Dear, oh, dear, still no effort by the Racists to actually refute what Pascoe has said.  They just prefer to engage in argumentum ad hominem debate. They just believe personal insults will replace reasoned debate.  It worked for them for generations so why would they stop now?  Tsk, tsk, still nothing that argues against Pascoe's quoting of the journals of the early explorers/settlers where they describe encountering fields of native foods.  Even when Valkie admits that he doesn't understand the argument, he still argues.  Typical Racist behaviour it seems, all passion, no sense.  Tsk, tsk. 

Brian Ross wrote on Jun 11^th, 2021 at 11:40pm:

Gordon wrote on Jun 12^th, 2021 at 8:55am:



Another, very significant point debunking Pascoe:


And if Aboriginal people were farmers as Pascoe contends, Sutton asks, where is the evidence for it in Aboriginal languages, as there is evidence in Torres Strait languages? “If, as he says, they traditionally hoed and tilled and ploughed the earth, made gardens, selected and sowed seed or planted tubers, irrigated their crops, reaped the results and stored them, and thus were farmers on farms doing farming, should he not have tried to demonstrate that these categories and terms were present in at least some of the approximately 260 distinct languages of Australia in 1788?”

Aboriginal people knew about farmers, Sutton and Walshe write, from their trading interactions with Torres Strait gardeners and Macassans and Baijini from the Indies, but chose not to emulate them, for reasons that were cultural as well as practical. Economics without religion was “inconceivable” to the Old People, they write. “Gathering and hunting and fishing were not just economics: they were the Law.”

“In contrast to the picture conveyed by Dark Emu, the greater part of Aboriginal traditional methods of reproducing plant and animal species was not through physical cultivation or conservation but through spiritual propagation,” Sutton writes. “This included speaking to the spirits of ancestors at resource sites, carrying out ‘increase rituals’ at special species-related sites, singing resource species songs in ceremonies, maintaining rich systems of totems for various species that were found in the countries of the totem-holders, and handling food resources with reverence … A secularised notion of Aboriginal cultivation, devoid of spiritual dimensions, did not exist in Australia before conquest.”

The decision to not adopt horticulture and agriculture was not a failure of the imagination, Sutton writes, “but an active championing and protection of their own way of life and, when in contact with outsiders, a resistance to an alien economic pattern”.

In the US they are known as “race-shifters”; in Canada they are “Pretendians”; and in Australia, they are more commonly known as “box-tickers” – people who discover, or else simply claim an Indigenous or First ­Nations heritage for themselves.

Some do so because they want to adopt a more exotic profile; others because being “just white” doesn’t have quite the cache it once did, especially in academia.

But the sheer number of ­people now laying claim to an ­Indigenous identity has begun to distort national statistics, at least according to Indigenous Australian academics and a group of international writers who took part in a lively roundtable on the topic of “race-shifting” at an anthropology conference in May.

The two Aboriginal academics, supported by colleagues from the US and Canada who have written books on the subject, say the trend toward adopting a new racial identity is causing real harm. The group plans to extend the discussion of the “self-­Indigenising” movement by presenting at the Australian Anth­ropology Society’s national conference in November.

Australian academic Victoria Grieve-Williams, a Warraimaay historian from the NSW mid-north coast, said: “In Australia the race shifting phenomenon is pervasive and well recognised by Aboriginal people. The statistics show that the increase is not natural, but it remains a difficult conversation for Australians to have. The race shifters hold the power, they stifle debate and ­resist scrutiny in various ways, including attacking Aboriginal people who ask who they are in our cultural terms.

“They tend to be urban-based, clustered in southeast Australia, and raised with all the privilege of being white.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/harmful-warning-issued-to-race-shifters/...

Brian Ross wrote on Jul 3^rd, 2021 at 11:38am:


Oh look Softcock as a Vahhhhgina.

“What interests me is not simply that race-shifting is happening and on such a vast scale, it is the ways in which it is happening. Box-ticking is a social movement. My analysis in health communication shows how it affects policy – it seems to have started in housing policy – but it has soared in the education sector, and the stats show, probably unsurprisingly, that the east coast of Australia is the epicentre.

“There is a performative element that these claims for legitimacy rely on, and Aboriginal people can clearly hear this. I have heard the most preposterous claims. How we recognise each other is up to mob locally, within our kinship networks. We are doing something about it now and I know mob elsewhere are, too, but the discussion is more open in North America than it is here.”

....
Dr Macdonald estimates that 5 per cent of people counted as ­Indigenous in Australia are actually white people, “self-identifying” as Indigenous.

“They are well-represented in the national Indigenous elite, many gain high-prestige jobs designed for Indigenous people, claiming insider knowledge they don’t possess,” she said. “Grassroots Aboriginal people resent having to deal with them but feel unable to counter this tidal wave.

I say, Agatha, you may well be a Boong yourself. How would you know?

How are you at the didgeridoo, dear?