If a white guy tells you he has conversations with plants, you should turn away in embarrassment. If Bob Randall tells you he heard the oak trees muttering, you should bow your head reverently.
After his death, in keeping with custom, his name and picture were removed from the Kanyini website “until sorry business is finished.” Like all flesh, he had been and gone: leaving much more than others, but still a fleeting footfall in the life of his ever-abiding mother, the red Earth.
Now, the trauma that primitive peoples suffered on encounter with civilization was very great. It was in many places a ghastly human tragedy, well documented in books like Alan Moorehead’s The Fatal Impact and Charles Mann’s 1491.
But that trauma was long over by the time Bob Randall was born in the 1930s. Australian governments of that time were struggling as humanely as they could with the very difficult question: How can a modern white-European nation assimilate a race of people displaying radically different statistical profiles on traits of behavior, intelligence, and personality?
They are struggling with it still. From a 2011 news report featuring the aforementioned Kevin Rudd:
Billions of dollars of spending on programmes to improve the lives of Australia’s Aborigines have failed to make any difference, with many stuck in the same hopeless situation they faced in the 1970s, a review commissioned by the government has found.
Australia spends an average of AU$3.5bn [the same in US$ at that time] each year on policies intended to improve indigenous health, education, housing and welfare, but was getting “dismal” results, the review concluded …
Australia’s 460,000 Aborigines make up about two per cent of the population.
They suffer higher rates of unemployment, substance abuse and domestic violence than other Australians and have an average life expectancy of 17 years less than the rest of the country.
Despite the glaring problems faced by indigenous Australians, policies devised by successive governments to build better housing, improve infrastructure and boost community safety have had little success.
The report, which was commissioned when Kevin Rudd was prime minister, took into account the progress of the government’s Northern Territory emergency intervention programme, brought in by John Howard in 2007 amid great controversy.
Under the plan, thousands of troops and police were sent into Outback Aboriginal communities to stamp out child abuse, alcoholism and domestic violence fuelled by “rivers of grog.” The policy is still in effect in several communities … [Billions spent on Australia’s Aborigines yield “dismal” results by Bonnie Malkin; Daily Telegraph, August 8, 2011.]
Whether there is any solution to this problem until our technology becomes capable of accurate genomic engineering, seems to me to be an open question.
In the meantime sensible people should prefer civilization to barbarism, mock the ethnomasochist fantasies of journalists suckled by the Walt Disney Company and educated under Cultural Marxism, and keep always in mind Dr. Johnson’s reproof to Boswell: “Don’t cant in defence of savages.”
