Gruesome Racism Of Christian Mission Propaganda

It's still hard to believe PR films like the one linked below, from 2.30 minutes in, were made to pave over the heartbreak and lifelong misery dealt out to Aboriginals over the stealing of their land and their children. The narration of is practically gleeful, and these kind of films were shown in cinemas, in schools, in government offices to staff, across Australia and England from the 1930s to the 1960s. Such films were made to convince those concerned by the purposeful destruction of Aboriginal culture and heritage and families that it was done "for their own good."

'Happy HalfCaste Girls In The Orphanage'

The counterpoint of an Aboriginal man detailing their rich lives and cultural lifestyles before the stealing of land and children began is jarring.


Here's the transcript, via The Australian Screen Office :

This clip shows black-and-white archival footage of Indigenous Australians engaged in traditional ceremonial activities, building a shelter, fishing with spears and collecting food. This footage includes narration by Aboriginal activist Mick Miller, who details the treatment of Indigenous people since Australia was colonised by the British in 1788. The second half of the clip shows footage of Indigenous people on a Christian mission in the 1930s. The original narration, included with this footage, claims that the missions are giving Indigenous people 'the benefits of civilisation’ and includes the intertitle 'Happy halfcaste girls in the orphanage’.

Mick Miller, narrator When the British, to use their word, “discovered” Australia, we had already been here for at least 60,000 years. Our culture was rich and complex. Based on a deep spiritual affinity for the land. The land is our mother. It is the source of all life and meaning to us. We were on the continent in small clan groups. We had no need for houses of parliament, or cathedrals, paved roads or fences, but the white man took that as evidence of our backwardness. They called us savages, subhumans. We were shot, poisoned, kept in chains. Our women were raped. They drove us from our land, and they desecrated it. Later, they decided to civilise us, to make us like themselves.

Original narration from Christian mission footage The Australian blacks are a vanishing race no longer. Earnest efforts by those who know and understand them are today bettering the condition of the Aborigines. The blacks are encouraged to live the old free life, but they are given the benefits of civilisation as well. And one big benefit is regular meals. Rations are issued to all who apply, and there’s no reluctance to apply. Some are reluctant to go. Along with the bucks and the youngsters, the women get their food the new way, but they still carry their babies the old way. The piccaninnies take their exercise seriously, even if some of them take it a bit out of time. “Well, how do you like this fella (inaudible), Mary? Too much altogether walkabout (inaudible).” So the good work of the Sacred Heart missionaries turns a primitive people into a happy, healthy community.

Mick Miller In less than 150 years, our ancient civilisation had been destroyed. It was accepted that we were doomed to extinction. We had become marginal people in our own country. Our land was now their land. 

John Pilger's Utopia Hits Home

John Pilger's extraordinary, jaw-dropping, heart-breaking but totally eye-opening documentary Utopia screened across Australia on SBS tonight. Utopia is one of the most important films ever made in Australia, about Australia, about its secret past, and its secret present.


Although mostly ignored by mainstream media, and unable to even get a distribution deal, initially, Utopia was still seen by more than 100,000 people in parks, churches, school halls and community halls across Australia, in dozens of communities.

The reaction on Twitter to Utopia airing on SBS was intense.

For a few minutes, a documentary about Aboriginals topped the Twitter trending topics for Australia. Shortly after, it locked in between AFL and NRL trending topics. If you know the volume of celebrity and sports and boy pop band related tweets that usually result in a subject trending, you will understand just how massive the public reaction to Utopia on SBS was. And it was on SBS, not on a commercial channel.

Tens of thousands of tweets were posted, quoting from the documentary, airing feels of shock, dismay, anger but almost overall a sense of betrayal. Not just betrayal by Aboriginals on social media still waiting for justice, but from people all over the country who had never been told most of the information in Utopia, by teachers, by the media, by history books. How did we not know all this? How can so much be hidden?



Films can change societies, and for now at least, it feels like Utopia will help Aboriginals in their fight for justice, and full recognition. It certainly got people talking. And that's a start, isn't it? At least people know more than they did a few years ago.




Here are photos from the first screening of John Pilger's Utopia, at 'The Block' in Redfern. More than 4000 people turned out to watch the documentary, and Aboriginals traveled from across Australia to be there, and to speak, passionately, about the stories of Aboriginal heroes and their battles for justice featured in the film. I'm haunted to this day by the cries of pain and anguish from some of the Aboriginal men and women in the crowd, when they saw images of dead friends, or relatives, or stolen children from their ancestral lands. I doubt I will ever go to another film screening where emotions were so raw, and the joy at truth finally being told was so overwhelming.

You can buy a DVD of Utopia here. It's archival footage, alone, is worth keeping a permanent copy of, but the story in total is something you should share with people who don't know, including your children, or your grandchildren. It is the truth of Australia.

