#41
I'm reading "The Fatal Impact" by Alan Moorehead which is about Captain Cook's travels, enjoyable read.... The first part is dedicated to his multiple stops in Tahiti, I'm not up to the Aussie section yet.

My main criticism so far is that Moorehead focuses too tightly on Cook and some of the other notable shipmates, I'm willing to accept that Cook himself was perhaps only interested in exploration, anthropology, scientific discovery etc. but presumably there were other commercial/imperial interests funding these long expeditions.

We get tidbits of that sort of info here and there. A paragraph about Cook returning in 1775 to England from his second voyage:

Again there was the excitement at his return: 'A glorious voyage' cries Solander in a letter to Banks. The Resolution had brought back 'curiosities' galore: a shrivelled human head, three live Tahitian dogs, maps and charts for King George delineating his new possessions in the Pacific, casks filled with bird skins and other specimens for Banks, innumerable sketches by Hodges, and a mass of scientific observations


(page 88)

Well, what are these possessions? At least in the case of Tahiti it appears to only be a very tenuous claim, as we later read that in 1777 Cook returns to Tahiti to find a sign that the Spanish erected there in 1774 declaring it the property of Charles III of Spain. Cook hilariously added his own inscription, which stated that the British had been there first in 1767 (page 91), so actually its King George III's island. Anyway, this is all very petty stuff but Moorehead doesn't discuss in any detail the more practical side of the visits. This is the kind of shit I want more of, about Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist who accompanied Cook on his first voyage:

In 1778 he was made president of the Royal Society, and from that influential post he was able to promote new expeditions to the South Seas. It was Banks who suggested that Bligh should be sent to Tahiti in the Bounty to collect breadfruit seedlings and then transport them to the West Indies, where, it was hoped, they would provide a staple diet for the Negro slaves


(page 102)

This is good but why is an English naturalist so interested in lowering the cost of reproducing slave labour? We can assume there were financial links obviously but it'd be useful if this thread was followed further... Anyhow I'm not gonna get bogged down in criticism too much yet, I'll say I find Moorehead's account of missionary work there in the late 1700s and early 1800s unconvincing and while Moorehead is generally sympathetic to the Tahitians he's also occasionally patronising or relies on stereotypes (this was written in the 1960s). Onto the stuff about Australia tomorrow.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#42
oi santa ya cunt where is me bloody bike i've unwrapped all this other junk and theres nothing here i like
#43
As I said, she is from Australia. To understand her, you should think about what that means. Australia is America 50 years ago, sunny and slow, a throwback, which is why you go there for throwback people. They still live and die with the plot turns of soap operas in Melbourne and Perth, still dwell in a single mass market in Adelaide and Sydney.
#44
So I'm predicting a minority government, LNP end up with 75 lower house seats, enough thanks to Katter, but pushing shit uphill to get anything through the senate. Which will be an interesting situation because parliament will have to sit for an absolute minimum 6 months before another double dissolution can be triggered, and the more likely option is a lower house election which could potentially happen in 3 months but wouldn't solve anything anyway. Long story short: lol
#45

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

I'll say I find Moorehead's account of missionary work there in the late 1700s and early 1800s unconvincing



Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that the natives had been induced to work; under the guidance of the missionaries they had established an export trade in coconut oil


(page 111)

Er,,, need more info on this. How were the natives "induced" to work and what exactly was the nature of this "guidance". not marxist, erases class, etc

#46
in the context of all the police brutality/BLM stuff in the US happening right now i just recently read about this case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_Pat
#47

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

...Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist who accompanied Cook on his first voyage...

just realised Banksias are named after this guy

#48

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

...Sir Joseph Banks, a naturalist who accompanied Cook on his first voyage...

just realised Banksias are named after this guy


they're my favorite political artist, so mysterious....

#49
[account deactivated]
#50
#51

Petrol posted:

thirdplace posted:

is there any kind of aboriginal movement to build the same kind of semi-autonomous governments you see in Canada/America/New Zealand?

