Happy Invasion Day
Today marks the arrival of the second group of boat people to arrive in Australia. They stole land from the first, and now they lock up the newest boat people (who have no such heinous intent).
Update: Darren’s post pretty much sums up my attitude to the day.
Well, why don’t you fuck off back to Ireland then? Invader!
As you know Rob, the indigenous peoples of Australia didn’t arrive in a single migration, so Europeans weren’t exactly the 2nd group of boat people.
And there’s a few people who have just such a heinous intent.
I am not sure why this makes people so angry, the British settled NZ around the same time as Australia and have been able, albeit belatedly, to come to some agreement about whose land it was, and I presume that the British who went to NZ and who came to Australia were operating under the same common law (unlike the original people who came here, when it really was uninhabited by humans).
The example you link to Peter, makes no mention in my, admittedly quick reading, of these people coming in by boat.
I can’t see why people are so abusive just because others have a different point of view. Isn’t that allowed any more?
Assuming you own the land you live on, your going to be the one who gives your land back to the indigenous people of Australia, without expecting monetary return? If you don’t own the land, then why not encourage your parents to do so.
I’ve been reading your site for a while Robert and consider you to be an intelligent writer. That paragraph is one of the less intelligent things you’ve written.
I agree with Scott.
Silly post Robert. You can do better!
5th Gen, the situation in NZ is a little bit different. While there were some land confiscations, the majority of land that went from Maori to Pakeha was sold. As far as I’m aware, Australia was the opposite.
Sorry, Timmy, but I didn’t see an invitation to debate the relative merits of returning to one’s “own country.” What’s done is done and it’s too late to undo it.
What I *did* see was Robert trying to point out the hypocrisy of this country’s shitty little policies in the light of how we got here in the first place.
Australia Day
Well it is Australia Day (public holiday - yay!) and I probably should write something deep and meaningful on what it means to be an Aussie - but I’m afraid inspiration has not come knocking on my door. So I…
Well, Raenaminy, in Robert’s case he can easily undo what has been done. He has a UK passport. Bye, Rob!
Somebody had to write it. It’s a great Aussie tradition!
No, Tim, I don’t have a UK passport. Believe it or not, the Irish told the British monarchy to fuck off a long time ago — something Australia hasn’t managed to do yet, but will soon, I hope. (And hopefully the Irish will complete the project soon, too.)
Scott, you have demonstrated a very peculiar understanding of native title. Yours is the product of Hansonite scare tactics and has no basis in reality.
I think 26 January is the wrong date for our national holiday, because it basically reflects the old “White Australia” mentality. Call me PC if you must, but I’d rather acknowledge the first Australians and the various waves of non-British migrants in any celebration of “Australian-ness”. A narrowly-defined nationalism paves the way for a racist nationalism.
OK, you’re PC. (Just wanted to be the first)
How the heck did you get past the locky-up squads of those other univited boat people?
Doesn’t your Irish passport apply throughout the UK? And the rest of the EU?
Sure, Tim, but it’s not a UK passport.
Raena, you twit, weren’t most of the settlers from Britain, Ireland, etc., convicts and their keepers? How is that like those lip-sewing dolts in “refugee” camps?
Robert, you might do better to consider what all this means for Ireland. Ireland has now embarked on its own multicultural experiment. There are large numbers of new arrivals from Africa and elsewhere. Is Ireland being stolen from the Irish aborigines? Or are the natives “racist” for trying to control the process? Is Irish nationalism illegitimate and racist? Are you comfortable with a future in which there are no ethnic Irish, not even in Ireland itself?
Quote:
Yours is the product of Hansonite scare tactics and has no basis in reality.
Convenient to pluck out a moment in Australian political history and label someone with it. Let me put my point across another way. If you are SO aggrieved with this situation, why don’t you hand your land and your parent’s land back to it’s original owners?
Or (Now it’s time for me to drag out a common misconception):
Back up this post with a meaningful argument as to why you think this way rather than sound like a career Uni student who’s hung out in front of the social sciences building for way too long.
I am just wondering in terms of the UK whom is the invader and whom is the invaded?
All this Invasion Day malarky is a load of PC shite. For most of us, its a great day to get out there in the sunshine on the piss.
