NEVER LET THE FACTS GET IN THE WAY OF A GOOD STORY.

This Wednesday, my native Australia has a public holiday for what the greatest idiot to occupy Kirribilli refers to as “The Defining Moment” in the country’s history. How on earth he can make that claim defies logic. What is was, was the first European settlement at Sydney Cove, of pickpockets, fraudsters, highway robbers, poachers and violent criminals some of whom had had death sentences commuted to transportation halfway around the world.

Yes, British prisons were overcrowded with not just prisoners but vermin, and yes, conditions on the hulks where some of them were housed were appallingly filthy, but they were sent over here as part of a British plan. I remember reading that if you had been transported after 1820, you’d have done a lot better for yourself. Rather than being transported with the clothes you were wearing, you would have been given changes of clothes and a smock.

According to the ridiculous doctor, Captain Phillip found a welcoming people. Well, is that true? Well, Captain Cook supposedly found the Aborigines near Botany Bay to be happy people and liked their ways, but Dutch and one British explorer, William Dampier, visited the West Coast and one of the Dutch explorers described it as “Wild country with hostile natives.” When Captain Phillip arrived, he didn’t find the Aborigines come down and offer to hold a welcome party, if that’s what the ridiculous doctor believed.

Also, according to the ridiculous doctor, the Aborigines could claim superiority. To that I say, Britain and Australia are climactically different and the British, in farming the land, tried to grow crops that were incompatible with Australian soil. The Aborigines, historically, were nomadic peoples who hunted and relied upon types of yams, and knew when it was time to move on, to allow the area to replenish itself.

After colonization, there were some European settlers who said to the Aborigines, “Okay, you can come and drink from the waterhole on my property, and you can hunt for kangaroos and wallabies. I’ll have my animals here and bring them down to drink at this time,” and lived in harmony. Many, however, did not.

January 26, 1788 was NOT the defining moment in Australian history, and nor was it a great time. It marked the beginning of the end of life for the Aboriginal peoples, the beginning of genocide. According to John Howard, there was no genocide of the Aborigines, but John Howard is no student of Australian History. The European settlers may not have had the Nazi ideology of bringing people on trains and saying, “Okay, you can step off and have a shower,” and put gas into the shower roses, they had other means, such as poisoning waterholes, distributing tuberculosis infected blankets, and then right through to the Stolen Generation. And let’s not forget, for all the right-wing outrage about Aboriginal people, in many cases, a person who had an Aboriginal great-grandparent or great-great-grandparent, may have had it that someone said, “Okay, you marry a European,” and then their offspring married a European as part of a plan to breed it out. Now, don’t get me wrong, some Aboriginal people married Europeans for love and that should NEVER be denied. And, some people didn’t know they had Aboriginal ancestry until later in life.

The fact of the matter is, yes, the Aboriginal peoples may have been happy peoples, BUT, they were happy without European settlement. They didn’t NEED someone else to come along and say, “Here, this way is better.” But nor did they, when Arthur Phillip came along, walk down and say, “Hey, you guys. Welcome.” Initially, they wondered what was going on and later were forced off their lands.