Nope - in our part of the world you would use mooted. Which pretty much fits with the dictionary.com meaning.
Unfortunately Rabbit Proof Fence is historically inaccurate anti-colonial propaganda.
That’s just silly, innit?
The gratuitous “racist” card tossed in along with the bigotry as a bonus word.
Apparently you’ve lumped every single superior item as a “technological advancement” and then decided that, except for that, well we’re sorta equal.
From the time you get out of bed in the morning until the time you nap off–and now that I think about it, while you are sleeping–every blessed thing you partake of reflects said “technologicalal advancement.”
Since the OP just wants to know if we need to worry about teaching “balanced history” and we both apparently agree on that, I’ll let 'er go there. But this ridiculous notion that somehow one “culture” (i.e. sum total achievements of a given group) cannot be demonstrably superior to another is egalitarian pablum for the weak of spine. The proof of the pudding is when the less adequate culture by and large votes with its own feet for the winning culture or technological achievements produced out of that culture.
Expressing an opinion that a given culture or civilization is superior to another has nothing to do with racism and only the utter indefensibility of your position creates the need to drag out that smelly old petard. Indeed, one of the strengths of Western culture, at least, has been the willingness to swipe what they can from every other culture, “darkie”-sourced or not.
Perhaps you are one of those folks who feels like the science project from the mentally challenged child is still an “A” because hey, we are all equal. In my construct we are all of equal moral worth but there is an actual objective standard by which we can readily judge quality. Let the chips fall where they may, but no amount of rosy-colored false egalitarianism makes a crappy science project equal, or puts [DEL]primitive[/DEL] success-deferred cultures on par with modern ones.
A balanced history of Australia–however it’s skewed–represents no real risk to students because they’ll be able to figure out on their own which culture is worth having if you have a choice.
That may be so, but it doesn’t affect my point, which is simply that such films tend to increase the comparative importance of Aborigines in non-Australians’ perception of Australia.
No, I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m certainly not arguing that vague awareness of certain general aspects of Aboriginal culture is equivalent to specific knowledge about individual artists or scholars.
I’m just pointing out that the vague awareness of many non-Australians concerning some Aboriginal cultural themes is disproportionately greater than their awareness of non-Aboriginal Australian culture. And that tends to increase the comparative importance of Aborigines in non-Australians’ perception of Australia.
Sure, but I wasn’t doing that. I was just noting that the widespread association of Australia with Aborigines in the minds of non-Australians, and widespread vague awareness among non-Australians of certain Aboriginal cultural themes, tend to increase the comparative importance of Aborigines in non-Australians’ perception of Australia.
That may be so, but it doesn’t affect my point, which is simply that such films tend to increase the comparative importance of Aborigines in non-Australians’ perception of Australia.
Nope. You’re the one who’s obsessed with evaluating the “superiority” versus “equality” of “competing” cultures. Personally, I think it’s just as silly to declare that two cultures are intrinsically and unqualifiedly “equal”, or even “sorta equal”, as it is to declare that one of them is intrinsically and unqualifiedly “superior”.
That’s because comparison only makes sense in terms of a specific metric. You have to explicitly identify some aspect(s) that you’re quantifying in order to decide which (if any) competitor outranks the other(s) with respect to the aspect(s) under consideration.
It’s meaningless to talk about comparing two cultures when you don’t specify what metric you’re using to compare them.
Expressing an opinion that a given culture or civilization is (intrinsically and unqualifiedly) superior to another often has a hell of a lot to do with racism. The reason such opinions tend to seem smelly isn’t because of anything I’m saying about them, but because of the fact that they’re so commonly uttered by racists.
Now, it’s certainly true that merely expressing such an opinion, despite the fact that it’s meaningless in the absence of a stated basis for comparison, doesn’t necessarily mean that the person expressing the opinion is racist. But there’s no point in denying that such unqualified generalizations do come across as racist.
