The White Rabbit put on his spectacles.

“Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?” he asked.

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely,

“and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”

 

The problem is, of course, that contrary to the schooling I received as a small boy, I am now informed that the settlement of Australia or to be politically correct, the invasion of Australia, was a sorry and sordid affair with little or no merit attaching to it nor, indeed, to any subsequent transaction in the history of the settlement of Australia.  It seems my esteemed and worthy ancestors should have stayed in Ireland and suffered to be stripped of their land by the landlord, the bailiff and tyrant, rather than to have sailed far over the oceans to the bright shores of freedom in faraway Botany Bay. For if they had, I would have benefited by the liberation of Ireland from British rule, the establishment of the Republic, the introduction of the euro and, perhaps, the greatest of all, a European heritage of astounding beauty and cultural significance, Erin Go Bragh. Hoorah for Ireland, Hoorah for the Republic, Ooh Ah Up the Ra, Chuckie Ár Lá. Instead, I was born here and must be screwed here, as I plod the weary path of a penitent for all the sins and failings committed and omitted by my forefathers and their accomplices in the creation of the sorry history of Australia.  Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

 

However, if we drop the humbug and take to speaking plain Strine as a fair dinkum Aussie would, we may make progress in analysing the history of Australia rather than be bogged like a duck on the Murrumbidgee flats, where the dog sits on the Tuckerbox nine miles from Gundagai, in left-wing, guilt-ridden flapdoodle and cant.

 

There’s a track winding back to an old-fashioned shack

Along the road to Gundagai

Where the gums are growin’ and the Murrumbidgee’s flowin’

Beneath the sunny sky

 

Now one could run the risk of being an Uncle Remus and start telling stories in an unsophisticated way, which did not reveal or expose the true state of affairs but merely reassure the reader with a wonderful defence of colonialism as it existed in Australia. So, before I carry out the King’s injunction, I must say a little on the subject of history. Apart from it being a boring little tit, history is like selling Bibles; so, I need to ask by whose yardstick shall I tell the story: The Authorised or the New Age? In other words, shall I stick with the ancien régime: the discovery of new knowledge, the testing of received knowledge and the honest and accurate writing or telling of that knowledge, or shall I cross the quadrangle and follow the yellow brick road to social justice and cultural competency?[1] Am I to follow the age-old mantra of high-quality research and scholarship that advances the state of knowledge and understanding of Australian colonial history or am I to hop aboard the Magical Mystery Tour and go with the flow to la-la land where the sheepdog drives the station ute, the sheep roll around heaven all day and the Aborigines invented the wheel and went to the moon? Moreover, I have been assured that none other than Henry Reynolds himself, will conduct the tour.

 

What is a historian? A man who sits in an Ivory Tower toiling away at the great puzzles of history, while scratching his tonsure or is it his arse? Daily plodding through the chaos of historical texts and sources; daydreaming endlessly on his desiderata. He can show us his jigsaw pieces but not the finished picture, which lies hidden deep in his mind’s eye. He has never milked a cow; skinned a cat; lanced a boil; been a catch-fart at a Lord Mayor’s banquet; nor stood before a jury pleading for a man’s innocence. Yet when the jigsaw is completed, we are supposed to roll over on our backs and pant like lapdogs at the bewildering perspicacity of the sage in revealing to us, petty peons, our glorious and heroic past. In the case of white settlers, it happens to be an infamous and darkly tainted past of clearing the land of bush and blacks, if you believe Henry Reynolds’s rat’s nest of history.

 

Australia was founded on the principles of patriarchy, Anglo-Celtic hegemony and advancement by hard work and merit. The left-wing school of history is a derivative of Marxism. Marxism is a political ideology based on a slave mentality, which is the rejection of individual triumphs, achievements and success in the face of isolation, deprivation, loneliness, and environmental and psychological adversities in the course of nation building. The slave’s catchcry is: Everybody is equal but some are more equal than others. Moreover, we did that not you on your Pat Malone.[2]

 

Since Australia was discovered and taken possession of by the British, it is said the principle of discovery gave title to the British government against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.[3] Captain Arthur Phillip on disembarkation and entry, together with the formal proclamation and reading of his instructions, duly bestowed British sovereignty over the Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies. Arising out of that, is the fact that the Territory of New South Wales and its Dependencies came under the control of the British Parliament, which had omnipotent powers.[4] The point I am coming to is this, the History Wars. As dear old Eric Arthur Blair, aka George Orwell, said: My country Right or Left.[5] This certainly is not the sentiment of certain historians in Australia. I don’t intend to get into a lengthy debate about the History Wars. The point I wish to make can be covered by a quote from another dear old lefty, Frank Hardy, writing in his The Unlucky Australians:[6]

 

I downed my beer and when through the yard for a Jerry Riddel. As I came back an old aboriginal woman, drunk and flabby, came out of the Ladies. She flounced into a chair beside a round table in the yard mumbling. In her eyes dwelt the mystery and the defeat – and a dozen flies. She sat forlorn and disgusting – a symbol of white Australia’s guilt.

 

This incident occurred in Bourke, NSW. The prohibition on Aborigines’ access to alcohol was removed in 1962. Is there any room in this debate for Aborigines to step up to the mark and accept responsibility for their own wellbeing and advancement or will it always remain the fault of the white settlers and their descendants? Incidentally, Mr Hardy failed to mention the toilet was a non-segregated facility; lucky he wasn’t in Little Rock, Arkansas or he would have had to go back inside the pub to go to the whites only pissoir.

