The Secular Fundamentalist

Aboriginals - Racism, Imperialism and 'Sorryspeak'

Chapter 23: Aboriginals - Racism, Imperialism and ‘Sorryspeak’

If one were to compare civil libertarians and humanists to regime administrators in the totalitarian mold of the Soviet Union, this would seem on the face of it to be a paranoid ultra right wing absurdity that defied ‘common sense’.  These people speak the language of liberation, popular empowerment, social justice and all the right thinking terms we have come to expect from a secular movement whose business it is to be on the side of the angels.  And the ruling oligarchy supports that, up to a point, by sponsoring a system of governance with democratic features that formally embodies libertarchic ideology in its constitutional arrangements and social and civil administration.

In some ways the relationship the Libertarchs and the industrial oligarchy has a more traditional pre-modern shape, as in the often tense collaborative conflict that characterized the relationship of medieval church and state.  They clashed and jostled as much as they needed, reinforced and moderated one another in the process of overall regime construction and legitimation.
 
The modern twist on that is created by the privatized totalitarian nature of marketed consciousness, which over a 60-70 year period has swallowed almost all its interlocutors, yet maintains a veneer of continuity, normality and business-as-usual.

Our ‘priests’ may be nominally in charge of moral conscience, but the ‘secular’ power controls the way social consciousness is mediated into the marketing system.  This has transformed liberation into disinhibited conformity that offers rights/indulgences to customer citizens.  The effect of this has been to not only turn the ‘libertarchs’ into regime administrators responsible for deregulating social reproduction and governance inside the education, welfare and legal systems, but their libertarian values have come to saturate familial domesticity in exactly the same sort of way as those of the deistic principate, as proselytized by the medieval church, six hundred years ago.

Like the priest class before it, its major job has been to remove its ‘pagan’/traditionalist predecessors and later socialist ‘adventurist’ and/or ‘reactionary’ heresies that might reflect badly on their and the larger ‘regime’ and/or disrupt its internal coherence, and/or interrupt its ‘progress’.  One regime was protecting the axis of feudalism on earth and its divine providence in heaven; the other, the axis of ‘free’ deregulated markets, and existential and social liberty, all within the ambit of capitalist relations of production, consumption and social construction.

While working under earlier state autarchies, the then Nazi and Communist party apparatchiks acted as creatures of the state.  Ideology (The Party) and power (the state apparatus) were formally separate, but managed by a unitary and hierarchical control system.  The Libertarchs, like the earlier priest class, have had a much more arms length relationship with ‘secular’ power, and run social management and heresy agendas on their own account, to not only maintain their authority against ideological ‘forces of darkness’, but the ever encroaching and ever more totalitarian power of the ‘secular’ oligarchy.
 
As in the days when The Mother Church was forced to abandon its more radical secular ambitions by the rise of absolute monarchy and the nation states they created, the modern priests have had to give up on a class based socialist economic alternative to or modification of capitalism.  Therefore to perpetuate their raison d'etre, they have had to invest in social welfare/justice ‘poorthingism’, vicariously leverage off past successes in anti-racist/imperialist struggles in the colonial, semi and post-colonial worlds (while averting the collective gaze from the post-colonial/racist regime failures in these theaters) and attach themselves and the rest of their agenda to the looming environmental crisis.
 
Thus struggle against capital by its working class gave way to a victimological empathy, carried forward on behalf of the local underclass and a struggle against colonial and imperialist ‘aggression’, directed at (in Australia’s case) indigenous peoples.  This was facilitated through constructing a ‘history’ of fascist styled invasion, racist sub-humanization, wholesale land confiscation, ‘concentration camps’, ‘enslavement’ and ‘genocide’.  This narrative became an important plank in the continuing struggle for their legitimacy, relevance and authority as political moralogians. 

History is always to some extent an extension of present ideological narratives and the interests they serve.

A combination double whammy of welfarist ‘Poorthingism’ and anti-racism is an ideal ‘heresy’ targeting device for an ex colonial society like Australia and a perfect platform for creating a sacred site indigenous client sector that is rendered absolutely untouchably criticism proof.  Libertarch administration of it thus becomes failure proof.  And whatever failures do eventuate are infallibly the fault of their old white establishment predecessors, their successors and current ideological fellow travelers, who are forever embalmed in guilt, shame and blame.
 
Indigenous affairs is an irresistibly juicy prestige project with a can’t lose agenda, knee deep in helpless victim pathos and injustices, and a ripe opportunity for righteous outrage, replete with guilty parties, who after several decades of softening up are ready to confess to everything.
 
The Inquisition and the Soviet/Nazi security police often had to torture people to get them to ‘fess up’ to their perverse and dangerous beliefs, and egregious ‘crimes’.  The Libertarchs have used the more subtle methods of the larger marketing system to reconstruct consciousness, using seemingly spontaneous, relentless, and protracted multi-media slow drip propaganda, lobbying, legal leveraging and key strategic individual attack and undermining.
 
Sustained long term pressure institutionalizes itself into an overwhelming given that drowns its antagonists in a labeling language of discredit that seems so ‘just’’, ‘self evident’ and ’damning’. The language of heresy, political deviationism and class enmity had passed into the hands of humanitarians.

As with its totalitarian state predecessors, once the rules of political engagement are shifted, those associated with the old order are bound to have done or not done things which do not comply with the standards and expectations of the new one.  So there are always bound to be wads of deeply incriminating evidence to be found to convict the Old Order apparatchiks dragged before ‘People’s courts’ for political ‘crimes’.
 
The Libertarchs do not have the powers of the great totalitarians, but they do have the same order of ‘influence’ as the medieval ecclesiastics in relation to secular rulers, who could at a pinch brush them off, up to a point, if they were powerful enough.  But the former had the congregation of the faithful and the machinery of ideological and cultural reproduction in their gift and that was a very powerful tool.

While the Church had its own court system and the preaching pulpit, the Libertarchs have had big slabs of the court of public opinion and the liberal media to draw down on.  And every now and again, they get given a moral-issue-of-our-time ‘trial’ to conduct. What could be a better subject than what every true blue Australian school child knows to be the arch villainy of them all: Racism!

Thus hardly anyone except the usual thick skinned diehards in The Melbourne Club (Old Traditionalist Establishment) and The Australian Institute of Public Affairs (Institute for the Maintenance of the Present Oligarchy) is going to even blink at a moral trial aimed at the Old Order, let alone ask awkward question that might put their own ideological values and attitudes into question.  Everyone who knows what is good for them, nods and applauds at the appropriate time.  Those who don’t, and who are insufficiently powerful, are ruthlessly pilloried, given seriously nasty names, are marginalized into the silence of the ideological naughty corner, and made to wear the racist bigot hat.

Mining industry oligarchs like Hugh Morgan can say whatever they like.  He can’t be touched, because his power derives from a corporate network that also controls the strategic sectors of the information media.  But if lesser mortals try to test out Morgan’s views on indigenous people in ‘respectable’ company, expect the ideological whips to be pulled out, and used.  Political correctness is not be sneezed at.  And even in ideologically ‘disreputable’ company, ‘crossing the line’ is a guilty pleasure, done discreetly, for the modern priests have ears.

There is an eerie similarity in show trials, no matter what the period or the issues of the day were or are.  The ideological jargon may sound different, but its methodology is exactly the same, whether we are talking sixteenth and seventeenth century Christendom, the Soviet Union and China in the nineteen thirties to sixties or The Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in the late twentieth century and into the twenty-first.  And however the terms of these trials are couched, whether religious heresy, state political or class deviationism, or racist/fascist criminal conspiracy, the process of regime reinforcement and the discrediting of its targets follows exactly the same pattern.

During the civil war period, a standard tactic for Chinese communist forces when they entered a village was to round up all the local landlords and then subject them to a ‘Speak Bitterness trial’ in front of the entire community; particularly their poorest tenants and laborers.  It could be quite a satisfyingly cathartic score settling exercise.  It gave the pent up resentments of the formerly oppressed (many of them undoubtedly justified) a chance at a table turning day of free kicks on landlord arse.

Naturally the ‘class enemies’ didn’t stand a prayer, as their only role in the proceedings was to stand silently, with their heads bowed low, in a process of public shaming and humiliation.  Comeuppance in some measure it may have been, but a fair trial it was not. And it wasn’t meant to be.  Nor did the poor peasant protagonists have the faintest idea just how drastic, life upturning and sometimes brutal the Communist Party plans for them really were.
 
Poor peasants were just grist in someone else’s mill.

On 13th February 2008, after more than 10 years of debate and procrastination, our then new Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, apologized to the indigenous Australians for what he described as 'stolen generations' that were the victims of an institutional attempt at ethnic and cultural 'genocide'.  He went on to say that he hoped this apology would allow a healing process to take place that would enable 'the stolen generation' to move on......

Back in 1995, the then Paul Keating led Australian Labor Party Federal Government gave The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission the task to investigate institutional racism and the aboriginal assimilationist  policies of governments from the 1930 through to 1970.

There was a prima facie case that the effects of the policies and practices of that period had left behind a great deal of ‘unfinished business'.

The Commission's investigation led to accusations that the then racist social welfare authorities systematically removed particularly 'half caste' children from their aboriginal parents and either fostered them to 'white' families or institutionalized them. All contact between the children and their natural parents was deliberately cut off.

The hearings into these practices produced a litany of distress and failure.

Trying to hide the children’s cultural and ethnic roots from them very likely didn't work in the overwhelming majority of cases.  And those who were institutionalized, like their non aboriginal counterparts, all too often found themselves in depressingly underfunded, overcrowded, over disciplined and under supervised environments that too often (and one case was too often) added sexual interference to the usual Dickensian abuses.  Long term psychological damage was often the result.

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's report 'Bringing Them Home....' was a watershed in trying to deal with the legacy of racism’.  The report's powerful language lent great weight to its extremely damning findings. Since then, these have become an assumed part of the national agenda in subsequent dealings with aboriginal communities, despite the obstruction and misgivings of a deeply conservative federal government being in power in the decade following its publication.

