The pond does enjoy the information provided by correspondents - we have to confess that we'd completely forgotten terrorist Steve "Sweeney Todd" Ciobo's use of choice language inciting violence on Lateline.
But the pond is always fair - "Todd" Ciobo - he of the cut-throat gang - didn't directly propose that he was a throat slitter himself, he was merely encouraging throat slitting, and in lieu of that, stabbing in the back:
NICK CHAMPION: That's an appalling way to refer to any politician and Steve should moderate his language.
STEVE CIOBO: Oh okay, Nick, would you prefer if I said stab in the back?
The trouble of course with these mad mullahs advocating murder, terror and mayhem is that they incite violence in others.
How does the contagion spread? Well you only have to read Reith echoes 'throat slit' comment to see how others easily fall into the terrorist trap ...
Yes, weak, impressionable minds like the one embedded in Peter "$50,000 phone card anyone" Reith are easily swayed, and soon enough they're out and about parroting "slit the throat" slogans, chanting like zombies in the killing fields.
You only have to look at Graeme Morris urging the citizenry to rise up and kick Julia Gillard to death to realise that we're only a nanosecond from the biblical days of stoning women - you can read that mad mullah's mouthings at Prominent Liberal says Gillard should be kicked to death.
And that's before we fondly remember Alan Jones' invitation to put Gillard in a chaff bag and drown her at sea, or the notorious terrorist standing next to all those 'ditch the bitch witch' signs ...
Should the pond ever be invited to sit in on Q and A - an unlikely event given the pond's fear and loathing of the show - we would have in any case to decline, because of the safety issues involved in sitting down at a table with a Liberal.
Especially those quislings, hacks and time servers like Malcolm Turnbull, for whom the pond reserves a special contempt. They should know better, but when given a chance, they turn into Albert Speer (yes, the Godwin's Law swear jar is running low) and do their best to facilitate the gutter tactics.
Oh sure, Liberals look nice, like a rottweiler, but who knows when the fangs are bared and the rabies pours in ...
The trouble of course is when the terrorists begin exporting their terror to neighbouring small states, and it seems that Nauru is now well on the way to becoming a fascist state, thanks to generous subsidies by the federal Australian government to the reigning junta - as you can see on what's left of the ABC, in Government and Police in Nauru escalate attacks on Opposition MPs.
Then there's the business of sustaining the gulags which will see both major parties unite today to make sure that laws can be changed at a whim to keep the gulags running.
Which brings the pond to its first cartoon, currently doing the rounds on Facebook:
By golly that's downright weird and eerie ...
Then belatedly came a few bleeding hearts hand-wringing and worrying and whining, as if it was new news Citizenship could be stripped for wide range of offences under terror laws (with forced video):
Under the legislation, dual nationals who are convicted of certain offences would be automatically stripped of their citizenship. Those offences range from treachery, sabotage and mutiny all the way down to damaging or destroying Commonwealth property. It also includes a broad range of speech-related offences such as urging violence or advocating terrorism.
A serial graffiti artist who shares British ancestry with notorious British terrorist Tony Abbott noted:
Mr Smith paid his debt - a bill of $16,350 to the Commonwealth for the clean-up as well as an additional fine. "To be under the threat of deportation for an action for which due restitution has already been made seems quite Orwellian," he said.
Good old George, but Orwellian hardly seems the best adjective for the orgy of demonisation and throat slitting being conducted by the bandits in charge, and only a few have bothered to protest - thank the long absent lord for George Williams and his Deeply flawed citizenship law throws a wide net.
It reached a height for the pond when the chief bandit explicitly and proudly invoked the notion of
"banishment", as if Australia was now a fundamentalist theocratic state run along the lines of an Amish shunning ...
How ironical does it get? Well you can figure that out with the full blown irony contained in the Graudian headline Foreign fighters need 'modern from of banishment' says Tony Abbott in Magna Carta lecture ...
Banishment and Magna Carta!
That's the trouble when you're a devout medievalist, out of your mouth will pop a fundamentalist religious concept and give the medievalist game away ...
Meanwhile, the Terror-ists at the Daily Terror continue to have a field day:
But these are the usual suspects, and the pond as always turns to the reptiles at the lizard Oz, for a moderate, informed tone:
Oh dear, what a classy illustration.