I don’t want to hear from history professors on why the day should be moved to April or October or some bloody month. Jan 26th; it’s bloody hot, it’s the end of school hols, we’ve been celebrating it for years and for most us it’s a day to celebrate being Aussie.
I know I didn’t stop to give thought to a bunch of seasick Pommies floating into Sydney two hundred years ago.
Celebrate
JONAS on Australia Day: All this Invasion Day malarky is a load of PC shite. For most of us, its a great day to get out there in the sunshine on the piss. I don’t want to hear from history professors on why the day should be moved to April or October o…
Rob
It is almost universally accepted amongst non-ideologically driven anthropologists that the people we call Aboriginers are decended from a group who arrived in Australia and wiped out another group of previous settlers.
It’s part of human history mate. Get over it or go back to Eire.
Australia Day 04
Well it is Australia Day (public holiday - yay!) and I probably should write something deep and meaningful on what it means to be an Aussie - but I’m afraid inspiration has not come knocking on my door. So I…
Why don’t we do a deal with the Irish and swap Rob for the gorgeous Corrs?
Ushie, my sweet, would you like to point out where I said that today’s refugees are just like yesterday’s convicts?
*crickets chirping*
Why no, you can’t!
The fact that it was convicts makes buggerall difference anyway. Does that make it okay? Was it okay for the American settlers to do what they did because they were ‘escaping persecution?’
Ok then, let’s call it Invasion Day. It’s the day when adherents to the British institutions which have marked the greatest upsurge in human happiness, prosperity and civilisation invaded a continent populated by primitive, barbaric tribes, and commenced the process of creating this proud and wonderful nation.
How very PC of you Alan.
I guess the British achieved something exceptional - creating a functioning nation-state - by doing something unremarkable:
marching onto someone else’s land and booting them out. That every culture in the world has done this at some stage and with varying degrees of violence is a common feature of history.
Funny: most cultures actually celebrate how they came to dominate their environs, past military victories, we killed those bastards etc. It’s only a small (but influential) portion of Westerners who have completely forgotten the true evil nature of human beings and seem to assume only Westerners are capable of doing bad, and hence are the only people in the world engaging in round-robins of self-shame. As one who enjoys reminding the luvvies (and for different reasons the neo-cons) about the culturally-neutral human values of death, dismemberment and bloodlust, I think we ought to get over the foundations of Australia and worry a bit more about the future.
That the place didn’t have to be looted, that the newly established ethnic groups have never come to civil war nor resorted to violent revolution, and that other people seem to be voting with their feet (migrating here from anywhere else), would suggest that perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing after all. I’m not booking my return flight any time soon, that’s for sure.
Wow Rob, the amount of abuse you have copped from the Blairites is amazing. Make a few critical observations about your adopted country and you are invited to leave it. I had a lot more respect for Timbo than I do now, his comments are on par with offensive Hansonism - as long as he’s the Right’s mascot, the Right will never, ever be taken seriously. Is it any surprise that he appears in Google under the category of ‘Impersonators’ - http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=tim+blair, impersonating a Journalist, perhaps?
Now on to substantive issues. Let us grant the following and see where it leads us:
1) We do not accept the notion of collective responsibility in any literal sense. Of course the migrants of today are not responsible for atrocities committed against Aborigines.
Does that mean Rob’s comments are shite? No, he’s merely making the point that there are lessons to be learnt, that even today’s migrants might benefit from being aware of, about the unjust origins of settlement in this country. This is about self-awareness and a sense of history, not about blaming people today for what happened in the past. One of the benefits of this self-awareness is that it *should* make us more magnanimous about how we treat refugees since compared to the Aborigines, we at least have more of a choice in the matter, and have the benefit of institutions for orderly migration. This was Rob’s original point. Trying to evoke this self-awareness does not imply commitment to the more radical position that we should evict ourselves (an analogy can be made here with Israel. There was clearly some injustice in Israel’s founding but accepting this does not imply that the prudent solution is to substitute Jews for Palestinians as the inhabitants of refugee camps - this is because a sense of legitimate expectations about continuity have already been created in the current generation of Israeli Jews - it is impossible to re-start from a blank slate and attempts to do so will simply perpetrate more harm. None of this contradicts the fact of original injustice).