Only a change of government made the apology possible.

However, only seventeen months before the apology was given, in June 2007, the 'Little Children are Sacred' report from the Northern Territory Board of Inquiry into the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse came out. Its findings of widespread child abuse were so serious, it triggered a major military, police and social welfare intervention to stop it.

What this report didn't trigger, was a re-assessment of the assumptions and agenda of the earlier 'Bringing Them Home' report. It should have, because it raised serious questions as to what indigenous and mixed race children had been brought home to.

The 'Bringing them Home' report was organized and run by an institution with a very powerful set of ideological prejudices and agendas. Its 'inquiry' was in effect an inquisitorial expose of what was already widely regarded as the sins and heresies of an already defeated, discredited, decommissioned and/or mostly dead generation of aboriginal administrators, church missions and government policy makers.

A more sectarian and ideologically pre-determined group of inquisitors would be hard to find.  Its proceedings were dressed up with all the legal trappings of a Soviet Show trial.  HRAEOC was an administrative rabbit left in charge of a very edible and defenseless lettuce.

Thus it came to pass at the 'Bringing Them Home' Inquiry that outraged human rights academic advocates could provide the right amount of 'anti-racist' intellectual respectability and authority without anyone ever questioning their values, the balance or selectivity of their judgment, or their unarticulated agendas. The inquisitors and their principal expert witnesses were apparatchiks grown out of exactly the same ideological mould. There was no one there in the proceedings to contradict them or to in any way hold them to intellectual account, or challenge their version of social reality and its history.  The people, instrumentalities and the colonial and post-colonial values that were 'on trial' were in effect defenseless.

Its modus operandi was to call for 'submissions'. Anyone with a complaint against the old order could come forward, and without fear of cross examination, was encouraged by a suitably sympathetic 'court', to pour out an eye watering and overwhelmingly sad litany of suffering. And while there were certainly 'sensitivity' issues with some of the witnesses, the lack of cross-examination meant there was no attempt to interrogate and cross check the oral evidence.

It was a classic ‘Speak Bitterness’ format.

When one reads the ‘Bringing Them Home’ report and accepts on face value the narrative that it tells, it paints a very bleak picture.  It is one of a people whose land and time-out-of mind wanderings on it had been ruthlessly invaded and expropriated.  Subsequently they were harried and pushed from pillar to post, in an awful stumbling litany of poverty, hunger, violence, virtual slavery and disease, and worst of all, family break up orchestrated by systematic ‘child theft’, imposed upon this utterly helpless ethnic group by successive settler colonial and post-colonial regimes.
 
The European administrative order veered from so called ‘protective’ segregation to assimilation, by either forcing hapless victims into staying in one prescribed encampment or forcing them out to fend for themselves on the economic and social margins.  And all this was underpinned by varying degrees of coercion and arbitrary use of power to break up loving families, who were targeted by authorities on no other grounds than their indigenous ethnicity/race.

This seems so manifestly unreasonable that you have to ask how it came to be, and that needs some wider contextualization.  The officials and policy makers who were administering indigenous affairs were not thinking and working in a vacuum, but a whole world that was modernizing, whether it liked it or not.  Capitalism was recasting the whole framework of economic and social relations everywhere.  And everywhere its agents and colonists went, an adaption process was set in train.  How that experience translated out depended entirely on the level of cultural and economic proximity a given population already had to the challenges that modernism confronted them with.

The European imperialist and colonial thrust wasn’t just a standard imposition, but a series of local relationships that varied enormously, including pull as well as push factors, depending on what it met, as it fanned out over the world.  It wasn’t all crude aggression.  For instance, the sultanate political infrastructure on the west coast of Malaya simply couldn’t withstand the commercial and political pressures of European merchants in Singapore, the beginnings of a local plantation economy and Chinese triads in the tin mines, and crumbled into absolute chaos. A very reluctant London colonial office eventually was forced to intervene to restore some semblance of order.

Outside the European metropolitan areas, the process of modernization was exported by imperial fiat that varied from the imposition of semi colonial intervention by way of unequal treaties (as in China and Japan) and limited administrative ‘support’ (as in China), through colonial indirect rule using native satraps, to direct colonial administration.  And in places where there were iron age (or earlier) communities living in low or very low densities of population distribution, the imperialists sent in their own colonial populations for resettlement and direct occupation of the land, which was expropriated in direct proportion to the level, extent and intensitivity of existing native population, agriculture, grazing and village settlement.

Japan was the top feeder in this process and they responded to the modernizing pressures by almost immediately and very aggressively responding to the challenge.  The unequal treaties imposed on them spurred them to become an imperial power in their own right, which they promptly did, within forty years.

The Chinese mandarins thought that they were too sophisticated and civilized to learn anything from hairy faced white barbarians.  They got a really terrible hundred year lesson in finding out that they really did have something to learn, but only after their country internally collapsed and then had to fight off an invasion by the Japanese, who had learned, all too well.

The Indian subcontinent was divided into mostly direct, but some indirect colonial administration by the British.  The Indian upper classes collaborated extensively in the colonial administration and the emerging system of industry and trade.  They submitted willingly to cultural Anglicization and education.  The British invested heavily in that educational, urban, port and communications infrastructure and did such a thorough job, they made themselves redundant, and the Indians increasingly knew it, as the twentieth century proceeded.  By the time the British went, Indian administrators were able to take over almost seamlessly.

Our New Zealand Maori neighbors were a late Stone Age people who rapidly took to iron, modern implements and trade to pay for them, as well as cultural artifacts like muskets, reading writing and Christianity in their own language, as soon as they were introduced to them by European traders, missionaries and early European settlers.  They were somewhat equivalent to the tribal Britons at the time of Roman occupation, and curious and fast learners. 

They were very good warriors who had an excellent feel for modern weapons and warfare techniques, but they did not have the population or economic base big enough for arsenal manufacture or the ability to maintain military forces year round.  They won some battles, but lost the wars against 18,000 permanently stationed imperial troops plus local militias, but they did not lose everything.
 
The Maori retained significant land tenure, their system of tribal governance and culture, got direct political representation in the colonial parliament and produced modern educated leaders of colonial standing, with a school, Te Aute College, founded in 1854, being established to produce this modern educated Maori elite.  They produced their first lawyer (articled to a lawyer and required to pass bar exams, but no degree required) by the 1880s, the first arts grad by 1893, law 1897 and their first Doctor by 1900.  There were three Maori Imperial Knights by 1927.  They were defeated, but not downed.

Indigenous populations in Terra Australis are amongst the most ancient peoples on the planet and when first contacted by outsiders were subsisting inside a paleo/mesolithic culture that disappeared in Europe ten to twelve thousand years before.  When Europeans arrived, indigenous populations were practicing the first elements of animal domestication (dogs) and very early farming techniques with wild plant species and fish.  Their notion of ‘country’ was defined by regular geographical patterns of seasonal nomadism that optimized availability of game and plants, parts of which were shared with other groups.

Such pacific sharing was made possible by very low population densities and sufficient resources to go round, to sustain a very simple and super lower productivity lifestyle, even in periods of adversity.
 
In 1770 there were somewhere between three hundred thousand and a million of them living on a territory of 7.629 million km2,  of which somewhere near the upper estimate was the same as the population of a tiny 150 km2 London of the same period.  The British armed forces alone lost 300,000 men during the Napoleonic Wars that raged from 1803-1815; wars that caused Europe wide losses of around 3.5-6.5 million people, which were 4-10 times the indigenous first contact population.

Given the kind of scales at which Europeans operated, it was hardly surprising that the awful imperialists regarded Terra Australis as ‘terra nullius’; tiny nomadic populations, no agriculture, no villages, no dominant language, no precise and defended territorial boundaries, and no clear leaders to negotiate with and work through; all features to be found everywhere else; all features which had over several millennia come to define what ‘occupation’ was.

Europeans walked in on a living museum, frozen in time, that had missed out on thousands of years of convulsive and often violent change, starting with the Neolithic move into agriculturally settled village based tribal territories, which put an end to nomadic hunter-gathering and propelled increasing populations into ever more elaborate and challenging biological, existential, cultural, political, social, economic and technological arrangements.  They found a whole continent with a miniscule population that hunted and foraged much as their own ancestors had done in the African rift valley, fifty to a hundred thousand years ago.

The original shift to settled agriculture and asserted/defended territorial boundaries would have been gradual and allowed time for a continuous adaption process by the nomads, to move into a new society that was still in many ways not too radically different from the one being left behind. The Europeans brought all that, plus every other massive change that had happened since, in a single tsunami wave.

Indigenous populations had acquired none of the mechanisms that would enable them to either fully comprehend or mount a defensive and/or adaptive response to the European intruders and what they brought with them.  And the same applied to the Europeans in coming to grips with indigenous people.  They had no models to deal with a group of people whose culture was so completely out of their understanding, their own historical experience, or their experience with other colonial peoples.

But there was one thing that was very clear to everyone, immediately, which was that the relationship was chronically and grossly asymmetric.  This meant that almost anything that the incoming Leviathan did would likely overwhelm a tiny and fragile indigenous society with highly specialized and deeply ingrained habits that had never been exposed to large and rapid change vectors.  A priori, this would likely make them very poor adaptors to the new introduced paradigms.

Radically asymmetrical relationships have a very high propensity for the weaker side to be almost casually overthrown.  Where clashes do occur, they are radically one sided affairs.  The losers then go limp with despair, embrace self defeat, retreat into cultural memory and surrender any notion of empowerment that might enable them to move on.  It is what would possibly happen to us if extraterrestrials took over our planet, or the much more likely prospect of a damaged global ecosphere taking our species back to a few million survivors, no planet B to go to and no prospect for much improvement for at least 10,000 years.

The other side veers from walkover expropriation to well intended good works to ameliorate and manage the process of ‘regime change’ that their system embodies, but ends up pulverizing its interlocutor anyway, as much out of frustration, as cruelty, as the corrosive character of modern life, as anything else.
 