Yes. http://nationalunitygovernment.org/


Bumping with a cool article about this. http://www.sbs.com.au/feature/boomerang-republic

#52

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

In 1778 he was made president of the Royal Society, and from that influential post he was able to promote new expeditions to the South Seas. It was Banks who suggested that Bligh should be sent to Tahiti in the Bounty to collect breadfruit seedlings and then transport them to the West Indies, where, it was hoped, they would provide a staple diet for the Negro slaves


(page 102)

This is good but why is an English naturalist so interested in lowering the cost of reproducing slave labour?



i'm curious what's the question is here exactly, is it just a rhetorical one about how the book you're reading doesn't go far enough? if not, that's something i'd like to talk about to see if anyone has up-to-date critique of the current bourgeois history idea of a combination of arbitrary disease immunity and displaced-peoples social control being the main reasons such a large community was kidnapped, enslaved and transplanted in the Americas in increasing waves over decades.

#53
well ideally i'll be able to actually answer that question if i read enough sources. this Banks guy in particular seems like hes a real cheerleader for colonialism. the passage i quoted above points to a very concrete link b/w scientific discovery and colonial interests, as marxists this is a point to be developed because Moorehead sort of just leaves it hanging there.
#54

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

I'll say I find Moorehead's account of missionary work there in the late 1700s and early 1800s unconvincing

Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all was that the natives had been induced to work; under the guidance of the missionaries they had established an export trade in coconut oil


(page 111)

Er,,, need more info on this. How were the natives "induced" to work and what exactly was the nature of this "guidance". not marxist, erases class, etc



later Moorehead talks about the difficulties of actually disciplining people into a capitalist work ethic:

In that soft soporific climate it was impossible to make the people work for long. They would try hard but things always went wrong in the end. The missionaries imported a weaving machine, and for a month or two the girls worked on it with great enthusiasm. Then the novelty wore off and the machine was left to rust away in its palm-leaf hut. It was the same with the attempts to start cotton and sugar-cane growing; after the first season or two the workers drifted away.



(page 116)

Note that Moorehead attributes this to the climate of Tahiti. Interesting also that the missionaries were trying to grow crops (cotton, sugar cane) so associated with slave labor in other parts of the world.

#55
the popular theory in a lot of circles nowadays would be the english naturalist was dumping calories into a disease-resistant slave labor pool in the West Indies. while someone like me on the other hand, i'd also call him bourgeois.
#56
As I said before, there's a weird strain of racism running through this book. It came through a few times with the Tahitians but now its coming through stronger with Moorehead's description of indigenous Australians.

Moreover they were diligent and enthusiastic observers and they soon became aware that they were confronted here with something infinitely strange: an utter primitivism, wild creatures that had not developed beyond the marsupial stage, plants that did not appear to fit into the Linnean or indeed any other system of classification, and a nomadic people who lived more like animals than men


(page 142)

A lot of the descriptions could be dismissed as 'well, that's what Cook's men thought of them, so that's what Mooreheads writing about' but there's also stuff like this in regards to a confrontation b/w Cook and some native people about sharing of food:

They kept grabbing at the animals and were furious when the sailors drove them away. Finally they leapt into their canoes and paddled for the shore. Here they ran to the four-foot high dry grass on the bank and set it on fire with the obvious intention of burning down one of the ship's tents and some clothes and nets that were hanging out to dry. A tremendous blaze developed and would have demolished all the Endeavor's stores on shore had not Cook twice fired his musket and driven the natives off.

Next day like children they came to ask for forgiveness, and an old man indicated by signs that they would light no more fires about the ship



(page 150)

Why does Moorehead interpret an apology as "childishness" rather than say, humility or conscientiousness?

I think the next chapter is anthropological which I'm sorta dreading...

#57

cars posted:

the popular theory in a lot of circles nowadays would be the english naturalist was dumping calories into a disease-resistant slave labor pool in the West Indies. while someone like me on the other hand, i'd also call him bourgeois.

I read a lot of bourgeois history and try to criticise it when it obviously goes off the rails. This book is from 1966 and written with a popular audience in mind (Moorehead was mostly a journalist). It's an enjoyable light read (so much more so than Karnow in my Vietnam thread haha) and there's obviously going to be all sorts of limitations.

