‘Truth Telling’ Is a Crock of Lies

“Truth telling” is all the rage with the race-grievance industry these days. It’s not exactly a spoiler alert to tell you that actual truth has very little to do with it.

Instead, what we’re getting is activists serving up a farrago of just-so stories and noble savage fairy tales, liberally sauced with anti-White racial animosity. In the “truth telling” game, all “colonisers” are violent and rapacious, all “indigenes” noble, generous and peaceful.

Yet, even when the grievance-mongers and the fake-news peddlers do their best to obscure the truth with an Orwellian exercise in “truth telling”, the actual truth just can’t help shining through.

For more than 180 years, the story of 26 shipwreck survivors who were killed by Aboriginal people in South Australia has been told from a colonial point of view.

By which they mean, “actual, recorded, documentary sources”, instead of fairy-tale “oral traditions”.

Now, thanks to a new project, the Indigenous side of the story will be represented.

As part of the Telling the Whole Story project — a collaboration between First Nations of the South East and the Kingston South East branch of the National Trust — interpretive signs and a sculpture will be installed in a new native garden in Kingston South East.

In other words, a bunch of activists are going to make up a whole lot of bs in order to try and whitewash a massacre, just because the “wrong” people got massacred.

The new installations will sit alongside a 1966 monument that says all survivors of the 1840 Maria shipwreck were murdered in a massacre by members of the Milmendura clan of the Tanganekald people of the Ngarrindjeri nation.

But that’s exactly what happened. The survivors were all massacred by Aborigines.

Cue the hand-waving and excuse-making.

“The broader mainstream culture and society are slowly realising the depths of the offences that have occurred to Aboriginal peoples,” Professor [Irene Watson] said.

So, what “offences” justify murdering helpless shipwreck survivors, including children?

The Maria was wrecked on the Margaret Brock Reef off Cape Jaffa on June 28, 1840.
All 26 people on board managed to make it to shore near what is now Kingston and then tried to walk back along the Coorong, towards Encounter Bay.

They received help from local Aboriginal people but were then all killed in what was described in the 2001 book Fatal Collisions as “the largest murder of Europeans by Indigenous people in Australia’s colonial history”.

Six of the victims were children.

Justify that.

Oh, you bet the Aboriginal industry are going to try.

The 1966 monument, prominently situated in Kingston’s Apex Park, next to a creek named after the Maria, does not give a reason for the shipwreck survivors being killed.

But a chapter on the Maria shipwreck in Fatal Collisions, by University of Adelaide historian Amanda Nettelbeck, details several early accounts of what happened.

One account, from a surgeon who was part of the party sent to the Coorong in 1840, suggests the Aboriginal people killed the shipwreck survivors after helping them to safety and receiving no reward.

So, someone on the ground says the reason for murdering more than two dozen people was umbrage at not getting some gibsmedat? That’s hardly painting the Aborigines in a flattering light.

Consequently, the excuse-making stories get even more unreliable and non-credible.

Another possible motive for the killing came from a letter writer in the South Australian Register newspaper in 1840, who suspected that “loose conduct … with the native women” was behind the deaths.

Similarly, a Ngarrindjeri oral history given to anthropologist Norman Tindale in 1934 said: “Several of the sailors took a favourable opportunity of interfering with some native women.”

In an interview with the ABC in 2003, the late Ngarrindjeri elder Tom Trevorrow said: “There were sailors in that group who kept looking at the young girls, and kept trying to, well, sexually interfere with them.”

So… some rando’s “I Just Reckon” Letter to the Editor and a bunch of Chinese Whispers from decades later. Yep, that’s totally credible stuff.

Even so, how is sexual jealousy a laudable excuse for mass-murder? Would these race-troughers be as eager to excuse settlers who massacred Aborigines for “interfering with white women”?

Of course, the made-up stories try to insinuate that the sailors were rapists, but, in fact, countless documents recorded (at the time, not decades after, and by people who were unusually sympathetic to Aborigines) note that Aboriginal women often showed a marked preference for non-Aboriginal men. Not least because of the gender-based violence of traditional law. William Stanner, for instance, wrote that, “Aboriginal women single or married, were eager for associations with Europeans and Chinese. While ready enough for casual affairs, they tried by any and all means to make semi-permanent or permanent attachments.”

Even accepting the wild rumours of the “truth-telling” troughers, compare the summary mass-murder dished out by the Aborigines with the response of the “colonisers”.

After reports of the deaths reached Adelaide, Governor George Gawler sent a party led by police commissioner Major Thomas O’Halloran to the area with instructions to identify up to three murderers and hang them on the spot.

The instructions and the eventual hanging of two Indigenous men sparked debate at the time because Aboriginal people were considered British subjects, from the proclamation of South Australia as a colony in 1836, and thus deserving of a fair trial.

Instead, the two men were chosen on hearsay and hanged above the graves of the Europeans.

“It was very controversial at the time and it’s one of the reasons Gawler was dismissed [as governor],” Dr Krichauff said.

ABC Australia

So, the “colonisers”, rather than simply massacre the lot for the perceived transgressions of a few, stuck to punishing the few. Yet, even that summary justice was enough to outrage colonial society with its unfairness.

Just who is coming out the better from even this blatantly tendentious exercise in blackwashing “truth telling”?