Both parties tended to adopt self-defeating strategies that prevented listening and/or learning, with the dominant one increasingly resorting to coercion, reducing its effort, patience and funding, and succumbing to the politics of dismissal and contempt.  And the passive response from the weaker party just accelerated its own downward spiral into chaos and helped bring out the worst in the stronger one.

When I was a child, one of my teachers read me a story about a young prince who fell in love with a beautiful princess and wanted to marry her.  Her father reluctantly gave his consent with the proviso that if he ‘struck’ her with iron three times, she would die.  The prince was surrounded by iron implements.  He went to enormous, but futile lengths to keep iron out their domestic life.  In the end inadvertent ‘strikes’ happened, and as it turned out, he only had to touch her with the wretched stuff and it would leave an angry wound on her flesh.  Very sadly, on the third ‘strike’ she died as her father foretold.

This is an iron age myth telling about the fragility of its stone age predecessor and while the relationship would not have been nearly as benign as the myth suggests, it draws attention to the corrosively transformative power of the new technology and the lack of defenses against, or adaptive responses towards all its expressions (not just the military ones) by the old society.

In some ways, it was fortunate that it was either going to be the French or British that woke the indigenous Rip van Winkles.  They did have some vague sort of notion of humanitarian conduct, sort of, if one discounted the sometimes very brutal behavior towards their own convicts, and the terrible dispossessional processes of industrialization that produced the impoverished and immiserated class from which they came.
 
By way of contrast, when the Maori invaded the Chatham Islands (using contracted European transport ships) in 1835, they immediately and systematically killed as many of the Moriori inhabitants (who were Maori who had reverted to a Paleolithic lifestyle) as they felt like and enslaved and egregiously brutalized the rest, until the surviving remnants (10% of the 1835 population) were rescued by shocked European authorities, 27 appalling years later.
 
And while Australian indigenous people fortunately missed out on the Maori, they could have got the Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch as masters.  The Chinese pulled out of colonial exploration in the mid fourteenth century, but the others were not known particularly for having any sort of humanitarian values.  Only after 1850, did the Dutch finally repent of their noxious forced labor policy in the East Indies.  And indigenous people would have had particularly ferocious handling by the Japanese Imperial Army, if they had managed to bring Australia into the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere in 1942.

The question that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission had to ask was what would anyone with the means to project their power to the more habitable southern and eastern coast of the largest, and to them ‘unoccupied’ island continent on the planet going to do with it?

The only defense the indigenous community ever had against penetration from the rest of the world was remoteness and the inhospitality of its most accessible Northern and Western approaches. And the longer that delayed outside contact, the greater the gap between them and any potential interlopers, the bigger their impact and the more instant and total indigenous loss of territorial license would be.
 
Unlike their Maori neighbors across The Ditch, their economic base was so hand-to-mouth, their capacity to trade so fragmented and slow, and their ability to create political leadership or form alliances so slight, they were not able to concentrate larger groups of fighting men, or to acquire muskets and munitions to defend themselves against even the most feebly organized attacks by frontier farmers.  They were more helplessly vulnerable than dodos.

At least the fact that one power was sufficiently dominant to take over the whole continent, saved indigenous communities from becoming hostage to inter-colonial wars like those conducted in North America by the French and British in the mid eighteenth century.

Not even the people down at HREOC would be saying that Terra Australis should have been declared an already occupied social museum and for the British to retain a sufficiently large fleet in the region, at not inconsiderable expense, to keep the other imperial wannabees out, like the Dutch and French, or even has been imperial derelicts like the Portuguese and Spanish.
 
The British may have been many things, but continental scale philanthropists they were not.  And if they didn’t want others doing the job of taking over the place, they would have to occupy to pre-empt them.  In the conflicted world of the early industrial period, a habitable land mass the size of Terra Australis was a strategic prize that no dominant power could afford to ignore. Anything else wasn’t an option, even if anyone at the time thought there was one, which there wasn’t.

What the British found was a power vacuum that couldn’t be left alone even if anyone had wanted to, which no one did, because the pressure to fill the vacuum was overwhelming.  Hesitation would be an enemy’s opportunity, and if they were given it, it would mean war to get them out later.

And once they had got there, they weren’t going to be doing hunting and gathering alongside their new indigenous brothers and sisters.  They were going to import the latest agriculture and grazing practices, systems of land title, set up the beginnings of cities, towns and hamlets and the roads and eventual railways that would service them, import new animal and plant species and in general transform the country in the same way as was going on all over the rest of the world; you know, the modern suite.
 
Where would the lifestyle of the indigenous brothers and sisters fit into all this?  Nowhere, because they were going to be thrust into the middle of an inevitably traumatic 10,000 year time hike, and have to make the journey in a few decades, or get permanently left behind, which is largely what has happened.  And instead of joining the tried and true pattern of migrating into the new economic system through its rural and urban proletariat, and starting to tap into its employment, religious and educational resources, they rotted on the margins.

It just seems to me to be a bit ideologically cute for the characters down at HREOC to be beating the colonialists and their successors over the moral head for doing what absolutely anyone with the power and technology to do it would have done, which was to take over Terra Australis and run it according to their lights.  It wasn’t even remotely like the real fascist invasions conducted by the Nazis in the Soviet Union and the Japanese in China, against peoples very similar to themselves, where millions were deliberately and systematically liquidated by armed forces who behaved much like the Maori did on the Chatham Islands.
 
Who can forget the immortal cry of the Japanese Imperial army as it smashed its way into Northern China, “Kill All!  Burn All!  Destroy All!”  In 1940, that particular campaign cost the Chinese an estimated 2.7 million people.  Now that was a fascist invasion, and front end of a killing spree that ended up costing the victims around 10-20 million all up; not all that different from the German invasion of Russia, which cost it around 20 million as well.  Fascists like to do mass murder and really grotesque brutality and torture on a grand scale, as a matter of systematic policy, with or without provocation, then enslave those not immediately killed and ‘attenuate’ them though underfeeding, maltreatment and overwork, giving them a life expectancy in places like Auschwitz, of about 3 months.

The Nazi concentration camps were a template designed not just to eliminate Jews, but to wipe out any other populations who were made ‘redundant’, once German people started to settle in the east.  They weren’t in the least interested in assimilating ‘sub-humans’.

Unfortunately, such humanitarianism that the British had didn’t provide much more than a salving side dish to a  modernizing main course that proved to be almost completely indigestible and often toxic for indigenous people.
 
All attempts at either protecting aboriginals in isolated enclaves or assimilating them into the dominant society failed miserably.  All attempts at education failed miserably.  Christianization failed miserably.  On the other hand, the diseases that the Europeans brought with them, against which they had some accumulated immunity, succeeded in laying indigenous communities waste.  And when one reads the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ retailing colonial and post-colonial policy development, one gets a sense of increasingly frustrated and negative attitudes towards a seemingly doomed indigenous people, which eventually saw any investment in that community as pouring good money after bad.

The ‘breed ‘em out’ policy towards indigenous Australians and the taking of particularly mixed race children out of indigenous communities was essentially admission of failure.  The European administrators just didn’t understand, because elsewhere, Europeanization of native peoples was moving right along.
 
By 1892, there were 60,000 Indian local and British university trained graduates, all instructed in the modern Anglophile tradition, and entering the professions, trade, manufacture and middle and upper middle ranks of the colonial bureaucracy.  And they weren’t all the children of wealthy Brahmin families.  There were scholarships for the indigent and a lot of competition for them.
 
The University of Fort Hare in South Africa was from 1916, a mainly black student institution until it was ‘nationalized’ in 1959 by the Apartheid policies of the Afrikaner government.  Large slabs of the twentieth century black African political class came out of its portals.
 
Black Africans ‘got’ modern education and its empowering importance.  It was the Afrikaner exclusionist and anti-assimilationist policies that ensured they got as little of it as possible, not only because they knew such institutions were hotbeds of liberalism, racial equality and pan African nationalism, but because they truly believed black people were the descendants of Cain, accursed of God and forever condemned to be hewers of wood and haulers of water. And they were absolutely determined to keep them that way, which is what led to the imposition of apartheid and the Bantu Education Acts.

The American native Indians got their first Harvard graduate in 1655, thirty-five years after the landing of the Mayflower!  There were American Indians who were genuinely curious about the new European interlopers and wanted to find out more…

In 1809, an illiterate but highly skilled Cherokee Indian silversmith (I wonder how many aboriginal silver smiths there have ever been?) by the name of Sequoyah, created on his own, from scratch, a syllabary reputed to be better than the English one. He successfully sold the idea of literacy to his skeptical peers and tribal elders and enabled them to read in their own language, print their own newspapers and have a literacy rate better than surrounding European American communities.

By brutal contrast, the first indigenous Australian to graduate from a university was in 1959. And by her own admission it had to be physical education, because academic analysis was not her strong suit. We had to wait until 1966 before we could see an academic arts graduate, Charlie Perkins, who went on to make a big political splash and have a substantial and important career (at bloody last).  And it needs to be pointed out that Charlie got that opportunity because from the age of ten, he was pulled out of his community and sent to Adelaide to live with white folks, who saw to it that he got a decent education and encouragement that would give him the opportunity to be an indigenous success story.

The first Australian indigenous graduate from Cambridge University, Lily Brown, graduated in 2013.  The first black graduate from that institution, Alexander Crummell, whose father had been a slave in the US, graduated in 1851, as a result of collaborative funding from his own New York slave abolitionist Episcopalian Church and the Church of England.  This was the same Church of England that was futilely trying to educate indigenous Australians in its mission schools during the same period.

Indigenous response to Christianity was equally desultory and unresponsive.  It should be noted that American Indians had very early and robust debates about and diverse and activist responses to European Christianity, over a long period.  And even during times when the dominant ethnic European society was trying to expunge Indian society and culture, it was still able to look at Christianity separately from the people who had brought it to their continent, and judge its theology on its and their own terms.  They were able to critique Christian theology, produce their own religious and prophetic leadership in developing either revitalized versions of native belief, or syncretic adaptations of Christianity, or, even adopted conventional church adherence.
 
The Maori response to Christianity was equally enthusiastic, thoughtful, adaptive and diverse.