A Dreamtime story :

Blatant Anti-Tinkerism

St Alban's, in the McDonald Valley, was still a two to three day, spine-jarring, bone-rattling Cobb & Co coach journey from Sydney when the Settlers Arms Inn, near the banks of the McDonald River, was heaving with travelers in the mid-1800s. But not just anybody could stay at such prestigious digs, as this reproduction of an original sign in the bar from that era makes clear :



Four pence a night for Bed
Six pence with Supper
No more than five to sleep in one bed
No Boots to be worn in bed
Organ Grinders to sleep in the Wash house
No dogs allowed upstairs
No Beer allowed in the Kitchen
No Razor Grinders or Tinkers taken in

Only five to a bed?

Outside of a local's explanation, "Tinkers would steal anything not bolted down," I don't have any valuable information to hand as to why Organ Grinders were thought only slightly more worthy of the most basic of accommodations than Tinkers or Razor Grinders, who were utterly banished.

The dark, atmospheric Settlers Arms today :



The sandstone blocks used to build the inn were hacked out, and usually transported, by convict slave labour. Breaking tools in the shaping of the sandstone could bring savage floggings, or death. Horses were more valuable than men, Aborigines were less valued than dogs. The McDonald Valley is one of the most beautiful and untouristed areas of New South Wales, with an extraordinary history soaked in extreme violence, incredible pioneering spirit, hardship, emancipation and back breaking work.

The St Alban's graveyard, like the inn, is small, but rich with history. The graves of the original white settlers dating back to the 1820s still stand, others older and forgotten decay into the ever creeping foliage.





Some local history, from the late 1700s into the early 1800s :

During this time the relations between the indigenous aboriginal population in the area was reasonably harmonious, the area being populated by the Dharug and Barkinung people who called the river Deerubbin.

The natives treated the newcomers as welcome guests, teaching bush skills and assisting in the planting of crops, they did not realize that the whites intended to stay and claim ownership of the land. Property ownership was completely alien to the Aboriginal; one cared for the land, but did not own it any more than one could own the sky overhead or the air one breathed.

The convicts and their keepers were the dregs of English society and were a hard and ruthless bunch and unfortunately conflicts soon developed as the Aborigines were denied access to many of their traditional areas, with Yam beds destroyed as wheat and corn were planted on the river flats and the banks denied to them for fishing, their traditional foods.

There are recorded cases of Aborigines providing labor on farms in exchange for a share of the crop and then massacred rather than given their share. They, in turn retaliated by setting fire to the crops just as harvesting was due. Regulations were introduced prohibiting Aborigines entry to established farm areas again denying them their food supply.

More Here

Photos by Darryl Mason

"Alexander The Great? Yeah, He's Buried In.....Broome"

A great story of the bush pub tale variety, does it matter if it's not true?

"We just got onto the subject of Alexander The Great's tomb, and he said, 'They'll never ever find it, no matter where they look, because Alexander the Great is buried in Broome, in Western Australia'....

"Approximately 50 years ago, some guy went into a cave in Broome and he saw some inscriptions in there and they looked like ancient Greek.

"He reported it to the government, then the government went and saw it and they confirmed there were some inscriptions there.

"....he defined the inscriptions as saying, in ancient Greek, 'Alexander the Great'.

"The government did say to him at that time, 'You didn't see this, OK, this never happened'."

"Nobody ever, ever suspected that Alexander could have died in Broome..."

Great story.

In primary school, there was a big map of the world on the wall. While we were being taught that Europeans didn't reach Australian shores until the 16th century, at the earliest, I'd look at that map, at the way you could pretty well paddle a canoe (with land stops for food, water, rest) from the Middle East to just above Darwin, and think "Bullshit." If you could make that journey in a canoe (and some have), why couldn't mariners a thousand or two thousand years ago have made the same trip?

Many years later I met an old Aboriginal man in Katoomba who said that he been told ancient stories of visitors who worshipped the sun being shipwrecked at different times on both coasts, perhaps four thousand years ago. The visitors, supposedly from Egypt, and the local Aboriginal tribes exchanged gifts and traded rock carving and hieroglyphic making techniques. Some of the Egyptians died here, others built ships and left again. And some who left, returned.

Years later again, an Egyptologist at the British Museum listened to this tale and said while there was next to no proof that such meetings actually did happen, centuries of Egyptian history is lost to us, wiped away by revisionists, looting and decay, particularly from the centuries when sun worship was at its peak.

The fact that we cannot find proof now does not mean such encounters did not happen. If Egyptians did meet Aboriginals three thousand years ago, it also would help explain why the ancient Egyptians and some Aboriginal tribes had the same name for the sun, 'Ra', and shared some very similar funereal rights and mummification practises.

And then there's the boomerangs found in the tomb of Tutankhamun :

The Aboriginal Romeo And Juliet

This story was told on SBS a few weeks back through a short documentary, with some stunning historical footage of the couple discussed below.

Why this beautiful and sad story of love, tradition and incredible survival in the harsh Australian outback has never been made into a full-scale movie, starring many of the superb indigenous actors, is beyond explanation.

From the UK Independent :

They were an Aboriginal Romeo and Juliet, star-crossed lovers who eloped into the desert because tribal law forbade them from marrying. And for 40 years they roamed, living off kangaroo meat and bush fruit, happy with their own company and the red landscape.

