AUSTRALIA DAY: Salvation Day 26 January 1788 or Invasion Day 26 January 1788?

 

No one has an inalienable right to anything, or any social state, such things are entirely dependent upon resource contingency and fellow citizens within the same socialscape determining such rights normative with the power to enforce.

To say non-indigenous citizens have to come to terms with their ancestors past behavior which is not their own nor could be in the present socialscape ideas, ideals and precepts is absurd progressive fabrication. It determines the past can be reinvented as having the same socialscape ideas, ideals and precepts as the present and therefore the present generations must be judged by the present normative rules for past ancestors behaviors based upon very different socialscape ideas, ideals and precepts and more importantly a significant lack of resources to achieve transition of the ancestors themselves and the Stoneage indigenous peoples without grief such a cathartic transition given the context limitations of the time necessarily brings.

To claim in hindsight it could have been different, yes it could very well be if we were able to transfer the total socialscape of the present day to the past with all its resources. Given this is impossible. How was knowledge-ethics to be transferred to prevent Indigenous people killing each other and the moral injury of watching indigenous children being subject to a development process which petrified them into a tribal Stoneage existence which in no way prepared them for the rapidly changing modernity which was to engulf them?

The political nature of the times determined if it were not the British, it could have been Leopold II of Belgium, and this would be a very different story. Easy from 2022. Read below what policy would you suggest? After reading my conclusion was it was Salvation Day 26 January 1788 for Australian Citizens of Indigenous of ancestry. For what was the alternative? It was to remain as it was.

Salvation Day 26 January 1788 for Australian Citizens of Indigenous ancestry by a British culture in a 1788 context trying the best they can to raise Stoneage tribe ancestors to modernity to stop them from being speared to death maimed have legs and kidney fat cut off for a feast.

“The place was all surrounded by bush, and hundreds of Gundagai aborigines used to camp close by. And well do I remember many of the fights in which they participated.

About the year 1850 a big battle took place just behind where the old brick mill on Morley’s Creek now stands. One morning we were awakened at daylight by piteous begging of a blackfellow to be let into our house. My husband gave him entry, and then he let a number of others in. They told us the Lachlan tribe had swooped down on them in the night and had massacred some of the Gundagai tribe. The last black fellow to come in had a long spear sticking out of his stomach-and, really, I wasn’t sorry as he was a cheeky dangerous man. Next morning ??? went to see what the damage was, and found two blacks -Motogee and Mecky, dead while a large number were wounded. A number of gins were speared. One of them Kitty, escaped by swimming Morley’s Creek carrying her two piccaninnies, and […] the ??? Ark, which stood below where […]. The marauding band also speared dogs and did other damage. They took away with them the legs of the dead blackfellows, cutting the limbs off at the thigh. They also carried away the dead men’s kidney fat.

[…] After this slaughter the Gundagai blacks thirsted for revenge. They made elaborate preparations, and, leaving their gins behind, set out to pay back the debt they owed their Lachlan enemies. After being away some days, they returned laden with trophies of war-the most prized of which were the legs and kidney fat of some of their opponents. At night they made a big fire on the Flat, and roasted the flesh of the Lachlan victims, and partook of a cannibal feast.

The blacks never murdered any white folk. I recollect the last big fight between the tribes. An old man named Billy Pemberton was walking down our main street early one morning when a mob of strange blacks accosted him with, ‘’Where blackfellow camped?’’. Billy directed them the wrong way and ran and warned the local tribe. A lot of them raced to our place for shelter. My husband was away at the time-only myself and two babies were in the house. I let a couple of blackfellows in and they got under the bed. Others planted in the outhouse; in Turnbull’s store in Lindley's yard and one got under a cask. But he forgot his dog, which started scratching outside the barrel and when the “invaders” came along the dog's antics directed their attention to the barrel and they hauled out the planted man, and I don’t think there was an inch of his body into which they did not put spears.”

Daily Advertiser (Wagga Wagga, NSW : 1911 - 1954) Sat 18 May 1912 Page 3 Sixty Years Ago.

Clearly, no massacre excuses another, violence against another Biology/Culture Ideology to resolve conflict is something we must leave behind, and remove as quickly as possible any Culture Ideology informing systemic violence from our midst, but to claim the high ground for a period when your own aboriginal Biology/Culture Ideology was intensively involved in massacring Other indigenous peoples, eating them and demand non-Indigenous face their shame and relinquish their celebration day for behavior your own were, under current moral framework, shamefully systemically informing is sickening hypocrisy.

Evil happens, there is no human endeavour of consequence which does not inform negative as well as positive; actions are taken which may be regretted, based upon previous contexts and belief systems, and differences in power. The egg cannot be unscrambled trying to do so is an absurd endeavour.

