First contact was often child rape

Duguid was a sincere and dedicated person. Hats off to his enduring commitment to better the lot of Indigenous people.

The Hermannsburg missionaries did more than most to record Aboriginal language. This should be acknowledged. Thank You.

Stop living in the past and move forward.

@ Pseudo Guru: yes but let’s fully acknowledge the past first.
So much of the early contact history in Central Australia is still hidden and sugar coated.
The truth is a rarity but must be told.

@ Pseudo Guru: If we don’t learn about the past – and the mistakes made – then we are at risk of repeating those mistakes.
It is also worthwhile to look at the good things that have happened. Learning from the past and examining what has happened will provide a sound basis to move forward.

@ Pseudo Guru: Delving into history is not “living in the past”.
There is something in that adage that not learning from history condemns us to repeating it.
The 1842 retreat from Kabul and the 2021 scramble at Kabul airport comes to mind.
And by the way Erwin, nowhere in the article is the phrase “child rape” used.

Hi Frank: “The lot of the ‘half-caste’ girls was tragic. Far too often they became the playthings of white men, including some who were supposed to be their protectors.”
That is child rape.

This is important history to retell and record. So much to learn from what these early social pioneers did and tried to do – often for the first time. Thank You.

Duguid understood the spiritual connection to the land that was and is central to the lives of Aboriginal people. A man ahead of his time. Worthy of more recognition.

Stop and study reflect on the past. It will help us move forward.

Yes Jane and I believe our politicians and leaders should follow those advices and the one of Kahtleen Kemarre Wallace: “Listen Deeply.”

Listen. Listen Deeply. Listening is a good start. Needs to be back up with thoughtful evidenced-based policies.

One of the problems with this type of history is it bases peoples’ comments as actual factual material.
There is a need to corroborate peoples opinions especially when made in the past when communications were poor.
In the book So Much Hard Work edited by Kay Daniels, there is a chapter on the Northern Territory “Black Velvet” by Ann McGrath, which discusses the overwhelming proportion of white men to white women in the outback.
Of the variety of relationships between white men and black women, actual rape was a minority: “The most common union was the casual sexual relationship where the customer made a small payment.”
It varied according to the generosity of the customer and the bargaining power of the Aboriginal woman or her husband.
Others considered women legitimate spoils of the conquered land, raped them, and left neither food nor payment of any kind. Other women were “loaned” to white men on a more long term basis, or else white men had “pinched” them, and without any permission, lived in a defacto marriage arrangement.
“A supply of food was normally supplied to the woman’s parents or her promised husband.” page 236. Pre white contact, Aboriginal women faced either an arranged marriage with men of another tribe, who may be much older than them, or being carried off violently in a raid from another tribe with their menfolk killed.

Duigid was not an anthropologist.
The author of the article John P Mc D Smith is a novelist and based the article on Duigid’s book published in 1972. (Duigid b 1884 d 1986.)
Both authors are story writers.
It is well known that Aborigines pre and post contact, sent forth their women for sexual favours to any strangers approaching (the original “welcome to country”).
If the strangers refused, then a spear and often death resulted.
“rape’ was not a considered activity in aborigine culture.

The author of this article has published four books.
All historical fiction. I detest the description “historical fiction”.
History is true, it happened. History is not there for people to run off with their own agenda. Call them novels.
Perhaps in the above article it would be worth mentioning the tragic life of young girls in Indigenous tribes in the past. Married off to complete strangers at times in their early teens.
Raped or broken in by Elders and having their private parts brutally enlarged.

Child marriage and rape of females was common in Aboriginal cultures as no doubt it was common in all human stone-age societies.
Another Aboriginal practice was making their females available to strangers, again, hardly uncommon in primitive cultures, for a price, and so the Europeans would hardly have been raping children since their needs, if they were interested, were likely to be met.
It would be foolish to say no European ever raped an Aboriginal woman but it would be even more foolish to deny that rape was common in most of the very different Aboriginal groups in Australia, around 350 of them, when the British arrived.
What we do know is that Aboriginal women and European men often formed enduring relationships.
There are also instances of European women marrying Aboriginal men. It was less common but it happened.
And so began the weaving together of many different peoples to found the nation of Australia.
There was more love than rape involved.

Liked this bit from Wiki: “He had two children, Andrew and Rosemary, with Phyllis. [5][2]
In 1944, Phyllis fostered a six-year-old Aboriginal boy, Sydney James Cook, who had been enrolled at King’s College, Adelaide.
e lived with the family until 1950 when he was sent to Roper River in the Northern Territory in order to benefit by growing up in an Aboriginal community. [6]
Duguid retired from his surgical and general medical practice in 1956, but later developed an interest in geriatric medicine. [2][7]
Yes, after being raised by White people from age 6 to 12 the boy is sent to Roper River Aboriginal community, for his betterment.
First up would have been his circumcision and then the kid would have to learn / relearn the language.
No mention of him again.
The Aboriginals who went on to become the movers and shakers of the Aboriginal industry were not removed from mainstream White influence at age 12.

