Facts, facts, facts. Why do facts come under 'hate speech' laws. Because they concern one interporetation of facts versus another?
Here are some facts:
Behrendt was born in 1969 and grew up mainly in the middle-class Sydney suburb of Gymea on Port Hacking in the Sutherland Shire. Neither she nor her parents came from an Aboriginal community. Her part-Aboriginal father Paul was an air traffic controller and later an academic, her white mother Raema an accountant.
A shire girl from the shores of Port Hacking is about as culturally distant as it is possible to be from the sorry females in the blacks' camps of Alice Springs.
Both Behrendt and her father claim that his mother, Lavinia Boney, was a member of the Stolen Generations. The archival evidence, however, reveals this is incorrect. According to Boney's file in the NSW Aborigines Protection Board records, in 1917 when she was aged about 13 and living at the blacks' camp at Dungalear Station, near Walgett, her mother died. Her father's whereabouts were unknown, so she was effectively an orphan.
The Aborigines Protection Board found her a job as a domestic servant on a pastoral station at Collarenebri. Her file says this was at "the girl's own request to get away from camp life". From 1921 to 1923 Boney was employed in domestic service in hospitals and private homes in Sydney and Parkes. She met the German editor Henry Behrendt at Parkes Hospital. They married and went to live at Lithgow. Lavinia eventually had nine children by him before she died in childbirth. In 1944 Henry placed five-year-old Paul and his surviving siblings in the Presbyterian Church's Burnside Homes at Parramatta.
Aged 15, Paul left Burnside and joined the Royal Australian Navy. He trained to become an air traffic controller, a profession he later followed in civilian aviation, settling in Sydney. While convalescing from a heart attack in 1980, he decided to pursue his Aboriginal mother's history. He subsequently became known for his research abilities and his activism in Aboriginal politics. In 1988 UNSW appointed him inaugural director of its Aboriginal Research and Resource Centre. He was also the first chairman of the Aboriginal Studies Association.
In the 1980s, when I was employed at UNSW, my path crossed briefly with Paul Behrendt. Even in middle age he was a good-looking man and it was not surprising many women were attracted to him. Unless you knew, you would not have guessed he was of Aboriginal descent.
In the spectrum of Aboriginal politics, Paul was an ultra-leftist. In 1992, he argued that British colonisation of Australia was illegitimate and that Aborigines still held sovereignty over the continent. He was a joint author with Gerhard Fischer, Michael Mansell and others of the book The Mudrooroo/Muller Project in which he demanded Aborigines be given a separate country, self-governing and with its own laws. Mansell used the book to make similar claims on behalf of the Aboriginal Provisional Government. At this time, Larissa Behrendt was also a member of the Aboriginal Provisional Government. In 1987 and 1988, Mansell had gone to Libya seeking funding for his organisation from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He also sought to join Gaddafi's Mathaba worldwide group of insurgents and terrorists.
About this time, Paul left his family. He lived in a hippie commune before moving in with Bobbi Sykes, the black activist made famous in the 70s at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. She was also a supporter of the Black Panthers movement. Sykes subsequently won a scholarship to Harvard University where she was described as its first Aboriginal graduate.
However, her Aboriginal identity was later declared fraudulent by Aboriginal activist Pat O'Shane, the NSW magistrate also from Sykes's birthplace, Townsville. Sykes's father was not an Aborigine but a black American soldier stationed in north Queensland during World War II.
Sykes became important in Larissa Behrendt's life, showing her how she could also get to Harvard. Larissa admitted that in her undergraduate degree, "I hadn't got particularly high marks". Yet she was preferred ahead of a university medallist, and the decision generated a complaint. In an age of affirmative action in higher education, however, she fitted the required profile. "I think Harvard saw a gap in their intake," she explained.
Behrendt's tweets, which have revealed her distaste for Aborigines with different political views, may well generate a revival of sentiments I recorded in Quadrant last year when discussing author Sally Morgan's claim to Aboriginal identity. Activist Jackie Huggins had said that, even though people might have some Aboriginal ancestors, they could not be genuine Aborigines if they had been brought up in white suburbs without any engagement with an Aboriginal community.
For saying much the same thing, it should be remembered, Andrew Bolt went on trial last month under the Racial Hatred Act.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/questioning-credentials...When Aborigines question the Aboriginality of other Aborigines, is that also hate speech? Or is it hate speech only when whitey asks questions about 'minorities'?
Identity politics is a curse. Aboriginality is a form of it, as is islamophobia-mongering.
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