We had an aboriginal elder talk at our work as part of NAIDOC week.

He mentioned that as a result of the stolen generation children grew up without a father/motherhead or a close family. And then when they had children they were not equipped to be a role model or be parental (facilitating, discipline, etc..), and so on...He explained that's why we have a lot of aimless aboriginal youth around today...they simply haven't been parented in a positive way, or at all due to the chain effect of the stolen generation.

My wife runs a local young parenting programme dealing with such cases...which in my opinion is part of the solution...being a role-model. Part of this was having group days like cooking. What she found was that during these activities the young parents talked about common things and made friendships and visited each other, etc... I think education is key, but more effective when it's indirect, let people connect and share stories...open circle facilitation.

Coming back to the speaker, he told us about his trip to Broome to search for records of his family. But all he could find were christian names and numbers representing people, and he wasn't even allowed to handle the records...shouldn't they been in a museum or something. He told us that even in his 70's he's encountering new family members...people going up to him after a talk and saying I'm your nephew...discovering siblings later in life, etc...

He also showed us pictures of aboriginals in chain gangs where the metal from the chains scorched their skin in over 40 degree heat, and that they got pushed off cliffs.

Lot's more on the secret history of Australia and perhaps attempted genocide of aboriginals in John Pilger's book "A Secret Country" (1989)

Eugenics and other repulsive social concepts and practices are the utter foundations of Progressivism and other leftist, socialist and statist political orthodoxies.

"...crude eugenic sorting of groups into deserving and undeserving classes crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard, 2003). Reform-minded economists of the Progressive Era defended exclusionary labor and immigration legislation on grounds that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers, whom they labeled "parasites," "the unemployable," "low-wage races" and the "industrial residuum." Removing the unfit, went the argument, would uplift superior, deserving workers." - eb.com

“The Progressives catalogue of unfit persons often included women and the lower classes. Eugenicists were also gravely concerned with those they regarded as deficient in intellect--for example, epileptics, the mentally ill and the "feebleminded"--and those they regarded as deficient in character--"the criminals and the incorrigibly idle … [the] morally deficient … and [those] incapable of producing their maintenance at any application whatsoever."

Obviously the parasites, industrial residuum, and feebleminded are the progressives, socialists and statists. Beware.

I think that there's a few reasons why the oppression of the Aborigines has never received as much attention as Apartheid in South Africa:

- As I found out a few years ago when living there - Australia is just a long way from anywhere. That's even more true when you consider the worst acts were perpetrated before global communications technology really took off. It is sad, but it does make a difference. South Africa, by contrast is in the European time zone, news of events there fits well into our news cycle.

- When we talk about our lifetime, South Africa has a majority oppressed by a minority - and Australia, the reverse. That offends the human sense of justice more than the oppression of a minority by the majority. (Not that it should, but that seems to be how it is...)

- If we think about an American centre of power in the Cold War, perhaps influenced by a sense of ties with the English speaking world, then Australians are "one of the club" where the Afrikaaners were just not quite the same, with their funny Dutch language, etc.

- Another part of it, now America is mentioned, is that until 1968 (or whenever you date the first big success point of the the Civil Rights movement in the US) both SA and Aus were undertaking policy not too far from that of the imperial centre...

- The existence of other African countries, governed by Africans (Nyerere comes to mind as an example) showed the lies of racial superiority as so much bunk, in a visible way. The other African nations also generated much pressure in the Commonwealth and media about the SA situation.

- The racism about Africa hasn't gone away, but it is less. But the stories about Aborigines remain little changed. The question of "civilisation" is often raised, to this day. The Aborigines, like the Native Americans were in the end victims of a story that claimed they were inferior. If you've seen the recent BBC2 series about The Normans, there's a very familiar set of stories that the Normans told about the Irish to justify their colonial conquests there...

Indy's observation that a 'minority oppressed by a majority' goes a long way towards explaining the invisibility of the deliberate oppression of Australian Aboriginals. Of course, they were not the minority in the beginning but campaigns to simply kill them off and the impact of new diseases combined with immigration made them the minority in their own homelands. North American Indians faced the same situation in the 16th to 19th century. The Ainu in Japan the same situation in Hokkaido in the 19th century. The native populations of Central and South America were never so completely displaced but they face various levels of discrimination now everyday in their new modern Spanish and Portuguese inspired countries. The world's modern immigrant nations have all tried to displace and dispossess the local population. Some have been more successful than others. We should not forget that the Romans did this to the Gauls and the Franks and the Celts as well so it is not something unique to the modern (last 500 years) world. I'm not justifying it as correct but simply observing that displacement by invasion is part of human history. The actual details are very ugly indeed.