@ Tony Connolly: The Aboriginal women I’ve been privileged to know, who lived a traditional life, did not describe their early years as tragic.
They described a society where both men and women had ceremony and power.
Arranged marriages are practiced in many societies and have been found to be more successful than free choice ones.
Aboriginal marriage alliances were linked with relationships to the land and it was customary for a man to move to his wife’s country to live with her relatives to whom he had many obligations.
Contrary to your claim that girls were married off to complete strangers, a “promised” girl had regular contact with her husband to be, so when the marriage eventually took place he was not a stranger to her.
Girls were not raped or broken in by Elders and nor did they have their private parts brutally enlarged.
Your critique is itself a scurrilous fiction.

Rape and a general lack of respect for Aboriginal women continued long after first contact.
So many of the youth running the streets are of European extraction. Often perhaps a poor Indigenous mother with few resources is struggling to cope, while the fathers, grandfathers, cousins, half brothers etc, are enjoying their wealth, and wondering “where are the parents?”

Good on ya, Ralph.

@ Ralph, sorry, the enlargement of the genitals is recorded, and completely valid.
I do not have the source handy, but yes, I have read of it, and will try and find it.
Truth telling involves accepting the bad with the good.

@ Ralph: What Tony said has been widely documented by many sources, including Daisy Bates, Baldwin Spencer and Gilles and https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fquadrant.org.au%2Fopinion%2Fbennelong-papers%2F2013%2F05%2Fa-blacked-out-past-part-iii%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR1uqnxHOUyBiAFXcWnQUF8lVwwtYjkmzpoyyiC8I4E6btr9cXHhtXH9RZI&h=AT2XjR87Eo8dzyQUbpBNEsLM6G2XxZn0n7qkp8i23Lofx5UeIEI6xuhOUDqyVTDh9QD5K4m_p64J8UO0j1HjmN_S-L5NIS2IwA3DwSvwTRFcSUNa_NrsZQil3axTFEaJzjMwGj2u4M9MOj4&s=1.
This is one of many links I could provide. Prefer not to copy and paste as the references are quite graphic, but for truth telling to happen, it has to involve the whole truth.

Ralph Folds: Spencer and Gillen write in The Native Tribes of Central Australia 1899: “The following is the custom amongst the Arunta and IIpirra Tribes.
“When a girl arrives at a marriageable age, which is usually 14 or 15, the man to whom she has been allotted speaks to his Unkulla and Unawa (correct kinship) to the girl, but not including her future husband
[They] take the girl our in the bush and there perform the operation called Atna-ariltha-kuma (at a vulva; kuma cut, the ceremony of introcision or cutting open the vulva.

The relationship between history and fiction has always been a controversial one.
Can we ever know that a historical narrative is giving us a true account of what actually happened? The challenge of Australian history is that early accounts and records are mostly by Europeans.
Is history fiction?
Anne Curthoys and John Docker examine this in some depth.

Fair go you guys. Put Ralph’s contribution into perspective. Spencer and Gillen’s book was published in 1899. Daisy Bates wrote most of her stuff in the early 20th Century.
Yes, some dreadful things have happened and continue to happen in Aboriginal society, but what is the purpose of listing and dwelling on these?
Is it to feel superior? How about listing the good things?
Keep in mind that less than a century ago (after Spencer and Gillen and around Daisy Bates’ time) large sectors of Australian society saw nothing wrong with randomly shooting “blacks” as a reprisal for the murder of one white man.

If Aboriginal people had a voice in their own historical representation they wouldn’t be focused on whatever is different or exotic to whitefellas.
They wouldn’t be highlighting or creating ‘bizarre’ aspects as Walter Roth, Protector of Aboriginals, did by forcing and photographing bizarre sexual acts.
Aboriginal voices would not have created sensational and false accounts of the cannibalisation of the new born as Daisy Bates did.
More recently, they wouldn’t view everything through a blinkered lens as Peter Sutton has in his The Politics of Suffering.
I’m sure that historical Aboriginal voices would be similar to the ones that contemporary outsiders hear when they live in remote communities and are open to learning.
These are societies that work very well to deliver a high level of satisfaction. There is immense extended family support that should be the envy of all of us.
The appalling treatment of Aboriginal women by white men, as courageously called out by Duguid, is in no way merely a continuity of ancient traditions.