#58
I should mention Moorehead was an Aussie who moved to England in his late 20s (in 1937) and made his name as a war correspondent during WWII. His books are very easy to find secondhand around here, actually I have one sitting here about the Russian revolution.
#59

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

I think the next chapter is anthropological which I'm sorta dreading...



Experienced singers led the choruses, and although the tunes they sang were simple and monotonous, degenerating at times of high excitement into mere animal grunts, the sense of timing and rhythm had an African exuberance. Among some tribes, those on Cooper's Creek in the centre of the continent for example, additional effects were added by fixing embers into the anal apertures of beetles which flew among the performers as they danced.



(pages 163-164)



Don't really have anything to say about this chapter, I really have no knowledge by which to judge anthropological stuff atm. There's some gory details about sexual initiations if anyone wants to know...

#60
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-25/child-hooded-to-mechanical-restraint-chair-in-nt-detention/7659008
#61
I'm mostly going to quote long passages of The Fatal Impact here.

For nearly eighteen years after Cook's departure the aborigines of New South Wales remained undisturbed, and would have continued so for even longer but for the American war of independence. The British defeat in 1781 meant that the American colonies could no longer be used as a convenient dumping group for criminals, and in order to relieve the overcrowding in the British gaols it was necessary to set up a penal settlement in some other country. As early as 1779 the matter was considered by a committee of the House of Commons. New Zealand was rejected on the grounds that the Maoris there were too ferocious, but Banks came forward with the suggestion that Botany Bay on the eastern coast of Australia might be the answer to the problem. Banks had been none too enthusiastic about the place - its soil or its water supply - when he had actually been there with Cook in the Endeavor, but time and distance had lent enchantment to the scene, and now he thought it might do very well if seeds and livestock were taken out from England. The committee agreed, and Lord Sydney, the Secretary of State for the Home Office, submitted the plan to the Treasury for its approval.

Botany Bay had obvious attractions. The natives were few in number, and being of a timid disposition were not likely to cause trouble. The land was there for the taking; no other European nation claimed it, and it was also commendably distant from England; once landed in New South Wales the criminals would not have much chance of getting home again.


(page 171)

A naval officer, Captain Arthur Phillip, was to have the command, and later, when the new colony was established, the status of governor. To control the convicts he was to be given four companies of marines, some of whom were permitted to take their wives and families with them, and there were also 443 sailors. The prisoners numbered just on 800, of whom about a third were women, the sexes being kept apart in separate ships.


(page 174)

They arrive at Botany Bay on the 18th of January 1788. Early on Phillip decides to settle at Port Jackson instead of the planned settlement at Botany Bay (Port Jackson is only ~10km away) b/c it looks more fertile (p.175)

On 7 February, nearly two weeks after they had got ashore, Phillip held a parade for the formal taking over of the new colony. He revealed in an address to his followers that he had been given by the King virtually absolute powers, not only over the settlement (which he had named Sydney Cove), but of the entire eastern seaboard discovered by Cook


(page 178)

Moorehead portrays Phillip as a firm but fair, competent leader:

We find him holding his hand at first from excessive punishment, and he gave the clearest orders that they must at all times try to befriend the blacks


(page 178)

However, the settlers were fairly unprepared to actually survive in Australia, and conflict was almost inevitable:

Crops had to be raised within the next eighteen months or they would starve. It was difficult for them to discover more about the country and its possibilities by befriending the blacks, because by the very fact of their presence they were antagonizing and frightening the tribes. They were bound to seize the aborigines' hunting grounds for their crops and to trespass upon their fishing grounds, and the aborigines were bound to try and defend their rights and to take reprisals. And over all, oppressive and persistent, stultifying every enterprise, was that dead, sullen atmosphere of a gaol


(page 179)

All through this time Phillip kept making efforts to come to terms with the blacks, but they rejected every approach. They were so suspicious that they even refused to give sanctuary to a Negro convict who had absconded. {...} In April 1789 black bodies were suddenly seen to be floating in the harbour and washed up in the coves. Smallpox had struck {...}, by May the disease had swept through all the harbour tribes. A few of the sick who were too feeble to protest were brought into Sydney for treatment, but the majority, comprehending nothing of this mysterious enormity that had struck them down, quietly succumbed by their campfires.


