Well, thank the Lord for small mercies: a woke bureaucratic push to rename a Tasmanian electorate after an Aboriginal murderer has been abandoned. While sensible Tasmanians celebrated the aborted attempt, they should perhaps take a closer look.
Because the renaming was abandoned not because it was too woke, but because it wasn’t woke enough for the race-grifters and box-tickers. of whom Tasmania has more than the national average. Despite Truganini’s death 150 years ago, Tasmania somehow has more ‘Aborigines’ than any other state. Nearly double, in fact. It’s a nice grift if you can get on it: pasty white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes are no barriers in the Aboriginal industry.
So, why was the name change abandoned? Because of a woker-than-thou fight over how to spell a name from a culture that never even developed a written language. I kid you not.
“The panel considered the case for the proposed name to be very strong – including Tongerlongeter’s strong connection to the area encompassed by the new boundaries of the electorate of Franklin,” Australian Electoral Commissioner Jeff Pope said.
“However, public submissions not only indicated a level of disagreement among Tasmanian Aboriginal organisations and individuals about the proposed name but also highlighted a broad sentiment that further consultation was required […]
The proposal had been criticised by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), which said the warrior’s name was actually Tukalunginta.
While they quibble over the many different ways to spell potayto, potahto; ugabuga, oogabooga.
Meanwhile, as they do with every murderous thug, from Che Guevara to Hamas, the left are determined to lionise a pitiless, racist killer.
Tongerlongeter was not exactly a noble freedom fighter. He was a war leader who specialised in the slaughter of isolated settlers, especially if they were helpless women and small children. During the Black War of the 1820s and 1830s, he and his Oyster Bay allies conducted a campaign of raids that left more than two hundred whites dead, according to historian Nicholas Clements. Huts burned, crops destroyed, livestock stolen and families butchered.
The two October 1828 attacks near Lake Tiberias remain particularly stark. Anne Geary was killed with axes and spears while her hut was being plundered. When Patrick Gough rode to help, the same war party speared his wife, who later died of her wounds. Their four-year-old daughter Alicia was beaten to death with a waddy. The seven-year-old and the 13-month-old were also clubbed and somehow survived. Two weeks later another raid left young John Langford dead from multiple spear wounds to the groin, neck and arm; his mother and sister were speared but lived.
These killings of women and children were the immediate trigger for the proclamation of martial law on 5 November 1828. The University of Newcastle’s frontier massacre project records 23 Oyster Bay warriors, “possibly led by Tongerlongter”, carrying out the raids.
Yet the Australian Electoral Commission, until the spelling row forced a retreat, wanted to scrub the name of explorer Sir John Franklin from the electorate he had held for 120 years and replace it with that of the man responsible for such atrocities. The official rationale was the usual cant about “honouring” Aboriginal resistance to colonial expansion. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the British Australian Community correctly called it an unnecessary and hostile erasure of Australia’s Anglo-Celtic foundations.
Funny how, when it’s blacks killing whites, it’s ‘resistance’. When it’s the other way round, and almost always in reprisal for the other, it’s suddenly a ‘massacre’.
But then, we are dealing with people who call mass rape and baby-killing ‘resistance’.
The left’s selective memory is by now a familiar pathology. Any non-European who killed whites is automatically rebranded a resistance hero. The same people who demand statues of explorers and governors be torn down will happily name public institutions after men who speared toddlers. The only thing that stopped them this time was an internal dispute over orthography among groups that never possessed a written language in the first place.
Tasmania’s Aboriginal industry remains a thriving racket. The numbers keep rising long after the last full-blood Tasmanian died. The grift is simple: claim the identity, collect the benefits and demand the rest of us rewrite history in your preferred spelling. That the proposed name change collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity is a minor win. The deeper sickness, the determination to lionise killers while erasing the civilisation that built the place, remains untreated.