Well you might be able to take the fascist out of the reptile - how to leave a cult - but you can't take the reptile away from a love of fascist demonising imagery ...
Naturally once you've lanced a wound with an illustration like that, all the pus and bile must flow, and flow it did as the reptile editorialist got on the high horse of indignation:
Poor Miranda. After all her terrorist activities were mild and limited. All she did was urge that greenies be hung from the nearest lamp post, and who could argue with that?
Be fair, there are some who say hanging's too good for them, and they should be first drawn and quartered ... now that's genuine terrorism.
What's more, at no point have the Murdochians called for the immediate privatisation of the ABC, and its assets signed over forthwith to the benign rule of Chairman Rupert. That will come later. But the pond does begin to understand the sort of TV that will soon be the rule around the land, thanks to David Rowe (and more Rowe here):
By golly that looks like it's going to make for great viewing.
Now back to the reptile channel of choice:
A serious debate on counter-terrorism would focus on such patterns of behaviour and work out how to avoid their ability to radicalise young people. Why, soon enough, if their influence continues, young Liberals will end up reading Ayn Rand and aspiring to join the IPA...
But there must be something more to all this terrorism, you say, there must be an ulterior motive, and of course there is ...
It's called misdirection, and it's well known to magicians - here the pond must cite Perceptual elements in Penn and Teller's Cups and Balls" magic trick to achieve academic respectability - and all the yammering about the ABC and terrorists and citizenship achieves a number of aims:
1. Silence and degut an already cowering ABC;
2. Slowly and remorselessly turn the state into a gulag while maintaining power;
3. Distract from other issues.
Those issues are too numerous to mention in a single post. Let's just whimsically look at a few:
Yes, the mad monk's mates are in need of a banishing, but you won't find the man who's self-confessedly threatened by gays doing anything but go along with the fundamentalist religious zealots, our very own Taliban.
And then there was this one:
Freedom's not at risk at all. Remember, will retain the freedom to be sued ...
And then there was this:
Oops, and there's more at Fairfax if you can be bothered getting past the forced video to read Free trade agreements 'preferential' and dangerous, says Productivity Commission.
The Productivity Commission has launched a scathing attack on Australia's latest series of free trade agreements, saying they grant legal rights to foreign investors not available to Australians, expose the government to potentially large unfunded liabilities and add extra costs on businesses attempting to comply with them.
Indeed, indeed. Quick, wheel out a terrorist and banish him ...
And then came this:
There's more at Fairfax here, PM confronted by Liberal sceptics, but how unfair is that!
There's Greg and Tony doing their level best to defy the Pope - why the sinful Tony is even prepared to put his mortal soul in jeopardy - and get rid of wind farms, and banish all this chat about renewable energy and keep the coal mines running out, and it's not good enough for some!
Ah well, at least it provides a lead-in to today's Pope, and as always more Pope here.
And now just to balance things, the pond was delighted to receive this photo from a correspondent who regularly visits toad land - not that the toads are in any way responsible for cockroach hippe blow-ins:
Grown to classical music! Is there nothing classical music can't do? Oh wait, the Bolter listens to classical music. Scrub that theory, banish it if you will ...
More Loonacy.
ReplyDeleteLeyonhjelm not so sure Aborigines were here first
According to the crossbench Senator "there is serious debate in anthropological circles" about whether Aboriginal people were the first to inhabit Australia and constitutional reform should be put on hold until it's resolved.
The loonacy has been out and about for some time. It's also known as Windschuttling history:
ReplyDeleteLiberal Democrat Senator David Leyonhjelm recently said Australia should not recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Australians in legislation because the evidence was only “conjecture”.
He raised his concern when he spoke in the Senate to oppose the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (Sunset Extension) Bill 2015, part of which aims to recognise that Australia was first occupied by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. He said:
This is conjecture. Archaeologists make extraordinary discoveries all the time, and one of those discoveries could be that someone made it to Australia before the Aborigines.
For him, the idea that archaeologists may one day show that Aboriginal people were not the “first Australians”, is one reason why legislation is an inappropriate place to record Indigenous or scientific views.
