Contemporary European observers of nomadic, tribal Aborigines were in apparent agreement that about 30 per cent of new-born Aboriginal children were routinely killed. According to Samuel Gason (1845–97), an early settler of the Flinders Ranges, writing of the Dieyerie tribe of the Cooper’s Creek area between South Australia and Queensland, “about thirty per cent are murdered by their mother at birth”. He gave as the reasons for this that “many” of the mothers married “very young, their first-born is considered immature, and not worth preserving”, and “because they do not wish to be at the trouble of rearing them, especially if weakly. Indeed, all sickly or deformed children are made away with, in fear of becoming a burden to the tribe.” (Cited in Robert Braugh Smyth, The Aboriginals of Victoria, Vol. I (London, 1878), pp. 51-52.)

Recent child-abuse cases, from Central Australia and Queensland, included a seven-month baby taken out of her home and raped, and who needed surgery under general anaesthetic. A two-year-old girl left unattended while her mother drank, was sexually assaulted by a man and also needed surgery. A three-year-old was sexually assaulted by three men, and ten days later another man raped her twice, once using a mangrove stick

A six-year-old girl was followed to a waterhole and while playing there was anally raped while being drowned. A 10-year-old girl was tied to a tree and repeatedly raped. One health worker examined a 14-year-old girl ‘so raw from being raped – she had been abused since the age of three – that she screamed throughout her examination.’

Morgan Jabanardi Riley, 27, sexually assaulted a two-year-old at Tennant Creek in 2004, digitally penetrating her vagina and anus as she screamed in pain. He got 4.5 years non-parole, later increased to 6.5 years.

Gerhardt Max Inkamala, 21, in 2003 digitally penetrated a 7-month-old girl’s vagina, causing serious injury, at Hermannsburg. His sentence was increased after appeal from only five years to nine years, with non-parole of seven years.

These cases are in the minority which get to court, author Louis Nowra wrote. The Robertson report in 1999 estimated near 90% of rapes in the Indigenous communities went unreported.

The Aboriginal Child Sexual Assault Taskforce (ACSAT) 2006, visited 29 NSW Aboriginal communities and child sexual assault was described as a ‘huge issue’ in every one of those communities. Aboriginal witnesses told the inquiry that the assaults on girls and boys were massive, epidemic, and a way of life. They were perpetrated by grandfathers, fathers, stepfathers, uncles, cousins and brothers, often important men, and including some non-Aboriginals.

Boris wrote on Jul 20^th, 2022 at 11:58am:


Are you masturbating again?

https://www.publications.qld.gov.au/dataset/child-safety-research-conferences/re...

Here is the actual (15 year old) report.  It talks about impacts of things like colonialism, as I have done

FutureTheLeftWant wrote on Jul 20^th, 2022 at 12:01pm:


Then leave

It is not colonialism - it is culture

Elderly people who could not keep pace with the younger members of the tribe on their nomadic wanderings in search of food were also killed. As James Dawson observed, “When old people become infirm, and unable to accompany the tribe in its wanderings, it is lawful and customary to kill them … When it has been decided to kill an aged member of the tribe, the relatives depute one of their number to carry out the decision. The victim is strangled with a grass rope, and the body, when cold, is buried in a large fire kindled in the neighbourhood … Very often the poor creatures intended to be strangled cry and beg for delay when they see the preparations made for their death, but all in vain. The resolution is always carried out.” (Dawson, op. cit., p. 62.)

Most contemporary observers, and recent demographers, have agreed that girls were murdered more often than boys. According to Rev. C.W. Schurmann (1815–93), writing in The Aboriginal Tribes of Port Lincoln in South Australia (1846), “From the greater number of male children reared one may infer that not so many of them are killed at birth as of the female sex. In extenuation of this horrible practice, the women allege that they cannot suckle and carry two babies at once” (p. 224). Similarly, William Wyatt J.P. (1804–56), in his Manners and Superstitions of the Adelaide and Encounter Bay Aboriginal Tribes (1879), noted that “female infants at birth are not infrequently put to death for the sake of the more valuable boys, who are still being suckled, though three or four years old, or even more” (p. 162). Anthropologists who have studied gender ratios among colonial-era Aborigines living in tribal conditions have concluded that there were probably about sixty-seven females for every 100 males, strongly suggesting that Aborigines killed far more girls than boys.

The two main reasons for the prevalence of Aboriginal infanticide are straightforward and clear. In their 50,000 years in Australia, Aborigines never planted crops to eat nor domesticated livestock as food. They were, and remained, nomadic hunter-gatherers. At all times, their population was therefore subject to an upper size limit dictated entirely by what a tribe could obtain by hunting and by foraging for eatable vegetation. No tribe could exceed in size the foods procurable by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; not infrequently, the size of the tribe must be even lower than this figure, when poor weather conditions or natural disasters decreased the amount of food available. Excess mouths to feed could simply not be tolerated; their existence threatened the very existence of any tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Infanticide, as well as the killing of the elderly, was the only way that Aboriginal tribes could cope with this upper population limit, as Yengoyan (above) suggests.

The second main reason for the prevalence of infanticide was that the mothers of small children, who were as nomadic as any other members of their tribe, could not carry more than two, or at most three, children, especially given that they also acted as beasts of burden, carrying most of their family’s possessions, as was set out in my previous article on the Aboriginal mistreatment of women. Nor could they suckle more than two or at most three infants, and often fewer, who regularly had no other source of nourishment.

Boris wrote on Jul 20^th, 2022 at 12:10pm:


Eating people is OK? yes, to save your own life if they were dead.

Grappler Deep State Feller wrote on Jul 20^th, 2022 at 12:13pm:


Sounds like you're one of those right wing people not getting the mental health care they need

Grappler Deep State Feller wrote on Jul 20^th, 2022 at 12:27pm:


It's obvious from the ways you talk that you'd NEVER go and talk to someone about your twisted hateful feelings