Sure, there are lots of actual objective standards by which we can readily judge quality. For example, we can use technological complexity as a standard to judge that a piano is higher-quality than a didgeridoo. Or we can use measured effectiveness in controlled studies as a standard to judge that some particular modern medical treatment is higher-quality than some corresponding treatment in traditional medicine.
In these cases, I can easily make valid judgements of quality, because in each case I have a meaningful metric of comparison that I’ve clearly specified.
If you’re claiming to be able to judge overall quality of a culture as an undifferentiated whole according to an objective standard, then you need to clearly specify what your standard is.
That may well be so, but it doesn’t affect my point, which is simply that the worldwide dissemination of some Aboriginal cultural themes (however incompletely, vaguely or inaccurately) tends to increase the comparative importance of Aborigines in non-Australians’ perception of Australia.
:dubious: The fact that a particular event or series of events occurred “a very long time ago” may be a reason not to constantly harp on it in ordinary conversation, but it doesn’t really seem like a valid argument against studying it in a history curriculum. Studying things that happened a very long time ago is a large part of what history’s about.
I’d almost be willing to bet money that the most that your average non-Australian (and non-SDMB member) could tell you about the Aborigines is “They’re the black people that live in Australia and paint themselves, right?”. And you might get something about Digeridoos, if you’re really lucky. That Simpsons episode ages back summed up how most people seem to see Australia: A desert country full of people with funny accents who drink a lot of beer and are celebrating their third decade of having electricity.
There’s “Studying” (The British killed many Tasmanians in the early 1800s. This is why they did that [non-biased contextual discussion of less-enlightened views on race and civilisation in the late 18th/early 19th century]) and there’s “Touchy-Feely Revisionism” (The awful British murdered all the Tasmanians in the early 1800s because they were racist warmongers. How do you think the Tasmanians felt about this? How would you feel if you were a Tasmanian in the early 1800s? Write how mean the British were in the space below.")
I’m in favour of the former (as I’ve said, I’ve never pretended the British Empire was perfect or never did anything crappy to anyone ever), but I’m not in favour of the (admittedly hyperbolic) latter.
The simple fact of the matter is that “feeling bad” about something that happened 200 years ago won’t fix or change anything today. That doesn’t mean unpleasant historical events should be avoided, but nor should we still be pointing fingers 200 years later, either.
Well, the way you set up that comparison, I don’t see how anybody could disagree with you.
However, it’s a comparison based on your own invented hyperbole, not on any actual data about the content of the revised history curriculum, which we still don’t seem to have much actual data on.
Fair enough, but it’s not clear where you’re drawing the line between “not avoiding” and “pointing fingers”. For instance, do you think Wikipedia’s description of the aftermath of the Tasmanian Cape Grim massacre falls into the category of “historical study” or “touchy-feely revisionism”, as you define them?
This being the SDMB, I’m sure someone will manage to all the same. 
The whole article itself (as opposed to the small part you quoted) is actually pretty good, IMHO. It explores why the event is thought to have happened, includes some interpretations from Keith Windschuttle (who’s completely right about the musket thing, BTW) and other historians, and manages to present the whole thing in a pretty decent way.
Parts of the “Aftermath” section, out of context, do see a bit closer to being “Finger-pointing” (“Disasters continued…” and lists of horrible things done by British settlers with no further explanation or context) rather than a neutral discussion of an historical event, IMHO.
It said the tribe was made up of elders, men, women, and children.
It said what remained after those who escaped were gathered up and massacred, so they may have been children, elders and women mostly, and more of an execution than people running about.
Obviously Windshuttle may be right, but some of the arguments sound a bit dubious - firing speed or fighting back may not have been much of an issue.
Otara
A point which nobody has been arguing. So it seems to be a ottal strawman.
Your original point of course was that it increased Aboriginals’ importance to post-Federation Australian history and made it essential for Australians to know in order not to appear ignorant. Both of those points are clearly untrue.
I’m having trouble even understanding what you mean by that.
I’m sure that 90% of non-Australians could recognise the names of 10 non-Aboriginal Australians, they could recognise 10 non-Aboriginal artworks, they could could recognise 10 non_aboriginal pieces of music etc produced over a period of 200 years by ~40 million people.
