Feral camels siege outback town

[Aussie Mark]

BAH, you've got it all wrong!  Just have the them open up casinos on their land!  Instant capitalism!  Problem solved   You'd be surprised at what few million dollars net a month can do. 

They would just piss it all up against the wall.

[Freuds_Cat]

I still have full blood "Black Fella's" (which is how they and we have always referred to them and the term that we are both comfortable) , urbanised half bloods and others who look white but have black fella blood way back, as friends. I have lived next door to a guy (not a friend) who showed me the utmost respect but got drunk regularly and beat his wife and kids. The 2 full bloods (Basil and Ambrose) are both non drinkers and well educated at the same school that I went to. Top blokes IMHO. One is an electrician and the other is working in the mines at Mt Isa. One of the more urbanised guys (Caroll) is now an elder in the tribe that belongs to the land at the back of the Adelaide hills and down the Coorong (The Ngarrindjeri) I met him through music, he is an excellent singer and very much into the same general vein of music that runs through this thread. He is a social but light drinker. Les (also from Carolls tribe) has worked in the administrative side of govt for most of his life and is also a great singer although I met Les from when he worked with my Mum. His band were one of the first bands to give a 16 year old Bret and band a few support acts in bigger venues.

I could go on about it but it just seems to me that for all the bad things said about Aborigines my experience is very much the opposite.

I've been to plenty of outback missions, towns and settlements and yes there is some bad situations out there. But anyone who ever went to white towns like Whyalla or Kallgoorlie in the 70's has seen it rougher.

The problem as I see it is that we, as white administrators expect their culture to simply harden up and get over the fact that they now have no choice but to change and fit into our culture regardless of any of the past issues that have gone on.

Uwe is right, there is no solution but just the same as other races and cultures not all black ppl are bad just because they are black. Lets face it we have all seen our fair share of complete 4ssw1pe Whities on a saturday night.

[uwe]

It has nothing to do with skin color. That is what made South Africa's apartheid such a perverse system. Categorizing people by pigmentation and deciding thus on their place in society and future. That is not only ugly, but it is also inane in evolution terms as it closes its eyes to the qualities of an individual.

I'm glad you wrote about your positive experiences, I find that hopeful. And nobody wanted to insinuate that white people don't have similar issues. The difference is that nobody wants to fence those white people in to protect them from the evils of modern civilization although my guess is that some of them wouldn't mind just that.

I don't doubt for a second that there are Aborigines around who are intelligent, hard-working, responsible, great parents and have a social conscience. I just wish there would be a lot more of them.

[Dave W]

My knowledge of living Aborigines starts and ends with Evonne Goolagong.

[Aussie Mark]

The 2 full bloods (Basil and Ambrose) are both non drinkers and well educated at the same school that I went to. Top blokes IMHO.

I hear you, they're are some good people in that race, absolutely.  Most of my experience with the original owners of Australia comes from 3 years living in central Queensland, where the rugby league competition I played in included a team from a closed (and supposedly dry) Aboriginal community.  The town I played for was captain-coached (for US readers, - player-manager) by a full blood, and two of his brothers were in the team as well.  All up, our team had 6 or 7 full or half bloods.  These guys all had jobs in town, most of them didn't drink, they were great athletes, and good blokes who had lovely families.

The team from the government-funded community on the other hand, and their supporters, got drunk on game day (players, officials and supporters - the women were the worst - I saw a woman knockout a referee after a semi final loss one year), threw rubbish everywhere (mostly KFC boxes and empty beer cans), swore like troopers in front of children, fought with each other and anyone who dared to take umbrage with them etc.  There are probably social and cultural arguments about why they're like this, but clearly they are a very self destructive race of people.

The saddest thing about the ariticles I read in the media and the absolutely shocking photos of the houses that these people live in and trash themselves on the communities, is the children - they have no hope of having anything approaching a good life.  Addicted to petrol sniffing or booze, pregnant at 12 to their uncles, life expectancy of around 50.  Sad.

[Highlander]

[Edit: sorry, Ken, had to remove pic... page loading problems.]

[EDIT: reply... It was the picture of the QANTAS Orange 747 with Aboriginal designs - used to see her visit Heathrow on a regular basis...]

Dreamtime...

"How can you sleep while your beds are burning...?"

