and numbers may be researched, but the language it's presented in is from someone with a seriously biased agenda.

Use of the term "invaded" up front is the first big alarm bell as it's a provocative term that does not have universal acceptance. Also claiming that the massacres were part of some overall "strategy" shows again a level of bias.

"The centre for 21st century humanities"? Please Rolling Eyes

Can you find something written by a real scientist or researcher who knows how to present facts without putting their own emotive overlay on it?

edit, the Wiki article was good. I can see that happening and can almost understand how and why, without in anyway attempting to condone or justify it

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David Libra

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:28 pm
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The centre is run by the University of Newcastle (among the ten top-ranked universities in the country), so it's not just some bunch of randoms – I presume they are experienced researchers who are subject to normal academic standards and requirements. I don't think 'invasion' is in any way a contentious or provocative term for the settlement of Australia, and am surprised that you think it is. What would you describe as an invasion, if not that?

As for strategy, I don't think anyone's suggesting that Australia's politicians, judges and police officers were all sitting around working out the most efficient ways to kill Aboriginal people. Clearly, there were many who thought that they ought to be protected (in some sense), and many others who only excused these massacres in a limited sense (e.g. as a targeted response to a specific act). But it seems clear that there was something systemic and commonplace about these acts, and they were certainly in many cases premeditated – hence the use of the word 'strategy'.

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stui magpie Gemini

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PostPosted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:52 pm
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premeditated in the case that groups deliberately went out hunting rather than tripped over and fell on an Aboriginal camp and killing them? I'll wear it in that context, but not in the case of some overarching strategy.

I assume most of the massacres follow similar themes and the overarching theme really is one that's been played out the world over. 2 disparate groups of people in conflict over the same patch of land and resources.

I grew up in the bush, it can be a harsh place to be a farmer or pastoralist. On one hand you have pastoralists trying to make a living on the land raising cattle, needing water and on the other hands groups of people just trying to live on that same land the way they always had. 2 groups in conflict, neither with a lot of sympathy for the other.

Each side has targeted responses to specific acts, whether it be natives killing cattle, or station hands raping Indigenous women. One side gets pissed off and people get killed. There is one or more reprisals, the side with the better weapons kills more people.

These are all isolated incidents with common themes and causes. Deeply regrettable yes, but understandable if seen through the lens of that time.

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