According to Quadrant Online “Dr David Barton is a proud Celtic andAnglo-Saxon man with a long generational family history in Australia. He livesin Central Victoria.”
Australia's Aboriginal Industry
By Dr David Barton
In 1983, as a naïve youth worker concerned by what I had been reading since theearly 1970s about what was happening with Aborigines in Alice Springs, I movedthere to see what I could do to help.
All told, I spent six years inCentral Australia, leaving both depressed and convinced that the situationcould never be fixed.
Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal ‘culture’ today is aninvention of the last 50 years.
Fortunately, much authenticAboriginal culture of the past has vanished. The gruesome initiations, genitalmutilation, inflicted cicatrices, burns, ritual spearings, sorcery and paybackmurders have by and large disappeared. Nevertheless, inter-tribe clangrievances often remain, as can be seen at some football indigenous matches,both on the field and amongst the spectators. Even though these encounters canstill become violent, at least those conflicts are mostly played out withfootball, not spears and clubs.
Meanwhile the Aboriginal Industry is chock full of ill-informed , urbanmyth-makers and illusionists, this caste of urgers and deluded pretendersgiving rise to the patronising insistence on the uniqueness of ‘Aboriginalknowledge’ about everything from agriculture and fish farms (a la BrucePascoe), water and fire management (a la cultural burning)’ to Aboriginal‘art’, fashion and even ‘astronomy’, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and RichardWalley’s thoroughly overdone ‘Welcome to Country’. This is mostly Disallowedfakery, an effort to convince contemporary Australians that Aborigines of oldwere something they clearly never were not.
Worse, histories and observational accounts or early Aboriginal life andculture are vanishing from library shelves, replaced by the anti-whitepost-modern dogma of ‘invasion, colonisation and inter-generational trauma’. Itis unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in secondary ortertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This cultural censureand erasure happening right under our noses. We are all the poorer for it,black and white alike.
Meanwhile, the recent invention, exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentationof alleged ‘frontier wars’ serves as a made-to-order replacement ‘history’intended to raise the status of Aboriginal people and degrade that of settlers.It is yet another bill of goods, a distorting sham, being hawked by apower-grabbing activist elite in whose interest it is to falsify and distortour history. The goal, need it be said, is an attempt to paint genocidal racismas Australia’s original sin…
Equality of opportunity is not enough for the power hungry, to whom anyperceived inequality in an outcome is and opportunity:
Unfortunately, self-determination for many people who today identify asAboriginal is taken to mean normal rules—keeping children in school, eschewingclan and domestic violence—aren’t thought to fully apply. This is nowhere moreapparent than on the troubled streets of Alice Springs.
Self-determination ‘means’ we’ll do what we like and you can pay for it’.
Self-determination is about colonising and taking control, accepting all thewhitefellas have to offer while offering nothing in return.
Self determination is about undermining whitefella institutions, judiciaries,organisations and bureaucracies.
Self- determination is about encultured white people who, on the strength ofwhat may be a mere spark of indigenous DNA, now identify as Aboriginal,thereby giving themselves an economic leg-up.
For the activist cadre it always was and always will be about money, power andcontrol, all underscored by the notion that member of one race enjoy apre-eminent ascendency over all other Australians.
More example of ‘self-determination’ can be found in the ban on climbing Ayres Rock (Uluru), MtWarning (Wollumbin), Mt Gillen and many Grampians climbs, all for ill-definedor unexplained ‘cultural reasons’. After much outcry, consideration isnow being given to re-opening the Mt Warning climb, but only to those who pay afee and are escorted by indigenous guides. More rent seeking, what asurprise.
Australian place names are alsorapidly being overwritten with (most likely made-up) Aboriginal names(eg:K’gari once known as Fraser Island). All of this is about claims toownership to ‘sovereignty’.
These changes should not bemistaken for deference to Aboriginal culture; it’s no more nor less than aninsidious takeover. What we are experiencing here is cultural guerrillawarfare, the picking off one target after the other.
Don’t believe it? Look no furtherthat what has happened in New Zealand.
More from Dr David Barton
AlwaysWas, Always Will Be About Power - Quadrant Online
