They never lived in Disneyland nor had a Disneyland type existence.


Sorcery:  Belief in sorcery as the explanation for deaths due to injury and disease is a feature of the culture that remains widespread in Aboriginal communities. Gary Johns says in his book, The Burden of Culture (which can be purchased here) “Clearly, sorcery is alive and well”.[1]  Professor Peter Sutton deals with this in Chapters 4 and 5 of The Politics of Suffering. He said:

The ancient institution of sorcery continues to maintain a function for many groups…There are still many Aboriginal communities in which virtually all deaths, other than those of infants, and in some cases, the elderly, are either attributed to sorcery committed by members of near or distant groups, or result from personal violence. Sometimes it is both. Many homicides or accidental killings are attributed to a sorcerer using the assailant as an instrument, or using the unwitting driver in the case of a car crash. The one whose act overtly caused death may thus be regarded as personally blameless. [p 89]

It is a feature of the culture that causes much harm. Belief in sorcery impedes delivery of modern and effective medical treatments in Aboriginal communities. See Sutton, Chapter 5 and Johns, Chapter 10. Sutton says that “well-meaning whitefellas who support traditional doctors in their quest to peel back the post-colonial power differential have to face the fact that traditional healers are likely to constitute a danger to the already disastrous health of their communities.’[2]

But this current element of traditional culture is going to be, by Queensland parliamentary decree, part of an “enormous resource for Queensland”.

Violent misogyny: In many indigenous communities in Australia there is a high incidence of violence to women. A 2015 Queensland Government task force report said that

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Queensland experience disproportionately high levels of violence, including domestic and family violence with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women being 35 times more likely than members of general population to be hospitalised for spouse/domestic partner assaults … Plainly, the most common pattern of domestic and family violence is that it is committed by men against women. [3]

That is an astonishing statistic.

In the Northern Territory the situation is worse. The rate of hospitalisation is up to 86 times higher for Aboriginal women. In Central Australia, this figure is 95 times more likely for Aboriginal women. The deaths of Aboriginal women from such ­violence comprise the most frequent form of homicide in Australia today. The media has shown little interest in that, preferring to concentrate on the rare police shootings of Aboriginal men. An Aboriginal man’s life is still valued much more highly than a woman’s. As Justice Judith Kelly of the Northern Territory Supreme Court said in a speech in August 2022:

Between 2000 and 2022, two Aboriginal men were shot by police both times followed by massive press coverage, calls for enquiries etc. In that same period, 65 Aboriginal women were killed by their partners … and in each case you would have been flat out seeing a small report on page 5 or 7 of a local newspaper – nothing nationally.

The Queensland Task Force touched on cultural factors for the violence suffered by indigenous women but identified intergenerational trauma as the major cause of this misogynistic violence:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Queenslanders have a unique history, very different from that of other sections of the Queensland population and characterised by successive generations of colonisation, dispossession, violence, and discrimination. A legacy of trauma arising from this history pervades the lives of individuals, families and communities and is seen as a causal factor for violence in the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and a causal factor for a range of other social, economic, psychological and emotional issues that themselves are situational factors contributing to violence. [p120]

The Queensland government accepts that intergenerational trauma resulting from colonial dispossession of their ancestors is the major explanation for indigenous men bashing and killing their women in such large numbers. The men can’t help themselves. They are innocent victims of white colonialism. It has accepted its treaty committees’ recommendation:

That the Queensland Government resource a comprehensive process of Truth Telling to chronical the history of First Nations Peoples prior to British colonisation of Queensland, …

That healing and reconciliation be supported through the Truth Telling process with relevant service providers engaged to provide support to First Nations People to recover from their lived experience and impacts of intergenerational trauma.

But neither the task force nor the government or its treaty committees have considered whether male violence to women is entrenched in Aboriginal cultures. There is much evidence that it is. Given the longevity of cultural behaviours, that may  better explain the persistence of such violence and the difficulty in eradicating it than the newly discovered intergenerational trauma that sounds like a medical diagnosis to which no blame can attach to the sufferers.[4]

Though unfashionable to admit it, violent misogyny has long been an element of Aboriginal culture.

