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Features Australia

Keeping Australia Day

The fabrication of Aboriginal history

20 January 2024

9:00 AM

20 January 2024

9:00 AM

Senator Jacinta Price astounded the nation during the recent referendum campaign when, courageously, she dared tell a journalist there were no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation.

The only continuing impacts, she said, were positive.

Pointing out that Aborigines have the same opportunities as other Australians, she said that constantly telling them they were victims was ‘the worst possible thing’ that can be done to any human being, creating the impression that ‘someone else’ was responsible for their lives.

She said that those in remote communities who experience the ‘highest rates of violence in the country’ do not do so because of colonisation.

It was because ‘young girls are married off to older husbands in arranged marriages’.

These were certainly not the answers expected by the many Australians indoctrinated by our seriously failing education system as well as those in the mainstream media who would push a victimhood agenda.

Chairing the function, the Sydney Morning Herald’s David Crowe challenged her unorthodox denials about colonialism.

‘Would you accept that there have been generations of trauma as a result of that (colonial) history?’ he asked.

Referring to her mixed-race background, Senator Price said this would mean that those whose ancestors were brought to Australia in chains as convicts were also suffering from intergenerational trauma.

‘So, I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma,’ she declared.

This brought the house down and Mr Crowe moved immediately to the next question.

In one fell swoop, Senator Price exposed what Keith Windschuttle long ago named the fabrication of Aboriginal history.

Little wonder that the big talking point across Australia after this was that hers were the words of a future prime minister.


That struck terror into the heart of the ruling elite wondering what on Earth they had unleashed.

The establishment does not of course accept the landslide defeat of the Voice referendum, just as they do not accept any refusal to agree with every new dogma imported into Australia and designed to undermine Western civilisation, however ridiculous.

The Voice referendum has taught Australians two things.

First, rank-and-file Australians are far more capable of taking common-sense decisions for the benefit of the country than their elite rulers.

Second, a small but determined far-left minority plans to take over and seriously damage the country. They will never stop raising new ways to undermine Australia.

Australians are realising the danger of compromising on fundamental matters.

Among these is Australia Day.

It represents exactly what Jacinta Price was arguing. What 1788 unleashed was of course not perfect, but its consequences have been of great benefit to all Australians.

Although they deny it, the Albanese government’s policy is to undermine Australia Day. Why else did it remove the requirement that naturalisation ceremonies take place on Australia Day?

Now, over 80 local councils have joined the Albanese campaign to change Australia Day.

Yet councils are famously only about the three ‘Rs’– roads, rubbish, and rates. Foreign policy, global warming catastrophism, or undermining Australia Day are not within their purview, nor do they need useless overseas trips and vast expense accounts.

Let them have a sword of Damocles over their heads ─ recall elections, either for a specific alderman or a whole council.

This could be triggered by a petition of no confidence signed by, say, five to ten per cent of voters.

Australia Day, it must be emphasised, commemorates a settlement, not an invasion.

It was inconceivable this continent would not have been settled or otherwise acquired, although most European or Asian powers had shown little interest.

Only the British and French did, and only the British had both the will and the capacity to settle the country. They were by far the best colonisers and the ones most inclined to treat the Aborigines fairly with Governor Phillip instructed in detail to ‘conciliate’ the ‘affections of the Aboriginal people’, and to live in ‘amity and kindness, with them’, and moreover, ‘to do them no wrong’.

As to the Aboriginal people, rather than life being utopian, it epitomised Hobbes’s description of primitive life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’.

Their reaction to British settlement has been misrepresented as involving frontier wars. That there was nothing that could be referred to as a frontier war has been painstakingly demonstrated by Keith Windschuttle in his book The Break-Up of Australia, published by Quadrant Books in 2016 and discussed at length in ADH TV interviews.

Rather than resistance in any significant way, what occurred was a mutual accommodation of the indigenous people into the settlement. As Windschuttle observes, by 1805, barely ten years after the establishment of the Hawkesbury settlement, and after only ‘a handful of interracial incidents’, Governor King found the ‘most effective punishment’ he could impose on Aborigines was to ‘deprive them of the company of British settlers’.

The best reward he could offer was to ‘allow them to come back into colonial society again’.

The important point to remember is that the British did not come alone with their extraordinary, unprecedented First Fleet.

They brought with them what are still the pillars of the nation, the rule of law, the English language, our Judeo-Christian values, and access to a sophisticated form of government, probably the most sophisticated in the world at the time.

As to the rule of law, those who would liken the penal colony to a gulag should be reminded that the very first case brought in the colony was by a convict, reported as Cable v. Sinclair [1788] NSWKR 11.

Brought by Henry Cable against the captain of a ship in the First Fleet concerning the theft of goods, the court found for Cable, who later became a successful businessman.

Can those who say NSW, as a penal colony, was a gulag, point to a similar case where a Soviet court made a similar award? This case illustrates how the settlement was already the basis of the development of an extraordinary country, one which is gradually being devastated by the delinquency of its ruling class.

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