As each person has a past, if you have lived long enough, which contains behavior less than a favourable reflection of their character, so it is with families, communities, institutions, and nations. Each develops myths, to enable the celebration of their achievement rather than their failures, no individual or group is immune from this. To be eternally accusatory, regretful are despondent states of little value, rubbing a culture ideologies face into a nation’s myth contradictions is not, is not going to lead to a pursuit of happiness, the opposite, terrible things happen all sides learn from it and move on.

We celebrate our beginnings or we diminish each other leading to schism, for it leads nowhere else, the conflict continues, there is never enough justice, never enough recompense, never enough transferred power. The result, responsibility for negative behavior is externalised someone else is responsible, change to ameliorate-solve the issues never occurs, in fact cannot occur.

The failure to thrive is blamed on others, aggression replaces reasoned reflection to admit you are responsible for your condition and it is you who must change and no amount of wealth draining-result failure institutional proliferation is going to resolve the problem you.

So what happens:

"Indigenous screenwriter Nayuka Gorrie said she thought violence was “okay” in the context of the oppression of Aboriginal people and declared “let’s burn stuff”.

Minister for Communications Paul Fletcher said the investigation was “appropriate”.

“This week’s episode of Q&A on ABC television, in which some panellists used offensive language and called for or endorsed violence. has generated significant community concern,” he said."

ABC pulls Q&A episode over provocative language after launching investigation, Stephanie Bedo, news.com.au, NOVEMBER 8, 2019

To claim special status because of genocide is ridiculous in reflected history for who, which biology/culture ideology in the historical past within the temporal existent moral context has not been subject to the notion of reality expounded by the Greeks to Melian citizens "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must", or justified as the moral righteous cause, still meaning exactly the same thing, Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union campaign address (1860) reverses the phrase: "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it". One must ask whose 'right’.

“We have mentioned them in passing with the campaigns; various reasons why these actions of terror, these atrocities were committed. It is difficult to estimate how many people were killed or died as a result of the Mongol campaigns, the great Mongol conquests. Numbers run up to fantastic levels, far beyond what we suspect the population of the world was at the time. There are comparisons, sometimes very facile comparisons, which are made literally to the scientific genocidal extermination of populations by the Nazis or by Stalin with the great purges and the collectivization. Again, the Mongols never practiced slaughter quite on that level, and a term such as holocaust can be essentially belittled by calling every massacre atrocity a holocaust. The Holocaust, in my mind, is really quite exceptional among all atrocities.

On the other hand, we do have some potential numbers of what the destruction involved. For instance, it has been estimated that at least 500,000 people, Russians, died as a result of the campaigns of Batu over a course of about five years. Many of these were killed in the sacks of Russian cities; many more probably died of exposure, starvation, and the privations that followed after a Mongol army had swept through, burned all the villages and fields, had turned agriculture to pasture. Again, there are suspicions that there were very high losses of population in the Northern Chinese areas, regions that had been under the Jin emperor, the so-called 16 prefectures; that Genghis Khan’s campaigns that climaxed in the conquest of the Jin capitals of Northern China in 1215 had a similar destructive level on Northern China as Batu’s campaigns in Russia. All agree that the destruction wrought against the Islamic cities in Transoxiana by Genghis Khan, later by Hulagu, the destruction of Baghdad, those are colossal numbers of destruction. Hundreds of thousands were slain and died in the aftermath of those destructive invasions.

Last but not least, we do have information on the kingdom of Hungary; that was the campaign in 1241. After defeating the Hungarian army, Batu’s soldiers seized the royal treasury and the seal; and the Mongols through the whole of the summer of 1241 sent out letters that resulted in the surrender of cities, and towns and huge numbers of captives were rounded up, large numbers that are exaggerated in the medieval chronicles. Then, in 1241, when Batu had to return to Saray and get involved in that election of the new Great Khan, these captives were slaughtered; and again, we get fantastic numbers of Hungarians slain in the retreat by the Mongol army. We have a lot of anecdotal material about the destruction of cities.

Perhaps one should suffice; and that is the former capital of Muhammad Shah, near the Aural Sea at the lower Oxus River. That capital, the city of Urgench, was put under siege by Genghis Khan’s sons and the city was essentially leveled. The course of the river was changed in order to undermine the walls, and as a result, the Oxus River actually flowed into the Caspian Sea for the next couple of hundred years. The city lost its water supply; everything was chopped down, the mulberry trees for silk; the irrigation ditches were deliberately destroyed; and the city was turned into a desert and ruins and was never rebuilt.”

