Re: To the victors, the spoils.
This is about a university trying to counter a history of lies and hypocrisy, which is the job of a university.
No it's not. It's about inventing a new and entirely imaginary history. To quote Keith Windschuttle:
Lyndall Ryan claims that in July 1827 a party pursuing the Aboriginal killers of a stockman at the Western Marshes left 60 blacks dead or wounded. She has taken this report, without acknowledging it, from Shayne Breen's 2001 book on northern Tasmania, which cited a newspaper story. But if you trace the story back to its source in the archives it refers to an event where a party led by Corporal Shiners of the 40th Regiment and four stockmen pursued the Aborigines. At nightfall they got to within forty yards of the Aboriginal camp before the dogs detected them. They got off three shots and only wounded one man. In other words, the press report was a wildly exaggerated rumour.
It's clear from this that far from respecting Aborigines, Ryan is claiming that the Aborigines were so stupid, that instead of fleeing into the night, fully 60 of them sat around a camp fire while five men with muzzle-loading rifles shot them all. The dogs must have been pretty useless too as one might have expected they would have harassed the shooters.
Henry Gee's In Search of Deep Time concludes:
When white settlers arrived in Tasmania they regarded the Stone Age inhabitants as animals and hunted them down to extinction.
Jim Everett wrote:
Aboriginal identity has been a problem area for Tasmanian Aborigines and non-Aboriginal Tasmanians since the death of Truganini in 1876. The official decree was that after Truganini, Tasmanian Aborigines were extinct. The recorded remnants of Tasmanian Aborigines, mainly nine women, survived on the islands of the Furneaux Group off north-east Tasmanian. These survivors increased to a sizeable population on the islands, and soon established a community on Cape Barren Island. The Cape Barren Island community was eventually placed under control when the Tasmanian Government introduced the Cape Barren Island Reserve Act 1912. There were, however, other Aboriginal survivors on mainland Tasmania, who integrated into white society to hide their Aboriginality. These mainland Tasmania Aborigines have publicly announced their identity over the past thirty or more years. The majority of recent problems over Tasmanian Aboriginal identity have surfaced because this group is seeking to be recognized as Aborigines after the islander Aborigines paved the way for Aboriginality to be accepted by mainstream Tasmanian society.
It's an odd feeling reading the writing of someone who is "extinct", not to mention communicating with him at UTas and elsewhere! Scary shit!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
