Lefties’ wishful thinking makes Santa Claus seem believable
Perhaps the ultimate believers in wishy thinking are the staff at the ABC and Nine (formerly Fairfax). In their minds, it is also beyond doubt that anyone who wishes to live a better life must be able to enter Australia and be showered with every benefit the taxpayers would provide, Piers Akerman writes.
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As Christmas rolls around again, the luvvies will be hoping and wishing things go better for them in the next 12 months than the last.
They didn’t get Bill Shorten in last May’s election and they didn’t even get Malcolm Turnbull, though they know that he would have won if he hadn’t been tossed out of the leadership by those who knew him best — his parliamentary colleagues.
But perhaps the ultimate believers in hopey, wishy thinking are the staff at the ABC and Nine (formerly Fairfax) publications.
In their minds, it is also beyond doubt that anyone who wishes to live a better life must be able to enter Australia and immediately be showered with every benefit the taxpayers would be obliged to provide.
They are now also imbued with the notion that Aboriginal Australians and all their descendants, indeed anyone who believes they may have a hint of Aboriginal ancestry, are deserving of special representation in parliament and special benefits not available to other Australians.
Forget the Mabo decision, the National Apology, the innumerable Sorry Days and the bogus Welcome to Country ceremonies and the lack of evidence for any large-scale Stolen Generation other than the necessary removal of children from abjectly disadvantaged and dysfunctional homes.
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Nothing less than a total revision of the carefully recorded and documented tribal life at the time of European settlement is now necessary and the luvvies have found new heroes in two authors: Bill Gammage, author of The Biggest Estate On Earth, How Aborigines Made Australia; and Bruce Pascoe, author of Dark Emu. Both of these works are being used to shore up claims of sovereignty and Aboriginal nationhood where it never existed.
Just a year ago Julia Baird, a flag-carrier for the Nine and ABC’s ideology, praised Pascoe’s work for overturning the accepted and thoroughly researched anthropological view that the Aboriginals were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers.
“The truth is starkly different,” she wrote breathlessly.
“In his brilliant book Dark Emu, indigenous historian Bruce Pascoe documented how Aboriginal peoples lived here for millennia before Cook arrived, establishing a sophisticated, cultivated form of land management, carefully tended irrigation and extensive farming and fish-trapping practices — with villages with wells, dams, permanent buildings made of clay-coated wood and elaborate cemeteries.”
Well, Pascoe and Gammage’s works have both been found wanting for their wanton wishfulness and lack of scholarship.
Indeed, author Peter O’Brien has just published Bitter Harvest, a detailed and forensic examination of the extravagant claims made by Pascoe (which are often extrapolations of Gammage’s writings).
Pascoe’s claim is that he has gone to the writings of the earliest European explorers for his information. But what is sadly telling is that he has tailored his reading to omit much of the material those explorers noted, because their full diary entries destroy his thesis, Gammage’s thesis, and deflate Baird’s enthusiastic appraisal.
Neither she nor her organisations, the ABC and Nine, have made the most basic checks.
Dark Emu has won an indigenous writers award, and the Australia Council gave Pascoe its Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.
The ABC is preparing a two-part history documentary based upon the work and worse still, it has been taken up by education departments around the country for secondary students and a special version is being prepared for infants. All in defiance of the mass of careful research that began with the first Europeans, the explorers, the scientists — even Charles Darwin.
It says a lot for the wishy-hopeys who dominate so much of Australia’s culture now that Dark Emu has achieved so much publicity, but it says more for people like O’Brien and the hundreds of researchers who were prepared to plough through the historical record and find the raw facts that demolish this work.
As O’Brien writes, Pascoe’s claims are “wilful manipulations, additions or omissions to slant the narrative and bolster his arguments”.
Aboriginals during their 40,000 years or so of existence in Australia managed to survive in extremely harsh conditions.
That alone is a remarkable accomplishment without unnecessary embellishment from wishful revisionists.