Religious freedom

 Anti-Enlightenment secularists are wrong on rights

HENRY ERGAS

In a country virtually drowning with rights, it is ironic that religious freedom should be the last cab off the rank – and the one that seems to be facing the greatest legislative opposition.

After all, religious freedom, with its intimate linkages to the freedoms of conscience, expression and association, was at the heart of the modern conceptions of liberty that took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries; and while the very early acceptance of those freedoms in the Australian colonies did not entirely avoid sectarian conflict, it contributed powerfully to our long history of social peace.

But that very early acceptance came at a cost: like the air we breathe, religious freedom was largely taken for granted. As new rights that impinge on it were sought and granted, we became, almost without noticing it, one of the advanced democracies in which religious freedom enjoys the weakest protections.

There is, however, a deeper element to the irony that now sees religious freedom so seriously threatened: it is only thanks to religion, and in particular to the fusion of Judaic legalism with Christian universalism, that the idea of human rights emerged, eventually becoming a defining feature of the Western tradition.Condemned, as religious freedom now is, to struggle against vocal and determined enemies, it is not difficult to imagine a future in which expressing many longstanding religious beliefs will be rendered illegal, as will the actions that give those beliefs practical life.

No one has shown that more clearly than Jurgen Habermas, the German intellectual who has been a towering figure of the European left since the 1960s, in his recently published Another History of Philosophy, which will appear in English translation next year. The West’s Judaeo-Christian heritage was “not a mere passing phase” in the formation of the contemporary concepts of freedom, Habermas argues in this extraordinary – if forbiddingly lengthy – book; rather, that heritage contributed their essential core and remains their vital underpinning.
The path leading from the biblical precepts to today’s versions of those concepts was never simple, untroubled or pure. It was, however, the Judaeo-Christian heritage that allowed Western thought to repeatedly overcome the obstacles it encountered along the way.

For example, Thomas Aquinas’s distinction between divine law, which was accessible only through grace, and natural law, which was accessible to every human being through the God-given capacity to reason, may seem of purely antiquarian interest. However, from that distinction Aquinas, and his great disciples in the Salamanca School of theology, derived not just the bedrock principle of human equality but the entirely novel, intensely controversial and eventually immensely influential contention that “heathens” – whose minds had unimpaired access to natural law – had rights as good as those of their Christian neighbours.

Equally, John Locke readily conceded that some people were not as clever as others (though bitter experience also taught him it was not the uneducated who caused society’s troubles but the overweening “pretensions of power” of the “all-knowing Doctors”).

Yet no matter how great the “difference in Men’s Understandings” might be, “the Candle that is set up in us, shines bright enough to lead (all) to the Knowledge of their Maker”, making us equally accountable to the Almighty.

And because we each bear that fearsome accountability’s full brunt, we are entitled to be “equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection”, and hence, he concluded, “cannot be subjected to Political Power without (our) Consent” – thus setting the philosophical foundations that shaped the American Revolution.

It would, however, be wrong to believe those brilliant thinkers viewed rights in isolation from their social context. On the contrary, particularly after Europe’s calamitous wars of religion had highlighted just how fragile societies could be, immense weight was placed on the need to recon­cile individual claims with a peaceful, stable and secure social order. Few concepts played a greater role in ultimately achieving that reconciliation than that of “things indifferent”. Referred to in Greek as Adiaphora, the concept, which originated with the Stoics and figured in 1 Corinthians 8:8-9, came to mean practices that were morally neutral.

Beginning with the Augsburg Interim of 1548, in which Charles V, in attempting to secure peace between Reformers and Catholics, advanced the principle of distinguishing those matters that were fundamental from those that were morally indifferent, the notion that there were many things on which we could agree to disagree without imperilling our immortal souls laid the intellectual basis for mutual toleration. Thus was born what is undoubtedly the most fundamental right of them all: the right to live in peaceful coexistence, perhaps not basking in loving friendship but at least respecting each other’s continuing presence.

However, few virtues have proven harder to secure and maintain than that of indifference and its indispensable companion, charity. Nor are there many virtues that are more manifestly lacking in the secularists’ attack on religious freedom.

