Thread: Sadly our history has some very dark parts

Originally Posted by trout1105

I Never said that everyone has to act the same and have the same beliefs and lifestyle.
What I am saying is that we are ALL Australians and we should all treat each other equally regardless of race, colour, creed or religion But we are ALL obliged to follow the rule of Law.
If you are not of a similar mindset then I wouldn't want you in our "tribe" anyway.

Yes now you're beginning to make sense. Agreed.

However, while this philosophy is generally good, too often it assumes that all are starting from a point of equality and fails to recognise that this rule of law is made by certain dominant factions of the community in their favour - Native Title being a case in point, whereby the pastoralists rights prevail over Aboriginal rights and the onus is on Aboriginal people to prove their ongoing unbroken connection to that land, despite being forcibly removed previously by colonial interests.

Originally Posted by PhilipA

Could you please show me the title deeds of the land to which you refer.

ALL civilized countries of the World have a system of title deeds to show ownership off land and buildings.
The land of Czech citizens was restored to them after communism destructed , because they had their title deeds.

The land and buildings of East Germans were similarly returned to their rightful owners if they could produce the deeds.

Unfortunately it was not enough to say, "my dad owned that building" to gain rightful title which directly affected a friend of mine whose father owned a building in East Berlin. His sister destroyed the deeds when the father died.
Tough titty for them.

Or are you suggesting that aboriginals really didn't have a civilized society where land title was recognized. Only in Australia is it sufficient to say , Oh my ancestors wandered this land so it really is theirs. Oh Come now.

Regards Philip A

Our feelings about ownership have very deep roots. Most animal life has a sense of territory – a place to be at home and to defend. Indeed, this territoriality seems to be associated with the oldest part of the brain and forms a biological basis for our sense of property. It is closely associated with our sense of security and our instinctual “fight or flight” responses, all of which gives a powerful emotional dimension to our experience of ownership. Yet this biological basis does not determine the form that territoriality takes in different cultures.

Humans, like many of our primate cousins, engage in group (as well as individual) territoriality. Tribal groups saw themselves connected to particular territories – a place that was “theirs.” Yet their attitude towards the land was very different from ours. They frequently spoke of the land as their parent or as a sacred being, on whom they were dependent and to whom they owed loyalty and service. Among the aborigines of Australia, individuals would inherit a special relationship to sacred places, but rather than “ownership,” this relationship was more like being owned by the land. This sense of responsibility extended to ancestors and future generations as well, who would inherit, and "own" the stories associated with that place. The Ashanti of Ghana say, “Land belongs to a vast family of whom many are dead, a few are living and a countless host are still unborn.”

For most of these tribal peoples, their sense of “land ownership” involved only the right to use and to exclude people of other tribes (but usually not members of their own). If there were any private rights, these were usually subject to review by the group and would cease if the land was no longer being used. The sale of land was either not even a possibility or not permitted. As for inheritance, every person had use rights simply by membership in the group, so a growing child would not have to wait until some other individual died (or pay a special fee) to gain full access to the land.

Farming made the human relationship to the land more concentrated. Tilling the land, making permanent settlements, etc., all meant a greater direct investment in a particular place. Yet this did not lead immediately to our present ideas of ownership. As best as is known, early farming communities continued to experience an intimate spiritual connection to the land, and they often held land in common under the control of a village council. This pattern has remained in many peasant communities throughout the world.

It was not so much farming directly, but the larger-than-tribal societies that could be based on farming that led to major changes in attitudes towards the land. Many of the first civilizations were centered around a supposedly godlike king, and it was a natural extension to go from the tribal idea that “the land belongs to the gods” to the idea that all of the kingdom belongs to the god-king. Since the god-king was supposed to personify the whole community, this was still a form of community ownership, but now personalized. Privileges of use and control of various types were distributed to the ruling elite on the basis of custom and politics.

As time went on, land took on a new meaning for these ruling elites. It became an abstraction, a source of power and wealth, a tool for other purposes. The name of the game became conquer, hold, and extract the maximum in tribute. The human-human struggle for power gradually came to be the dominant factor shaping the human relationship to the land. This shift from seeing the land as a sacred mother to merely a commodity required deep changes throughout these cultures such as moving the gods and sacred beings into the sky where they could conveniently be as mobile as the ever changing boundaries of these empires.

The idea of private land ownership developed as a second step – partly in reaction to the power of the sovereign and partly in response to the opportunities of a larger-than- village economy. In the god-king societies, the privileges of the nobility were often easily withdrawn at the whim of the sovereign, and the importance of politics and raw power as the basis of ownership was rarely forgotten. To guard their power, the nobility frequently pushed for greater legal/customary recognition of their land rights. In the less centralized societies and in the occasional democracies and republics of this period, private ownership also developed in response to the breakdown of village cohesiveness. In either case, private property permitted the individual to be a “little king” of his/her own lands, imitating and competing against the claims of the state.

The above changes, occurring as they did over thousands of years, have become entrenched in our way of thinking, absorbed as you grew from your mothers breast, to make your own way out in the world, and thence to continue the spread of those customs and lores to your own children.

Is it such a difficult stretch of your imagination, to realise that there are people in this world to whom that is not the customary way of life? That they absorb a whole different set of customs and lore as they grow? Like the Yolgnu people, who saw the cattle come into their tribal lands, and decided (just as countless other native tribes did before and since), "Look, the Great Earth Mother has brought us a new animal! Let's see if it's good to eat!" Having no concept of anyone "owning" the animals that were grazing the bush, they had no idea that what they were doing was about to bring death and destruction upon their loved ones.
If you enter someone elses home, or travel to another country, it is only common decency, and good manners, to try to understand at least some of their customs, so as not to appear to be a boorish dickhead. To be fair, quite a few of the early settlers tried, with varying degrees of success, to gain a better understanding of the Aboriginal society. Sadly they were swamped by the hordes of get-rich-quick schemers, bible-thumpers and bureaucrats.

The answer is not simple, because the problem is not simple. The first step in overcoming the problem is to stop trying to apportion blame for past deeds, and start looking to the future. Sadly, there is very limited hope for many whom are already in the depths of this national disgrace, but shouldn't we at least be starting to look for ways to assist the next generation, rather than just re-hashing old things that didn't work already?