Black slave Christianity in the US proved to be widespread in its community, enduring and dynamic, to this very day, despite the awful track record of the people who brought these religious ideas to them.  In a lot of places slaves were flogged if caught worshipping, because their white owners feared religion would bring subversive ideas with it, which it frequently did. The masters didn’t want their slaves warmed up to stories about Moses telling Ramses to let his people go!  So worship had to be done in secret.  Where it was allowed, there was a whole class of tolerated black slave preachers who publicly retailed the master’s version of Christianity, but privately preached something else.
 
Clearly the Christian message had enormous resonance in the Negro community.  Christian literacy and the educational infrastructure it produced, including African American tertiary education institutions founded as early as 1837, would eventually embody themselves in the very subversive person of Martin Luther King!
 
The Australian indigenous experience of Christianity was very largely represented by passive resistance to it.  James Unaipon (1835-1907) and his son David, the inventor, whose face adorns the fifty dollar note (1872-1967) were amongst the painfully small indigenous results of missionary conversion and educational effort.  And while they both suffered from the prejudice and misuse arising from racism and the accumulating reputational damage accruing to their people in the wider European community, there was also a lot of support for their individual struggle to embrace the new world order, just as there had been for Alexander Crummell at Cambridge.
 
When one considers that Abrahamic monotheism was arguably the single biggest and fastest spreading idea on the planet until well after the rise of modern science, its inability to significantly influence indigenous communities was as much a measure of eons of geographical and ideological insularity, as the insensitivity of those who attempted to bring it to them.

By 1930, indigenous society had not been traveling terribly well for a long time and child removal for social welfare reasons was much more common in the period under study, right across society.  In large part, the assimilationist effort arose from general concerns about the broader indigenous community and its perceived failure to integrate into the modern economy.
 
Everyone was floundering and stuck for a solution that had some prospect of working.  Every new generation of indigenous and mixed race children living with them found themselves repeating the behaviors and attitudes of their indigenous families and ending up in the same miserable cul-de-sac as them; unable to go back to a nomadic past that they pined for, unable to bite the bullet of modernity and steadily sinking into a world that was gradually falling to pieces around them, which is what happens to anyone if they do not adapt to change.
 
It would have appeared to Europeans that indigenous society was in deep denial as to what had happened to its stone age nomadic lifestyle; that they were in the same state of reactionary sentimentalism that Marxists of the time accused feudal aristocratic traditionalists of, in the face of rising bourgeois industrial power and liberal ideas.  While aristocracies had enough accumulated power, prestige and wealth to ideologically indulge themselves with through into the middle twentieth century, indigenous society did not.
 
The aristocratic class in England was eventually expropriated too, because in the end, they too ran out of time and social license.  The world changes and all of us have to keep justifying our place in it.  And no one is safe from being pushed over a social and economic cliff if they fail to make the necessary minimum defense of the status quo, or adapt to a new order, or combination thereof.  And indigenous society didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t.
 
Throwing all the blame for that on the people who represented the forces of global change just isn’t fair or reasonable.

None of us own anything we cannot defend against someone who would take it from us, whether it be market share, job security, technological edge, ideological dominance, social and economic position or possession of real estate.  The Japanese very nearly showed white Australia what it is like to lose everything and become servants to another people.  The Yanks rescued us.  Lucky us. Lucky indigenes.

And while indigenous people may have continued to believe that what was left of their training regime for tribal nomadism constituted their version of Eaton and Oxbridge, by 1911, the greatest tertiary educational institution in the world until the rise of science, the over eleven hundred year old Chinese Hanlin Academy, was forced to close its doors because the ruling mandarinate that it trained had failed to adapt to the challenge of modernity.  Its legendary Confucian academic and literary standards weren’t worth a pinch of salt in a country falling into chaos, which is precisely what was inexorably bound to happen to indigenous society, for exactly the same reasons.

The very rapid rise of a population of multiracial children of indigenous mothers who were no longer under the control of family and elders, and sexually predatory European fathers, who had no interest in taking responsibility for their indigenous lovers or their offspring, was a very ominous sign of morally corrupted behavior from both sides of the ethnic divide.  And while all official efforts to stamp out this kind of sexual congress and the venereal diseases it often brought in its wake failed, they had some fairly clear ideas about how to deal with the outcomes of it, which was either to countenance the rather unsatisfactory default option of absorption of this multi racial product into the mothers’ indigenous community, or a similarly suboptimal one of adoption or institutionalization on the European side.
 
The fact was that those children were every bit as much the European community’s problem and responsibility as an indigenous one.  And just because European fathers had welched on it didn’t mean their community should as well.  And given that disreputable and irresponsible European fathers had helped bring mixed race children into the world, the European community had some responsibility for them, particularly given how badly indigenous communities were traveling and the very poor prospects that these communities offered these part European children.

Given that Europeans perceived indigenous society to be a kind of slow motion train wreck and felt that as the dominant ethnic group, they could offer their part European offspring a better chance in life by assimilating their indigenous genes into the European pool, physically removing them into the European sphere became rational, albeit inevitably messy, unpleasant to administer and likely traumatic for the affected families. Tough but thought to be necessary policy is often like that.
 
By the same token, the price of its failure was likely to be big all round, and all the more discreditable for that, in hindsight.  But then leaving mixed race children to rot in indigenous camps without access to any modern facility that their European ‘culture’ ought to entitle them to, was also discreditable, at least by the standards of the time, particularly as it was regarded as generally proper standard practice to take out-of-wedlock children from the birth mother.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that some of the responsible European welfare authorities started to suggest drastic measures to take responsibility for part European children.  Those who might have had humanitarian qualms about this didn’t prevail because they couldn’t suggest anything else that might plausibly do better, because leaving them to indigenous family administration wasn’t considered to be doing them any favors either.

It should be noted that racial exclusionists (keep ‘em out and keep ‘em down) and associationists (a separated limited second class European franchise a la ‘cape coloreds’ in apartheid South Africa) would have opposed the assimilationist policy.  They would have opposed it on racial biological/eugenicist grounds that saw any absorption of indigenous racial stock into the European community as racial ‘contamination’.  These views, which eventually dominated politics in Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and South Africa, didn’t get any oxygen in Australian official circles.

On the other side, whatever the circumstances of part European child retrieval, whether forced, ‘negotiated’ under pressure or willingly collaborated in, witnesses at the ‘Bringing Them Home’ inquiry were hardly likely to say anything about their circumstances that might conceivably paint their own culture and family backgrounds in an adverse light.  And clearly, whether it be to protect/defend and/or further the inquiry's own political agendas, the inquiry process wasn't in the least interested in finding out if that were the case.  After all, the designated 'victims' weren't on trial, even though it was known that indigenous society wasn’t traveling terribly well at the time and likely wrestling with quite a few ‘Dickensian’ problems of its own.

In the Kimberleys around the turn of the twentieth century, the main headache for government officials was suppressing the rampant prostitution that was going on between indigenous women and Malay pearlers, with girls as young as 14 being ‘sent to work’ by their communities and tragically bringing back venereal disease to their tribe.  Infection rates were around 15-25% and either killed or sterilized the victims.  The authorities did not have enough police to keep the sides apart and indigenous society didn’t have the will or the social resources to stop the trade either.
 
Clearly either indigenous society had always had pretty sloppy sexual mores, or their system of social governance was falling to bits.  Why on earth would Europeans have the least confidence in the fate of their part genetic product inside indigenous communities?

Today, an indigenous woman in the Northern Territory was, as of 2010, eighty times more likely to experience domestic violence leading to treatment in an emergency ward than any other ethnic group.  Alcohol abuse and associated violence goes back a long way in indigenous communities, and while that is also the case in any community exposed to alcohol, as with everything else the European settlers brought with them, indigenous society had no defenses against it and suffered, and continues to suffer its worst effects.  Indigenous society of the 1930s probably wasn’t traveling that much better than it is now.

Over time, colonial and post-colonial indigenous policy proved to be clearly ineffective and compounded the unfolding tragedy started by lifestyle dispossession and continued by their lack of material progress, which led to policy changes that in their turn did no better.  These outcomes offer the unforgiving prism of masterly hindsight plenty of easy and reprehensible targets to shoot down. HRAEOC didn't have far to look to find a litany of awful outcomes and abuses.  It is just a pity that that was all it was looking for.

Today, inter-ethnic political discourse that assumes and relies on racial differentiation is considered to be not only antediluvian and unsubstantiatable, but morally offensive and unconscionable.  However, it needs to be pointed out that for more than half of the period that the ‘Bringing Them Home’ inquiry covered, racism as an idea was transitioning out.

Race was for European imperial societies of the nineteenth century and up to the Second World War, an understandable perception.  Material culture and power seemed to them to be vested in a hierarchical coincidence of skin color, with whites at the top, Indian browns and Asian yellows second, African blacks next and finally, by a long last, stone age indigenous populations of varying non white colors.
 
This was an almost universally assumed given until after the First World War.  Between the World Wars, race based differentiation started to become contested at the social and intellectual margins, but was up against a considerable body of academically half ‘respectable’ and influential pseudo-scientific racial biology and eugenicist literature.  Racial biology was only finally discredited by its association with the WW2 racial holocausts prosecuted against Jews, Slavs and the Chinese.  The decolonizing post-European world order after the war made it even more unfashionable, as people in the former metropolitan societies began to make an unctuous virtue of ideologically abandoning an imperial world now being lost to them, and no longer making any material, ideological, or intellectual sense.

It became increasingly obvious that the coincidence of skin color, power or any other human attribute was precisely that; coincidental, rather than causally linked.  History was clearly showing all but the most obtuse that whiteness was not the source of dominance and cultural prestige.  And the Japanese, who were and are racist, had very nearly demonstrated that they were the divinely ordained superiors and that whites (and everyone else, including the Chinese) were trash worthy of only being their servants; a very sobering experience for the Europeans caught up in, or adjacent to that imperial military thrust, while it lasted.

