Stolen Generations - what about the Captive Generations?

Up until the short period of the Whitlam Government Aboriginal stockmen worked productive lives on many cattle stations in Central Australia. Managing and herding cattle in the rough environment of the Outback was a job they liked and excelled at. The station owners were fulsome in their praise of the Aboriginal stockmen's ability. But there was much more involved than the managing and herding of cattle.

The stockmen lived on their customary land, maintaining the continuity of their cultural lives simultaneously with and within the framework of British-derived property law. There existed a fruitful harmony between the two cultures, leaving open the opportunity for cultural dialogue and actual incremental change into the future.

But this concrete set of particular circumstances was not good enough for the ideologues of the Labor Party. There was a question of 'principle' involved and that principle was being transgressed. That principle, based on their particular theories about the equality of peoples, was equal pay for equal work. There would be no discussion with the station owners whose crude understanding of such theoretical matters was not to be tolerated. The Aboriginal stockman was to be paid according to prevailing community wages - or else. The Whitlam Government's 'or else' won the day and the hard economic rules of outback farm management came into play. The Aboriginal stockmen lost their jobs for the simple reason that there was not the money to pay them.

While Australia's budding PC Class, having struck firm roots in the Labor Party, was congratulating itself on winning the ideological battle, the Aboriginal stockmen were drifting from the farms into the nearby towns where many of them ended up in the gutter.

Years later in a friendly debate over a few drinks I outlined the above case to a vigorously committed member of the PC class. 'But it's a question of principle!' she protested, totally blinded by her 'vision' - and her soft city-situated well paid job. The same argument and the same outcome have been played out in the years since Whitlam Government - and the unstoppable ascendancy of the PC class. It reached a peak with the High Court Mabo Judgment which provided the legal platform for ramming through the Native Title Legislation.

Any objection to the Mabo judgment - that the prevailing judgment was not legal but political, that the one dissenting judge (Justice Dawson) did deliver a legal judgment, that the case of the Murray Islands could not be logically generalised across Australia, that the Native Title Legislation was not a necessary logical outcome of the Judgment, that this was a tragically wrong track and so on - was dismissed as racially motivated. No political action in Australia's history has been so successful in shutting up legitimate discussion. An impenetrable unassailable ideological wall was erected around the Aboriginal community and has kept them captive in a fast degrading state ever since.

The PC class managed in their usual way to bring about a change in the meaning of genocide so that white settlement could be characterised as genocidal. But in their own ideological terms, the PC class's impenetrable ideological wall can be more reasonably characterised as a program of genocide - especially considering the actual rapid degradation, culturally and physically, of the general Aboriginal community.