Statements like this belong in scholarly research not legislation. Ever since the Enlightenment we have accepted that questions of fact are resolved by evidence not by decree. You cannot legislate a fact. He also feels that recognition singles out a single ethnic group.
Setting the question of legislating fact to one side, it’s worth looking at Senator Leyonhjelm’s question of who were the “first Australians” and what evidence exists to suggest they were the ancestors of modern day Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
In making his first point, the Senator may be echoing earlier claims for a pre-Aboriginal population of Australia. But such views are as much out of step with present-day archaeology and human biology as they are with Indigenous tradition.
Writing in the magazine Quadrant, the historian Keith Windschuttle claimed that Indigenous Australians should not have Native Title rights because they were not the first to occupy Australia.
He claimed that over most of the continent they had wiped out an earlier group, the sole survivors being represented by pygmies of northern Queensland.
He employed an outdated theory known as the trihybrid model for Aboriginal origins, developed initially in the 1930s, to support his claims. He wrote:
[…] the fact that the Australian pygmies have been so thoroughly expunged from public memory suggests an indecent concurrence between scholarly and political interests.
In addition to this hint of conspiracy theory, there was at least one major problem with his argument: there is no evidence that pygmies ever lived in Australia.
You've got to admire the loons and more consideration of the loonacy here
http://theconversation.com/who-we-should-recognise-as-first-australians-in-the-constitution-38714
What to say? Between the reptilian space cadets and a Govt.and Opposition that make my head spin almost 24/7, I marked 24th.June 2015 on my FDOM calendar as the first official WTFF Day. Presciently, FD had left the box vacant. Sigh!
ReplyDeleteDP - I think Leyonhjelm is the Oz representative of the Monster Raving Loony Party, who have a long and proud history in the UK. But maybe he has less of a sense of humour.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.omrlp.com/
It's Yowies.
Deletehttp://www.australianyowieresearchcentre.com/yowie-homo-erectus-andthe-pygmies.html
Homo Erectus sounds strangely appealing.
Delete:)
Ermergerd, Graham Lloyd runs a rainforest conservation foundation in Peru ... :\
ReplyDeletehttp://www.crikey.com.au/2015/06/25/the-secret-life-of-graham-efrem-lloyd-oz-environment-editors-greenie-double-life/
Mish
Hi Dorothy,
ReplyDeleteWith such modern thinking as Banishment occupying Abbott's thoughts, maybe this would be a good time to bring back that ancient democratic tool, Ostracism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracism
I certainly know what name I would like to scrawl on a pottery shard.
DiddyWrote
In the 80's we struggled long and not least against Joh and Martin Tenni (Bob Hawke: "Who?") to save the NQ wet tropic rainforest remnants and have them World Heritage listed...
ReplyDeleteIt's been a while since my part earlier in a little tin show in the Kangaroo Hills bordering to the south west or croc wrangling on the banks of the Hull (where white tailed rat was worse), but, anyways, historically North Queensland wet tropic rainforest dwelling Aboriginals were in fact described as being somewhat small and slight of stature - due to a necessarily restricted diet, and, I'd suspect, consequent epigenetic effects rather than old school genetics. They were apparently as uncomfortable about leaving the dim visually complex, crowded, and closed environment in which they dwelt as were the surrounding peoples of more typical open Australian landscapes about entering it.
Back then younger local Aboriginal work mates thought me bullshitting when I related what I'd learnt of Pemulwuy from a new Johnstone Shire library book - incomprehensively totally fictitious bullshitting. I told them about Pemulwuy. I couldn't tell them why their reaction had me feeling so sad/sorry/angry all mixed up.
"Pygmies" he says? Different people, different origins, but the word for "forest" in the language of wet tropic rainforest dwelling people of NQ and those "pygmy" peoples of similar environments in Central Africa has the same generic meaning: "mother". Parsimonious, pragmatic, poetic, and unlike the pygmy pseudoscience parroting Windshuttle.
Well then let's see, 30 odd years on, a quick ghunt:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmy_peoples#Oceania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbuti_people#Religion
http://www.survivalinternational.org/galleries/mothers
The Wet Tropics Aboriginal Cultural and Natural Resource Management Plan http://www.terrain.org.au/content/download/140/845/file/V3-Aboriginal-Cultural-and-NRM-Plan.pdf [19.9MB]
And do take a gander at:
Hurricane Lamps and Blue Umbrellas : a history of the Shire of Johnstone to 1973 / [by] Dorothy Jones.