Warri and Yatungka were perhaps Australia's last nomads, leading a traditional lifestyle long after their Mandildjara tribe gravitated to urban settlements. They abandoned the desert only in 1977, when a severe drought dried up the waterholes, and tribal elders, anxious for their welfare, sent out a search party.

Warri and Yatungka met in the 1930s, but were from different "skin groups", so their relationship breached tribal law. Rather than separate, they ran away together. They had three children.

By the 1960s, with mining companies and pastoralists encroaching on their land, most Mandildjara moved to towns such as Warburton and Wiluna. British nuclear tests conducted in the Outback during the 1950s had also blunted Aborigines' desire to live in the desert. But Warri and Yatungka stayed there, leading a solitary existence, apart from occasional encounters with tribe members and white anthropologists.

It was not until the drought that they struggled to survive. It took the search party, led by an Aboriginal tracker, Mudjon, and a white explorer, Bill Peasley, several weeks to find them.

The couple were naked and stick-thin. As well as having to walk for days to find water, they had not eaten meat for a long time. Warri had a leg injury and could not hunt.

The couple, still inseparable, were close to starvation. They agreed to come into town, although they feared they might be punished. In fact, the elders had forgiven them.

However, Warri and Yatungka yearned for their peripatetic existence, which was how Aborigines had lived for 40,000 years.

In 1979 they died within weeks of each other.

A remarkable story, and a unique portrait of shared Aboriginal and Australian history.

Howard : "Racist Bastard"

New Zealand MP Scours Howard Over Aboriginal Intervention

Sacred Arnhem Could Become Backpackers Paradise

A New Zealand member of parliament has cut loose on Australian prime minister John Howard over his logistically, ideologically challenged plan to seize control of more than 60 Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory.

Hone Harawira, of the New Zealand Maori Party, claims that comments by John Howard, his ministers, and the one-sided media blitz over shocking child abuse, alcoholism and societal breakdown in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities has defamed and ostracised indigenous men :

"If I was an Aboriginal man in the Northern Territory I would feel like absolute s**t right now," the Maori Party MP said today.

"I would have the leader of my country saying I am an alcoholic, I am into pornography, I am into sexual abuse. All I would want to do is go out and smash someone."

Howard last month announced radical measures to tackle problems including abuse against children and women, and poverty in remote Aboriginal communities.

They include bans on alcohol and pornography, quarantining welfare payments, abolishing a permit system that limits access to remote communities, and mobilising extra police and troops to help address abuse and other problems.

"All Howard has done is generate more anger and bitterness in the Aboriginal community, a lot of which is going to be internalised," Mr Harawira said.

"I said John Howard is a racist bastard trying to impose racist policies on a people who can't fight back," he said, adding that he stood by those comments to air tonight.

Mr Harawira slammed Howard for ignoring reports issued ten years ago that revealed similar problems in Aboriginal towns and camps. Harawira, like the majority of Australians, views the intervention as an insidious publicity stunt related to the forthcoming federal election, which current polls show the Howard government is expected to lose.

The report into child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory that John Howard used to launch his intervention claimed that many of the sexual assaults on Aboriginal children were by white miners, a fact Howard himself acknowledged in an interview on Lateline, announcing the intervention.

That fact that so many white men are involved in the abuse of Aboriginal children barely surfaced amongst the hammerhard media coverage of indigenous communities in the Northern Territory in the past few weeks.

Only a few days ago, a report was published on how white men were buying sex from young Aboriginal girls in Darwin in exchange for cigarettes and beer. It received minimal media coverage.

Aboriginal men from all over Australia have been heard on talk back radio in the past two weeks talking of the glaring looks and verbal abuse they are now getting from white Australians since the child sexual assault report, championed by Howard, hit the headlines.

While government ministers and officials have been seen entering at least ten Aboriginal towns and camps in the past two weeks, we are yet to see any of them turn up in white mining camps, awash with alcohol and hard core pornography, to tell them to leave the Aboriginal children alone.


Meanwhile, the Northern Territory government has announced it will back the Northern Land Council in a legal challenge to Howard's intervention :

The Chief Minister, Clare Martin, led growing criticism of the intervention yesterday, saying seizing control of townships and scrapping the permit system did not make sense and would not stop child sexual abuse.

"So while we're working broadly with the Federal Government on the important issues of health, of tackling alcohol abuse, of tackling pornography, we will not support the removal of permits," Ms Martin said.

"It does not make sense, it is not supported by this Government and by Aboriginal Territorians, and we do not support five-year leases."

The Federal Government will seize control of 73 remote indigenous communities and introduce the most radical measures in decades to end indigenous neglect.

The Northern Land Council's chief executive, Norman Fry, said the compulsory acquisition of private property without consultation was discriminatory and could not be justified. He predicted that removing the permit system would subject tribal Aborigines to rampant tourism or rampant journalism.

"Removing the permit system will mean a free-for-all, with Arnhem Land instantly becoming the world's most sought-after backpacker destination, an exotic must, with busloads of tourists leaving Darwin for remote communities every day."