(page 184)

...He's getting into some weird racial ideas here, not really sure what to say about paragraphs like this:

There was never much chance that a real rapprochement could ever be made between the white men and the aborigines in their wild state, The gap between them was too great. The black man may have been a better physical specimen than the white, but he had to change if he was going to adjust himself to the European way of life, and in making that change he lost his strength and virility. The few aborigines who now, little by little, began to come into the settlement to bed for food and tobacco - and eventually liquor - and who paraded themselves in dirty and ragged cast-off clothing, were not half the men they had been when they were living with their tribes in the bush. It seems a strange thing to say, but apartheid might have saved them. Had they been kept out of the settlement, had they been allotted hunting and fishing grounds from which the white men were excluded, they might have made the transition to civilization in their own good time. But this was a head-on conflict between the two races, both wanted the same territory in order to survive, and impatience and fear were created by hunger. The convicts, not to speak of the marines, were hardly the sort of people to make allowances for the aborigines. They treated them like wild dogs, and when the aborigines tried to defend themselves they shot them. Thus violence alternated with cosseting; the tame aborigine who hung around the settlement was indulged and tolerated, the wild one was killed; and both in the end were despised.


(page 186)

Moorehead concludes the chapter with something of a class analysis of settler society:

There were now {in July 1791} more than 4,000 people in the settlement, some 3,000 of them established at Sydney and Parramatta and the rest on Norfolk Island. The colony was not really secure as yet. In the autumn of 1791 they were again on short rations, and a disastrous drought continued until August. {...} It was still a bizarre existence, the elite of the officers and their wives clinging to the refinements of Europe, the soldiers and the free settlers forming a middle group, and beneath them the unhappy mass of convicts, the illiterates from the Irish bogs and English slums, the forgers, the footpads and the political undesirables. {...} There remained enormous social gulfs between the three layers of the little community, yet their common experiences in a land that was basically hostile to white men were beginning to bind them together. {...} The first shock of contact was over, a pattern of existence, or at any rate survival, had been established, and like a virus that suddenly proliferates in uncontaminated fields they were ready to spread out and make the continent their own


(pages 190-191)

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#62
"the aborigines in their wild state"

this is great, it's what the vast majority of white australians still believe, just expressed with less guile. that there was literally no civilisation here prior to invasion, just some weird form of homo sapiens forgotten by time, living as animals
#63

Petrol posted:

"the aborigines in their wild state"

this is great, it's what the vast majority of white australians still believe, just expressed with less guile. that there was literally no civilisation here prior to invasion, just some weird form of homo sapiens forgotten by time, living as animals



It's actually very strange/interesting, one chapter Moorehead will be talking critically about how certain settlers or explorers subscribed to the noble savage type mythology, the next he'll be talking about the "virility" of the "aborigines in their wild state".

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#64

In 1801 came the first of a series of expeditions which were to open up the country, and to make people see it for the first time, not as an appendage to Europe, not as something monstrous or bizarre, but as it really was. In 1799 the French had announced that they were sending out an expedition of two ships well staffed by savants of the Institut de France to explore Australian waters, and this prodded the British Admiralty into setting up a voyage of exploration of its own. The command was given to a remarkable young naval officer named Matthew Flinders


(page 193)

Moorehead positions this voyage (which charted the majority of the coastline Australia) as "the third great event of Australian history" after Cook's initial voyage and the colonisation of Sydney (page 194).

The political and geographical results of the voyage were very great. No one from this time onwards seriously challenged the British claim to the country, and within Australia itself - it was Flinders who suggested that the name should be changed from New Holland to Australia - the colonists now had some notion of where they could best establish new settlements round the coast. One after another the good harbours that Flinders and others had charted were occupied; at first Hobart in Tasmania, then Brisbane, then King George Sound and Perth in Western Australia, and finally Melbourne on the south coast. By the mid eighteen-thirties the country's chain of future capitals was complete.


