It’s in vogue for the woke class – appointing coal black actors to play characters from lily-white stories, sometimes centuries-old, and concocting history as a demonstration that objections are racially motivated. The American feminist program ‘The View’ is shamelessly guilty of this propaganda trick. Of course, in Australia we have battalions of government-funded academics busy spinning the most preposterous ‘histories’ of the Aboriginals.
‘The Aboriginal Land Rights Act was a Whitlam-era ideological experiment premised on the fantasy that land transfer and autonomy would allow Aboriginal people to revert to a viable “traditional” existence inside a modern nation-state. Wadeye is the living wreckage of that idea.
‘Fifty years on, it has no real economy, no self-sufficiency, no civic order, and no credible path forward. Land has been handed over, and the result is not empowerment but stagnation, violence, and permanent dependency. Wadeye is not transitional. It is the end state of a policy that mistook symbolic restitution for governance. No government has been willing to confront or unwind the model, because any attempt at reform is immediately racialised and treated as illegitimate . . .
‘The Northern Land Council is not a marginal or impoverished body. It is one of the wealthiest statutory land councils in Australia, controlling vast territories, negotiating resource agreements worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and maintaining substantial financial reserves. It asserts authority over land use, access, and exclusion, yet disclaims any operational responsibility for safety, order, or civil peace on the land it controls.’ These are quotations from Robert Hill’s Quadrant article, Welcome to Wadeye.
Australia is one of the only places where humans maintained a hunter-gatherer lifestyle into the modern era. This makes it an invaluable window into humanity’s deep past—a window that is closing, writes Mungo Manic. This video explores the complexities surrounding the identity and history of Aboriginal Australians, particularly focusing on the distinction between contemporary Aboriginal Australians and the pre-colonial foragers. It delves into the impact of colonization on these communities, the ambiguity of Aboriginal identity, and the challenges faced in preserving the archaeological and cultural heritage of Australia’s forager past.
Written by Mungo Manic, read his piece here https://quillette.com/2025/01/25/the-…