2) Aborigines might conceivably have been better off dispossessed by the British than by any other conceivable colonialists or even better off than if they had been left alone.
True, but the ends do not justify the means. This isn’t just a matter of words - morality matters because it has long run consequences. Even from the perspective of means-ends rationality, reflecting on situations that were unjust in the past helps us in the future because it instills greater commitment to moral rules in the future that has the potential to minimise the need to choose between evils because further evils are less likely to be perpetrated i.e. (1)though Aborigines may have been better off being colonised by the English than the likely alternative of being colonised by someone else, (2) a world where people treated other peoples as equals would have avoided the choice of such dilemmas in the first place. Though it’s obviously impossible to rewind the past, being constantly reminded of mistakes made in the past may bring us closer to possibility (2) in the future.
3) The Aborigines displaced other peoples.
True enough, but the response to (2) above also covers this. Furthermore, it is a logical fallacy to argue that just because too many past injustices are lost in the mists of time for us to remember them, that we should therefore not, as members of the human race, regret ones more proximate in time and take time to reflect on them. Obviously one reason all those past displacements are lost in the mists of time is because there was less documentation. 500 years from now, will the Holocaust by the Nazis be any less an event for regret? Does our moral sense depend arbitrarily on whatever recording technology we have then? I guess objectively this will be so but should it?
Furthermore, if we accept (as I certainly do) and that as I presume, the Blairites do, that we have reason to be proud of the achievements of Western civilisation, and the achievements of liberal capitalist democracy, and to believe, as I do that compared to other forms of social organisation, it is the best available so far, then to attack the likes of Corr is to want to have your cake and eat it too. The capacity for introspection and for a morality that transcends tribe, and the prizing of achievements other than martial achievements may well *not* have been characteristics of other cultures including the ones we are lamenting having dispossessed - but it is precisely that we are capable of criticising ourselves and placing ourselves to higher standards that other cultures placed themselves that we earn the right to be self-congratulatory about our civilisation. In short, Western liberal democratic civilisation needs whingers like Robert Corr because criticism leads to improvement, indeed the moral progress of our civilisation depends more on whingers like Robert Corr than it does on ostrich-like jingo nationalists.
Ouch! Ouch! I’m being bashed to death with a small wad of damp cottonwool! And the monster wielding it has the strength of two, maybe three hummingbirds! Help! Help!
oh can it, you microcephalic buffoon, your ‘jokes’ are getting tiresome. go entertain your trailer trash audience. you didn’t make any substantive points aside from ‘fuck off Rob because you didn’t go “rah! rah!” on Australia Day’ so most of that wasn’t addressed at you anyway.
Jason, he’s already moved on from “go back to Ireland” to “I wish the Irish all died in the potato famine”. Fine lines and all that.
Jason, your audience could fit inside a trailer. And have plenty of space left over for trash.
Rob, what did you do for Aus Day?
Listen, Soon, you stupid, mealy-mouthed, fuckhead: the Aborigines were not even aware of the concept of a nation or kindred spirit. They didn’t know where Australia began and where it ended; nobody can claim ownership over something which they are unable to even begin to describe. They fought amongst themselves and displaced each other from time to time. They had no system of land title transfer except via the orchestration of violence.
When the British came to Australia and displaced the nomadic tribes they acted no differently to any other pre-existing Australian tribe which desired a chunk of turf. They just happened to do it more efficiently.
Tell me: if Aboriginal Tribe A is allowed to displace Aboriginal Tribe B through the use of violence then why shouldn’t yet Whitey Tribe A be allowed to do the same?
The British were just applying the same concepts of law to Australian Aborigines which those people applied to each other.
Gee Murph, you’re so articulate and coherent and you addressed all my points. I am so blown away by your erudition, you Mensa candidate of the year.
It’s always interesting to see such a thoughtful analysis of all the underlying issues.
Feckwit
Rob Corr, a newly arrived Irish migrant who has the gall to call Australian born people invaders because they are white, has truly outdone himself with his latest effort. You see, Rob has identified old people as the group which…
Normans alive!!
As a first generation immigrant who has paid his due in taxes I thank those Australian for making this such a grate country.