(pages 194-195)

here's a map i took off the internet:



Rest of the chapter's about early attempts to link these settlements to each other overland and the exploration of the interior of Australia; Moorehead mostly just details this guy's hazardous trek:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_John_Eyre#Overland_to_Albany

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#65

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

Petrol posted:

"the aborigines in their wild state"

this is great, it's what the vast majority of white australians still believe, just expressed with less guile. that there was literally no civilisation here prior to invasion, just some weird form of homo sapiens forgotten by time, living as animals

It's actually very strange/interesting, one chapter Moorehead will be talking critically about how certain settlers or explorers subscribed to the noble savage type mythology, the next he'll be talking about the "virility" of the "aborigines in their wild state".


One presumes he took a somewhat consistent position, which I guess must have been that they were indeed savage, just not so noble. The whitefella really struggles with the notion that settlement actually involved war rather than series of sporadic episodes of domestication of the blacks

#66

Petrol posted:

Makeshift_Swahili posted:

Petrol posted:

"the aborigines in their wild state"

this is great, it's what the vast majority of white australians still believe, just expressed with less guile. that there was literally no civilisation here prior to invasion, just some weird form of homo sapiens forgotten by time, living as animals

It's actually very strange/interesting, one chapter Moorehead will be talking critically about how certain settlers or explorers subscribed to the noble savage type mythology, the next he'll be talking about the "virility" of the "aborigines in their wild state".

One presumes he took a somewhat consistent position, which I guess must have been that they were indeed savage, just not so noble. The whitefella really struggles with the notion that settlement actually involved war rather than series of sporadic episodes of domestication of the blacks



maybe im being too lenient on Moorehead but he reads to me like hes struggling against his own racism and upbringing in a deeply racist society. while saying racist and patronising things like 'primitive', 'untameable' etc he also uses words like 'invasion' and 'holocaust' which mainstream australia still has problems applying to the treatment of Aboriginals now 50 years after this book came out.

Most of central Australia was an impossible place for the white man to live in - that fact was established by Eyre and his fellow explorers beyond all reasonable doubt - but elsewhere and especially on the coast the colonists were doing very well, Sydney continued to be the major settlement. By the time Darwin arrived there in 1836 the population had risen above 30,000, and it was nothing unusual to see in the harbour as many as a dozen ships from England as well as traders from India and China, and whalers from the islands. 'On entering the harbour,' Darwin wrote, 'we were astounded with all the appearances of the outskirts of a great city: numerous windmills - forts - large stone white houses: superb villas...' The town, in fact, had become the principal outpost of civilization in the South Pacific, and most southbound vessels made a point of calling there. Darwin did not much like what he found; the colonists, he thought, lived miserably uncomfortable lives, everyone was out to get rich quickly, and the presence of convicts working on the farms and in chain gangs along the roads was degrading. But he conceded that the place was prosperous: more than £12,000 was paid for an acre of land in the city.

At last, after half a century of relentless effort, the country was being forced to conform to the European pattern. Everywhere around the new settlements the native bush was being torn down and replaced by English farms where European crops and plants were being made to grow. It was true that most livestock, whether horses or pigs, dogs or poultry, tended to degenerate after three generations, and new blood had to be brought in from the home country, but already there were substantial herds of cattle in New South Wales and sheep were thriving wonderfully. Manufactured articles, and such things as tea and sugar, still had to be imported, but in all the more basic commodities of life the colonist was becoming self-supporting; he could eat his own bread, mutton and beef, pick his own apples off the trees, and even drink his own wine. Every settlement had its acclimatization society which studied the means by which imported animals and plants could best adjust themselves to the Australian climate.

The aborigines fell back steadily before this invasion. They could not conform, they did not know how to adjust themselves to the new social climate that was closing around them. So far as the white settlers were concerned they were in the way, they were an obstacle to progress, they had to be removed. European diseases removed most of them, and violent death in their futile struggle against the settlers carried away a few more. The prostitution of their women to the white man led on inevitably to sterility or what was almost as bad, a race of halfcastes who had no place either in the tribal system or the new European society. And when their own tribal laws collapsed the aborigines found they could not understand the new English laws by which they were governed, especially the law of property. They thought that their tribal hunting grounds were their own, and when they found that this was not so, that they owned nothing, that they had virtually no rights of any kind, that they were aliens in their own country, they were bewildered and resentful; and when all their protests failed they succumbed into listless serfdom.

