Genuflecting Before Savagery, by Tony Thomas (who has a new book out).
OK, the University of NSW wants its students to refer to Australia from 1788 as “invaded, occupied and colonized”. Moreover, students should be reverential towards the, er, invadees. For example, “the word ‘Elders’ should be written with a capital letter as a mark of respect.” … The guidelines note that the “sophistication of Indigenous Australian social organization (is) starting to be more recognized.”
This is all terrific, but I don’t think it quite gets the flavor of pre-contact … Aboriginal social customs. Helpfully, the earliest white arrivals jotted down their impressions.
A trigger warning follows for sensitive, compassionate PC types:
Newly-arrived British and French were shocked at the local misogyny they encountered. First Fleeter Watkin Tench noticed a young woman’s head “covered by contusions, and mangled by scars”. She also had a spear wound above the left knee caused by a man who dragged her from her home to rape her. Tench wrote,
“They (Aboriginal women) are in all respects treated with savage barbarity; condemned not only to carry the children, but all other burthens, they meet in return for submission only with blows, kicks and every other mark of brutality. … When an Indian [sic] is provoked by a woman, he either spears her, or knocks her down on the spot; on this occasion he always strikes on the head, using indiscriminately a hatchet, a club, or any other weapon, which may chance to be in his hand.”
Marine Lt. William Collins wrote, “We have seen some of these unfortunate beings with more scars upon their shorn heads, cut in every direction, than could be well distinguished or counted.” …
Settlers reported that sexual violence, including pack rapes and horrific genital wounding, was inflicted in many groups on girls barely out of the toddler stage. …
Solicitor/historian Joan Kimm wrote: “The sexual use of young girls by older men, indeed often much older men, was an intrinsic part of Aboriginal culture, a heritage that cannot easily be denied.”
Much, much more in the article.
So are the PC guidelines on indigenous history in fact promoting domestic violence? Delightful. We all know that if a non-PC organization, say a Christian Church, had issued such a document asking for respect for a bunch of wife-bashers and child molesters then the PC wrath would be instant and voluble.
The extreme inconsistency of the politically correct betrays them again. Their real agenda of course is to use PC to get a leg up in the competition for power and money in white society.
