Message for Lidia Thorpe about the realities of her idealised Aborigine life
Sunday, 24 January 2021
I'm tired of this nonsense. My family ran cattle stations "on the frontier" form 1860, until the last retired in 1976. They had a great deal to do with Aboriginal people, and acquired a fair knowledge of their customs and laws. Under traditional Aboriginal tribal law, a young girl would have been given to one of the tribal elders as soon as she reached puberty. She would have given birth to three or four children, and - if she survived- and he tired of her, and there was a fresh pick of the young girls - she would have been passed on to the young men of the tribe to complete their sex education...when the tribe moved on, and she couldn't keep up, she would have been left behind to die. The matriarch of one of the Noongar clans in Western Australia, was being interviewed on the A.B.C. all those years ago, and outlined the above scenario. "That's what I would have had to look forward to. Some of those tribal elders were really creepy old men. I'm GLAD the white man came!" Funny, the A.B.C. announcer couldn't shut her up quickly enough!