Brian Ross wrote on Sep 11
th, 2022 at 11:57pm:
About time some truth came to Australian interaction with the Indigenous peoples and their resistance to white colonialism. The Australian War Memorial has resisted telling this version of Australian history for over three or more decades that I am aware of. Shame, really.
The first episode of the show, produced by Rachel Perkins, daughter of the late Charles Perkins, made a number of claims which cannot be verified but serve to vilify the nation’s European colonisers.
In the introductory episode the staggering claim is made that 100,000 Aboriginals were murdered by troops or settlers in wars which lasted a century.
There is no evidence presented to justify this statement and even the final findings of the eight-year long Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project (elements of which have been successfully challenged) conducted by University of Newcastle emeritus professor Lyndall Ryan do not support this figure. The Guardian, which supported Professor Ryan’s flawed project, analysed the data and found that between 11,000 and 14,000 Aboriginal people died.
Which leaves a credibility gap into which Perkins’ 89,000 to 86,000 alleged deaths have fallen.
War is usually defined as a state of armed conflict between two countries or different groups within a country but it clear that there was never a state of war between Great Britain and an Aboriginal nation as there were no Aboriginal nations, no matter how nation is defined.
Further, the groups of Aboriginals who resisted European settlement did not constitute a coherent body.
Wars is too strong a term for what were at best deadly skirmishes between soldiers and a handful of Aboriginal clan leaders initially and later between small Aboriginal bands and police or settlers.
The claim is also made that children were taken as ‘slaves’ and that women and children were the most valuable commodities in the nascent colony though there is no evidence that slavery was ever practised by the colonisers and certainly no evidence that women and children were traded as commodities.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/australian-notes-321/