White Men Buy Sex From Teenage Aboriginal Girls For A Beer At 'Lollipop Corner'

Local Northern Territory Police Claim The Permit System Is Essential

Census Shows Indigenous Populations On The Rise

Indigenous Fears Over 'Military Occupation'

Canberra Ready To Seize Town Camps

Aboriginal Poverty And Neglect Is Rife In Sydney's Backyard

Greer Vs Ackerman On The 'Aboriginal Intervention'

Two columns about prime minister John Howard's 'Aboriginal Intervention' campaign from two of Australia's most hysterical, hyperbolic, clarity-challenged blabbermouths - Piers Ackerman and Germaine Greer.

One of the two thinks Howard is just brilliant and never puts a foot wrong and has a heart of pure gold and would never let politics or the thought of winning the coming election influence his decision making, particularly when it comes to the fate of Australia's Aborigines.

The other thinks Howard is the scum that grows on scum and wants to drink the blood of abused Aboriginal children while stealing their tribes' land so his rich mates can move in and start mining more uranium.

You can guess for yourself which one is which.

Ackerman : While a majority of Labor supporters (80 per cent, according to Galaxy) believe the move is an election stunt pulled by Prime Minister John Howard, those most affected see it as an attempt to remedy a disaster long-neglected by governments. ...those who stupidly claim the Federal Government could have acted sooner are ignoring the tens of millions Canberra has given the states and the Northern Territory to deal with the inherent problems faced by those who have been kept subject to abuse in their isolated reserves by the appalling policies so warmly embraced by misty-eyed members of the kumbaya crowd.

Greer : Ever since white men set foot in Australia more than 200 years ago, they have persecuted, harassed, tormented and tyrannised the people they found there. The more cold-blooded decided that the most humane way of dealing with a galaxy of peoples who would never be able to adapt to the "whitefella" regime was to eliminate them as quickly as possible, so they shot and poisoned them. Others believed that they owed it to their God to rescue the benighted savage, strip him of his pagan culture, clothe his nakedness, and teach him the value of work. Leaving the original inhabitants alone was never an option; learning from them was beyond any notion of what was right and proper. As far as the pink people were concerned, black Australians were primitive peoples, survivors from the stone age in a land that time forgot.

Ackerman : Those most to blame for this horror are the promoters of the Aboriginal industry - from H.C. "Nugget" Coombs and his successors to the legislators who disenfranchised rural Aboriginals from the economy through the equal wage case 30 years ago, to the jurists who conspired to concoct the Mabo case and the authors of flawed reports on Aboriginal deaths in custody and the so-called "stolen generations".

Greer : As commander-in-chief of an army of police, the Australian Defence Force and hordes of doctors and nurses, (John Howard) will storm the 70 or so autonomous Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory.

Ackerman : It comes as no surprise that Labor's true believers - the dilettante North Shore doctors' wives - are loathe to support genuine action - because it focuses attention on the abject failure of the ill-conceived apartheid policies they marched for and in which they placed their deluded, emotive trust.

Greer : The name of the game, as usual, is bad faith. Everything Howard does is calculated to win him votes. The suffering of Aboriginal women and children at the hands of their deranged menfolk has been going on all Howard's life. For most of that time whitefellas made a joke of it. At this late hour, on the eve of a general election, he is suddenly taking it seriously. It is of no consequence that what he is doing is illegal. His treatment of asylum seekers and boat people is just as illegal, and it is widely admired by Australians and people who should know better.

Ackerman :The dewy-eyed media handwringers and academics who rarely miss an opportunity to bray their compassion for Aborigines are now silent....It's time these poseurs said sorry to the generations they have so tragically exploited.

They both need to take a cold shower. Together, to save water. But for God's sake, don't post the footage of it on YouTube. We might accidentally stumble across it and then have to gouge out our eyeballs and use the new memory flush pill to empty our minds of that horrific vision.

But in reality, Germaine Greer's article is one of the better, and more comprehensive, stories on the realities of the 'Intervention' you'll find online today. She's spent plenty of time in Aboriginal communities up north where the elders have already intervened and worked out most of the problems of their society and want to be treated with the respect they deserve. They're still waiting. Greer is harsh on the history of the whitefellas treatment of the blackfella, because that treatment has been appallingly bad, more often than not, for more than 200 years. And not much has changed in the 11 years John Howard has been running the country.

Ackerman, meanwhile, just provides another example of why he is one of the highest paid propagandists in the country. He is so good at it. Never has a failing, disconnected and inherently dishonest Australian government as John Howard's had such a master of The Big Lie so firmly on their side. In Australia, there are few, if any, more rehearsed proponents of the vile, insidious personal attack, and practitioners of The Big Lie than Ackerman.

Greer still has hope for the communities she spent time, and believes that most Aboriginals need less interference from the whitefella, not more, particularly from those whitefellas who sell them booze and drugs and buy sex from their children, or just rape them for nothing. Almost nowhere in the storm of media coverage about the appalling child abuse in some Aboriginal communities was it mentioned just how often whitefellas with a few cartons of booze, or a cheap bottle of scotch, were the perpetrators.

Greer also believes the Aboriginal people still have a lot to teach white Australia about this massive country where we all mostly cling and congregate near the coastlines.