[Freuds_Cat]

Fair enough Mark, like I say I see the same media reports as you do.   The only thing that makes me cynical about what and how the media portrays things is that I've been to a lot of the places that they present in 12 second grabs on the 6.30 news and the hour by hour, day by day reality just gets totally skewed by a 12 second grab which has been done with close ups and  shock factor narration. Sensationalism. Thats not to say that the exact thing that they are reporting on didn't actually happen but that they give the impression that its happening on a massive scale every minute of the day in every aboriginal community.

When I lived in London I received a phone call from my frantic and generally very common sensical mother asking if I was OK because the evening news had portrayed london as Burning with upside down cars, riots in the streets etc.  I hadn't yet turned the TV on to see the news that a few people got a bit out of hand in Trafalgar Sq during the "Poll Tax Riots".

Northern Ireland was the same for me. Before I left home they portrayed it as if it was a constant war zone. My experience travelling by myself and hitching in and out of Northern Ireland was one of friendly helpful people who just got about their daily lives.

Nepal during the disturbances against king Birendra in 1989 was the same. A few trucks rumble through the streets once or twice, a few demonstrations by mostly students and sadly a few people were killed up at Bahktapur. This of course portrayed as a major insurgency and uprising against the king with massacre the word of choice for western jouno's.

Scroll down to 1980's if you are interested.
http://www.mikeldunham.blogs.com/mikeldunham/2007/01/nepals_politica.html

The mainstream Australian media are very much like the the tabloid media in the UK. Imagine living with just that lot and not having the more reputable media available to you to offset the sensationalist Bull5h1t.

meh,  just ranting again.... sorry 

[Freuds_Cat]

This guy is one of the "live in the community Business managers" appointed to help fix the standard of living problems of the Aborigines. He recently quit because he says he couldn't handle seeing how little the Govt were doing to help fix the problems.

Mr Hudson says a plan to push Aboriginal people to relocate to growth towns would prove "disastrous".

The Federal and Territory Governments' policy is to channel funding into 20 key Territory communities to build them into functioning towns with essential services.

He says the town of Wadeye is proof that developing large towns where different clans are forced to live together is a "flawed" plan.

"How many Wadeyes do you want?" he said.

"It's as simple as that.

"How many times do people have to prove putting people from different language and cultural groups together is social engineering which is just disastrous."

I'm sure a few of you in different countries can relate to that message, especially the last part.


http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/30/2757337.htm

[eb2]

This sounds like a lack of diversity training.  Or Cabrini Green in the summer.

My knowledge of Aborigines includes Goolagong, the movie Walkabout, extras in Skippy and Crocodile Dundee, and if you want your boomerang to come back then first you've got to throw it.  I think these social problems have no easy answers.  As much as the early stages of US development were not so spectacular for the American Indians, the instances of cultural survival are miraculous considering.  Disease was more thorough than guns.  They have fared a lot better than the cultural founders of Kaliningrad.  That only took a couple of years.  Time is the best bet, and govt gambling with tax payers' money.  House always wins.

[uwe]

I saw Australia with Hugh, Nicole and the little Aborigine-kid they quasi-adopted! That film went out of its way to be politically correct to the Aborigines.

And I once saw a documentary that followed an Aborigine clan around - one that at its own choice did not have a permanent settlement but lived as hunters and gatherers. That film was impressive in how they preserved a culture that is milleniums old, but I also wondered whether such self-chosen seclusion form the outside (other) world could be practical for the majority of their pouplation in the long run.

Uwe

[uwe]

"They have fared a lot better than the cultural founders of Kaliningrad.  That only took a couple of years."

If you mean the original Königsberg-German population there and their post-war forcible eviction, then I think that is an injustice to both Native Australians and Native Americans. I don't remeber either of these ethnic groups waging a genocidal war on white Australia or white America, more the other way around. Ethnic cleansing of German populace in Eastern Europe after WW II wasn't nice or in most cases individually just, it cost hundreds of thousands innocent lives, but given what had happened in Eastern Europe under the German name from 1939-45 hardly unprovoked. If I had been a Russian, Czech or Pole in 1945, I wouldn't have thought twice about putting an end to having large German populations live within my own borders given that their countrymen in core Germany had the nasty habit of "liberating" them uninvited. Storm was harvested, but it had been sown many times over and I don't remember the populace of Königsberg holding food solidarity rallies for the populace of their Baltic Sea neighbors in Leningrad either when that city was viciously starved to death during the 900 day siege of German troops.   