The final battles to overthrow racism that emerged in the 1960s led to its demonization as a social evil, especially in the face of the South African regime, which continued to stand out against the global tide of opinion.  It did so in ways that unambiguously closed off any hope of eventual change in social status, economic power, political say or ethnic intermarriage for black Africans, as well as mixed race ‘coloreds’.  It entrenched that into a particularly nasty police state whose racial ideology was heavily influenced by the Nazis. It was deeply and offensively unattractive, and much more, out of the time and historical context that had once made sense of it.  It was obvious that the apartheid regime was nothing more than a small group of white colons hanging onto their privileges and be damned.

The whole thrust of the HREOC inquiry was to systematically move the moral framework from a complex relationship picture to a simplistic set of ideological clichés and slogans: racist 'theft', ‘abuse’ and ‘genocide’.  This ideological sleight of hand reduced the entire settler/indigenous relationship into a one dimensional racist abuser/victim model that necessitated systematic selective data massaging, cribbing pre-determined narratives onto it, and then conflating post-World War 2 ideological values onto them, as if they were what applied during all of the period being revisited.
 
If the Australian Institute of Public Affairs defenders of the Old Order (who subsequently came to its rescue some time after HREOC had handed down its findings) hadn’t been so hell bent on defending the Old Order’s reputation, and thus resorting to the same propagandist strategy as their ‘progressive’ antagonists, they would have walloped the secular humanist establishment and shown them up to be the partisans they really were and are. Instead we got both ‘black armband’ and ‘white blindfold’ caricatures.

While exploration of the indigenous experience of colonial and post-colonial life in Australia could be a welcome antidote to earlier ‘whites only’ settler histories, the humanist ‘progressive’ agenda was as propagandistic as what it purported to attack.  HREOC’s modus operandi was that of a Stalinist or Maoist Peoples' Court, used to remove elements of the administration left over from a period of policy and practice that the current regime wanted to distance itself from, and discredit.  This would shift responsibility and blame from itself onto previously powerful and prominent elements, which would be used as fall guys for a required regime shift and/or policy failure disposal.

From time to time, socialist governments have found it necessary to remove both regime opponents and failed factions/policies within.  They developed a totalitarian language of condemnation that destroyed and embalmed its victims in disgrace.  The elegance of this technique is that accusers had at their disposal a phrase or word that was self explanatory, absolute in its authority, required little justification or evidence and would effectively demolish whoever it was aimed at. 'Reactionary Imperialist Collaborator!'  Bourgeoise Saboteur!' Revisionist Traitor!'  'Left Adventurist Clique!'  'Rightest Revanchism!'  Petit Bourgeois Defeatism!  Anything they didn't like, they had a devastatingly nasty and politically dangerous name for it.

We have 'Racism'.  It is a diamond encrusted solid gold gem of condemnation that works every time as soon as anyone gets too close to any ethnic group in ways that might 'stereotype' them, i.e., critically evaluate them.  It instantly turns ordinary ethnicity into an untouchable cultural artifact that is beyond criticism and any offense against this divine right, real or imagined, sanctions a tirade of ideological grapeshot and outraged moral dudgeon, against anyone with the temerity to question it.

We are allowed to scoff at the Christian ‘fairy tales’ in their Bible, blasphemously desecrate its beliefs in theater and film and relentlessly denigrate its record as a religious group, but saying anything negative about aboriginal ‘culture’ just isn’t racist on.

And the thing about 'racism' is that for it to work as an accusatory tool, it doesn't have to actually exist.  For all but the most old fashioned, the color of a person's skin color per se has long since disappeared as any sort of criteria of reproductive, social or political status.  Long standing Australian multicultural immigration has made the movement of non Europeans into all strata of society, and the intermarriage of its children into European families so commonplace, it is hardly even noticed or commented on.  And as our new Chinese brothers and sisters move into the upper echelons of our society, and adopt the mannerism, attitudes and culture of the upper middle class, marrying their children has never been more attractive.

These days European lillywhites only need the slightest ‘touch of the tarbrush’ (nineteenth century euphemism for inter-racial miscegenation), not to be discriminated against, but included in the mystical and sacred dreamtime ceremonies of indigenous culture, replete with possum coats, tribal paint and a right to publicly funded indigenous housing, education grants, disadvantage funding, etc, etc… And it doesn’t pay to make fun of them, or question their motives….and inverted racism.

Even for the Nazis, who were principled racists, a Jewish great-grandparent was tolerable for persons to be included as Aryan Germans.  Their Aryan raciality would not be called into question if the half Jewish grandparent had been baptized a Christian.
 
It seems to me that ‘race’ has become conflated with all kinds of other extraneous stuff which has nothing to do with race at all and more about grabbing at existential identity straws.  If you discovered you were one eighth part Jewish, why would you make a meal out of it, when so much else has gone on in your genealogical line?  It might make an interesting discovery, but it would hardly rate as a particularly important identity shift.  So what is so priceless about aboriginality, other than an enormous ideological investment in the notion of race that is even more inflated than that of the Nazis?

‘Racism' continues to be a culturally powerful ideological tool, replete with a whole raft of very powerful taboos, in an age when taboos generally are extremely unfashionable.  Notwithstanding that, this priceless ideological artifact keeps on being renovated by conflating it with 'class', 'lifestyle', ‘disadvantage’, 'culture', 'ethnicity' and 'tribality'.  These may be totally dishonest cribs, but they keep this ideological blade razor sharp, any moron can use it and it immediately shuts down rational discussion.  It is an excellent tool of authority and political obfuscation. And the beauty is that there is always just enough real old fashioned racism around to give the lie.
 
The now venerable Pauline Hanson is a national treasure, because her name continues to inspire the national racism ‘stereotypes’ that her enemies trade on to stay in business.

We are allowed to bemoan the terrible plight of indigenous people and all the well documented dysfunctionalities, abysmal educational outcomes and spectacular imprisonment rates within many of their communities, as long as it is a justificatory excuse armed with all the appropriate ideological euphemisms, clichés and hand wringings.  But as soon as anyone uses this very same material as a socially predictive and risk management device to increase their caution in dealing with this group, that is 'racism' rather than rational social judgment of a group which just happens to be black.  They could just as easily be Roma or concentrated pockets of long term welfare recipients from any ethnic group.
 
Marxists used to refer to the more disreputable elements of non-working class poor as ‘lumpen proletarians’, who were regarded as much too unreliable and shiftless to be potential class allies. Large slabs of indigenous society fit that label to a T.

Indigenous communities and their supporters like to use the idea of 'Community' as a very positive, unifying and culturally legitimizing entity which all community members naturally want to take some credit and honor, especially if one or some of them have won some kind of accolade or distinction.  But if that community produces more than its fair share of problems, then it is not 'discriminatory' to point this out, just because it inevitably puts everyone in them, including the decent and upstanding people, in a poor light.
 
It seems to me that if you take community credit, you also take the community discredit as well, because the behavior of some reflects on the many.  That is what 'community' identity means. The community or ‘team’ has a reputation which is mainly the product of some of its members on both sides of the credit/debit equation.

That isn’t ‘just’ or ‘unjust’.  That is how it is universally throughout our species, for good and bad, equally.
 
Any ‘community’ that has a higher than normal propensity to behave badly, particularly if that poor behavior becomes inter-generational, will suffer the same problem, and any representatives coming from it will have to fight their way through and past the wider community's negative expectations, to gain social respect and acceptance.  And for those who do manage that social hurdling exercise successfully; they aren't necessarily going to blame the surrounding community for this, as much as their own community brothers and sisters, who keep letting them down.

If that community happens to be indigenous, it is not their race that is in question, but the accumulated reputational damage they have acquired as an ethnic group by the way significant elements within it have conducted themselves.  And if they collectively decide they are going to try and copy the Chinese success paradigm, and they do, it won’t be because they owned superior racial characteristic that they had been secretly hiding under a bushel for two hundred years.

The whole notion of racism in our current setting only makes sense if it is seen as a manipulative ideological control vehicle to bolster the world view and standing of its Humanist-Libertarchic sponsors and an excuse mechanism for unconscionable behavior and self pity amongst its client groups.

As with all show trials, the guilty parties, the old state instrumentalities and church missions; they were forced into a naughty corner to try to work out whether it was better to 'confess to their crimes' or try to cobble together a few fig leaves of 'acceptable' defense that might at least minimize the extent of the blame about to be heaped on them. They knew that the ideological certainties and assumptions of the earlier period were no defense at all, for they were the source of the very racist and assimilationist crimes for which they stood accused.  They were completely trapped inside a circular argument they couldn't possibly escape.  Their guilt was built in.

Unlike the Nazi defendants after WW2, who were responsible for a pattern of completely aberrant (in relation to modern pan European civilizational norms) mass scale violence and killing, many of these post-colonial ‘defendants’ were simply applying the common standards of their day and age, that at the time a ‘reasonable person’ would have accepted as par for the course.

While we can have a debate about how morally rigorous, consistent and courageous the above referred to ‘reasonable people’ of the post-colonial period might have been in their attitude to their indigenous charges, it is highly likely that most of them would have been as horrified as us by some of the stories that came out of the HREOC Inquiry.
 
Sexual interference with children was never OK, whether aboriginal or anyone else.
 
As to what is regarded as physical abuse today: it would not necessarily have been so in the 1930s.  Chastisement was common and regarded as a necessary accompaniment to loving nurture. We have forgotten just how strict traditional society could be in defending its moral and management boundaries, particularly in relation to its children. It still is in most of our adjacent region of South East Asia, and not just with children.  Post-colonial society would have tended to give disciplinarians some benefit of the doubt.

That did not mean a blank check to do anything they liked.  Reasonable people of the time would not have knowingly tolerated gratuitously severe cruelty towards children beyond the then ordinary requirements of moderate chastisement.  And there was plenty of court precedent at the time HREOC was looking at, and going back to the 1850s, to support that assertion, when public welfare bodies and courts did intervene in families where the children manifestly needed protection against parental malfeasance/violence/neglect.