As Greer points out, on behalf of the female Aboriginal elders she calls friends, it doesn't seem to occur to the Howard government that the whitefella might actually have something to learn from the people who lived in these lands for more than 50,000 years.

Ackerman, meanwhile, is just dripping with his trademark rancid snobbery and dealing from the same tattered deck of tired old cliches he was already wearing out back when he was still even remotely relevant. And that was a long time ago. His bile and bitterness is so toxic, you might need to eat a big spoonful of honey after reading this to get back your sense of taste.

Aboriginal Families Flee The Police, Military 'Intervention'

Howard's "Invasion" Of Aboriginal Lands Begins Today

Prime Minister John Howard said he was left with no choice but to act immediately to stop the rape and molestation of children in a number of Northern Territory Aboriginal communities, after the release of a report detailing the living horror that is daily life for thousands of Aboriginal children, living in Third World conditions.

For many who have spent years and decades trying to help Aboriginal communities devastated by alcoholism, petrol sniffing, gambling, social decay and sexual exploitation, Howard's move to action has been years overdue.

But the speed of Howard's 'emergency intervention' has reportedly left some Aboriginal communities reeling, and horror-struck, and there is much angst that Howard did not consult enough with Aboriginal leaders before setting his plans into immediate action.

Howard said the time for talk and discussions was over. It was time for action.

Today, the first wave of police, backed by Australian Defence Force soldiers, will enter Aboriginal communities to start rounding up the more violent, abusive offenders, and to close down pubs and liquor outlets.

According to Howard's rushed, vague and possibly disastrous plan, medical professionals will follow the police and military and will conduct medical examinations of all children under 16. The examinations will be compulsory, and parents will not be required, according to Howard's comments, to give their consent.

Howard's stated mission is for health workers to examine the children for signs of sexual abuse, or infection by sexual disease. Many of the doctors who are taking part said they will use the opportunity offered by the intervention plan to do complete check-ups of the children they encounter, and they will not be rushed in their work by the politics that will overshadow the intervention as the federal election draws near.

Neither Howard, nor the vast sprawl of critics of his plan, know what the eventual outcome of the intervention will be. But few, obviously, are hoping it will fail. Virtually all Australian want the exploitation of Aboriginals, by their own, and by outsiders, to cease. Today.

But it will be a dream many years in the realisation, with some extremely ugly and possibly deadly confrontations to come.

It is not only a small number of Aboriginal elders who don't want the social order, the power of their rule over their communities, by decree or by sheer force of violence and threat, to change, or to be lessened by the presence of police and soldiers.

There is also a lesser known number of white Australian males who have grown rich and powerful from the illegal trafficking of alcohol and drugs into remote Aboriginal communities, and who control pedophile rings where Aboriginal children are prostituted and traded between communities, and between mine workers.

Howard has vowed to stamp out alcohol and pornography in more than 60 Northern Territory communities, and not all of them are dominated by Aboriginals. There is a small number of camps filled with white Australian miners, who will also be told their days of heavy drinking and watching hardcore porn, and buying sex from Aboriginal kids with a few litres of petrol, are well and truly over.

To believe that all of the people in the isolated communities of the Northern Territory will relent to the police and military is a fantasy. For a few months, at least, the police and military may be facing their own mini-insurgency, as hundreds of members of Aboriginal gang members go bush and possibly begin to fight back.

The police, and the military, already have their 'hit lists' of the more violent and abusive and dangerous members of the communities they will be entering.

There will be jubilant scenes in some towns as drunken thugs are taken away and the sober grandmothers and community elders are able to take back control of what alcohol, rape and violence had desecrated for so many years.

And it all begins today.

In the first community to be targeted, located near the base of the majestic Uluru, reports claim that Aboriginal families are packing up and fleeing their community, terrified that their children will be taken away from them, and a replay of the 'stolen generation' stories of their parents and grandparents, will become their reality as well.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

Panic about the Howard Government's crackdown on child sexual abuse has spread widely throughout remote Aboriginal communities, where parents fear their children will be taken away in a repeat of the stolen generation.

Some families have already fled the first community to be targeted, Mutitjulu at Uluru, but the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Mal Brough, blames "liars" who have something to hide from police and military personnel for terrorising people and spreading hysteria.

"The reason people are scared there at the moment is because people are putting around that the army are coming to take their children away, that the army is coming in to shoot the dogs and the Government is going to take away their money and make them sit there and do what they're told," Mr Brough said.

Social workers and indigenous MPs in the Northern Territory are being swamped with phone calls from Aborigines wanting to know what will happen in their communities.

An indigenous MP, Alison Anderson, said she had been trying to persuade families in her huge desert electorate south of Alice Springs not to take their children and flee before police and troops arrived, which in some places could be within days.

"In one telephone hook-up last night people told me they were going to run away to a waterhole 50 kilometres away," Ms Anderson said. "I have heard from many people thinking they may do the same thing. I've urged them not to panic and to stay on the communities and work with the people who arrive."

