GENERAL COMMENTS

GLOBAL ACTION AUSTRALIA supports the notion that people probably entered this ancient land either via a land bridge from Asia or by sea and that hunter gatherer families and tribes roamed Australia long before the coming of the European and more particularly the English explorers who subsequently laid claim to the continent and its various islands for their own sovereign.

Whether those people claiming to be 'Aboriginal' are in fact the descendants of some prehistoric 'original' people cannot be conclusively demonstrated due to a lack of any unbroken physical or written record.  We simple do not know either when the first human arrived on this continent or whether that illusive 'original people' were in any way connected to those who today claim to be aboriginal.  For example the so called Bradshaw Art and documented comments by aboriginal people themselves support the claim that they were not the first or the original people to dwell in this land.  See Land Rights

Amongst the most Ancient Rock Paintings of Earth?

"When the first settlers occupied the area, the Aborigines told them that the Bradshaw Paintings were "before their time", and that they were "rubbish paintings". According to legend, they were made by birds. It was said that these birds pecked the rocks until their beaks bled, and then created these fine paintings by using a tail feather and their own blood. This art is of such antiquity that no pigment remains on the rock surface, it is impossible to use carbon dating technology. The composition of the original paints cant be determined, and whatever pigments were used have been locked into the rock itself as shades of Mulberry red, and have become impervious to the elements.

Fortuitously, in 1996 Grahame Walsh discovered a Bradshaw Painting partly covered by a fossilised Mud Wasp nest, which scientists have removed and analysed using a new technique of dating, determining it to be 17,000 + years old. This discovery lends solid support to Grahame's theories about the true antiquity of these works of art. It must be remembered that this is the same age as the famous Lascaux Cave Paintings discovered in southern France."
Courtesy Bradshaw Foundation.

The following issues are not in dispute:

    a.  That many of todays aboriginal people probably have a prior claim to arrival in this country to that of the white
         races.

   b.  That many of todays aboriginal people have a long, close, meaningful and enduring connection to 'the land.'

    c.  That many of todays aboriginal people possess a proud, substantial body of oral tradition and belief, part of
         which is commonly called 'the dreaming'.

    d.  That the aboriginal people possess a substantial body of known and acknowledged tribal sites and artifacts
         that demonstrate a close affinity with the land and some continuity of residence in Australia.

    e.  That certain of the aboriginal people still possess a unique body of knowledge about the flora and fauna of
Australia.

    f.   That during and for a period of time after the occupation of Australia by settlers from Britain and Europe the
         aboriginal people (by the standards accepted in those times) were viewed as inferior and that they suffered
         strong persecution and disadvantage.

    g.  That the aboriginal people of today are a precious, vital, remnant and connection to this country's distant past.

    h.  That the aboriginal people have a vital and unique contribution to make to Australian far into the future.

STATED POLICY OBJECTIVES

PAST DAMAGE

GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA) regards the aboriginal people as a proud, equal, integral and  respected part of the fabric of Australia.  As with all other people of this great land, they are Australians first and aboriginal second. Not the reverse.

The plight of  aboriginal children is of particular concern to GLOBAL ACTION because they are the future.   We cannot
change the past, but we can act in the present to bring a better future for all aboriginal people.

A task force would be empowered to attack all issues causing harm or disadvantage to aboriginal children and youth
and to raise their conditions and standards to those of the rest of the community.

Where possible and within reason GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA) aims to repair the consequences of the damage of the past.

This means immediate equal rights for aboriginal people in all aspects of life and bringing closure to many outstanding issues including:

    a.  Swift and just negotiated resolution of all genuine outstanding land, mineral and water claims.

    b.  Rigorous audit of and accurate direction of funding to where it will best benefit individual aboriginal people and
needy families.  As opposed to being squandered by bureaucracy, vested interest groups, lobbyists, lawyers
         and other blood suckers.

    c.  Identification and immediate termination of all clearly political, frivolous or vexatious legal claims. The end of the
         'lawyers gravy train'.

    d.  Where they are seen to be disadvantaged, aboriginal people will be offered direct, appropriate and immediate
        assistance.

    e   A clear acknowledgment by the government and the people of Australia of the mistakes of the past (including
        those involving the so called 'stolen' generation) and a formal apology to the aboriginal people. #NOTE: This was
        suggested by Global Action long before the Rudd government's superficial 'Sorry' and media circus.  Such an
        acknowledgement should have been on the firm understanding that before the formal offfer and acceptance of
        such an acknowledgment and apology a limit to all legal claims or compensation was be agreed.

    f.  A pledge by the government on behalf of all of the people of Australia to look toward the future and so bring
        final closure to the issue of the aforementioned mistakes.

    f.  A policy of empowering and encouraging aboriginal people to help their own.

    g. The encouragement of increasing numbers of talented Aboriginal people into tourism, sport, entertainment
        and other careers.

