Andrew Bolt: Rush to wipe out white culture divisive, offensive and tiring

In Australia’s rush to eliminate the white, or Western, we are blotting out anything now tainted by whiteness. How many more insults must people of British or non-Aboriginal ancestry endure?

Where’s the respect for the rest of us? Senator Lidia Thorpe would have turned even more Australians against the Voice with her turn at the National Press Club on Wednesday, demanding “Blaks” like her get “sovereignty”.

But hang on, Lidia.

Your father is white. So are some of your ancestors on your mother’s side.

How did your white heritage get wiped out?

I’m sure this kind of thing makes more Australians by the day think the push to divide us by race is not just stupid but offensive. It’s a Blak-out of whiteness. Of the identity, culture and history – even the flag and place names – of many non-Aboriginal Australians.

Take this example. Tourists landing at Tullamarine and taking the SkyBus to Melbourne’s CBD now hear this so-typical recording: “SkyBus acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Aboriginal people as the traditional owners of Naarm, also known as Melbourne. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty of the land we know as Australia has never been ceded.”

How did Lidia Thorpe’s white heritage get wiped out? Picture: NCA NewsWire

How often do you hear variations of this? There’s the Qantas landing announcements, and the ABC’s regular declarations that they broadcast from “Nipaluna” or “Gadigal lands” or some other state capital whose white name now offends.

How patronising – and offensive. Why must we pay respects even to people not yet born, of whom we know only their “race” and none of their virtues?

Don’t the British elders who already gave us democracy deserve that respect far more? The Italian elders who gave us the Snowy hydro project and great restaurants?

And why “Naarm”? Why can’t we at least keep the “white” name of Melbourne?

“Melbourne” refers to an overwhelmingly Western creation, not an Aboriginal one. There is little that’s Aboriginal about those houses, towers, shops, stadiums and hospitals, and those roads and railways – or the city’s system of government and the agricultural and engineering know-how to keep it all fed and watered.

Isn’t it enough that the next four biggest cities in the state all have Aboriginal names – Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo and Mildura? Can’t we have one big Victorian city with a non-Aboriginal name to honour the British contribution, too?

Our flag is banned by the Greens because it has a quadrant acknowledging the nation’s British heritage, much stronger in our culture and institutions than our Aboriginal one.

As for Melbourne’s sovereignty never being ceded, there’s actually a treaty in the State Library signed in 1835 by eight Aboriginal leaders agreeing to transfer the land to Batman. Besides, trying to “fix” history some 180 years and more than half a dozen mixed generations later seems at the very least problematic, if not provocative.

But to object is racist, we’re told.

Yet what’s racist, it seems to me, is this blotting out of anything now tainted by whiteness.

How many more insults must people of British or non-Aboriginal ancestry endure? Councils are banning celebrations of Australia Day – our national day – on the grounds it offends Aborigines.

Our flag is also banned by the Greens, because it has a quadrant acknowledging the nation’s British heritage, much stronger in our culture and institutions than our Aboriginal one. Even Labor relegates that flag to the left of three flags, with the newly invented Aboriginal one dominant in the middle, and the Torres Strait flag on the right.

On it goes. A Melbourne council tried to replace John Batman’s name in a park with an Aboriginal one; and Melbourne City Council is considering removing the reconstructed cottage of Captain Cook’s parents.

Melbourne changed its name to Narrm during the AFL’s Indigenous round this year. Picture: Getty Images

The CSIRO has even given an Aboriginal name to the Parkes radio telescope which tracked the first landing of men on the moon and was made famous by The Dish. It’s now called Murriyang, in part to honour the alleged contribution of Aborigines to astronomy, a science actually invented and made great by the West.

Excuse me, but why give an Aboriginal name to this telescope, a supremely Western invention, when no traditional Aboriginal language even has a word for “telescope”, let alone “supernova”, “galaxy” or “dark star”?

This rush to eliminate the white or the Western is perfectly – and absurdly – illustrated by Dark Emu author Bruce Pascoe, now our most feted Aborigine. DarkEmu Exposed highlights Pascoe’s British ancestry, yet he has so fled his whiteness that he claims he’s a member of no fewer than three Aboriginal tribes. He’s even been rewarded with a professorship at Melbourne University for also falsely claiming Aborigines, not settlers, brought agriculture to Australia.

But this nonsense comes at a cost. See now the revolt of Australians sick of seeing this Blak-out of their culture and the civilisation it produced. And so the Voice will fall.