Ray Stephens

The arrogance of the colonialists was equalled primarily in their ignorance, with Europeans almost always assuming themselves superior and enlightened and civilised.

Much of what I have learned was NOT part of my schooling education of 12 year tenure of primary anx secondary schooling. There was conversation ( a few minutes) of the “exile and extinction” of Tasmanian first nation on Flinders Island with no mention of the coasf to coast herding performed in final act, nor any discussion about the future generation of mixed old and nes tribe, as proof ectinction were NOT so (despite all effort to fulfill the mythology). I knew notbinv at all of stolen generation until decades after school. Closer to 2007 year of Kevin Rudd PM apology than to fhe year of my HSC 1974.

With respect for the Wurundjeri first nation people of Kulin culture, upon the ancestral land of 30,000 to 65,000 years ( or more) where I have been living mostly since 1957.. Alas history will indicate that through disease transmission, arrogance and ignorance prolonged, ths newbie boat people missed learning from the knowledge acquired from the locals with lengthier experience than 10 and 20 times that Homer’s Greece or Julius’ Rome or Pharoah Seti’s Egypt, in landcare. We have the mass extinction record, the rising salt, the deforestation. ths loss of grassland and wetland to prove the folly and dysfunction of our historic arrogance with extensive embarrassing hubris. Regret acheives little more than reason for apology, and rather, the wisdom of the ages be supported, and manifest in more that platitudes commencing conversation and futures shared, and to actively block the bulldozers upon the buried history of 500 years imperial colonialist abuse between the NW Africa through Giza to Terra del Fuego deep south of the Americas heading easterly, with recent Australia and New Zealand in between from 1788 to now. It is not yet too late for civil evolution and humane enlightenment from our savage barbarism by gunpowder and whip. Honouring the Burunga document of 1988 ought be first step, albeit delayed by 36 years, which is not as much delay yet as 1967 were for first Australians to vote subsequent to dying on battlefields as ANZAC since Australia felt debt to Britain in Boer and WWI. Such a debt is a contentious point in Kenya & Malasia in terms defined in texture entitled honour and “Dulce et decorum est pro patria more” on fields of chlorine gas.

See the above, and ask them how to make damper with Kangaroo grass.

See the above, and ask them how to make damper with Kangaroo grass.