       # NOTE: Most Australians would be only too pleased for their government to offer an apology if it weren't for
        the fear of such an apology opening the floodgate to legal claims for compensation by Aboriginal groups.

# NOTE: The rise and popularity of aboriginal entertainers and comedians is to be greatly encouraged as
        a way to project the talent, humour and uniqueness of aboriginal people and their culture to other Australians
        and the world.

Proposals for a  separate Aboriginal nation within Australia are flatly rejected as divisive and totally unacceptable to the mass of the Australian people.   The Australian aboriginal has no more right to a separate country or to special rights than would the supposed descendants of the tribal Celts, Saxons, Huns or Vikings to lands their forebears may once have dominated.  Australia exists and will prosper for all Australians and that with the greatest pride includes the aboriginal people.

FUTURE PROSPECTS

The restoration of aboriginal pride in their heritage, culture, capabilities and future prospects is paramount.

The creation of a strong vision of the future for all Aboriginal people is long overdue.  Where are the aboriginal people headed?  What will happen to their culture in the coming decades and beyond?  GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA) challenges it to grow on all constructive fronts.

The constructive motivation and raising of the self esteem of the aboriginal people to shift from a mentality of often low self esteem, handouts and second class citizenship to one of proud self sufficiency (as in former times) is a key part of GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA'S) policy.

Additional emphasis on Education not just in formal schooling, but also in areas of aboriginal heritage and cultural matters will be accelerated greatly and money saved in other (under performing or unprofitable) areas of this portfolio will be directed into this.

Unprofitable, self destructive practices such as crime, alcoholism and drugs will be attacked head on with the government working closely and in direct co-operation with aboriginal leaders, families and communities on the ground.  All such practices are largely the products of hopelessness, low self esteem, lack of strong positive incentives and deprivation.

Mentoring will be a major policy objective of GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA).  Less backsides on seats in offices and more help at the coal face.

Meaningful work skills mean long term careers and so GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA) will ensure the end of the 'courses for courses sake' syndrome and the Centerlink merry-go-round.  GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA) is not in the business of feather bedding dysfunctional bureaucracies or creating ivory towers for educators.   All training and education will be aimed squarely towards placing aboriginal people in meaningful, well paid, rewarding, esteem building, long term careers. Students will not be placed into training course situations when there are no real job prospects at the end.

Whilst retaining their own cultural heritage aboriginal people will be encouraged to strive at all levels for world class academic excellence.  While never forgetting their past, they must not live in it, but strive for the future.

GLOBAL ACTION (AUSTRALIA'S) policy aim is to reduce the number of aboriginal people receiving social security payments to the national average within a decade by swiftly implementing and closely monitoring the above policy changes.

DISCRIMINATION

Discrimination against aboriginal people will be attacked on two fronts:

        a.    Building aboriginal self esteem, self confidence and wealth and empowering aboriginal people to find a
               meaningful place in the world.

        b.    Both educating and punishing those who discriminate against aboriginal people on the grounds of race or
               aboriginality.

PRIVILEGE AND RESPONSIBILITY

Equality within the Australian community is a right, a privilege, and a responsibility.  If balanced carefully the future for the Australian aboriginal people can be very bright indeed.

ALSO SEE POLICY STATEMENTS ON ALLIED TOPICS SUCH AS EDUCATION, CRIME, MULTICULTURALISM, ETC

ALSO SEE: LAND RIGHTS

LINKS OF INTEREST:  Extinction  "by man not climate"

________________________________________________________________________________________________

OF FURTHER INTEREST

What really happened in early Tasmania?

The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,  Volume One: Van Diemen's Land 1803-1847  By Keith Windschuttle.
Macleay Press

"Historian Keith Windschuttle has created a great deal of heat in the opinion columns and the letters pages of the broadsheet newspapers. The basic reason is that he attacks the academic pride of the left-liberal historians Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan, authors respectively of The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) and The Aboriginal Tasmanians (also 1981). They are cast as the "orthodoxschool".

Windschuttle finds that Reynolds and Ryan have vastly overstated their case, and misunderstood the causes of
violence. But he is not content simply to correct the record. In a prologue called "The Final Solution Down Under" he
criticises the extravagant statements about "genocide" and policies of "extermination" made by Lyndall Ryan, the journalist Philip Knightley and others.

Orthodox Opinion: That there definitely was an orthodoxy needing to  be criticised can be readily confirmed. If one looks, for example, at a standard, general book by an outsider, the Frenchman Robert Lacour-Gayet, one reads that "... wholesale slaughter had [before 1830] taken the place of a policy on the problem [i.e., race relations in Tasmania]. It has been estimated that, of the 3,000 to 7,000 Aborigines who inhabited the island in 1804, no more than 300 remained by 1830 (p.162, emphasis added)".

