Australia - What If......

Bad ideas have legs far longer and fitter than good ideas, it seems. No sooner had the American leftist wreckers made Statue defacing and replacing a pastime than here in Oz similarly mindless yobs  want do the same. Homosexuals  in Oz take their lead from all over and copy mindless arguments and bullying tactics (including car bombs and 'powders' in the mail) to show their 'lerve' too. They used up all their thinking energy in costume design for the Mardi Gras. The focus swings back and forth to meet the outrage du jour.

Not that French phrases are common in English-speaking Oz. The British established the country and the Nation after the French and even the Dutch passed up the chance.

And we are reminded, frequently, of the dastardly British who stole the land from the Noble Aboriginals. And the massacres and genocide that followed.  Not that they did, of course, but hey, why let facts get in the way of a fine burst of outrage from morons.

One such moron is Anthony Mundine. The boxer. He has had his ears boxed so many times his brain is addled. He is a self-appointed spokesman for Aboriginal Angst.  Here he is talking about Australia Day. 

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but all too many disregard rooting their opinions in Facts. Simple skin colour hides truth easily enough. But you see, Mundine is Aboriginal so must be heard. Well, part Aboriginal. A smallish part as you might guess from just looking at him.

Australia Day is important.  There are calls to change the date ! January 26, 1788, was the first time Europeans landed on this continent to stay. People in NSW have been marking January 26 since the early 1800s to commemorate the anniversary of the first British landing. The other colonies celebrated their own founding dates.

It wasn’t until 1935 that all Australian States and Territories accepted January 26 as Australia’s national day and agreed to call it “Australia Day”.

Marking January 26 had always been about commemorating British arrival. 

But over time it also became a day for the colonies to celebrate growing self-reliance and lessening dependency on Britain. There’s always been a tension between celebrating British arrival on the one hand and celebrating Australia’s own identity and independence on the other.

In 1938, then Australian premiers gathered in Sydney to mark 150 years since the First Fleet’s landing. That same day, Aboriginal leaders held a Day of Mourning and Protest to highlight the mistreatment of Aboriginal people and campaign for equal rights.

They have been protesting ever since.

Almost anyone can claim aboriginality these days. It is a term almost as fluid as gender and just as chooseable. This is a comment which was spoken in the Oz Room bar by 'John' who has an Aboriginal ancestor:

On 26 January 1788 when the First Fleet ships unloaded their ~1200 convicts, Royal Marine guards and officials, not a shot was fired. As they looked around what's now Circular Quay they saw nothing other than bush.

Not a single building, planted field, domesticated plant or animal - nothing at all. It was the same across the continent.

It was "terra nullius" - a vacant land.

OK, not quite vacant and that term 'terra nullius' was not heard until quite recently. 

There was no Aboriginal Army to defeat in battle. There was nothing to claim as the spoils of victory.

Not a photo !

There was just wild bush. The few Aborigines who came out to have a look at these strange people were completely illiterate and innumerate and those on the south side of the harbour spoke a language completely unintelligible to those on the north side of the harbour and they'd been constantly at war with each other for as long as anyone can remember.

There was no "invasion".

Captain Phillip was instructed by the government in London to 

treat the natives "with amity and kindness" 

and he did.

No Aborigines were shot; no platoon of Marines fixed their bayonets or loaded their muskets or took a shot at anyone who emerged from the bush to see what was going on. Instead they offered them gifts and friendship.

Again, OK, but armed and violent tensions were felt sporadically - on both sides - for quite a while. But there were no 'wars' such as the Americans waged on their native populations, who were far more advanced. 

Most people now "identified" as "indigenous" - like myself and my children and grandchildren have European - mostly British - ancestry to a greater or lesser extent.

Indeed, there are far more 'Aboriginals' today than there were back then.  

I recently had a DNA test done that shows I'm 48% Irish, 20% English, 30% Scandinavian, 1% Spanish and 1% Aboriginal.

James Cook. The world's Greatest Navigator.
Boldly went where no Englishman had been before
The Captain of the Starship Enterprise
took his name. James Kirk.

The absurdity is that, in this time of identity politics, I am an "Aborigine" by virtue of the fact that one of my Irish ancestors married an Aboriginal woman 6 generations ago.

There is no reason to change Australia Day. It was the day "Australia" came into being and had it not been for those British coming ashore on 26 January 1788

I wouldn't exist and neither would Mr Mundine.