In contrast 90% could *not * recognise even a single Aboriginal achievement in the same fields produced over 40, 000 years by ~10000000 individuals.
So in what way is the recognition of Aboriginal culture disproportionately greater? It seems self-evidence that it is in fact infinitely lesser both relatively and absolutely.
You keep saying that your sole point was about perception, yet that was not your stated point at all. Your stated intent was to refute M.E’s assertion that “[Aborigines] haven’t contributed much to Australian society since Federation”.
Can you please explain how foreigner’s perceptions of Aborigines have any bearing at all on Aboriginal contribution in the past 110 years?
If your sole point is that some foreigners may have some vague inkling that Aborigines exist then nobody would dispute that.
However, if you still wish to argue that Aborigines have made a significant contribution to Australia’s development on the past 110 years or that foreigners know disproportionately more about Aboriginal culture than non-Aboriginal then I’m going to call you on it. Those statements are clearly not true.
I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. In fact, I’d bet on it. If I went outside now and accosted a random person, I bet the only Ozzies they could name would be Shane Warne and “that dead Crocodile Hunter guy”, and maybe one or two other cricketers or rugby players. Even Paul Hogan is forgotten.
As for Australian artists - I love art, I consider myself reasonably educated in art, and I couldn’t name a modern White Aussie artist. The only Australian artist I can name is Shaun Tan, and he’s Chinese.
I can hum Waltzing Matilda, and I know the themes to Neighbours and Bananas in Pyjamas, do those count? Oh, wait, there’s the collected works of Midnight Oil and Men at Work, I suppose you win on music.
But what I want to know is, How can you defend Australia as the only “true” democracy in the Southern Hemisphere, please?
White guys are having sex with 12-13 year old girls, they remove these young girls from their family, and we’re supposed to think that punishing the girls was the heroic thing to do?
Neither one is what I said. I certainly don’t think that just because Aborigines are overrepresented in many non-Australians’ popular perceptions of Australia, the historical importance of Aborigines within Australia is thereby somehow magically increased.
Sorry if I was unclear, let’s try again:
Many non-Australians’ awareness of Aboriginal culture, compared to their awareness of non-Aboriginal Australian culture, is disproportionately greater than the actual importance of Aboriginal culture within Australian culture would suggest.
In symbolic notation:
(Foreign awareness of Aborigines)/(Foreign awareness of non-Aboriginal Australia) >
(Actual impact of Aboriginal culture on Australia)/(Australian culture as a whole)
No, that was not my stated intent, and perhaps this incorrect impression is why you’ve misunderstood what I’ve been saying. In fact, I specifically said at the start of my original reply to that comment that I wasn’t attempting to contradict or refute it:
Emphasis added. As I clearly explained, I was commenting on a side issue relevant to Martini Enfield’s statement rather than on that statement itself.
Just so we don’t go to far afield, I’m assuming the term “culture” in the context of the OP’s issue is the whole nine yards of the invaders: their undifferentiated whole civilization, so to speak.
One easily-applied standard is to see which culture tends to overtake the other when put in juxtaposition.
A second standard is success on a broader scale across the globe.
A third standard is whether a culture, when confronted with thought processes from a different culture, decides their prior belief systems were inappropriate. Cannibalism and clitoridectomies come to mind (yeah I know; we haven’t quite cured the genital mutilators. But we’re getting there).
A fourth standard might be immigrants versus emigrants. Apparently a lot more people who vote with their feet (and who tend toward the higher intellectual strata of their source country) seem to feel like the undifferentiated whole of western cultures are preferable to the motherland.
A fifth standard might be the ability to produce a culture which actually creates a better, less primitive, less helpless, less hapless life. In short, a culture which improves the lot of the average human being rather than just taking it on the chin.
I do get your general drift…what, after all, is Absolute when we are talking about purely cultural sub-points? I suspect an otherwise difficult-to-articulate answer might crystallize if it was your kid hollering during a clitoridectomy. There’s this broad fancy-dan verbiage around the fascinating cultures, and then there’s the practical reality.
