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Frank
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Assimilation is an anathema to progressives, who prefer ‘integration’ as the term de rigueur — but they are essentially the same thing. Aborigines need to learn to fit in, be a part of, what we have known to be Australian culture for the last 200-plus years and, indeed, most of them have done just that. (So why the special treatment, benefits and funding, you may well ask? That’s a topic for another conversation.)
None of this means Aborigines need to lose their culture – far from it. Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal ‘culture’ today is an invention of the last 50 years. Fortunately, much authentic Aboriginal culture of the past has vanished. The gruesome initiations, genital mutilation, inflicted cicatrices, burns, ritual spearings, sorcery and payback murders have by and large disappeared. Nevertheless, inter-tribe clan grievances often remain, as can be seen at some football indigenous matches, both on the field and amongst the spectators. Even though these encounters can still become violent, at least those conflicts are mostly played out with a football, not spears and clubs.
Meanwhile, the Aboriginal Industry is chock full of ill-informed, urban myth-makers and illusionists, this caste of urgers and deluded pretenders giving rise to the patronising insistence on the uniqueness of ‘Aboriginal knowledge’ about everything from agriculture and fish farms (a lá Bruce Pascoe), water and fire management (a lá ‘cultural burning’) to Aboriginal ‘art’, ‘fashion’ and even ‘astronomy’, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and Richard Walley’s thoroughly overdone ‘Welcome to Country”. This is mostly snake oil fakery, an effort to convince contemporary Australians that the Aborigines of old were something they clearly never were not. Worse, histories and observational accounts of early Aboriginal life and culture are vanishing from library shelves, replaced by the anti-white post-modern dogma of ‘invasion, colonisation and inter-generational trauma’. It is unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in a secondary or tertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This is cultural censure and erasure happening right under our noses. We are all the poorer for it, black and white alike.
Meanwhile, the recent invention, exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentation of the alleged ‘frontier wars’ serves as a made-to-order replacement ‘history’ intended to raise the status of Aboriginal people and degrade that of settlers. It is yet another bill of goods, a distorting sham, being hawked by a power-grabbing activist elite in whose interest it is to falsify and distort our history. The goal, need it be said, is an attempt to paint a genocidal racism as Australia’s original sin.
I, too, would like more self-determination in my own life, too, but I am constrained by the laws of the land. Unfortunately, self-determination for many people who today identify as Aboriginal is taken to mean the normal rules — keeping children in school, eschewing clan and domestic violence — aren’t thought to fully apply. This is nowhere more apparent than on the troubled streets of Alice Springs. ‘Self-determination’ means ‘we’ll do what we like and you can pay for it’. Self-determination’ is about colonising and taking control, accepting all that whitefellas have to offer while offering nothing in return. Self-determination is about undermining whitefella institutions, judiciaries, organisations and bureaucracies. Self-determination is about enculturated white people who, on the strength of what may be a mere speck of indigenous DNA, now identify exclusively as Aboriginal, thereby giving themselves an economic and social leg-up. For the activist cadre it always was and always will be about money, power and control, all underscored by the notion that members of one race enjoy a preeminent ascendency over all other Australians.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/aborigines/2022/12/always-was-always-will-be-abo
ut-power/
The Constitutionally enshrined voice is about creating an indigenous body and a supporting bureaucracy that would be a de facto government for a quasi-independent indigenous nation that would have a treaty-governed relationship with the Commonwealth of Australia.
Just say No.
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