The name "Mundine" is as English as a cold pork pie or fish-n-chips wrapped in newspaper.

It's time for all indigenous people to get over what happened 229 years ago and stop playing the victim."

I can only agree. But then I am m'self the product of at least four invasions and cultural upheavals. The Danes (Vikings), the Romans, the Normans, and of course, those Saxon buggers. That makes me, oddly enough, Anglo-Saxon. The new despised mob.

Leo Maglen asked what do the activists think would have happened to Aboriginal Australia if the British had NOT colonised the continent. Be grateful, he says, because there is no way a land occupied by tribes with no technology and an essentially Stone Age culture would have been left to them.

Why Australia Day Matters

We have no land borders, and Australia is the largest country in the world not to have any any.  According to Geoscience Australia, we have a coastline of almost sixty thousand kilometres (mainland plus islands).  The perimeter of our territorial waters is probably longer, and the outer edge of our exclusive economic zone (EEZ) longer again. 

 https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2017/01/australia-day-matters/

Back on shore we have, of course, state borders, and we once built a rabbit-proof fence over thousands of kilometres of outback, but only at sea do we share international borders with other countries (PNG Indonesia and East Timor).

Australia is the only inhabited continent that is not criss-crossed with international boundaries and a patchwork of nation states.  Not for us razor-wire fences, concrete barriers, guard-posts, check-points, manned border-crossings, heavily armed border patrols, disputed terrain. 

We are one country, one nation, spanning an entire continent and its offshore islands.  The shape is so iconic, so much the image of our country, that we take it for granted.

It is pertinent to ask how this happy situation came about. 

 It was not, it must be said, anything to do with the first inhabitants, the Aborigines and Torres Strait islanders. 

Whilst they had spread across the entire continent and adjacent islands, and shared a nomadic hunter-gatherer existence, they were divided into around 250 separate tribal groups, each with its own traditions, customs, language and territory, with which it had a strong and deep affinity. 

Whilst there was, of course, contact between adjacent groups, it is doubtful whether there was any knowledge of, or affinity with, groups beyond this range of contacts, with those living on the other side of the continent.   

Nor is it likely that the first inhabitants had any concept of the country, of the continent, of Australia, in its entirety. 

 This awareness could only come in the modern era.

It was the British, at the end of the eighteenth century, who changed all that.

Arthur Phillip. 

It was an Englishman, Arthur Phillip, who with a small ceremony on the shore of Botany Bay on 26 January, 1788, began the annexation of the continent for the British Crown.  It was another Englishman, Matthew Flinders, who first circumnavigated the continent and revealed in detail its size and shape, and it was he who bestowed upon it the name Australia.   

In just a mere 113 years after Arthur Phillip established the first British settlement at Sydney Cove, Australia became a united sovereign nation, taking its own place in the world.  This it achieved freely, and with the encouragement and consent of Britain.   

There was no ‘throwing off of the British yolk’, (sic), no need for an independence struggle.  The heroes of Australia’s nationhood were not resistance leaders or freedom fighters, but politicians and statesmen, most now forgotten or only half-remembered.

From the moment of Phillip’s annexation Australia became part of the British Empire, and through this the Anglosphere, that group of English-speaking countries that subscribe to the same values and share the same heritage of democratic institutions, parliamentary system of government, separation of church and state, equality before the law, respect for private property, strong civil society, protection of basic freedoms.   

It has been upon this base that Australians, old and new, have built our remarkably prosperous, free, open, tolerant, outward-looking, progressive and enterprising way of life.   

It is this bedrock, not the continent’s great wealth of natural resources, that makes Australia a ‘lucky country’.

It is, of course an article of faith amongst Aboriginal activists and the grievance industry generally to see things in a different, much darker, more doom-laden way, to view the running up of the Union Jack by Phillip on that day as the beginning of the end, the start of an invasion, one that would lead to the subjugation of the first inhabitants and the destruction of their culture and way of life.

What this view overlooks, of course, is that such an ‘invasion’, or even a succession of them, was inevitable. 

On no other continent have the original inhabitants been successful in holding on to their lands and traditional ways of life. 

Through waves of invasion, conquest, migration, settlement, by people ever more technologically and organisationally advanced, similarly nomadic hunter-gatherers either adapted, or were forced into ever more remote, inaccessible and inhospitable terrain, as in Asia, Africa and the Americas, or driven to extinction, as in Europe and the Middle-East...