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000698406
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt/search?id=mdp.39015026996531&view=1up&seq=7&q1=aboriginal
http://www.worldcat.org/title/hurricane-lamps-and-blue-umbrellas-a-history-of-the-shire-of-johnstone-to-1973/oclc/1863906
http://peterjkel.tripod.com/id1033.html Dorothy Jones' book pictured as once repeatedly borrowed from the JSC library!
Now then,
"It is fair to acquit [Christie] Palmerston, so far as his own published accounts are concerned, of much of the legend that has grown in later years." - J. W. Collinson, Early Days of Cairns Christie Palmerston, Cummins and Campbell Magazine 1938
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christie_Palmerston
Palmerston, Christie (1850–1897) "..Few records survive to indicate the truth about a hardy and skilful bushman who had rare insight into the life and habits of North Queensland Aboriginals in the first years of white contact."
Legend of North Queensland - Christie Palmerston (1851-1897) / http://www.textqueensland.com.au/item/chapter/c86d7bdc36869d2fd3af700412c586f8
DeleteIt was an area unique in Queensland, as
the first explorer of the region, Elphinstone Dalrjrmple in 1874
explained in his report to the Queensland government:
"In the dense scrubs, or rather jungles to which
descend the surrounding hills to the water's
edge, we were for the first time introduced to
true tropical Queensland, and to a development
of vegetation thoroughly oriental in its
character and unlike any other in the
Australian colonies. Dalrymple and his
party painfully and slowly hacked their way
to a vantage point on one of the ranges to
get a view of the surrounding country. The
view was breath-taking but the terrain
apparently impenetrable.
Bellenden Kerr Mountains were shrouded in dense
clouds of smoke of black's fires, but the
lofty peak of Mount Bartle Frere cut the clear
blue sky to the N.W. far above them. Thence,
W. and S., ranges beyond ranges bounded the
great coast basin, the whole of the widespread
floor of which presented one vast
unbroken expanse of dense tropical jungles."
And Dalrymple with a sea-borne expedition saw only a fraction of it.
Perhaps it is not surprising that Palmerston, who some ten years later
tried to establish tracks through the area across the jungled ranges to
the other side, assisted by a handful of Aborigines and Kanakas, should
have become a legendary character.
Dalrymple. although only on the fringes of the area remarks
on the frequency with which they encountered Aborigines. By the 1880s
the rain-forest had become a strong-hold because of its impenetrable
nature, of Aboriginal resistance to white and Chinese intruders in far
North Queensland. The unusually stubborn resistance of the rain-forest
Aborigines, in the nature of a drawn-out guerrilla war, which has also
become part of the frontier legend, is a study in itself which we have
no time for in this lecture.
The most romanticized version of the Christie Palmerston legend can be
found in River of Gold by Hector Holthouse: the story seems to be
culled from already established legends. Here is a typical example:
He [Christy] arrived on the Palmer early in the
rush, bearded, and unkempt as a blackfellow with
a carbine slung over his shoulder, Colt revolver
on his hip and a small army of half-wild myalls
at his back. No one ever saw him digging gold,
but he always seemed to have a good supply of it.
Old diggers muttered darkly that it came from
the miners who had been murdered by the blacks.
In Cooktown's gambling dens he was nearly
always lucky, and in the dance halls women
flocked about him.
Again, "Christie Palmerston was one of the most remarkable men the
north ever knew. To the diggers he became a friend in need, to the
Chinese a death-dealing terror, and to the cannibal blacks a legendary
figure who moved among them unmolested".
...And this is not to mention his beautiful singing voice and Immediate fascination for women."
Christie Palmerston - a North Queensland Pioneer, Prospector and Explorer / http://www.textqueensland.com.au/item/article/2b69452d3bb894cebce613fdc23b8d39
DeleteHe (Christie) was a man over medium height, stout built, and very
active, with a black bushy beard, and black thick curley
hair. As he wore no hat, it looked like a big mop. He
was dressed in what I used afterwards to call his fighting
rig, it consisted of a cotton shirt, held round the waist by
a broad belt, glistening with cartridges, and holding onto
his hip a large sized colt revolver, while a snider rifle
hung from his shoulder.