Phillip had estimated that there were about 1,500 aborigines around Sydney when he first arrived in 1788. By the eighteen-thirties only a few hundred remained. Darwin, in 1836, found them still trying to live their tribal lives among the colonists' farms on the outskirts of the settlement, but there were practically no wild animals left for them to hunt. A few years later even this last remnant had disappeared, and all that was left were a few beggars in the Sydney streets. 'Wherever the European has trod,' Darwin wrote, 'death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope and Australia, and we find the same result...'

In Sydney it had been a wearing away of the wild tribes. In Tasmania it was a wholesale massacre. Tasmania, because of its cooler climate, attracted many of the newly arrived free settlers, and by the thirties they numbered, together with the convicts there, about 13,000, all of them eager for land and none of them disposed to let the blacks stand in their way. But those mild and cheerful people whom Cook had visited half a century before did not prove so tameable as the aborigines on the mainland; when their land - and there was not much of it - was taken over for farms they attacked the settlers with their spears, and an organized manhunt was begun against them. There was no particular secrecy or shame about this; it was supported by the government. John Batman, one of the early settlers, describes a lookout on his land which was designed 'to entrap natives'. He kept, he says, 'a number of domesticated Sydney natives for the more particular purpose of sending them out to trace our wild ones if any should happen to report as being seen.' And John Glover, the son of the artist who had settled on the island, remarks soberly, 'The natives have been very troublesome and treacherous, spearing and murdering all they find in the least unprotected... the only alternative now is, if they do not readily become friendly, to annihilate them at once.'

So the manhunt started had started, and it grew more savage as it went on. In 1830 Tasmania was put under martial law, a line of armed beaters was formed across the island, and an attempt was made to drive the aborigines into a cul-de-sac. They succeeded in slipping through the net, of course, but by now the heart had gone out of the tribe, and their terror was greater than their desperation. Felix Maynard, the surgeon of a French whaling ship that was based on Hobart at this time, wrote that the natives were 'continually hunted and tracked down like fallow deer, and, once captured, are deported, singly or in parties, to the islands in Bass Strait.' In 1835 the last survivors, only a couple hundred of the original 5,000, were shipped away. If there had ever been any intention of preserving the race it was now too late; they could not sustain life away from their tribal hunting grounds and the instinct to survive very quickly flickered out. Within seven years their numbers were down to fifty. The last pure-blooded Tasmanian died in 1876.

Charles Darwin visited Tasmania in the Beagle during this holocaust, and he wrote 'I fear there is no doubt that this train of evil and its consequences originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen.' He was putting it mildly. It was a monstrous, unforgivable crime, worse even than the brutalities which were being committed against the white convicts in the Tasmanian prison of Port Arthur at that time. Even when one makes allowances for the hardships of the settlers, the loneliness and danger of their lives, it almost seems that a sadistic frenzy possessed them, a toughness and pitilessness that was beyond all reason. The setting of the tame Sydney natives against the Tasmanian primitives was especially horrible. The place to be allotted to the aborigines in the new society was now becoming very clear. Only two alternatives lay before them: to resist and be killed, or to submit and to degenerate into caricatures of themselves, street-beggars and useless hangers-on.

Count Strzelecki, the Polish explorer who was in Australia in the late 1830s, was moved to write: 'Degraded, subdued, confused, awkward and distrustful, ill concealing emotions of angers, scorn or revenge, emaciated and covered with filthy rags; these native lords of the soil, more like spectres of the past than living men, are dragging on a melancholy existence to a yet more melancholy doom'.

Nowhere apparently in this process was anyone in particular to blame; it just happened, one thing led to another, and in the disastrous ending the beginning was forgotten.