So it if hadn’t been the British, it would have been someone else, or a bunch of others, contesting the terrain, carving it up, claiming it as their own...

No-one else in the region, the Papuans, the Javanese, the Japanese or the Chinese, for example, felt so inclined or had the logistics to invade the place. Otherwise, presumably, they would have done so ages before...

By the modern era, therefore, it was most likely that it would be a European maritime power that would do it and, of those, there were only four other real contenders – the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the French...

The Spanish and the Portuguese had a record for being less enlightened and more despotic colonisers than the British ever were, and their legacy in the lands they did conquer has not been as stable, democratic or economically as successful...

Had the Dutch done so, then perhaps Australian settlement would have been much more like that of the Afrikaaners in South Africa, where they did put down roots, with all that would have entailed, particularly for the original inhabitants...

The French, of course, have had a different attitude to de-colonization to that of the British. They, the French, have been most reluctant to give up any of their colonies, and in those in which the locals have not been able to force them out, they remain to this day, as they do in nearby New Caledonia and French Polynesia....

The other possibility, already mentioned, is that the continent of Australia could easily have been not a single nation, but one divided into competing European colonies, with all the likelihood of frontier disputes and inter-colonial wars.... 

Not having to share a land border with another nation has bestowed upon us huge benefits, especially in the areas of defence, quarantine, customs, immigration and in terrorism prevention. Australia is its own customs union, free-trade area and common currency block. It has only one official language and a unified legal system...

So, all in all, the country could have done worse than have Arthur Phillip plant the Union Jack on its soil 226 years ago. Although they didn’t appreciate it at the time, Phillip probably gave the first inhabitants as good a chance of surviving in, and adapting to, the global world as any ‘invader’ could have given them, and the waves of immigrants that subsequently came, and are still coming, to these shores, a much freer, safer, fairer, equitable, open, tolerant and prosperous place in which to start a new life than might otherwise have been the case.

Despite all this, the morons will always be with us and they will deface, destroy, lie and cause mayhem because, well, that's what they do.

And they have supporters with deep pockets, often imported for the occasions, and cultural marxist drives to destroy any western civilisation they pick on. 

These are not in the slightest 'Aboriginal' but the product of the Frankfurt School and Mr Gramsci.

Ray Cadmore had an interesting observation before I moved away to pull pints in another bar:

Interestingly it seems that much of the Australian ethos owes its origin to Arthur Phillip and the decisions he made based on his life observations of many parts of the world. 

For example, Phillip was at pains to ensure slavery was never established here as he was to ensure the First Fleet was well provisioned and catered for. Frost compares the First Fleet to a moon shot in terms of technical audacity and human determination. Australia is half way around the world and months of sailing time from Britain, whereas the Americas were just a couple of weeks sailing away.

Convicts once here rapidly achieved property rights and levels of responsibility that they would never have aspired to at home.

Drink up.

We are watching the slow demise of reason and the Rays of the world are getting fewer by the day.

Pax.

PS.
While we are talking about statues, someone just stepped up in the US Room to say......

Protestants Object To Removal Of Statues For Once

Protestants from around the country for once Thursday finally expressed sadness and dismay over the removal of statues from several locations in the wake of the Charlottesville riots.

“It’s sad to see the history and culture being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” 

 http://www.eyeofthetiber.com/2017/08/21/protestants-object-to-removal-of-statues-for-once/

The Pastor of The Tsunami Church in Greensboro, North Carolina Ted Roberts said that this morning as he defaced a statue of St. Junipero Serra. 

“These men were bad, I admit that, but it’s part of our heritage. No statue that is part of our collective heritage deserves to be torn down. Man, that sounds weird to say.”

Going on to call the removal of any statue a foolish move, shivering as he used the word “any,” Roberts said, “You can’t change history, but you can learn from it.”

“We, as a God-fearing people, ought to be more respectful of the past and the present. We must respect even those we disagree with because they, like us, were a part of making this country what it is today, even if those people were racists or – Catholic. 

Were the confederates Protestants like myself, yes, but God forgives, and we’re confident that most, if not all, of these men were saved by the Blood of the Lamb. We have faith and rejoice in that. 

And though we cannot be so confident that a person like Junipero Serra who served the poor and brought the good word of the Gospels to non-Christians was actually saved by the Blood of the Lamb, because of the fact that he worshiped Mary, we should not tear down his statues. 

Deface, yes, but not torn down.”

Hahahahaha 

Now I have to go to Confession.