Annie Anthrax wrote on Feb 4^th, 2012 at 9:42pm:


Great post Annie and I agree with it(and here is comes)......................BUT

At what point in that cycle can we expect them to help themselves?
We as a society have spent billions just over the last couple of decades providing all sorts of stuff, when does it start to fall onto the recievers of this largess(wether owed or not) to start to contribute to their own future?

As an observation, I was driving at the start of last nights game and heard an aboriginal women speaking, what she said did make me think that at least some have finally turned that corner.

salad in wrote on Feb 5^th, 2012 at 8:13pm:


There is nothing wrong with any of the role models you have mentioned.....However there is also nothing wrong with an Indigenous team providing inspiration for young Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.....If you do not like it do not watch it....I think it is a positive initiative that allows young people to support something unique to them they can relate to.....Calling it racism is your choice if that is the way you see it!!!

Aborigines must stop thinking like hunter-gatherers. Otherwise all those millions and billions and Toyotas and houses we give them are just so much huntered and gathered loot - and salve only for our conscience.
Personal responsibility is the cultual divide. Aborigines must take it on our die myserably.  There is no future  in tribalism.

Their way of living is dead, no matter how much they drink or sniff to avoid facing it.

Annie Anthrax wrote on Feb 5^th, 2012 at 5:45pm:

Soren wrote on Feb 5^th, 2012 at 9:05pm:


They do? Most live in cities.

And previous generations worked as wage labourers on cattle stations, which only changed when they earned equal rights to wage awards.

Grey wrote on Feb 6^th, 2012 at 8:56pm:

Big Donger wrote on Feb 6^th, 2012 at 8:33am:

Promptly losing their jobs.

The New Stone Age
[From Chapter One of The Culture Cult]
Should American Indians and New Zealand Maoris and Australian Aborigines be urged to preserve their traditional cultures at all cost? Should they be told that assimilation is wrong? And is it wise to leave them entirely to their own devices?

The Australian example suggests that the answers are no, no, and no. The best chance of a good life for indigenes is much the same as for you and me—full fluency and literacy in English, as much math as we can handle, and a job. In the year 2000 artificially preserved indigenes are doomed.

Since the folly of locking native peoples up in their old-time cultures is plain, but it’s tasteless to say so, governments everywhere resort to the rhetoric of “reconciliation”. This pretends that the problem is psychological and moral: rejig the public mind, ask leading political figures to adopt a contrite demeanor and apologize for the sins of history, and all will be well. Underlying this is the assumption that we’re all on the same plain of social development, divided only by misunderstanding.

This is false. The division is deep—there’s a very Big Ditch between the tribal world and modernity. Until around 1970 governments in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand accepted this fact, and they saw their duty as helping indigenes to cross the Ditch. For that reason they concentrated on better health, education, and housing, and let the chips of traditional culture fall where they may.

That’s how western civilization dealt with its own traditions, creatively destroying those that would not change. Creative destruction is a law of historical advance.

But romantic primitivism swept progressive policies away. Planning for the future and looking forward was out. Looking backward became the only proper way to look. Transfixed by the Culture Cult, a hyperidealised vision of traditional life was adopted, and the effect on indigenes of romanticising their past has been devastating.

On the one hand they found themselves being used as pawns in political games played for high stakes. On the other hand they became the deluded victims of the extravagances of their admirers. If your traditional way of life has no alphabet, no writing, no books, and no libraries, and yet you are continually told that you have a culture which is “rich”, “complex”, and “sophisticated”, how can you realistically see your place in the scheme of things? If all such hyperbole were true, who would need books or writing? In Australia, policies inspired by the Culture Cult have brought the illiterization of thousands of Aborigines whose grandparents could read and write.

http://www.rogersandall.com/the-new-stone-age/

Big Donger wrote on Feb 6^th, 2012 at 10:54pm:



It's this kind of fookin gibberish that reprimitivises them.
There is no goddam dreamtime and rainbow serpent at the bottom of that petrol can, or even on iPad. The Stone Age is over.