Proponents of a so-called “Indigenous Voice” endlessly whine that “Australia doesn’t recognise it’s First Nations people”. Leaving aside that grating, imported Americanism, one has to ask: what rock do the Voice proponents think we live under?
Because it’s impossible to open a paper bag in Australia without a “traditional acknowledgement” or “recognition of elders past, present and emerging” (a phrase almost as sickening in its cretinous repetition as “First Nations”). Not a football game, council meeting, school lesson, or even a plane flight can pass without an eye-rolling intonation of “recognition”.
As great Australian journalist Jack Marx once said of triumphalist queenery: since when did the love that dare not speak its name become the love that just won’t shut the fuck up? Similarly, for a demographic who claim to be marginalised and un-recognised, “First Nations” (I can’t type that phrase without gagging just a little) are everywhere.
Nowhere less than, it should surprise no-one, Australia’s bastion of wokery, the ABC. The ABC endlessly informs its viewers that it is broadcasting from this or that Aboriginal group’s “country”. Which is a subtle reminder to the 99.8% of Australians who aren’t Aboriginal (or have yet to concoct a fictional, distant Aboriginal ancestor), that, according to the Woke, they will never belong here.
And everything, everything, must be subsumed by the Woke fetishism of Aboriginality. As has happened in New Zealand, scientists are abandoning actual science for a facile, Deepak Chopra-esque infatuation with the oxymoron of “Indigenous science”. So, they invent nostrums like “cultural astronomy”, in order to pretend that paleolithic mythology is every bit as “scientific” as the Hubble Telescope.
As for that foundational event of modern Australia, Anzac Day, despite involving almost completely white men who overwhelmingly considered themselves part of Britain, the ABC is gunning for that, too. No matter how ridiculously they have to stretch credulity and batter historical accuracy.
The ABC claims that:
Over 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander soldiers were among those who fought at Gallipoli. Aunty Marion Leane Smith was a proud Dharug woman who is the only indigenous woman known to serve in WW1 as a nurse.
Nearly every word of that paragraph is utter bullshit.
In fact, the number of Aboriginal soldiers that fought at Gallipoli is estimated to be about 70. The figure of 1,000 refers to the whole of the war. Their contribution was welcome but insignificant on any but an individual level. In other words, they did what thousands of other Australians did. They should be honoured in the same measure, but no more, than all other Australians who served.
In their desperation to be win accolades for being “anti-racist”, the ABC are being very racist indeed. They’re also dishonouring the very people they pretend to lionise, not least by lying so assiduously about them.
Marion Leane Smith was neither a “proud Dharug woman” (what Aboriginal person isn’t “proud” this or that? But try introducing, say, John Simpson Kirkpatrick as a “proud white man” — but, I digress), nor would she ever have used, much less understood, “Aunty” as an honorific.
In fact, Smith was a proud Canadian woman.
It was Canada where the barely-Aboriginal Smith (she had a single Australian Aboriginal grandmother) lived from the age of two. (Arts crony Tamsin Hong tries heroically to link the move to “prejudice against half-caste children”, despite a complete lack of evidence, and the glaring fact that Canada was no less prejudiced.) After growing up in Canada, she studied nursing in the US, before returning to Canada to serve with the Canadian forces in France. She returned to Canada after the War, married a Canadian, and Canada is where she died (after a few decades in Trinidad, where her parson husband became a school principal).
If she ever thought about her ethnicity, I am sure she would not have been ashamed of it. But I rather think it would have been only incidental to her psyche.
Quadrant Online
Marion Leane Smith’s life and achievements as a Canadian are every bit enough for her to be proud of. Reducing her whole to the simple measure of a measure of Aboriginal DNA is, frankly, an insult to a life impressive in itself. There is no reason for her to be ashamed of her ethnicity, if indeed she ever gave it much thought. But there’s also nothing to indicate that her ancestry “oppressed” or “marginalised” her.
Marion Leane Smith was much more than her identity, and serving this sort of belittling tripe up to gullible children as “history” is to do a disservice to Australians all, Aboriginal or not.