He was, firstly, a prospector,
He ("Charlie" a Johnstone, ie low land rainforest, aboriginal man) was a long lean slab,
swivel eyed, very deficient in the matter of calves and thighs,
knees the size of pumpkins and more than usual share of mouth.
Pen cannot describe the voraciousness of this uncouth creature.
Johnny cakes, snakes, nuts, lizards, frogs, leeches and in fact
almost everything rolled into this broad ugly mouth and
disappeared with a quickness and precision of some enormous
self-feeding machine, he showed nothing but the whiteness of
his eyes while occupied with gluttonous meals.
Christie Palmerston: Cold-blooded murdering bush ranger or hero? byTony Ashworth
"The Snider rifle, a British Army military breech-loader, used to pacify colonial natives for decades, capable of firing ten rounds a minute, was a deadly weapon. It was especially so in the hands of a crack shot like Christie Palmerston. John Fraser of Mitchell Station said of Palmerston: ‘He was reputed to be one of the best shots in the north, the others being Inspector Douglas and Jack Hamilton.
Thus armed, Christie Palmerston had a great advantage over any dangers he was to meet on his journeys of exploration, especially against poorly armed aborigines. He wrote of one encounter while blazing a trail from Mourilyan Harbour to Herberton, a skirmish which reveals much about Palmerston's character, attitudes and values that were no doubt shared with many in the community of the times.
On sighting their enemy in a small clearing, the rainforest aborigines worked themselves up to a frenzy. They were led on by the example of their tall thin leader, the top of his head quite bald and showing great elasticity of movement for his age. They gripped their metre-long hardwood swords as they stooped and covered most of their bodies behind large softwood shields. They formed a half circle behind their ‘old general’, but their frenzy and courage were to no avail. They knew nothing of firearms, and Palmerston, his threat in raising his Snider rifle having no effect, ‘submitted (them) to the usual ordeal’. He shot the leader and continued firing until he realised they ‘seemed so helpless and at (his) mercy’...
So Christie Palmerston had a great affinity with North Queensland aborigines, but the Chinese were anathema. He is said to have come into conflict with the authorities and to have fled into the bush during the Palmer River gold rush. He is said by descendants of rainforest aborigines to have massacred whole communities and raped and shot aboriginal women. On this last point, perhaps we should also ask if an oral history is any less reliable than a written account.
Are the tales of this man I heard about at the Cairns Historical Society all those years ago correct? Then we come to a debate about whether we should examine historical events in the light of cultural and ethical norms of the day, or apply our current set of values.
Even viewing Palmerston’s exploits within his contemporary historical context, should he be so revered in the North and should the citizens of Milaa Milaa have erected a monument to Christie Palmerston?" That 'Christie Palmerston Statue'
Christy Palmerston, adventurer, man of mystery, explorer, trail blazer.
Delete"Palmerston represents an altogether different type of explorer and track blazer to those others whose names have become familiar to us. Mulligan, Doyle, Robson, Atherton, McLeod, Mazlin, etc. His method of exploration was different too. He was of a class apart. He was to some an enigma most of the explorers and vanguard pioneers , who opened up our northland had a defining aim, a projected purpose in view ahead of their journeys.
Palmerston's name has been woven into the fabric of many legends which, as time goes on, become more colourful. ...
On the Palmer Christy came into sharp conflict with the authorities, and was for a time compelled to live almost as an outlaw. What the cause of his disagreement with the police was, does not matter at this stage. He had no real reason for the supposition that he would be connected with the happening. Perhaps false counsels prevailed; perhaps it was his independent nature. In any case Palmerston went bush for a few years, moving at will over a wide area, appearing in unexpected localities, living mostly upon the game provided in forest, scrub and stream. During the period of his isolation from civilisation as it was in those days much careful and laborious exploring of the Daintree and Bloomfield was partings was done. He rendered good service to a lonely home on Leadingham Creek when myalls attacked it with its solitary occupant a woman. It was while dispersing these blacks that he captured the boy, Pompey."
Christy Palmerston, adventurer, man of mystery, explorer, trail blazer.