What we can say now in retrospect, is that there was insufficient supervision of state and non state institutions dealing with children displaced from their families, from any race.  There was a culture of trust in public institutions run by churches, charities and governments that we now know weren’t warranted.  The recent behavior of the Catholic Church, Salvation Army and state run institutions in relation to their aberrant employees gives us some inkling of the way the more unsavory aspects of life in the marginal places within traditional society might have been treated; just too discreditable and appalling to be allowed to see the light of day.

And as we have been seeing all too recently in the Royal Commission investigation into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, it hasn’t just been the poor and the marginalized who have suffered from institutional child predation and desultory institutional responses to it. Places as prestigious as Geelong Grammar had exactly the same issues.

Notwithstanding all of that, the churches, even by show trial standards, were pusillanimous in their defense of the thousands of people, who over the 1930-1970 period, devoted themselves to the welfare of aboriginal or part aboriginal children in their care; who didn't sexually interfere with them; who disciplined them fairly and consistently according to the standards of the time and loved them as best they could, in conditions that were often not easy, as they were never exactly a glamour industry sector swimming in money.
 
Nor did they defend the then uniformly widespread and very long standing tradition of total separation of adopted/removed children from their birth families.  The fact that this is no longer done or approved of doesn't mean it wasn't considered an entirely right, legitimate and proper thing to do at the time.  It was seen as a necessary way to protect the child and give it as normal a life as possible, given its origins, which were likely considered either disgraceful or otherwise deeply negative.  That this is no longer believed to be true is totally after the fact!

I think the position of the churches in this inquiry was one of the worst possible betrayals of its dead brothers-and-sisters-in-Christ, unforgivable moral cowardice and an exemplar of how show trial victims turn on their old comrades to try and save themselves.

Well before this trial, long standing research had clearly demonstrated that colonial and post colonial policy towards indigenous peoples had been unsuccessful in bringing them into the fold of the settler society, from beginning to end.  Not one attempt at intervention had had any effect in advancing the general condition and circumstances of this ethnic group.  The trial conclusions were foregone.  It had the predictability of a film script.  The report could have been written before the inquiry without ever having to go to the trouble of getting witnesses to confirm it.

Whatever was left of the wreck of paternalistic secular and Christian missionary assimilationism and the rest was ceremoniously burnt to the water line. And the lesson was no one in their right mind would ever question the integrity and autonomy of aboriginal society again.  Aboriginal culture was turned into a sacred site. Anyone with the temerity to test these boundaries would necessarily be in league with dark, sorry, unacceptable forces.  The deadly and intimidatory accusation of racism was in effect a bullet proof defense system against all comers; a defense system that mandated critical silence from without and moral impunity from within.

It would be just as much an unreasonable propaganda exercise to accuse the modern human rights movement of not being there to take care of matters as the terrible drama of indigenous dispossession unfolded.
 
Where were they in the early 1800s, except for a miserably few aboriginal advocates, who clearly were willfully uninformed as to the correct perspectives necessary to start a mass movement of outrage at the injustices and the lack of self-determination and land rights for indigenous people? They didn't get anywhere?  Why not?  They obviously weren't trying hard enough and were derelict in their plain duty.  Why wasn't the moral message made clear enough?

Had they done a half decent job, the ideological cataracts in the eyes of the European colonial and post colonial masses would have been peeled away, and they would have risen up against the imperialist oppressors and made anti-racist justice, truth and virtue possible, with pigs flying over the victory parade, led by the liberated aboriginal tribes in all their native sartorial and painted glory, carrying placards celebrating the towering truths of the American and French revolutions and loudly supported by fraternal Maori hakkas and Catholic Irish pipes and drums, all cheered on by the progressive white colonial masses in their thousands....
 
So why didn't it happen?  Why did they fail in breach of their manifest historical destiny?  The conscience of British and colonist liberal and radical society did almost nothing, with painfully few honorable exceptions.

That sounds fair enough, doesn't it?  Yes I know the human rights industry didn't get going until after WW2, but that won't be any excuse under the forensic glare of the judgment of history! After all, these social justice values are timeless, universal and self-evident.  Why isn't the human rights industry on trial for its numerous and egregious failures to act when it had the chance, when the issues were so clear, right from the beginning?

We can all play the ex post facto game; of what we coulda and shoulda done way back when….

Beyond all that, there was an unarticulated, more, unspeakable silence, that always attends a show trial; something that is beyond the silence about the current regime or its informant ideology, but the silence about the people for whom the ideology is supposed to be for; the poor, the downtrodden, the marginalized and the dispossessed.

We hear lots about their oppression in the bad old days, and how this legacy has made it absolutely impossible for them to improve themselves in the brave new world they were promised when the ancien regime was overthrown. This is because show trials have very little to do with them really, other than to provide fabulous new regime excuses for non delivery of promised outcomes, and an opportunity to continue to use the old regime as a fall guy.

The Wretched of the Earth are props to be trotted out to provide just the right amount of pathos that will destroy those in the dock, ensure as little current introspection as possible and facilitate regime reinforcement at the top.

Thus no one had to go into what was going on in indigenous society that would explain its extraordinary passivity in all respects to not only its colonial and post-colonial experience, but anything that had happened ever since.  We heard nothing by way of any criticism that this supineness wasn't good enough and augured extremely badly for the future, no matter how many hand wringing sorries were offered or monies thrown around.
 
Nor was anyone going to be allowed to suggest that parts of that society were so badly damaged, they had descended into a self destructive and disempowering loop in ways that brutally mocked attempts to turn the culture into a sacred site.
 
Nor could it be explained why the dominant secular society that had largely abandoned its own Christian fairy stories had to have such an extravagant regard for the dreamtime culture, as if it were either some fantastically expensive museum piece, or a form of Rousseauian noble savageism, or a salving 'spiritual' balm for its own existential barrenness!

In 1995, when the show trial was put on notice, the situation was that amongst the indigenous poor and the downtrodden, after thirty years or more of community consultation, self determination, civil rights, land rights and bank vaults of money, they were flatlining on just about any measure and somebody was to blame.  And of course it couldn't possibly be their fault, or the fault of the people now in charge, or their informant ideology, could it?  No of course it couldn't!  Show Trial Time!

And the fabulous thing about show trials is that they are a blood sport that everyone loves to watch, because audiences know for sure that it is going to end in executions.

The difference between what HREOC and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission were doing in roughly the same period, was that the latter was dealing with the immediate past (not 30 years plus later) of a regime which had continued to enforce radically exclusionist (non-assimilationist) racist assumptions long after they had ceased to be acceptable anywhere else.
 
The new South African black leadership was involving European South Africans in a very delicate ‘soft landing’ version of the denazification program immediately after WW2, dealing with some very violent and sadistic characters who should have been thrown into a one way doored hard labor prison, or hanged.  Its overwhelming purpose was firstly to create a moral accounting and shaming that would put a line under a Gestapo style police state whose Nazi inspired racial theories and practices directed at non white populations had been explicitly repudiated in the war crimes trials of 1945-49 and universally repudiated since the mid 60s.

And a crucial part of that was to draw attention to the fact that instead of adapting to the new world order, as the American southern states had been forced to do between the later ‘50s to ‘60s, they had intensified the repression.  There was a very particular, systematic and officially pervasive moral ruthlessness, willfulness and unscrupulousness in this that simply wasn’t applicable in Australia without a lot of exaggeration, fudging and after the fact moral revisionism.  The South Africans knew at the time they were regarded as moral pariahs, ignored the feedback and pushed on regardless.

The second purpose of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to enable the country to move on and embrace a new order that otherwise might quickly degenerate into civil war and a ruinous white separatist disengagement from the Republic, backed by large sections of the army and the police.  This gave the exercise a degree of urgency which also didn’t apply in Australia, because we were already 30 years on into a process of trying a liberal humanist solution to the indigenous/immigrant conundrum in the context of an increasingly multi-cultural society.

While South African was digging in and actively fortifying a now defunct sense of reality, Australia was starting to make the transition to a more appropriate non racially based model of migration and citizenship, and of behavior towards its own indigenous population, in line with the changing global values.

By the time I reached university in Australia in 1966, one could search the whole place from top to bottom and find absolutely no one who was willing to publicly support the old racist order.  It was well and truly over, except for remnants that one could clearly see were being steadily mopped up by the increasing tide of disapproval and derision.  The following year the decision by over 90% of Australians in a referendum to include indigenous people in the population count indicated overwhelmingly that there was a groundswell to fundamentally change the status of indigenous people.  During this period, the White Australia Policy was on its way out, by a process of steady dismantlement and relentless marginalization.  When it was formally abandoned by the incoming Whitlam government in 1973, there was hardly any of it left.

So what was HREOC really doing in digging up the grave and gibbeting the corpse of the racial agenda in Australia from the colonial and post-colonial period, in its hearings between 1995-7?

Sure, 30 years later, the last effects of part European child removal were still lingering, and those caught up in police and welfare dragnets deserved a voice to express the pain, personal disruption and loss that it had caused.  But it mightn’t have been a bad idea to encourage those same people to take some responsibility for their inability to adapt to the modern world, and take a critical look at what they were offering by way of opportunity for their own children in it.

Such a more balanced process would give the successors to the society that did this an opportunity to say a heartfelt, but qualified sorry.  Although the policy was considered the right thing to do at the time, in hindsight, we know it was a risky and under-resourced experiment that did not deliver what it was supposed to and caused a lot of suffering for little or no good end.

However, what it would not be saying sorry for is taking all the blame for everything that went wrong with the necessary transitioning process that indigenous society had to make to become part of the modern world.

Nor would the sorry mean that drastic measure to sort out indigenous affairs won’t become necessary at some point in the future.

All things being equal, the successors to the colonial and post colonial regimes would make a promise that they would be extremely reluctant to countenance repeating the experiment again, with any ethnic or other type of social group.  But if they ever did, they would promise that the lessons learned from the deficits revealed in traditional institutional care settings would be appropriately addressed, with a much better funded and more proactive regulatory and community oversight and participation, and flexibility in the way they worked and interacted with all the stakeholders, and not just indigenous ones.
 