 

If you have a look at Australian history as a punter might, then you possibly have four days on which you may care to have a drink and a bit of a knees-up:[7] Australia Day, ANZAC Day, May Day and the Queen’s Birthday. Now the lefties have just about crippled or abolished Australia Day. So the idea of a local community having a founder’s procession led by an Arthur Phillip look-a-like and a series of drays or flat-tops following-on displaying the arts and crafts of the pioneer settlers is beyond the pale and an absolute affront to Aborigines and their supporters but like all things aboriginal, if you turn the coin over and ask what they can do for their country, you would be met by absolute silence until they regrouped and then you would have on your hands an angry mob of demonstrators. Of course, what the historical Australia Day really cerebrated is not the brave new world of Advance Australia or the Lucky Country, created by a bunch of felons and Run Hunters, but the grim reality of mounted bushwhackers shooting down scores of Aborigines on their home turf, according to Reynolds. May Day and the Queen’s Birthday are virtually non-events apart from the faithful doing whatever they do on their sacred day. In the case of May Day, the Wobblies walk down George Street with their boots on to the tune of Colonel Bogey and then adjourn to the Breakfast Creek pub for a top-up and to sing the Internationale.

 

Might I propose here that the Trades Hall invite all those Aborigines who wish to commemorate the Forgotten War, as Mr Reynolds calls it, to march at the front of the May Day parade suitably equipped with their battle colours, banners, standards, guidons, tribal pennants, badges and honour rolls. This may well prove a solution to the problem and release Australia Day from the slings and arrows of social justice warriors and the modern day bashi-bazouk.

 

This then leaves Anzac Day. As I understand Mr Reynolds, he says:

 

… it will be unconscionable to indulge in a crescendo of commemoration and ignore the fundamental importance of the war between settlers and Indigenous nations within Australia. This is the forgotten war of conquest that saw the expropriation of the most productive land over vast continental distances and the transfer of sovereignty from the Aborigines to the British government and its successor colonial administrations. This is the war that made the nation, not the fateful invasion of Turkey at the direction of the imperial government. If we assess tangible, measurable development so lasting significance, how can the two be compared?

 

The aim of left-wing cadres is to attack and destroy the foundations of Australia through its history by promoting the aspirations of what was initially called the proletariat but what is now come to be called Identity Politics. Since the proletariat as a class are no longer victims because of increased wages, better working conditions and a better standard of living, the left has been driven to find new classes of victims in the left’s struggle for political power, Voila! Identity Politics. In other words, every ragtag and bobtail is entitled to social justice and a seat at the High Table. Consequently, the left chose an amorphous class of mestizo people, labelled them Aborigines^[8] and then sought to erect around them an edifice of not only a heroic class struggle against repression and apartheid but liberation and land rights as well. If the left-wing cannot destroy the historical keystones of Australia, then they must damage or cripple it as severely as they can.

 

To achieve this, they must construct a historical image and narrative that shows Australian aboriginal natives populated the Australian continent in large numbers and had a technological or exploitive connection to the land rather than diffuse mythological and spiritual ties to the land where they roamed a habitat more concerned with the ecological and fecundity of their space than altering it to achieve increased productivity. Their stories and beliefs did not allow them to change the landscape or the set rhythm or cycle of their patch for the purposes of creating a surplus or greater efficiency. They had no productive relationship with the land or the animals or the plants. There was no market only subsistence.  In other words, by showing a pre-colonial construct of close or dense settlement by Australian aboriginal natives and the active use of the land in the production of food and material goods then, firstly, the left-wing can argue that the act of settlement was, if not an invasion, at least an illegal act of displacement and seizure of aboriginal lands and assets and secondly, there was aboriginal resistance to the unlawful occupation evidenced by “20 to 30 000 dead.”  Furthermore, the reconstructed invasion mythology requires a racial dimension, where the mestizo remnant can be re-born again as the First Nation by simply adopting some make-believe tribal name with the approbation of a likeminded group of self-anointed kooris, to prosecute the new ideology.

 

If the colony is founded on illegal and immoral principles, then subsequent acts of governance and settlement are equally unsound and illegal giving rise to the need for a re-birth or reformation of the social and legal basis of the nation. In other words, a new constitution will be required where the foundation of power does not lie with the Crown (an indivisible symbol of unity and solidarity, the host) but in some fragmented, collective style republic with a shattered Volksgeist (“national spirit”) and no cohesive identity where sovereignty is shared between indigenous elements[9] and federal and state elements with reserve powers awarded to a head of state and indigenous groups, so the left-wing dialectic goes. In other words, the destruction of an existing home-grown homogeneous regime, which we once had and are now at real risk of losing, and the redistribution of the national assets and accumulated wealth, which have been acquired over a very long period of time, to underserving and unproductive sectors of the nation on the perverse and erroneous principle of social justice-the right of the deadbeat to remain a parasitic loafer. What comes after this chaos who knows, but the ever-present jackals wait patiently for their moiety?

[1] Palo Alto University’s first core value is social justice, cultural competency, and diversity.

[2] The Marxist concept of justice “To each according to his need, from each according to his ability.”

[3] Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (1823). This is for the settlement deniers.

[4] There is no constitutional to limit the British Parliament and after cutting off the head of Charles I and sacking James II it was omnipotent. For the purist see Dicey and The Colonial Laws Validity Act 1865 (28 & 29 Vict. c. 63).

[5] An essay published in 1940 by George Orwell.

[6] Pan Books Ltd, London, 1978 p 19. I know, what about the Moree Baths 1965?

[7] Perhaps I should have said a piss-up.

[8] Pick up a mestizo group of fringe dwellers, re-defined them through a loose self-identification criterion; give them a back-story of historical persecution and then exploited the image to undermine the leading white culture which had long out-grown leftist populist rhetoric.

[9] See the Uluru Statement of 2017 and related comment.