Pax Mongolica and Cultural Exchange, The Barbarian Empires of the Steppes, Kenneth W. Harl, Ph.D., Professor of Classical and Byzantine History, Tulane University, 2014

“Until the 1960s, approximately one million Jews lived in Iran and other Arab countries having arrived in the region more than 2,000 years before. Nowadays, it is estimated that only around 15,000 remain, as the majority of the Jewish population in Muslim lands were forced to flee their homes in the years following the establishment of the State of Israel. […]

Despite the positive influence that Jews brought to the places where they lived, more than 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries in the 20 years that followed the Arab-Israeli war of 1948. Another major forced migration took place from Iran in 1979–80, following the Iranian Revolution and the collapse of the shah’s regime, adding 70,000 more Jewish refugees to this number.”

The expulsion of Jews from Arab countries and Iran – an untold history, World Jewish Congress, 02 Feb 2021

In the context of the 1800s it is preposterous to impose twentieth century developed morals to justify diminishing democracy by imposing a louder voice, equaling more power, for one group over another, as for the constructed notion of prior ownership of a piece of land defines superior rights is absurd for it seeks to diminish the connection to a spatial environment within which all came to existence at the same time, how is it one is more connected than another, it is a spurious political constructed assumption, also it ignores the fact each of us exist in a landscape which we all pass through and life events which determines ownership ephemeral at best and non-existent at least, the notion of a greater spiritual link is an insulting and erroneous unsubstantiated notion taken as an assumption to underwrite gaining more resources and power, for I, born in the same land are to be determined less connected is a notion which bears no weight of examination.

Just because I set fire to my surroundings to clear undergrowth to have better access to food sources, can dig up grubs and yams and live off the land in part or in whole, determined spiritual creatures inhabit my surroundings as the Greeks and others in the past and present, does not assign me a special status other than a skill in alternative survival methods and a curious set of spiritual beliefs in landscape formation defying scientific reality. Can Christians claim as their God created the world therefore engendering sole spiritual connection and sacredness of all lands as to their own divination?

Worse could have been the lot of Australian Indigenous peoples given the nature of other biology/culture ideologies past and present moving into the Australian indigenous space, yes Australian Indigenous citizens, should deem themselves fortunate they were not completely wiped out. One must reflect on the Belgium Congo, the Mongol hordes, Islam-Muslims wherever they went.

In the context of the 1800s in Australia the British relative to their actions elsewhere which caused millions to die particularly in India having forced the population to grow cotton instead of food crops were morally bounded by policy which I believe had much to do with the Australian Indigenous peoples peaceful natures regards the settlers “The blacks never murdered any white folk.”, much more prone to attack each other than European settlers. The impediment at least initially to exploit resources to the extent it excited political economic pressure to feed into the rapidly expanding industrialization in the home country; those Europeans moving into the interior were intent initially on subsistence survival not capable of enforcing any form of control of the aboriginal peoples nor of a status experienced in doing so themselves extradited from their lands to a foreign shore relying on Australian indigenous peoples for help in developing a new life particularly as things went awry.

Disease inevitably would arrive to decimate the Australian Indigenous peoples, be it from any of the other Nation-states moving in to assume sovereignty which was inevitable due to the distinct technological-power imbalance and moral context or from connection with Indonesian traders linked into other biology/culture ideology nation-states disease profiles.

Australian Indigenous citizens have to reflect on their own relative circumstance as we know the noble savage is non-existent it is another Western confabulation, as seen above as evidence who can justifiably deny Aboriginal life was much closer to Hobbes version of a natural state:

“In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Despite the inevitable transition trauma such meeting of biology/culture ideologies incur, where I ask would Australian citizens of Indigenous ancestry be compared to the opportunities of the advanced developed Australian nation which the Europeans and others laid the foundations for which Australian Indigenous citizens now seek to exploit and admonish for doing what biology/culture ideologies, even their own did and do? You have no more rights than I or anyone else other than those you and others make assumptions for which frankly are erroneous.

No Day can excuse or forget and nor should it. But no Biology/Culture Ideology - Nation, if it has existed for some time, can with any conscience determine itself devoid of the blood of Other on its hands, and demand of Other what it does not demand of itself.

There is no such thing as a noble savage who hold more connection to the land within which they were born than those who were born in the same land at the same time. Nor any status First above others in a Democracy simply because they were first through the door, residing in the same space.

A Biology/Culture Ideology–Nation invents myths about their creation which enable the Nation to celebrate its continuing existence and move forward. I ask Australian Indigenous citizens to reflect on their own sacred myths and accept the truth about themselves before they go rubbing fellow Australians sacred myths in their face.