Posts by Joe Wylie
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Tim Flannery makes a good case in The Future Eaters that the main reason the Botany Bay penal colony wasn't situated in NZ was due to the intractability of the locals.
Cook already had Tasman's charts of NZ, Western Australia and Van Diemen's Land. He came here expecting to find the place, The big surprise came after leaving NZ, when he ran up against the hitherto unknown East Coast of Australia.
As a possible site for a penal colony, NZ looked good - similar climatic conditions to Europe, etc. The only trouble was those pesky uppity natives.
BTW 1788, Flannery's edition of the remarkable Watkin Tench's journal of the first fleet and the settlement of Botany Bay and Sydney Cove, is a great account of first contact with aboriginals.
When you compare Tench's - and even Governor Phillip's - attitudes to that of Howard, you can onlly conclude that things have gone horribly backwards.Meanwhile, for those who like such things, a one-page history of Australia by the great Simon O'Really, from Australian Motorcycle News:
http://members.tripod.com/fredgassit/fguvnor.gif -
A guy is driving on the Warringah expressway. Some battler in a Commodore cuts in ahead of him, forcing him to brake.
'Where'd you get your license - K-mart?' the guy mutters.
A little later an aboriginal in an expensive car pulls the same trick.
'We should never have given those bastards the right to vote back in '67,' says the guy, 'look how they abuse it.' -
Good point on the Maori Warden.
If Howie was serious (and we all know he's not) a community based structure with resources to take on the community as a whole is a great start.Like most good ideas it's been thought of before - over and over and over again, as it happens, right back to the Queensland 'native police' of the 19th century.
See here, for example:http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/alrc/publications/reports/31/Ch_32.html
Not sure what you mean by 'taking on the community' - if there's no economic base then 'wardens' will be no better than jailers.
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I agree, a witch hunt for pedophiles and abusers is not the answer. It will cause great fear. Sure, do justice when it's found necessary, but going after injustice in the form Howard is proposing is creating another injustice.
Expect to see selected 'abusers' identified and publicly vilified, just as asylum seekers were in the manufactured 'children overboard' election rort of 2001. There'll be the usual Howard dog-whistle message of what-can-you-expect-of-people-who-do-this-to-their-kids.
Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough on Tuesday said concerns were being whipped up by people who themselves had something to fear from the reforms.
"It is the very typical scaremongering, standover, bully-boy tactics and lies that some have perpetrated upon their people for too long, to keep them scared of authority, to keep them in a state of desperation," he said.
There you have it - everyone who opposes this plan is an abuser.
I do think that the Aboriginal community and many in this blog may need to stop seeing this community as 'victims' supreme.
It'll take more than positive thinking to counter the Howard government's opportunistic attacks on aboriginals.
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I do think the Aboriginals were treated worse, either through their own weakness or greater cruelty in the invaders of the time. Or both, more likely.
Weakness being numerical inferiority, perhaps?
Whatever Ben, overall I'd pretty much agree. It's hard to live and travel in Australia for any length of time without accumulating a host of anecdotal stories of past horrors - for example, the great rock near Dorrigo, NSW, where the local people were reputedly rounded up and forced to jump from to their deaths.Still, we regularly came across human bones among the gravel of the North Island river I swam in as a kid, but that was held to be Te Rauparaha's doing.
I don't believe that it's any exaggeration to describe Keith Windschuttle, Howard's favourite historian, as morally equivalent to a holocaust denier.
I'm cautious about making easy comparisons between the situation here and in Australia. In the late '80s I was in Sydney, talking with a tertiary educated, politically astute civil servant. The Bulletin had ran an article about Winston Peters, and she was genuinely interested in how someone from NZ saw him. We talked about the similarites and differences between Oz and Nz, and how Peters fitted in to all of this.
Then, suddenly, she asked 'Would he have come up through the mission system?'From an Australian standpoint it was a perfectly reasonable question, but I found myself struck by the sheer gulf of understanding.
While I've spent a major chunk of my adult life in Oz, I sometimes wonder if I'm any better informed than she was. -
Howard's initiative is not humanitarian - it's part of an ongoing process of constantly chiseling at the vulnerable, even to the extent of plundering them of their culture. As an example of this mean-spiritedness, there's a group of particularly striking rock paintings in a national park in Victoria. A persistent local myth has it that they were created sometime in the late 19th century by a visiting 'French impressionist', as they're far too sophisticated to have been produced by blackfellas.
This kind of thing directly undermines aboriginal autonomy. The highly distinctive rock art of the Kimberley has become a tourist attraction in recent years. Most examples are on land held as long-term cattle leases. When the local aboriginal nation attempted to re-establish an economic base by running guided tours of THEIR heritage, local graziers took legal action, using a scholastically spurious account produced by a local crackpot as evidence that the Kimberley art was produced by a now-vanished people with Indonesian affiliations. Beef prices were down, tourism was suddenly lucrative. The vulnerable are plundered over and over again.
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There's an account in James Belich's Making Peoples of Cook's first encounter with Aboriginals off the Australian coast. When the Endeavour appeared among their bark canoes they simply gestured for him to piss off out of their fishing spot. Belich notes that this lack of interest in the marvels of Western superiority is a trait for which Aboriginals 'have never been forgiven.'
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Australians are not all rednecked bigots, and some New Zealanders could do with being less smug and self-satisfied about their supposed superiority over their Australian cousins.
3+ cheers for that. As James Belich and others have amply demonstrated, this country couldn't have been colonised without the active co-operation of a large proportion of Maori. Whatever concessions Maori have won or retained have been through their own effort, not because they were subjected to a somehow kinder 'n gentler colonising force.
By indulging in feel-good smugness about how comparatively enlightened we imagine ourselves to be we simply help to perpetuate the situation that we're so happy to condemn. -
Howard deserves critical/sceptical/conditional support at present rather than falling back on all too easy demonisation.
I'd suggest that 'all too easy demonisation' is exactly what Howard is practising against remote aboriginal communities. As for 'coming down on MEN who exploit children', Howard has shown little interest in curbing the activities of whites who sexually exploit aboriginals.
Try visiting a pub in a Western NSW town such as Narrabri, or pretty much anywhere outside the tourist zones of the Territory. Those unprepossessing individuals who occupy their own semi-ostracised end of the bar aren't referred to as gin jockeys because of their drinking habits.
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Very impressed by the way that pesky puss got transformed into a zip-up pencil case.