Marion Scrymgour, a Northern Territory Government minister, said: "There's a lot of fear, particularly among elder woman. Not so long ago - 30 to 40 years - children were being taken out of the arms of Aboriginal mothers. There is real fear that is going to happen again."

The Chief Minister, Clare Martin, told MPs yesterday to travel to their bush electorates as soon as possible to tell people "what is fact and what is fiction" in an effort to halt the panic.

Lesley Taylor, one of the Territory's most experienced child abuse workers, said: "They are scared stiff … This is creating very stressful environments that could lead to even more children being at risk."

Sixty to 70 communities will be targeted, and small teams of police, military and government officers will begin arriving today to audit people's needs. They would be replaced by teams who would stay to meet those needs, Mr Brough said. Public servants will oversee the programs, with a manager in each community responsible for what happens.

This is only the beginning. The road ahead will be hard, long, historical and will hopefully change the nature of how Australian state and federal governments deal with Aboriginal communities forever.

Hundreds of Aboriginal tribes survived more than 50,000 years in this country, in some of the harshest environments in the world. It wasn't sheer luck that saw them survive, and in some regions absolutely thrive. Aboriginal culture holds knowledge and secrets about this land that we can barely comprehend, that we have barely begun to understand.

It's no time to tell them all that they were wrong, that they don't know what they're doing, and what they believe is bad for them, and destructive for their children and societies.

Australia stands on the edge of a new beginning for its Aboriginal people. But the 'emergency intervention' cannot last only to the federal election. It must mark the fresh start of a new life for the tens of thousands of people left behind, and it must usher in decades of rehabilitation, rebuilding and re-integration.

But it is not only into the dominant white society of Australia that Aboriginals must integrate. We must meet them halfway, and protect what they hold sacred, and preserve the knowledge and traditions that helped them survive for hundreds of centuries before white man arrived in their lands, and changed their societies forever.

We may believe we still have much to teach them. But they have so much more to teach us, about this land, about their ancient knowledge, that we are only beginning to understand after 200 years.

We all have a long way to go.

But something, finally, and hopefully for the better, has begun.

Tasmanian Aboriginals To Bring Home Remains Of 17 Ancestors From British Museum

Aboriginal elders, and representatives, from Tasmanian tribes will return this weekend from the UK with skulls, bones and teeth of their relatives, after the British Museum relented over a long-running battle to have the remains returned to their homelands for proper burial, as Aboriginal custom demands :

After three days of mediation proceedings in London this week, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) and the museum agreed on the repatriation of the remains - including teeth, skulls and bones taken from Tasmania in the 19th century and held in the museum's research collections.

Under the decision, all of the remains will be returned and the museum will no longer be able to extract genetic material from them or conduct invasive tests.

TAC delegate Greg Brown said he was pleased with the outcome.

"We're happy with what's been agreed because we've been able to stop any additional testing, which was our ultimate aim when we first came over," Mr Brown said.

"Our belief system is that any remains of the dead need to be kept on the land, in traditional country, and that any separation of the two means that the spirit of that person remains restless.

"We need to bring both back together ... we have a cultural obligation to ensure that happens."

The remains were originally stolen by white settlers.

Aboriginal remains are also currently held by Cambridge University, Oxford University and institutions in Scotland. So far, these institutions have refused to hand over the Aboriginal remains they once displayed like trophies.

The Lord Is My...Stockman?

It's taken 30 years and the work of some 100 linguists and translators, but the Bible has finally been translated into an Aboriginal language, Kriol, a pidgin variation that was used by stockmen, and spread far and wide through the Northern Territory.

Only 200 or so other Aboriginal languages to go.

While the Kriol translation will no doubt be read, and welcomed by some Aborigines, it's not exactly going to be a record breaking print run for this version of the Bible. The Anglican Church, who commissioned and oversaw the translation, are showing great ambition, however, by planning to distribute some 30,000 copies of the Kriol translation through the Northern Territory in the coming months.

One of the reasons why it has taken so long to finish the translation is that numerous Bible stories and tales had to be rewritten so they made more sense to traditional Aborigines.

The Dreamtime tales traditionally passed down through the generations by oral storytelling are usually short on examples of Christian-based morality and concepts of kings and individual ownership. Many such stories don't have beginnings, middles and ends, as Western stories usually do, and for the most part were tales told for the benefit of learning how to hunt, what plants and roots were safe to eat, how to read the wind, the clouds and the landscape to forecast the coming season(s), and generally how to survive.

There was also the problem that Aboriginals tend to worship the Earth, more than some formless, all powerful entity. After all, it was knowing and loving and respecting the Earth that enabled them to survive in some of the harshest climates on the planet for more than 60,000 years.

The stories of the challenges faced by the linguists and translators are fascinating :

Peter Carroll, a linguist who worked on the translation, said the phrase “to love God with all one’s heart” was a special challenge. He said: “The Aboriginal people use a different part of the body to express emotions. They have a word that is, broadly translated, ‘insides’. So to love God with all your heart was to want God with all your insides.”

Margaret Mickan, another linguist who has been working on the translation since 1984, said: “If you want to get to the deep things of life and talk about meaningful things, about your beliefs and those sorts of things, then you need it in your own language. What has meaning is something that really touches and speaks to you in your own language.”