DeleteA NORTHERN ADVENTURER
CHRISTY PALMERSTON PIONEER
By Clem Lack
Truth 3 December 1950
"No headstone marks the grave of Christy Palmerston, at Kuala Pilah, in Malay; the morose, taciturn adventurer, who blazed the pioneer trails in North Queensland would have wanted it that way. He could not have foreseen that his fame, real and legendary, would increase in the years after his death, and that his name would be perpetuated on the maps of Queensland.
Around the campfires in the lonely places of the far North and great North West, men still talk of Christy Palmerston, and his exploits, and the tales handed down from their fathers and grandfathers before them, lose nothing in the telling.
Legend persists that Christy Palmerston was an Englishman the natural son of Lord Palmerston, England's great Prime Minister, and that his mother was the beautiful Italian Countess Carandini, whose fame as a singer won her world wide repute. Actually he was the son of a dairy farmer in the Gippsland district of Victoria.
The assertion has also been made that he was the well educated product of an English public school but the later General Reginald Spencer Browne, who knew him in the North Queensland days, said that he spoke no language but that of the blacks, and his own English tongue, the latter "rather indifferently."
He was a man of solitude and mystery. There was nothing of the hawk-eyed swash-buckling adventurer of the romantic story book about his appearance. He was a saturnine, lean and wiry little man with a withered arm, who might have been the living embodiment, except for the flapping cabbage tree hat he wore, of Rider Haggard's small-boned hero, Allan Quartermaine. His skin was tanned so dark by the northern sun that he looked almost as black as the aboriginals who were his constant companions.
Lonely and aloof he came and went from the Northern outposts of white settlement in the early 1870s with a silent, almost stealthy swiftness, stalking ahead of a body guard of blacks, with Pompo, his devoted black boy trotting at his heels. Pompo, on the authority of J. W. Collinson, died at Herberton in August 1882. ...
Many a settler he saved from the blacks; he discovered and nursed sick prospectors; he tracked down and rescued men who became lost in the jungle. The police esteemed him highly, because he was in fact, worth an entire detachment of native police. Warrants for arrest on various charges in the criminal calendar dating back to the early 1870s were never executed. Because his services in exploration and settlement, his many acts of charity and kindness to men, women and children, old charges which had hung over his head for years were tacitly cancelled."
Christy Palmerston, adventurer, man of mystery, explorer, trail blazer.
DeleteEarly Days of Cairns
Christie Palmerston
By J. W. Collinson
Cummins and Campbell Magazine 1938
"G. E. Dalrymple in 1873 had noted slightly different racial characteristics in the blacks at Trinity Bay; and as they were scrub-dwellers for the most part, their habits were determined by their environment. They were fierce and treacherous, made substantial canoes from cedar logs, were adept in making fish-traps, and unlike the dwellers of the open country, had more choice of game and fruit. Dr. Logan Jack noticed that the blacks of the Russell scrubs did not use spears. On the sand dunes of the site of Cairns were relics of camps, with heaps of shells, of a small species of black-lip, found in the mud of the foreshore.
Cannibalism was common everywhere on the coast, and castaways on that coast never lived to tell their story. This cannibalism belonged to their tribal customs. Generally, a young woman was clubbed unawares to furnish an addition to some festive occasion.
Christie acquired the knowledge from the natives with regard to edible nuts, roots, yams, and fruits, and native fisheries, and he was able to supply them with game with his fire-arms; so this remarkable man roamed the scrubs, making his home with the children of the soil, independent for the time being of civilised comforts. ...
It is fair to acquit Palmerston, so far as his own published accounts are concerned, of much of the legend that has grown in later years. Neither would the accounts of W. H. Miskin, W. H. Monk, Dr. Logan Jack or A. Meston lend much support to those legends. His paper read before the Royal Geographical
Society at Sydney in 1886, has had several distortions in the Press quite recently, where all the events have become mixed up with matters of another occasion. His discovery of the Upper Russell Goldfield with Clark and Joss was his best contribution to the opening of the dense jungle country at the head of the Johnstone and Russell Rivers."
"...And this is not to mention his beautiful singing voice and Immediate fascination for women." - That, I dare say now, could not be said about some Christie wannabe holding court whilst propping up an 80's Johnstone Shire bar... yet echoes of Christie's time might sway a far north Court for better or worse on occaision, and that before the loon Windshuttle squarking.