I may have injured myself laughing at that. Rage, vengeance, fire-spitting gerbils, blah blah blah.
The first determines power while providing no measure of quality (unless power is your sole metric).
The second measures power and opportunity.
The third is subject to the rule of the victor writing history without regard to a serious metric.
The fourth ignores outside factors that would tend to drive both immigration and emigration–climate change, loss of soil fertility, etc.–that really have no bearing on culture.
The fifth requires a subjective determination regarding “better” that begs the question.
Clearly, one may, indeed, use any of these metrics to identify “superior” cultures, but not one of them actually provides an objective measure for all cases. They are each simply different ways to arrange a hierarchy in a manner that one chooses.
Right. I personally think that trying to evaluate one undifferentiated whole civilization with respect to another is so vague and broad as to be pretty much meaningless, but if you’ve got a clearly specified objective standard for making such evaluations, then by all means, have at it.
Neither of these looks very promising as a “clearly specified objective standard”. How are we defining terms like “tends to overtake” or “success on a broader scale”? And does using “across the globe” as a criterion mean that we automatically rank cultures that have had a worldwide impact (of whatever kind) higher than ones that haven’t?
You mean, superior cultures are those whose inhabitants are more easily converted to the “thought processes” of different cultures? That doesn’t seem as though it would work out very consistently with your own conclusions about cultural comparison.
For example, by this metric we’d have to conclude that Aboriginal culture is superior to Western Christian culture, at least insofar as many Aborigines relinquished their prior belief systems about spirituality in favor of Christianity, whereas very few Christians converted to Aboriginal beliefs.
Well, here at least we’ve got a metric that’s definite and quantifiable. But are we sure that it really constitutes a clear measure of overall quality of culture, or is it affected by lots of other factors as well?
For example, there are more emigrants from India to the Persian Gulf countries than to North America: are we to conclude from that that the Persian Gulf states have a better culture than the US and Canada (at least, from the perspective of Indian culture)? Or are there other significant issues involving a variety of different goals and motives for different emigration experiences?
But as tomndebb noted, this just begs the question by failing to define what we mean by “better” and “improves”. How do we quantify what constitutes “a better life”? Do we evaluate life quality on the basis of something like the Satisfaction with Life Index, according to which, for instance, life in the Seychelles is better than in the US, which in turn is better than Saudi Arabia, which is better than the UK, which is better than Gabon and Ghana, which are better than Japan, and so on and so forth?
Again, I think the actual results you’d get out of such a comparison are very inconsistent with the sorts of relative rankings you’ve been arguing for in this thread.
This seems like nothing more than an appeal to emotion in order to avoid thinking about complicated issues rationally. There’s no reason why we can’t use, say, rejection of genital mutilation of children as one of our objective standards for comparing cultures. It’s perfectly legitimate to declare that according to that standard, cultures that don’t practice genital mutilation of children are better than ones that do.
By that standard, for example, the US is better than many African cultures, while Europe and China are better than the US (although the differences are less pronounced in the second case, since the clitoridectomies common in various African cultures are more mutilative than the prepucectomies common in the US). But we can make such comparisons specifically and rationally, without invoking any vague sweeping generalizations about some abstract cultural Absolute.
Today? NO!
At the time - maybe?
Isn’t this why we study history, so that we can understand why and how things happen? What were the circumstances, events and attitudes that led to particular actions?
Do remember, this was what, the 60s that we are talking about - in Australia.
That’s not to defend the actions, merely to put them into perspective of the social situation of the times…which is (what I always understood) the study of history was supposed to be about?
Come on, surely it’s got to be obvious to anyone that isn’t a mother-earth type that the culture with electricity, running water, agriculture, computers, radios, cars, aeroplanes, and medicine is superior to the culture which lives in caves and doesn’t get to eat much when it’s not hunting season.
We’re not talking about whether American culture is superior to French culture- we’re talking about “Modern” Western culture being clearly “better” than a culture that is still basically stone age in many, many aspects.