@ Ralph Folds, now you are I making things up.
Accusing Roth of taking photographs of bizarre sexual acts – you need to reference that.
Infanticide is a well known way of keeping the population down in times of drought.
Also well documented.
Common to stone age peoples around the world.
In regard to Duigid – by name and nature apparently.
Alistair Crooks has this to say: “In the one book I read of Duguid’s he laments at length on the State of the Aborigines who were camped (at their own free will – and being fed by missionaries) who were “forced” to endure squalid living conditions in corrugated iron and hessian bag shelters. Wow to the world for not treating them better!
But then when he went out to the Pit Lands he describes with rapture the naked Aborigines lying on the ground with no shelter whatsoever and surrounding themselves with little fires to try and keep warm and then having to treat endless injuries when they roll in the fire in the night.”
So how this is a much superior arrangement!
As regards reflecting and learning from the past people like Bess and Jacinta Price have begged for the men in remote communities to let the old culture of violence of sexual abuse towards babies and children to be discarded.
William D Rubenstein in his latest article on Quadrant writes of cannibalism and wonders if this pre-historical violence is not imbedded in the DNA in the Aborigine male in northern remote communities and unleashes in the rape and sexual abuse of babies, children and women.
William is undertaking a study and writing a book on this which hopefully will be used by those that are trying to reduce the cruel violence often resulting in death.
May I suggest you read the following paper and respond to the author on line at Quadrant The Incidence of Cannibalism in Aboriginal Society. 25th September 2021.

@ Ralph: Daisy Bates made it up? As somebody stated previously: “Truth is a rarity but must be told” so many other languages referring to historical sources, not one, but many, yet they seem distasteful to you so you try and discredit them?
And also with Frank, what’s the point of listing and dwelling on these? Well, the whole truth for a start. When the white man is portrayed and the evil doer, you all scream about the bad white man, yet when an examination of the full story, showing repugnant acts on both sides, it’s “come on let’s move on”?
No, as I said earlier, I think the truth should be told, but Frank, keep it in perspective, and perspective is looking at both sides.

Indigenous culture is different to whites. Through highlighting their culture they have obtained native title, hey have obtained enormous amounts from mining companies, through highlighting their culture they have obtained exclusive native title which stops all non Indigenous from entry to this area on land or sea.
Through highlighting their culture they obtained “special Aboriginal places” where non Indigenous are not allowed. Mount Warning, Ayers Rock parts of the Grampians are just a few, with many more nominated.
All this and $34billion or around $60,000 for each Indigenous every year provided by our government. If highlighting their culture provides all this, isn’t it important to know all their culture and not just the glossy parts?
Many Indigenous languages would be lost if not for white fellow intervention.
To say Roth and Daisy Bates are not reliable sources of history is ridiculous.
As for cannibalism and particularly infanticide I could provide many researched examples of this.
You seem to have a bad case of “confirmation bias” but if you change your ways I suggest reading the diaries of Tom Petrie, Reminiscences of Early Queensland.
As for “blinkered lens”, Peter Sutton showed Bruce Pascoe to have the most blatant lens of all.
If we are going to highlight the wrong doings of a few white fellows in the past, let’s be thorough and view all aspects of life and culture in these times.
Indigenous who still live by aspects of past culture mixed in with drugs and alcohol is the reason for the appalling statistics of violence towards women and children in outback and rural areas.
I suggest a listen to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to understand this problem.
History is useless without truth.

Oh dear!
Ralph, give up. I am.

Fascinating how a rare and timely historical account of the poor treatment of Aboriginal women by white men has been swamped by a tide of historical ‘evidence’ of Aboriginal cruelty and violence and even sexual abuse of children and babies.
This is to know their culture, Tony?
I would suggest that anyone aspiring to know contemporary Aboriginal culture should follow Frank and Ralph in actually living long term in remote communities.

Pickering, M. (1985) critically assessed the literature on cannibalism in Australian Aborigines, in a peer reviewed published paper, including 440 accounts in 298 different sources.
He concluded that there is “very little evidence of institutionalised cannibalism in any Aboriginal society. Almost all reports were second hand.
“Aboriginal sources were usually of the “we don’t do it, but that mob (enemies) do.”
Characterising people as cannibals was often a prelude to stealing their land.
As Eleanor Hogan has demonstrated conclusively in her recent book Daisy Bates was a “fabulist”. She made stuff up. Including her “accounts” of cannibalism.
Rubenstein is one of Quadrant’s pet culture warriors, and his article is full of second hand accounts.
He even quotes Daisy Bates.