Gosh Dot. Have you been setting essays?
ReplyDeleteMiss pp
To be fair Miss pp, it is a pond where all may frolic, and racist texts are revealing, and not too far from where the good Senator himself frolics in the pond.
DeleteI note Christie Palmerston (1851-1897) was born in Gippsland, Victoria. The white settlement of the wet tropics region of Far North Queensland in Palmerston's time reminds of Gippsland boy Don Watson's Caledonia Australis. A wonderful read on the history, mythology, and murder associated with white settlement of 'impenetrably' forested 'inaccessible' Gippsland, inclusive of the revelatory Caledonian exiles thread. Why, there's even similar statues and memorials erected by similar white-washing revisionist do-gooder descendants. There would be, I suspect, far more documentation to go on in the FNQ wet tropics case backing a far richer tapestry of characters and their origins, motivations, outcomes and extending to, say, the awesome Christie Palmerston-like jungle fighters of WW2 PNG.
DeleteDon... if you read this, waddaya say?
The property barron "getta-betta-job" smokin' Joe's own expansive Malanda beef and dairy farm country home lifestyle choice... is on FNQ wet tropic highland dispossessed Yamani country.
DeleteYamani Country: A Spatial History of the Atherton Tableland, North Queenslad
Featuring some Christie Palmerston contrasts: Yamani Country: A Spatial History of the Atherton Tableland, North Queenslad, Chapter Three Nature in Names ( or Chapter Three Nature in Names is also here (Chapters xxx _1.pdf to Afterword xxx_7.pdf are available from either server.)
Chapter Seven Afterword
In the Chamber
"It feels like an inquisition, sitting on hard leather-bound seats, lined up along the edge of the chambers of the Eacham Shire Council. The council building in the heart of Malanda appears to warp space and time - inside the walls are lined with the rainforest timbers of Ngadjon-Jii country. Outside we are greeted by a fibreglass diorama of pioneering achievements and agricultural implements. These icons of European settlement of the district, felled trees and sown pastures, memorialise the present as much as they do the past. For nothing much has really changed, even though everywhere there is a veneer of modern life. This perceptual discordance is also apparent in the chamber. From the throat-clearing and seat-scraping, it appears that everyone is uncomfortable. Ngadjon-Jii people sit in this administrative gallery as though spectators to the history of their own dispossession. On this stage, they are about to perform in the latest epoch in the history of Indigenous-Anglo-Australian relations – the era of native title. The audience for this spectacle is the body of seven male councillors, many of whom are the descendants of the original European settlers. Ngadjon-Jii people and councillors alike awkwardly acknowledge their mutual familiarity and shared histories. Though this doesn’t amount to greeting each other by name. They face each other as two cultural categories, divided along racial lines, rather than as individuals. ...
A Landscape of Historical Left-Overs
Emerging from this crucible, the era of native title challenges the pervasive culture of forgetting and the environmental amnesia associated with the historical production of the landscapes of the Atherton Tableland. Somehow, in this unfolding view of fields and farmhouses, rainforest pockets, and rural townships, the contours and coils of Yamani Country can still be glimpsed."
Editorial standards? News Corp Professional Code(s) Of Conduct breaches? Press Council Of Australia complaints? Potential defamations actions? Just a bit of fun!
ReplyDelete"GERARD HENDERSON: Well Jonathan Green on ABC television this morning thought it was fun. I don't put together News Corp tabloids. That's what tabloids do. But I don't really think that's the essential point. But I didn't do it. And I wouldn't do it. I am very ..."
You win the pond's brave viewer of the week gold stamp award, because the pond simply had to switch off, and go to sleep and what a good Gerard Henderson free sleep it was (whereas if we'd gone to sleep with him talking what surreal nightmares there would have been). What a great pity that GH hasn't announced a personal boycott of the ABC. It would be a great tribute to his capacity for silence, instead of his insistence on earning his title of prattling Polonius every day of the week, and it would be an even greater service to hapless viewers of the ABC.
DeleteTo true Dorothy the man is a menace to viewing the ABC and the cheek of him appearing and getting paid by the ABC to appear on Insiders.
DeleteAnd could not be shut up on lateline so Prattling Polonious is a very apt description of him.