[eb2]

I can't agree.  To compare examples of ethnic injustice, and weigh which is greater or lesser, is to suggest that innocent people who are victims of ethnic intolerance are somehow deserving of it, is itself an injustice.  The residents of Prussia were victims of the aftermath of war, and quite literally ethnic cleansing by any definition.  The residents of the Siebenburgen were not even citizens of Germany, and all had been residents of towns and villages that existed within the borders of several different nations.  To condemn their inaction during the siege of Leningrad is to suggest they should have offered their famillies up to execution.  Also, considering that the military was as successful in raising volunteer units in Russia as among ethnic German areas, it is not fair to blame these people for much of anything.  The Soviet post-war retribution, and subsequent colonization of large areas within the baltic and balkan regions is to many people the unnecessary injustice that will fester over the long haul.  But the world was into making mistakes like that in that period. 

Me, I look at it as anywhere the Turks ran around making mischief a couple of hundred years before has had a hard time recovering, weather it be Macedonia, Bosnia, Byzantium, Palestine,...oh I could go on and on.

[uwe]

So you think I'm being too tough on my countrymen. Might be, my sympathies with the "Vertriebene" (displaced Eastern-European German population) were never great, I don't see much of a difference between being evicted in the aftermath of WW II from the eastern parts of the former Reich to losing your house in an airraid over Cologne in 1944.  Both the bombs and the eviction were a direct result of what had happened in the German name from 1939 onwards. That doesn't create individual guilt, but it explains causation. No attack on Poland = the house in Cologne would still be there and the house in East Prussia would still be owned by Germans. And the causation here was so one-of-a-kindish, it cannot possibly be ignored for what happened afterwards. And Nazi imperialism didn't come over Germany like a black cloud overnight, it had pre-Nazi origins and was built on a supremacist attitude against anything east of Germany's border. What happened in the mass displacements after the war was chickens coming home to roost or "payday".

Ethnic cleansing is per se bad, but in the aftermath of WW II, given how Germany minorities had been convenient excuses for Nazi expansion pre-war  (Czechoslovakia), the start of the war (Poland) and how Germany had intended to enslave Poland and Russia, planning and executing the starvation, eviction and plain genocide of great parts of the populace there, I can understand the reaction of the Eastern European nations. There are few examples in history where the initial aggressor (and his total lack of justification) can be identified more clearly than at the advent of WW II.

That said, Jim, your view is perfectly mainstream with what a lot of people think in Germany and what - to my chagrin - has become the more assertive school of thought in recent years. You're not German so none of this applies to you, but I'm wary of those views when my countrymen voice them. It smacks of disengaging themselves from our collective past. Like Nazism, the Red Army and its atrocities didn't come out of nowhere either.  

Uwe

[eb2]

No one can be tough enough on Nazis.  I agree with your entire first paragraph with the exception of the last sentence.  And I am at odds with much of the second paragraph.  It is not even the concept of displacing an ethnic minority, but more to the brutality in which it was accomplished.  I tend to find historical precedent in much of this in the horrific treatment of Ukrania (to know a Ukranian is to never use an article for the nation/region) at the hands of Stalin, and I can't disqualify many of the same supremacist attitudes towards the balkan states behind the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact.  Hitler and Stalin, for their brief honeymoon, had intended to starve and enslave Poland together, and ultimately the baltic and balkans between them.  That Hitler saw the Russians as equally in the crosshairs seemed to not be possible to Stalin.  Stalin would have been more content starving his own lesser-slavs, and got tripped up trying to do the same to the Finns.  The guy was a monster equal to Hitler and arguably more directly involved.  I suspect my views are mainstream in Germany because many people got swept up in the collective past.

As to the Aboriginal people, I see a less abrupt and brutal force.  They are on the receiving end of cultural migration.  Call it colonization too, but the history of the world is made up of these migrations and settlement.  When stuff gets crowded and crummy in your home territory, groups are left with the choice of hanging on, or as Sam Kinnison put it, going to where the food is.  Sometimes, like Brits in Australia and Germans in Wisconsin, they get in and take over.  Sometimes, like Philistines (aka Crete) they show up and have a bad time with the Isrealites.

[uwe]

"It is not even the concept of displacing an ethnic minority, but more to the brutality in which it was accomplished."

The displacements of Germans after the war were harsh and cruel and there was violence and murder, yes, but it wasn't a mass slaughter or a genocide. It was - once the war had ceased and discounting quite a few post-war atrocities that happened in countries that had suffered badly under German occupation - mainly a heartless administrative and inhumane act. The majority of Germans were given a sometimes only 24 hour notice to leave the country and everything behind with just one or two suitcases. Still, that has a different quality to being led out of your village in the middle of the night, being forced to dig your own grave and - eventually - be shot.