I make that caveat because I anticipate that at some point, domestic governance in the broader society may well start to collapse, which may demand of us policy responses that would now seem at least as draconian as taking peoples’ children away from them.
 
And the sorry would also have a dimension that has not been so far included.  Those still living and/or their institutional successors, who committed crimes and/or acts attracting tortious liability by the standards of their day, should be held accountable and pursued through the courts and/or a Royal Commission, particularly in relation to sexual and torture crimes against children. The fact that HREOC did not even attempt to assemble the basis of such cases against persons and/or institutions that could be sent through to prosecutorial authorities, indicates a greater interest in discrediting a defunct regime rather than bringing justice to victims and holding individuals and institutions to legal account.

More, I think HREOC selectively distorted what was a much larger problem in the way that traditional institutions dealt with children from any ethnicity or social background.  Poor management, underfunding and abuse of children were not particularly a racial problem and seem to have been much more widespread than previously supposed.  Indigenous people were not nearly as much of a special case as was made out.  Race was just one element of marginalization among many.  European society of the time was pretty tough with anyone who failed to measure up to its standards and fit in to its social norms.

But it was much more than that.  This was not just an exercise in compassion and adjusting the historical narrative of the successors to the old Anglo-European settler regime, to take greater account of the indigenous experience of it.

Underpinning this essay is a suggestion that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission was there to consolidate the power of a mainly bureaucratic and academic clique that was increasingly taking over the social welfare and education system, and parts of the legal one.  It needed to be able to ‘prove’ that any history lived in the absence of its perspectives would inevitably be disastrous to their disadvantaged and dispossessed clients.  By inflating the indigenous narrative to at least an equal and a major discrediting component of the white settler one, they were reinforcing the perception that they were the morally necessary, ‘natural’ and only possible legitimate successors to the post colonial political establishment.  It was a classic power grab in the tradition of the struggles between ecclesiastical and secular authorities of an earlier period.

It is also being suggested here that the lack of indigenous progress under the aegis of this clique since the breakup of the post colonial regime, needed to be blame shifted so that none of the rest of its agenda could be questioned.  Even if it wasn’t structurally sound, this wonky indigenous brick in the wall of its legitimacy had to be re-pointed with some rock solid excuses.

I note that questioning the methodological and intellectual sloppiness of the of the ‘Bringing Them Home’ Inquiry, which would neither meet the standards of a judicial inquiry nor ordinary academic rigor, was left to a body that would normally be regarded as an academically suspect lobby organization representing the corporatocracy, neo-conservative free market ideas and what is left of an older political establishment; the Australian Institute of Public Affairs.
 
When I read the IPA’s reprise to the report, ‘Betraying the Victims’, by Ron Brunton, and the subsequent debate with Hal Wooten, Ronald Wilson and Robert Manne, I noted that Brunton in no way tried to deny that by standards we accept today, a whole lot of things happened to indigenous communities and individuals in the 1930-70 period that were indefensible in today’s terms.  Rather than the very dubious denialism that we have come to expect from the IPA on climate change matters, what I found was a very conventionally rigorous academic criticism of a tendentious document full of the kinds of mistakes and sloppiness one might expect in a poorly researched and partisan document pushing a powerful ideological agenda.

My only criticism of Brunton was that it was not the case that the flawed character of the report in any way weakened its impact.  It was so spectacularly successful as a propaganda exercise that it could have been triply flawed and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to its unstoppable momentum, driven by the gnashing of teeth, the flooding of tears and the keening of mourners.  While I can understand Brunton’s risk averse reluctance to defend the old order within its own historical and moral terms of reference, it further emphasizes the almost viselike ideological grip of the Libertarchs and the political fear that that can inspire in people trying to maintain their intellectual reputation within the current regime.  And that might explain something of the silence coming from the academic establishment that ought to be advocating less partisan, more balanced and more disinterested tentativeness with the historical evidence.

This is not to say that the neo-cons in the IPA are not partisans on their own account.  People like Keith Windshuttle who is a vehement critic of the liberal progressive history ‘movement’ is not content to merely interrogate and question the use of primary historical source material with a thoroughness that some of his antagonists clearly lack, but he puts as much ideological pressure on it as his opponents, only in the opposite direction, to exculpate the old order.
 
The overwhelming impression one gets is that both sides are bristling with ideological axes to grind, interests to serve and egos to smooth.  What is concerning about this is that it wouldn’t pay, if you were an ambitious young aspiring historian with an interest in colonial and post colonial Australia, not to fall over backwards to feel the indigenous pain, or suspend judgment on their efforts to meet the challenges of the modern world.  And it is a telling reflection on the power of the libertarchs inside the Australian history fraternity that critical feedback on its historical narrative had to come from outside its professional ranks.

It is one thing to admit that along with the achievements and good things pertaining to nation building came some pretty unpleasant behavior that needs to see the light of day.  But it is quite another to extrapolate that into an analogy with say the Nazi invasion of Russia, or the police state in Apartheid South Africa.  One represents balanced judgment, the other, inflationary fudging and political spiel.

What is being further suggested here is that the power of the libertarian humanist clique is and has been every bit as malign as any paternalistic post colonial assimilationist brutality we have ever seen, whether it be in relation to indigenous affairs, or any other area of policy that it has colonized.

After the extremely salutary final moral destruction of the old white racist colonial order, the new one was now able to continue to assemble itself behind an almost impenetrable facade of ethnic inviolability.  It unfolded a following decade of unpleasant rumors, denials, repentant self-flagellation and excuse making; a decade of acquiescent silence, bureaucratic obfuscation and pretense; and a decade of pervasive fear of being accused of racism; all of which paralyzed criticism and insulated the fantasies of the entrenched 'progressives' who were now completely in charge.

The widespread and egregious sexualization and sexploitation of children inside many aboriginal communities that was exposed by the 'Little Children are sacred' report finally broke part of this spell, to the extent that mainstream society broke through its inhibitions against interference. Would any reasonable person knowingly leave a child to the mercy of communities that are locked into a cycle of abuse and dysfunctional behavior that keeps repeating itself from one generation to the next with little hope of change or escape?  Is indigenous 'culture' so sacrosanct that no outsider can presume to criticize or interfere?  I don’t think so.

But the question is, why isn't anyone asking why the people who put together 'Bringing Them Home' were able to get away with such a totally one sided view of the settler-indigenous relationship, which allowed indigenous society to so completely evade any kind of honest discourse about its own condition; to so completely evade taking some responsibility for it and evade doing what was and is necessary to become full citizens of the world, as well indigenous people within the multi-cultural mix that Australia is becoming?  What was all that tearful hand wringing and condemnation about, if what it led to was and abandonment of a ‘generation’ of indigenous and part indigenous children to circumstances that put anything the colonial and post colonial white bastards did into some kind of ‘perspective’?

Chapter 4 of the ‘Little Children Are Sacred’ report, which describes in awful detail the collapse of social governance inside some Northern Territory indigenous communities, makes excruciatingly difficult reading.

When the 'progressive' apparatchiks threw out the externally imposed disciplines of paternalism, the worldview of missionary religion and the directional focus of assimilation, did they just throw out discipline, faith and focus of any sort? Did they merely throw aboriginal society to another pack of wolves by offering it license rather than freedom?

I think they did, and the very same all-rights-and -no-responsibilities laissez-faire libertarianism that has been pedaled to indigenous society by the Libertarchs also threatens to overwhelm and annihilate the rest of us not far down track.  Indigenous society is just a bellwether for what can happen in an already vulnerable community, when the means for building sociophilic values and the robust discipline and responsible moral agency necessary to enforce them, are abandoned.

The tyrannies of racism, paternalism and assimilationism were merely replaced by the tyrannies of life without boundaries.  The report lays bare what happens when a community loses its existential center, social values and authority structures.

40 years ago, I saw an indigenous humpy settlement just outside Roebourne in Western Australia that looked like a slum, but it was not like the Djakarta kampongs I had earlier visited.  What I saw in Djakarta were communities populated by many God fearing Muslims, and no matter how poor they were, they lived disciplined lives and made every effort to maintain their very humble homes and their children as comfortably, cleanly and well fed a condition as possible, even if all they had was nine square meters of earth floor, with only tin and plastic to protect them from the elements.

When I first saw that filthy garbage strewn indigenous humpy settlement, I was with Melanesian Thursday Islanders, who formed a quite strong (and not to be crossed) contingent in our railway construction camp.  They regarded those humpies and their inhabitants with distaste, because they felt that its denizens were ‘letting down the side’ and making TIs look bad.  Torres Strait islanders do get lumped in with mainland indigenes of completely different ethnic stock, and they don’t like it.  Anyone foolish enough to call a TI ‘an Abo’ either got beaten up and/or they hastily left the camp. And TI ‘sensitivity’ was not so much to the implied slur in the name, as the insult at being lumped in with such incorrigible losers, who were known to regularly hawk their adolescent girls behind the Roebourne pub for the price of a slab of beer.

Some of the TIs were missionary educated and Christians, and they really didn’t like that…..

And worse, were those awful racist assimilationists observing not necessarily terrible different scenarios fifty to sixty years before?  The answer to that is much more difficult.  Tribal law was likely more intact and likely to be enforced.  The sexual ‘revolution’ had yet to make its baleful and corrupting influence felt  Missionary badgerers were still at work.
 
On the other side, the standards being applied by welfare authorities across the board, regardless of race, whether in relation to irresponsible/neglectful parenting, out of wedlock single parenting, or anything that might be seen to put a child in moral danger, were much stricter and more interventionist than they are now.  The whole discourse was being played out at a completely different level of value judgment, social expectation and ideological articulation.

Building on the precedent set by the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’, apparatchiks of the new regime could blandly get away with announcing the failure to deal with dysfunctional and self-defeating behavior, failure to deliver better health outcomes, or reduce the enormous imprisonment rate of indigenous people, as if it had absolutely nothing to do with 'their' clients or the system of service delivery.  The client group is now such officially declared totally helpless victim that it is absolutely not responsible for anything that happens to it.  The service delivery system is weighed down by the crushing weight of cast iron excuses that makes any funding level, any bureaucratic procedure and any remote community delivery system insufficient to manage the overwhelming and insoluble needs of  ‘the clients’.