Those working on the project needed to check constantly with far-flung communities that their interpretations of language and Biblical concepts were correct – and they were often surprised to find that their offerings had vastly different meanings from what they had intended.

Here's an example of how the "Lo, tho I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death" passage from the Bible now reads, after re-translation from the pidgin English Aboriginal language Kriol :

Yaweh, you are the best stockman. You care for me continually, and everything I have comes from you. I can’t want more.

You care for me just like the stockman who takes his sheep to rest in a quiet place with lots of grass and spring water.

Every day you make me strong. You show me the way to go because I trust your name to do what you have promised.

Even if I go through a very dark place where anything could kill me, but I am not frightened because you are always with me. You have your spear and long stick to always protect me.

Aborigines Use Ancient Weather Forecasting Methods To Predict Coming Rains

For more than 60,000 years, Australian Aborigines have been reading the land, the clouds, the stars, the plants and the animals to predict how the cycles of nature would affect their hunting and gathering in the season ahead.

Using that ancient knowledge, some of the world's longest surviving cultured people are seeing a bit of good news in the natural world for some areas of Australia devastated by mega-drought.

So don't start evacuating the cities just yet, drought breaking rains might not be as far away as previously thought :

With wattle trees blooming across southeastern Australia and native birds and cockatoos on the wing, Aboriginal weather watchers say rain is on the way – giving some hope to parts of the country ravaged by drought.

"The cockys are flocking everywhere. That's usually a good sign that rain is coming," said Jeremy Clark, from Victoria.

"The way the flora and plants and shrubs are starting to react, I'd certainly be expecting rain."

For the first time, the forecasts from Clark's Brambuk community, which covers five Aboriginal homelands, are being taken seriously by Australia's Bureau of Meteorology as it looks for different ways to better understand the changing climate.

Bureau climate meteorologist Harvey Stern said the traditional Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring seasons have little relevance in Australia's tropical north – or even in the temperate south, where aborigines have six seasons based on the weather and changes to the natural environment.

The bureau's Indigenous Weather Knowledge programme taps into the Aboriginal philosophy that all of nature is connected, and subtle changes to plants and animals can give clues about the climate and weather.

Mr Clark, chief executive of the Brambuk community which covers most of western Victoria, including the Grampians mountains and national park, said Aborigines have always had different ways of looking at the weather, reading landscape rather than a calendar.

"It's still practised. We won't go fishing for eels, for example, until wattles start flowering and the animals start moving, and the full moon comes. Then you know the eels are running on the migratory journey to the sea," he said.

The 'Mount Olympus' Of The Aboriginal Gods



Deep inside the Wollemi National Park, protected by natural barriers like steep cliffs and virtually impenetrable terrain and bush, lies one of the greatest collections of ancient Aboriginal rock carvings found to date.

Rock art expert, Professor Paul Tacon, likened the find to an Aboriginal Mount Olympus.

From the Melbourne Age :

Last spring archaeologists discovered an enormous slab of sandstone 100 metres long and 50 metres wide in the 500,000-hectare Wollemi National Park, which is north of Lithgow, in western NSW. The sandstone was covered in ancient art.

The discovery was an unprecedented collection of powerful ancestral beings from Aboriginal mythology.

For most of the day the engravings are almost invisible. At dawn and dusk, the images are briefly revealed.

Supreme being Baiame and his son Daramulan were both there. Near this father and son pairing is an evil and powerful club-footed being, infamous for eating children. Several ancestral emu women and perhaps the most visually powerful of the images, an eagle man in various incarnations, are also present.

"The site is the Aboriginal equivalent of the palace on Mount Olympus where the Olympians, the 12 immortals of ancient Greece, were believed to have lived," says Professor Tacon. "This is the most amazing rock engraving site in the whole of south-eastern Australia."

And yet the archaeologists have found hundreds of sites in the past five years. It seems almost certain that engravings are part of a much larger network of songlines and stories.

An aboriginal representative of the local tribe who joined the expedition to study and catalogue the rock art said :

"They reckon we didn't have written language...We didn't have A, B, C, D but we had a written language in these engravings. They would have been able to read from site to site to site."

Aboriginal rock engravings are widely regarded as the oldest art works in the world, some dating back more than 40,000 years.

Australian Aborigines have long been recognised as having the most ancient culture in the history of all mankind. Before Dutch and English explorers reached the continent, more than 500 distinct Aboriginal tribes existed, each with their own oral and dance storytelling traditions and unique languages.

A number of tribes are believed to have used the stars for navigation across the vast stretches of the outback for thousands of generations.

Boxer Anthony Mundine Likens The Decimation Of The Australian Aboriginals To The Jewish Holocaust

By Darryl Mason

There's a few Australians, including the NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, who would prefer that Anthony Mundine just shut the hell up and do what they say he's supposed to be doing - preparing for a title boxing match due in a few weeks time.

And he is one hell of a boxer. But world champion Anthony Mundine is also an Aboriginal, and he's a Muslim. Plus, he's getting mouthy. He's got plenty to say, on behalf of Aboriginal Australians, whether most of them want him to speak on his behalf or not.