Lacour-Gayet's Concise History of Australia, French edition 1973, was published by Penguin in 1976, fully 20 years before John Howard became Prime Minister.

Size of the Aboriginal Population: The main source for estimating the original size of the Aboriginal population of Van Diemen's Land (renamed Tasmania in 1855) is the diaries and other writings of the so-called "Conciliator", George Augustsus Robinson. He was appointed (quite late: in 1830) to make contact with and "conciliate" the remaining 'wild'
tribes.

Wherever he went on his treks around Van Diemen's Land, Robinson questioned the Aboriginal members of his party and those he encountered along the way about the names of the local tribes or bands (including those already extinct in 1830).

Drawing on this work, the historian Brian Plomley and the archaeologist Rhys Jones have proposed that originally Van Diemen's Land had a population of about 4,000 Aborigines. Windschuttle argues that Plomley and Jones counted too many bands or tribes and they failed to account for many observations of some very small bands. A better total, he
thinks, is 2,000 people, or about 50 bands with an average of about 40 members.

It is widely agreed that by 1831 the surviving Aboriginal population was only about 350 people. Thus the population was reduced after 27 years of colonisation (1804-31) by about 80%.

But, what were the causes? Was it "bullets or bacteria" (as Windscuttle poses the question)?

Declining Fertility: The imported disease gonorrhea, although it was rarely fatal or even likely to cause a marked deterioration in health, effectively inhibited pregnancy and child-bearing. Gonorrhoea was spread by casual relations between white workers and Aboriginal women. Also some Aboriginal women were seized, or perhaps "lured", by
white men as their concubines (for Windschuttle thinks that the Aboriginal women may well have preferred life with rough white men to life with their own even rougher males).

As a result, many Aboriginal men could not find marriage partners. Those women who were available were often unable to bear children. So the number of babies being born fell below the rate needed to replace the number of adults dying or being killed.

Imported Diseases: On the Australian mainland, it is known that there were several smallpox pandemics that devastated the Aboriginal populations of the south-east (see Judy Campbell's Invisible Invaders: Smallpox and Other Diseases in Aboriginal Australia 1780-1880, Melbourne University Press, 2002).

But apparently smallpox never reached Tasmania. In Van Diemen's Land, it appears that respiratory diseases were a major source of Aboriginal deaths. Colds, influenza and pneumonia, although usually not fatal among the whites, affected the Aborigines seriously, killing (probably) hundreds of people over the quarter-century from 1804 to 1829. (Some strains of influenza will kill people of any race: more people died from the world-wide flu pandemic of 1918-19 than from the fighting during World War One.)

Feuding between Bands: Windschuttle also proposes that continued fighting between Aboriginal groups was a major cause of Aboriginal deaths.

By itself, of course, Aboriginal feuding would not have affected the size of the population, but, as noted, fertility was declining due to venereal diseases and other factors. More adults were dying than babies were being born.

Guns and Spears: Each contemporary report claiming that a British workman or soldier killed an Aborigine or an Aborigine killed a colonist is considered. Windschuttle assesses all the claims for their reliability, classifying them as "plausible" or "implausible", sometimes "highly implausible". He concludes that the total of plausible killings was 118
Aborigines during 1803-34: equivalent to about four per year. On the other side, Aborigines killed 187 whites. This included (in 27 years) just a single soldier.

The worst year for white deaths was 1828. In that year Aborigines killed 40 settlers or their convict servants, which is to say, about three per month. To put this into perspective, the British colonial population increased from 5,000 to 24,000 during the 1820s. The year 1828 also saw the single most bloody incident, when a detachment of soldiers
from the 40th Regiment shot 10 Aborigines.

In other words, if a "massacre" means more than 10 people killed in one incident, then there were no massacres in Tasmania.

Plunder

Windschuttle goes on to ask "Were the Aborigines fighting a guerilla war, or were their attacks merely aimed at plunder?" and "How many of the opinion-makers among the colonial population believed that extirpation was the best policy?"

Aboriginal attacks, he argues, were motivated not by any aim of driving out the whites but by a desire to acquire flour, sugar, tea and blankets, or by revenge.

If some of the leading land-holders did eventually advocate a policy of extirpation, they came to this position very late.

Equally, some rejected the idea of extirpation. The colonial authorities refused such a policy.

Indeed the authorities tried strenuously to prevent bloodshed, and (Windschuttle explains) one of their main motives was a sincere belief in the principles of Evangelical Protestantism. This is perhaps the mostinteresting theme in the book.

Conclusion: The importance of this book is to show that, before we decide whether one part of the Australian people should apologise to another portion of the Australian people, we need to be clear about what happened in history, and how and why it happened.

Regrettably, the leading historians have been very loose in their reading of the colonial documents. As a result, instead of seeing race relations in Van Diemen's Land as a tragedy, some have misread it as a conspiracy amounting to genocide."

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