Bruce Pascoe claims that the genesis of his risible pseudo-history Dark Emu was reading a copy of explorer Ludwig Leichhardt’s journals and supposedly discovering startling ‘facts’ of Aboriginal history that had been nefariously suppressed by academic historians. The suppression must have been good, because no one else who’s pored over Leichardt’s journals since has been able to find any of the bullshit Pascoe claims about widespread agriculture, huge villages and the invention of democracy.
Joe Lane spent years transcribing: not secondhand paperbacks, but the primary sources of much Aboriginal history – journals, letters, 19th century royal commissions and more. All in all, some 6,000 pages of primary source material. As it happens, Lane’s research has indeed uncovered much material that is at odds with the currently accepted narrative of Aboriginal history.
And, unlike Bruce Pascoe, his really are facts, not made-up bullshit by a fake ‘Aborigine’ trougher.
Comprehensively, this primary source material does not support the current narrative. In fact, it supports a more complex and interesting perspective. The dominant paradigm, which is being taught around Australia, in schools and at universities, asserts that
• Aboriginal people were “herded” onto missions;
• Aboriginal people were driven from their lands;
• Countless children were stolen from their families.
At this point, pretty much anyone who’s endured 12 years of indoctrination dressed up as ‘education’ in Australia screams: everyone knows those things are true. But, as is too often the case, what ‘everyone knows’ just ain’t so.
Herding Aborigines onto missions
Between 1840 and the present, the Aboriginal population on missions never exceeded 20 per cent of the total Aboriginal population in contact with the state, except during the Depression when it rose to about 30 per cent. In other words, for most of the time, more than 80 per cent of the Aboriginal population lived away from missions, across the state.
The total number of full-time staff of the grandly named Aborigines Department was one, the Protector. His main task was to set up and supply up to 40 ration depots, as well as roughly as many issuing points for individuals and families. Issuers, who were mainly police officers, station managers and pastoral lessees, and missionaries, were not paid. So: one full-time staff member and 75 or more issuing points. Who was doing the “herding”?
Mission staff rarely numbered more than three or four. They were flat out issuing stores, building cottages, supervising farm work, running the schools, providing medical attention. As far as I know, no mission ever had a fence around it to keep people in.
In fact, they probably wished at times they could fence people out. In keeping with the nomadic traditions that had ruled Aboriginal life for 40,000 years, periodically dozens to hundreds would flock to missions, scarf up all the rations they could and disperse again. In many ways, the missions were precursors of the endemic welfare dependency that blights remote communities to this day.
Driving Aborigines from their lands
There is only one instance in the Protector’s letters of a pastoral lessee trying to drive people from his lease (in 1876), and as soon as the Protector was informed, he wrote to remind the lessee that he would be in breach of his lease, which stipulated that Aboriginal people had all the traditional rights to use the land as they always had done, “as if this lease had not been made”, as the wording went. It was assumed that traditional land use and pastoral land use could co-exist, as, of course, they could and still can. I’m informed that that condition still applies in current legislation.
By the way, six months later, that pastoralist was applying for rations. The depot there was still issuing rations at least thirty years later […]
From the earliest days, Aboriginal people were encouraged to lease plots of land, up to 160 acres rent-free, and to live on the land, which was usually in the country they came from. The earliest record seems to be a woman who had married a white man. Often white men thought that, if they married an Aboriginal woman, they could get a piece of land, but no, the lease was always vested in the Aboriginal partner.
Then we come to the biggest Big Lie of modern Australia: that Aboriginal children were ‘stolen’ as a genocidal policy.
Colonisation disrupted Aboriginal traditional life and family patterns. Women had children by white men (as well as by Africans, Chinese, Afghans and West Indians) and lived peripatetic lives around the towns. Many children were abandoned or orphaned by single mothers who either could not support them or died.
Or were rejected by Aboriginal communities. Dolly Dalrymple, here in Tasmania, was one of three children of an Aboriginal woman traded by her tribe to a Bass Strait sealer. When the sealer returned her to the tribe, they refused to take the children. Dolly and her sister were driven off and their baby brother was thrown on a fire.
All states have fiduciary obligations to their inhabitants, especially to children. The Protector was, in effect and in law, the legal guardian responsible for the well-being of such abandoned children […] the reasons for Aboriginal children being put into care of any sort were not much different from those for any other Australians, and at 4 per cent, neither was the rate of “removal”.
Indeed, more non-Aboriginal children were removed from their parents, usually single mothers forced to adopt out their babies. As a policy, it was paternalistic and often devastating, but it was never racially exclusive, much less a supposed ‘genocide’ policy.
It may not have been all sweetness and light, but neither was it as brutal as the conventional paradigm supposes. Nineteenth-century people were no different from ourselves […]
So why did I believe as I did, without evidence? Because the conventional paradigm, the “black-armband” version, fits together. It makes sense. It doesn’t need evidence.
It’s also bullshit. Destructive, insulting bullshit: and far too many people will willingly gobble up bullshit and call it ice-cream, if it suits their prejudices.