Things were not so bad in the other new colonies on the mainland, mainly because the natives still possessed open country into which they could retreat, but they were bad enough. Along the Murray River, which divides New South Wales from Victoria, a series of pitched battles was going on between the settlers and the tribes, and it was nothing unusual for the whites to organize a day's sport in the bush - a kangaroo or a man, it did not matter much what you bagged. Smallpox and tuberculosis swept through the tribes whenever they came into contact with outlying farms, and soon missionaries who had gone inland were giving up their missions because there were no longer any blacks to convert. Now and again the government made inquiries into the extermination of the natives, but it was a half-hearted interest a solitary policeman in a remote outpost did not stand a chance against a horde of angry settlers, and Strzelecki summed it all up bitterly as 'an inquest of the one race upon the corpse of the other, ending for the most part with the verdict of "died by the visitation of God".'

There were others too who protested, but Australia was still a convict settlement, and most people found their own lives too hard for them to bother about the misfortunes of others; you might just as well have asked the slave drivers of Africa or the settlers pushing out west in America to take pity on the tribes they were exterminating.



(page 210-214)

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#67
have you counted all the votes yet
#68

getfiscal posted:

have you counted all the votes yet

the Liberals formed government (only have to form a coalition with The Nationals which is essentially a Liberal appendage these days anyhow) by the slimmest of margins. i think there might be re-counts happening in a seat or two but its basically all decided.

#69
the last part of this book is about the whaling and sealing industries and how they completely depleted those populations of animals... there's a few lil tidbits about australia so i might as well reproduce a couple of them.

The first comers in the South Pacific hardly needed to go to sea at all; the whaler simply set up a shore factory in some estuary where the animals were known to breed and then attacked them from small boats. There were dozens of such places: the Bay of Islands in New Zealand, the Derwent Estuary in Tasmania, all the coves and inlets along the deserted coasts of southern, western and eastern Australia. Each year, following an immemorial instinct, the whales would arrive from the south, travelling sometimes in small groups and sometimes in hundreds, and directly they cruised into these quiet bays where they had never met an enemy before they were set upon like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, by midgets armed with murderous arrows

{...}

In the Derwent River estuary where it had once been dangerous to sail in a small boat because of the numbers of right whales there - mostly pregnant mothers either calving or about to calve - a massacre went on year after year until the animals were wiped out. And so the hunt went on from May to October in all the breeding and mating grounds along the New Zealand and Australian coasts.



(pages 242-243)

Eyre on his walk along the Great Australian Bight found the shore at Fowler's bay 'literally strewn in all directions with the bones and carcasses of whales', and he estimated that there were 300 American and French vessels operating on that coast alone. For meat they killed the kangaroos on Kangaroo Island, and for women they raided the native tribes ashore



(page 245)

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()

#70
next up im reading 'The Other Side of the Frontier' by Henry Reynolds. for non-australians reading this thread there was a particularly acrimonious debate in the Howard era about to what degree the Aboriginals were genocided etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_wars

Reynolds was one of the main historians caught up in this, i've got a few of his books here to go through;

The Other Side Of The Frontier (1981)
Dispossession (1989)
Forgotten War (2012)
#71
I'm still struggling to work out what to post about this, almost a week later. Seriously proclick for anyone who hasnt seen this
kACOj69yQpc
#72
VICTORIA - Several DOCS staffers came under fire Thursday for prescribing up to eighteen cans of Foster's a day as a treatmeat for orphans
#73
thats funny, but you should still watch the video.
#74
Just an update re: weekend protests, for the trainspotters..




#75
There's a good possibility that Canada is going to adopt preferential voting before the next election.
#76
Preferential voting is obviously not a panacea but it's still a good thing, I think.
#77
The best thing about it is that it mostly ends 'strategic voting'/'lesser evil' debates that would otherwise repeat themselves at length every election cycle
#78

Petrol posted:

Just an update re: weekend protests, for the trainspotters..

is the CPA decent? trying to learn a bit about history of socialist parties in australia... i could have very well stumbled into SAlt earlier in my life (before i knew what trotskyism was), probably would have wasted a lot of my youthful enthusiasm.

#79
the CPA twitter is extremely LF
#80
reading that Reynolds thing (its good) but im also browsing some other books... might read them more comprehensively later


from Broome's "Aboriginal Victorians" pg 73

reminds me of the physiocrats except now with settler colonialism