@ Narelle Ryan: The Fabrication of Female Genital Mutilation: The UN, Walter Roth and Ethno-Pornography.
Roth’s controversial claims would appear to be a rather fragile basis on which to base an assertion about Aboriginal practices even in the late 19th century. If we add the misreadings of Roth by Worsley and others, what is at issue takes on the colour of fraud. To claim, on the highest of authority of the United Nations, that introcision is currently practised among a spuriously named tribe is to perpetrate a mischief of the gravest order.
Combating violence against women is not helped by relying on fictitious or shaky claims.
What the documents point to, however, is something extremely disturbing: evidence of the common occurrence of practices of slavery, taking a sexual form. Forcing, or persuading, Aborigines to perform sexual acts like performing bears for a white male audience fits squarely even within then current criteria of enslavement, a heinous crime that shocks the conscience of mankind then and now.

Yes @ Corrine: Many people did exactly what you suggested, as in living with the people out bush, Strehlow, Gillen Spencer, including Daisy Bates.
Unfortunately with the passage of time, these writings and observations can be discarded, as the author is no longer around to defend their works.
I could name many other books, from anthropologists, and others who spent time with these people and witnessed the unpopular practices such as infanticide, patricide, cannibalism etc and recorded them, all before the time of Ralph and Frank, who are talking about their experience with contemporary Aboriginal people. But no need or point as this horse has seem to have run its race.

Interesting discussion on cannibalism. In the late 1970s I did a lot of bush trips with work colleague and good mate Merv Ah Kee to remote Aboriginal communities in FNQ from Peninsula Area Office in Cairns.
Merv’s Aboriginal heritage was Wanyurr Majay from Babinda. His Chinese heritage was Palmer River goldrush diggers mob.
On our trips, Merv used to regale me with stories of how the Gugu Yelangi Aboriginal mob used to waylay the unarmed coolies near Hell’s Gate and string them up by their pigtails, for leisurely cooking at whim. Merv said they preferred the Chinese flesh as sweet tasting because the digger coolies did not cook with salt whereas white diggers’ flesh was salty and stringy from cooking with salt.
Relatively contemporary oral anecdotal evidence narrated by a good mate with the relevant heritage.
I have no reason to disbelieve. Unless Merv was pulling my leg. But I doubt it. Merv was serious.

John, Pickering (see above) devotes quite a bit of his thesis to the “eating Chinese” stories.
As you admit, they were stories, anecdotes.
Rural myths.
Absolutely nil first hand evidence.
About as credible as bunyips.
What Pickering did uncover was a very deliberate ploy by the white miners, spreading these stories to scare off their tenacious competitors, the Chinese.

@ Charlie Carter: With greatest respect. I think you may have missed the point I was making. This was simply my experience that I would like to share with you and your fellow Alicians. Nothing more, nothing less.
The late great Merv Ah Kee was a very dear friend who I trusted like a brother. An activist like his well known brother-in-law Mick Miller. This article is about the differing oral and written accounts that proliferate over the past 200 years in the historical recording of Aboriginal life and customs.
I was providing an example of an oral account given to me by a trusted friend whose racial background gives him some credibility. But only in my opinion. Nothing more, nothing less. To be weighed up in the due diligence study of Aboriginal history. In the fullness of time.
I was not relying on any other source for my comment. I have no opinion one way or the other on your reference to Pickering. Merv’s account and Pickering’s view simply both add further pieces to a fascinating mosaic of interesting study of the ever-evolving history of the Dreamtime as it came into contact with colonial European Aussies.
Make your own mind up on what you accept or disregard, as you wish. Would you agree? You appear to have made your mind up. I wish you well.

@ Charlie Carter: Oh no, you don’t believe in bunyips?

@ John Bell: Methinks thou dost protest too much!

@ Charlie Carter: I’m a bit surprised that you quote William Shakespeare’s Queen Gertrude to point the finger of insincerity.
Shakespeare was an observer, a story teller of English life and times that you seem to rely on.
Merv Ah Kee was an Aboriginal oral story teller of Aboriginal FNQ life and times whom I greatly respected as an honest and sincere man.

What you see happening today is a result of what happened in the past, our futures will become more and more of our past history.
It is spiritual warfare, if you stand for nothing you’ll fall for anything unholy. We’ve been lied too throughout today’s education systems, great architectures and advanced technologies have been kept hidden, the popes throughout the ages operating in the Vatican haven’t been honest and the current pope understands in order to set the future for the Vatican straight, a lot of what has been hidden from the world needs to be foretold.
Deceit began hundreds of years ago. Totalitarian and a new world under one order has been a working progress for hundreds of years. People bitching and moaning be in for a shock, the great reset will be the bigger thief taking everything including lives. FTS