This is a classical example of the ideological version of the emperor’s new clothes.  It is a testament to the enormous propaganda success of the New Order that the extraordinary fatuity of this isn’t immediately recognizable by everyone, instantly.  And in a way it is, for as with the naked emperor, everyone is too frightened of him to point out the screamingly obvious.

Who is going to call a significant proportion of aboriginal society to account for its abject failure to join into a modern, tolerant, prosperous and opportunity rich multi-cultural society that attracts amongst its migrants people whose histories of suffering and loss put the indigenous tragedy in the shade?
 
If the survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, Soviet repression, the killing fields of Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Rwanda, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Sri Lanka and Syria can take their place and make good in this evolving multi-cultural experiment, what is the matter with indigenous Australia?  And what is the matter with their libertarian humanist sponsors?

If we have had to say sorry to aboriginal society for the surely traumatic things that have happened to them since industrial society crashed in on them, then it seems to me that it is incumbent on a good many of them to apologize to their own children and each other for continuing to make such a terrible mess of managing their part in recovering from these blows, moving on and doing what needs to be done, for themselves, but particularly their children, so they do not end up as the kind of willful losers far too many of their parents are.
 
That is what just about everyone else on the planet has had to do and with varying degrees of success, that has left even the most laggardly some way down the path to catching up with the ever moving feast that is the modern world.

The December 2013 decision to send truancy officers after indigenous children from schools with up to 30% non attendance, indicates still very significant elements in the ‘community’ that just aren’t really interested in doing anything to join the modern world and a parent cohort that is prepared to either connive with its children to ensure they live off welfare all their lives, just like them, or they are just too indolent to get their children out of bed in the morning.  Why on earth should we accept that any more than our grandparents’ generation did?  Indulging them merely compounds the inter-generational damage.

If aboriginal leaders like Noel Pearson, who are powerful advocates for energetic and disciplined self help can't get traction and action to start making the right moves and very soon, we all just might find ourselves being forced to go back to the future.

Underneath the satisfaction that we have at last started to do our bit in at least symbolically taking responsibility for the sufferings of indigenous people is an overwhelming question.

What are ‘we’ going to do about a 'generation' of children (meaning a significant proportion, whatever that is; say 10%, which we now know was the rough percentage that were ‘stolen’ by those nasty colonial white guys after the 'Bringing Them Home' enquiry exaggerations were toned down a bit) who haven't been educated, or fed properly, or have been made to live in squalor, filth and indolence, or allowed to become chronically unhealthy with disease conditions that should have and could have been easily fixed if anyone could be bothered, or had to endure the effects of alcoholic violence and emotional neglect, drugs, petrol sniffing, ubiquitous pornography, petty criminality, early onset sexual interference and all the rest of the obscenities that were so lamentably revealed in the ‘The Little Children Are Sacred  Report?

Who is thieving the lives and futures of a whole 'generation' of children here? Who is destroying the fabric and viability of aboriginal communities and their 'culture'?  Continuing to blame the 'invaders' or 'racism' for it all just won't wash anymore. Playing the helpless victim is in the end a self defeating mind game. All human beings have some responsibility for themselves, no matter what has happened to them!

The time has come to call some bluff, to insist on some excuse free honesty and to resolutely refuse to tolerate the most recent layer of ideological cliché, euphemism and cant that has characterized the discussion of indigenous affairs since the 1960s, if we want to avoid repeating an already baleful history.

If we fail to do that and the mis-styled 'progressives' who have defined and further perverted the process of intercultural dialogue are allowed to continue to dominate it, there will be produced yet another 'generation' or two or three, of indigenous children whose reasonable expectation of a loving, secure and disciplined upbringing will have been betrayed, again.

I do not for a moment believe that the answers are either simple or easy.  The ball really is in our indigenous brothers’ and sisters’ court.  It is about adopting sustainable beliefs and practices that will strengthen their life expectancy and social commons, apply pressure on educational outcomes and start the process of aligning their distribution of income and wealth with the rest of the Australian community, by opting out of the welfare system.
 
This will possibly start to happen when we stop giving out anti-racist moral blank cheques similar to the holocaust ones we used to give out to Zionists, and tear up the ones already in circulation. And that push will only follow through when indigenous communities try some disciplined firmness and toughness with themselves and each other, by lowering tolerance of poor behavior, increasing punitive reactions to it, abandoning the excuses for the second and third rate, and recognizing that every right is underpinned by a non negotiable set of obligations and expectations that need to be met, in order to gain and keep it.

That would be a good start and be made much easier for them to adopt, if we did the same thing, for the rest of us are almost as much in need of rescue from the ideological garbage that now so blights them.

But it is more than that.  Indigenous society must at some point make decisions about how much and what parts of their still extant traditional culture are portable into a modern multi-cultural society that is never going to accept half hearted participation in its economy and way of life. Multiculturalism is a compromise between traditional culture and modernity.  It gives all comers something of an each way bet that lets them participate in the latter and draw sustenance from the former.  This has to work and it seems to me that this is our indigenous brother’s and sister’s best chance for a happier future, by letting go of some of their past in order that they can more fully embrace the present.
 
It has never been an easy journey for anyone.  From 1780 to 1830, my own ethnic group went through a really terrible convulsion that totally uprooted my ancestors from a rural past that went back to the first Neolithic villages, and thrust them into cities, leaving large sections of that population in the most impoverished and immiserated condition.  Most of the Europeans indigenous people first met were part of the new semi-criminalized/destitute underclass created. by that upheaval,  It was a long struggle for them to get a better deal.  Many non convicts who were blocked from economic and social opportunity in Britain by entrenched class and privilege later risked all and migrated to find a better life here.  Most of them did.
 
Indigenous people must also become migrants; time migrants.  Just like Christian in Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’, they have the burden of the past on their shoulders and the only way to lighten it is to make their way towards the great city of modern imagination.  There are no devices that can be used to make that journey easier.  It has to be walked, or if in a hurry, run, past many hazards and obstacles.  But none of them are insurmountable.

Nothing is stopping our indigenous brothers and sisters from doing this except their own reluctance and inertia.  Disadvantage does not stop the resolute, but it devastates excuse makers and keeps those who make them on their behalf in business!
 
And while some are starting to make that journey through the education system, there are not nearly enough of them.  The future of those who don’t, who stay on the welfare, take to the drugs and alcohol, do the violence and sexual destructiveness, is almost too grim to contemplate.  And if that can’t be fixed, we’ll just have to try and retrieve the children again.

Screw ‘Bringing Them Home’.  We have done quite enough sorries.  We will just have to trust that we have learned enough from the previous failures not to repeat them, so that the children really do have a better chance at life and happiness.  And above all, they need a proper modern education to complement and balance their sense of indigenous country and tradition, in the same way everyone else does in a multicultural society.  They need to become citizens of the world as much as Australians and indigenous people in it.

Wikipedia has a list of indigenous achievement firsts. They are not just thin on the ground, but all too recent.  I tried to find an indigenous officer in any of the armed forces, and aside from Captain Reg Saunders (who was commissioned in the field) during WW2, I could only find a Captain Chloe Dray from Norforce, which is a reserve unit in Northern Australia and a Navy Doctor.  But there still has never been an indigenous cadet at the Defense Force Academy.
 
If you read the recruitment bumpf put out by all the defense arms, they are desperate to get indigenous personnel involved.  But the Defense Indigenous Development Program has had to be commanded by a transferee from the New Guinea Defense Force, because at least he isn’t European!  And if a man whose great grandfathers may have been highlands headhunters can make his way to a modern command, what is the matter with our indigenous brothers and sisters?

If a young man or woman with even a vague prospect of getting through the academic program were able to stand and breathe, and had a genealogically or genetically detectable indigenous forebear in the last 200 years, he or she would get into the Defense Force Academy (Duntroon).

The first black officer to graduate from West Point in the US, a country notorious for its racism, was 1877.  The first Indian, a Creek, gained entrance in 1822! 

Maori junior officers first appeared in the New Zealand army in the First World War.  During World War Two, Maori reached the rank of colonel and some of their young men made it into both Sandhurst and Duntroon.  The present Maori Governor-General of New Zealand, Lt General Sir Jerry Mataparae, is the ex chief of the Defense Forces. 

So what is the matter with our indigenous brothers and sisters?

If indigenous Mums don’t go through their pregnancies in an alcoholic or other drug induced haze, aren’t suffering from STDs, don’t get seriously beaten up, go to a doctor if they get sick and take medication as directed, get regular gynecological checkups and are eating a vaguely plausibly healthy diet, their kids should have exactly the same distribution of IQ as anyone else. 

If indigenous parents have high expectations of their children in the way that even the poorest Chinese peasant does in the back blocks of Szechuan, and those children go to schools where there are no excuses and very low tolerance for poor behavior or performance, we might eventually see them turning up for trade and tertiary training like everyone else.  I look forward to the day when an indigenous young person feels like he or she has ‘failed’ with 90% grades, because all the other indigenous kids did better!  Why bloody not!?

Indigenous society as a whole and many of its communities in particularly, need to stop feeling sorry for themselves and grasp the opportunities that migrants from far more difficult circumstances than theirs avail themselves off, by taking huge risks in leaky boats to get here. They have to ask themselves the hard questions about their attitude to the modern world and their willingness to participate in it.  It beckons to them and demands that they respond in ways that give their children the same chances in it as anyone else’s.  And if they don’t respond, it is they who are letting those children down.

The days of trying to use the accusation of racism to fend off questions and excuse themselves are over.  What is going on in many indigenous communities isn’t good enough and it is time the rest of us stopped indulging them.  It is time to for the do-gooder liberal humanitarians to shoulder some responsibility for the parlous condition their ideology has left indigenous society in.  It is time for them to own up to the need to re-establish and enforce a social commons that produces robust characters with some integrity, whose sociophilic values can be reliably passed on inter-generationally, and not just in indigenous communities.