Misogyny – other forms: There is other evidence of the misogyny in traditional First Nations cultures. In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes, summed up the position of women in First Nations culture:

It [marriage] did not change a woman’s status much. Both before and after, she was merely a root-grubbing, shell-gathering chattel, whose social assets were wiry arms, prehensile toes and a vagina. [p 16]

This is not an exaggeration. Historian Henry Reynolds in The Other Side of the Frontier [1990 edition] at p146 mentions male Aborigines’ attitudes to their women. Referring to the last decades of the nineteenth century, Reynolds spoke of indigenous men changing traditional patterns of migration round their country in the far north of the continent to travel down to the sea coasts when the pearling luggers were laid up for the monsoon season because they preferred to live “in ease and idleness” from the earnings of their women whom they prostituted to the pearling fleets rather than seeking the more uncertain returns from vestigial hunting and gathering. “The demand for the young women was such that all other clan members could live off the proceeds of their copulation for the duration of the [monsoon] lay-up season.” [p177]

This was not a recent or localised abuse by aboriginal men of their women: Reynolds also refers [p179] to reports in the first three decades of that century by sea captains, officials and settlers of similar behaviour by aboriginal men in the Bass Strait region.

Anthropologist Bill Stanner reported similar behaviour around the Daly River in the early 1930s of Aboriginal men pushing their women into sexual relationships with European and Chinese farmers in return for payments of tobacco, sugar and tea.[5]  It appears that a feature common to various Aboriginal cultures from first contact was the use by the men of their women as a means of obtaining from Europeans the goods they wanted. The women were also used by the men in traditional culture as negotiating pawns. Mark Powell in “Reconciliation Starts with Telling the Truth” (Quadrant 27 May 2021) quotes from The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them, by AP Elkins, Professor of Anthropology, University of Sydney 1934-1956:

When an attacking party is about to attack the home party, the latter, if it does not want to fight, will send a number of its women over to the former. If these are willing to settle the matter in dispute without fighting, they have sexual intercourse with the women; if not, they send them back untouched.

If this is how Aboriginal men, widely separated in place and time, treated their women, how can traditional Aboriginal cultures properly be recognised in legislation as an “enormous resource for Queensland”? Will the  Minister for Women and for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence have anything to say about any of this when her government’s treaty legislation is before the parliament?

Violence: Professor Mick Dodson told the National Press Club: “ Importantly, I want to make the point that violence is not and never was part of Aboriginal tradition. … Most of the violence, if not all, that Aboriginal communities are experiencing today are not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture.”[6]

The hold this myth of a uniquely non-violent culture polluted by the arrival of white settlers has on many Australians was recently shown by the call by the federal politician Zali Steggall, for local councils across Australia to include a one minute’s silence during their official Australia Day celebrations in recognition of the Indigenous Australians’ lives lost since 26 January1788. While it marks the commencement of European colonisation of this land, she said, “it also represents the commencement of violence.” [7]

The anthropologists David McKnight, who worked on Mornington Island in the 1960s, said of the avoidance of the topic of indigenous violence by some anthropologists and others: “It seems to be quite acceptable to write about violence, providing that one takes the line that the people are basically peace loving and shy but they have become violent because of exploitation by Europeans.” That was the approach of the Queensland task force in 2015.

A more realistic view of the place of violence in Queensland’s Aboriginal cultures than Professor Dodson’s was common in earlier times. In 1895 the Queensland Government appointed Archibald Meston, who was previously Protector of Aborigines, as a special commissioner to report on their conditions in Queensland. Meston started from Thursday Island and moved southward. He said:

The white man came and shot game and trespassed anywhere without permission. When a white man took up land or a station, he expected the blacks of that locality to move back into other territory, unconscious that this would be an unpardonable violation of tribal laws, and involve immediate deadly warfare with the adjoining tribes. …[8]

There is much evidence, widely ignored, of the violence that pervaded Aboriginal culture pre-1788. Some is referred to by Quadrant‘s  Tony Thomas in “The long history of Aboriginal violence”.

Is the brutal and continuing violence in the traditional culture of First Nations really a part of the ‘enormous resource for Queensland”?

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/aborigines/2023/03/enormous-resource-only-when-l...

Great read.
Can see why this doesn't fit the narrative of the arse holes feeding in the trough of first nations, welcome to country, smoke festing, dot painting parasites.
They want it like a tropical island getaway, and are pushing that propaganda hard.

Don't let the truth get in the way of the leftist utopia.

Frank wrote on Mar 7^th, 2023 at 9:26am:


Fits right in with the beaver-bashing and beaver-owner bashing, eh?  The racism, discrimination, misogyny, victimhood mentality, cargo cult mentality... you name it....

Frank wrote on Mar 7^th, 2023 at 9:26am:


Well they're both Portals to Africa and both have a big Sacred Rock.