NOW WE HAVE APOLOGISED, CAN WE PLEASE HAVE A PEACEFUL AUSTRALIA DAY?
Since national apologies are in vogue, here is one that Prime Minister Albanese should be giving to Aboriginals:
We apologise for helping you to read and teaching you the English language, which opened you up to European civilisation, thought and enterprise.
We apologise for giving you free/subsidised doctors, hospitals, medical care and medication, that help you to live longer than you ever did before colonisation.
We apologise for mapping Australia and being the first to inform you of the size and location of the continent that you had inhabited for 60,000 years – without which, you wouldn’t know what you had ‘sovereignty’ over.
We apologise for the colonisation as you would have preferred the kinder Spanish, Japanese or Indonesians.
We apologise for giving you law and order, which has helped to prevent you from slaughtering one another and at times eating the victims.
We apologise for developing agriculture which today feeds your people, whereas before you survived by living off the land and often starving during droughts.
We must apologise for building houses for you, which you have largely neglected, vandalised or destroyed.
We apologise for providing you with clothing made of fabric to replace the animal skins you wore.
We apologise for constructing roads and railways and building cars, so that you no longer have to walk great distances in the heat over harsh terrain.
We apologise for providing your own national television station (NITV), which you use to condemn those who made it possible, financially and technologically.
We apologise for giving you vehicles, petrol, boats, firearms, fishing gear and other non-traditional methods, which you now use to carry out ‘traditional hunting and fishing’ with impunity.
We apologise for subsidising your travel costs to attend family funerals.
We apologise for not charging you rent on any lands, while others have to pay rent.
We apologise for giving you concessional loans.
We apologise for our police who unfairly arrest you for all the theft, burglaries, domestic assaults, sexual assaults on children some of your men commit.
We apologise for aboriginal parents not sending their kids to school and then blaming us for their disadvantage.
We apologise for developing oil wells and minerals, which you have not utilised.
We apologise for developing Uluru and Kakadu in 1985, then handing them over to some of you mob who pretended to be the traditional owners, so that you can receive the tourist income. Hawke handed the area to the PITJANTJATJARA mob who only took it over in 1917 when they defeated the original mob in a war 1917 during a drought, over hunting grounds.
We apologise for taxpayers’ money being paid towards your celebration events such as NAIDOC Week and all the other eight aboriginal days every year where we are supposed to take the knee.
We apologise for working hard to pay taxes which finance your welfare, medical care, education, etc., to the tune of $39 billion each year.
We apologise for appointing Ministers for Indigenous Affairs in each state and federally to focus on you.
We apologise for not appreciating your Welcome to Country ceremonies, for which we pay, even though they imply that we are merely visitors on this land.
We apologise for the ‘white-aboriginal’ activists who are living very well on government-funded gravy trains, while some of your real mob live in poverty in isolated locations out of sight of the identifiers.
We apologise for having racist doubts about such people who are genetically mostly European but identify as aboriginal.
We do apologise and humbly beg your forgiveness for all of our sins, past, present and emerging.
To make amends, we are only too happy to take back all of the above and return you to your utopian traditional stone age tribal lifestyle somewhere. Just let us know when you are ready to revert.
Ray,
Do you also apologise for removing an aboriginal woman from her mother , at about 8 years of age, retaining her wages when she was used as a house servant, and preventing her from having contact with her mother for 30 years? That woman died today at the Age of 91. Her name was Lowitja O’Donoghue. She was an Australian of the year! A nurse. A leader of her people. A voice for reconciliation. One of the nicest people it has ever been my pleasure to meet. I trust that your publishing this piece of lies and half truths on this of all days is a coincidence!
I suggest you stick to military matters of interest to military personnel and leave nasty hyperbole to Sky News, the Bulletin or those “researchers “ from the IPA
Swannie, she was indeed a wonderful woman and leader whose greatest desire was to achieve a unified Australia. Her life as a role model for all Australians should rightly be celebrated.
As far as I am aware, Ray did not remove her from her mother, steal her wages or prevent contact. Neither did I. I empathise with the emotional pain she must have suffered, as I do for many of the other Australians whose life has been challenging. I admire her achievements despite those adversities, as I do for the other Australians who push on with improving the lives of themselves and others in similar circumstances.
But apologising for something that you didn’t do and had no control over so that some perpetually offended person feels empowered to continue to do nothing to improve things is fundamentally dishonest.
If doing so makes you feel better, then go for it. But there is no moral high ground in meaningless platitudes, just a diversion of emotional and intellectual effort that might better be used for trying to rectify the problems.
Swannie: virtue signalling apologist. What about your own life are you trying to atone for?
At the risk of slightly prolonging the faintly fatuous complaint about the apology article, I wonder if Swannie read the Australian article on Monday that revealed that it was Lowitja’s father, not the bureaucracy, who placed the children in care:
“At De Rose Hill – the pastoral lease Tom established north of Oodnadatta – he and Lily slept under a bough shed. Between 1924 and 1935 they had six children including Dr O’Donoghue who was born fifth. It was Tom who handed the eldest five children to missionaries at the Colebrook Home for Half Caste Children…”
The article further explains why it took so long for her to be reunited with her mother. Swannie would do well to read the whole article.
Then he can man up and apologise to Ray…
At the risk of slightly prolonging this discussion,
I would refer Hazard to not a wished up faked story by an Australian journalist but to a recorded interview by Lowitja herself where she states clearly that she was taken from her mother by missionaries from the home, she says this was a common practice in those days, she actually preferred the term removed rather than stolen.
This material is readily available and any source other than the person herself is not to be relied on.