But an Aboriginal Muslim with high media exposure spells 'Danger Zone' for those who live in fear of the day coming when Islam becomes the predominant religion of Australian Aboriginals.

You can read a previous story here about the music video Mundine's made, where he tries out his chops as a rapper-storyteller, while Redfern Aboriginals shred photos of the prime minister, John Howard, and a Union Jack flag goes up in flames.

But it's the words Mundine spoke today that are likely to set off fires in the media far bigger than his controversial video.

Mundine has claimed that the decimation of the Aboriginal population under the invasion and occupation of the British, from the 1770s onwards, is comparable to what Nazi Germany did to the European Jews in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Governors of the early colonies estimated the Aboriginal population of Australia at around 200,000 in the late 1700s. By the early 1900s, there were fewer than 80,000, by most reputable estimates.

Aboriginals have lived on the Australian continent for 60,000 to more than 100,000 years. Although there was never a written language, Aboriginals developed incredibly complex social, tribal and family structures, and used a language of symbols, paintings and rock carvings to communicate with other tribes, and to leave markers for where to find the best hunting and food stocks in thousands of areas across the continent.

Some of the hundreds of Aboriginal tribes that lived and thrived in Australia for thousands of generations worshipped the sun as a creation entity, tens of thousands of years before Ancient Egyptians came up with the concept of Ra.

From the late 1700s onwards, Aboriginals were massacred, hunted for sport, exposed to alcohol (close to a deadly toxin for many Aboriginals), decimated by viruses brought in by colonists and treated as slave labour, sometimes in conditions that led to a premature demise.

There has been a rigorous attempt by the extreme right wing of politicians and historians in Australia, in the past two decades, to whitewash such facts out of our collective history. Prime Minister John Howard dismissively refers to "the black arm band" of Australia's history, as though we are supposed to forget what happened here, as though it is unimportant to the state and fate of the nation.

But as the reconciliation movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s showed, along with the unofficial 'Sorry Day', most Australians would agree with Mundine's words below : that there was a Holocaust of Aborigines, and it was conducted under the Union Jack.

Or as some Indonesians still call it, 'The Butcher's Apron.'

From the AAP :

Boxer Anthony Mundine has likened the British treatment of Aborigines to the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

"John Howard has got to step to the plate, admit he is wrong, just like the Germans did back in the day and admitted under Hitler what they did and then moved forward," Mundine told Channel Nine.

He said the Union Jack was not a symbol to be proud of.

"It symbolises murder, raping, pillaging of the native people of the land," he said.

"The burning of the flag, we burn it, or the people burnt it, because they want to wash away with the dark side, with the dark past that Australia's got in its history and let's move forward, get a more unified place for the people."

Story continues below...

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Mundine is right.

The majority of Australians are waiting for a true reconciliation, but John Howard refuses to let this become part of his political legacy, even though in decades to come such a move for reconciliation would feature more prominently, and positively, in the history books than just about anything else he has done in his decade in office.

Mudine waits, Aboriginal Australians wait, as we all wait.

Australia is not a British colony anymore, we're not an outpost under the Union Jack. And the sooner we truly, officially, recognise what has been to the original people of this land, the better.

For everyone.

John Birmingham Gives One White Man's Response To Mundine: Shut Up And Box

John Howard's Image And Union Jack Torn To Shred And Burnt In Mundine's Video

NEW THEORY CLAIMS MEETING OF ANCIENT INDONESIANS AND PAPUA NEW GUINEANS GAVE RISE TO AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

For scientists, it has long remained a mystery how Australian Aborigines came to colonise the world's largest island.

But a controversial new theory from molecular anthropologist, Dr Sheila van Holst Pellekan, suggests that indigenous Australians may be the result of the meeting of ancients migrating from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

From abc.net.au :

Previous genetic analysis shows that modern humans took two migration routes out of Africa 100,000 to 150,000 years ago, she says.

One group went north into Europe and Northern Eurasia, the other along the coast via Saudi Arabia, India and South-East Asia.

Dr van Holst Pellekaan analysed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from Aboriginal people in western New South Wales and Central Australia.

She says she found evidence of two ancient genetic groups that appear to be linked to these two migration routes.

Dr van Holst Pellekaan says some archaeologists argue there was more than one founding population of Australia, and her research is the first genetic evidence that could be used to support this.

It is possible that some Australians came in from the north via Papua New Guinea and the other took a more southerly route via Indonesia, she says.

Archaeologist Dr Colin Pardoe, who is speaking at the conference on a related topic, disagrees.

He believes the diversity of early Australians could have arisen from one group that came in from South-East Asia and then diversified as it adapted to different environments.

"The idea of two founding populations is speculative," she says. "I can't prove it either way."

Dr Van Holst Pellekaan says despite the links with the global lineages that came out of Africa, the Australian groups are quite different from those shown in samples from Papua New Guinea, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Malaysia.

"[People] have to have been in Australia for a very long time for that diversity to generate. We're saying at least 40,000 years," she says.