Rather, just like the Anabaptists – who provoked Philipp Melanchthon to coin for them the term “fanatic” (that is, believer in phantasms) by claiming that any concession to the principle of indifference would set off a chain of further concessions that led to eternal damnation – so our secularists, in their opposition to a legislated right of religious freedom, agitate slippery slopes that seem utterly fantastic.

How, for example, could anyone familiar with contemporary Australia seriously suggest allowing a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding would unleash uncontrollable torrents of homophobia across this sunbaked land? And is it even vaguely credible to contend that if a small, entirely self-funded, religious school decided to not admit gay students, or to hire only evangelical gardeners, the consequences would be so dreadful as to justify coercing them to do otherwise?

Perhaps those contentions are made in good faith; they are certainly not made with good sense.

Redolent of Lenin’s dictum that liberty is “so precious that it must be rationed” – with none of it going to the people one detests – they reflect a view of rights antithetical to that which the Judaeo-Christian tradition did so much to forge. That view saw rights as the fences within which we can each peacefully exercise our freedoms. Instead, for today’s secularists, their own rights are the bulldozers with which to crush the fences of others.

Little wonder then that Habermas, in this 2000-page masterpiece that fittingly caps a brilliant career, castigates that zero-sum mentality as an intellectually vacuous betrayal of the Enlightenment’s hopes and values. Unfortunately, in an age that has managed to lose both its faith and its reason, it may take a miracle for voices like his to be heard.

Aboriginal historical cannibalism

 

The Incidence of Cannibalism in Aboriginal Society

• 25th September 2021

“Cannibalism is practised by all natives on the north coast with whom I have come in contact, with the exception of a very small tribe inhabiting the immediate neighbourhood of Port Essington … The eating of grown-up people—that is, of natives—is, as far as I can ascertain, not practised. Only children of tender age—up to about two years old—are considered fit subjects for food, and if they fall ill are often strangled by the old men, cooked, and eaten, and all parts except the head, which is skinned and buried, are considered a delicacy. Parents eat their own children, and all, young and old, partake of it. The only instance I have heard where grown-up people have been eaten, was that of two Europeans who were out exploring in the neighbourhood of the Tor Rock, about forty miles inland from Mount Norris Bay; this was in 1874. These unfortunate travellers were, according to the statements of the friendly natives, killed by the ‘Tor Rock’ tribe, cooked and eaten; and from my own knowledge of the natives in that neighbourhood I have no reason to doubt this statement to be correct.” (P. Foelsche, “Notes on the Aborigines of North Australia”, in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, vol. 5, 1882.)

“The natives to the south eat human flesh. It is said that they engage in regular human hunting parties for this purpose … It is even said that they roast and eat their own infants, if they succeed each other too quickly. Only last year a woman not far from here did it, and when reproved for so doing, by means of an interpreter (for they speak a different language), she was surprised at being found fault with, as she considered the roasting and eating of her own child as something quite natural.” (Rev. Louis Schulze, missionary, “The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke River: Their Habits and Customs”, in Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, vol. 14, 1891.)

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There are literally hundreds of accounts of Aboriginal cannibalism, dating from the first European settlement in Australia to the 1930s or even later. These accounts were made in all the states and territories of Australia with the possible exception of Tasmania. They were written by witnesses and commentators from a wide variety of backgrounds who wrote in many genres—newspaper articles; autobiographies, many not meant for publication; court reports; scholarly proceedings, as in the accounts quoted above. They were written by persons not in contact with one another, often hundreds of kilometres apart, and having no knowledge of the accounts made by other white Australians, and whose veracity, when they wrote on other topics, would not be questioned.

Reports of Aboriginal cannibalism comprised a significant component of works on Aboriginal society down to the 1950s or even later. Since then they have vanished from all depictions of Aboriginal society, and, if asserted today, would be regarded as the embodiment of racism, and dismissed out of hand. These old and frank depictions of Aboriginal society have been replaced by their opposite: veneration for the indigenous inhabitants of Australia and their society as utopian and pristinely moral, and any trace of the endemic and nightmarishly barbaric world inhabited by the Aborigines found by virtually all early observers here has been totally erased, its depiction as fact wholly taboo.

Aboriginal cannibalism had many different aspects, but the practice existed because of one all-important fact. The Aborigines were pre-literate nomadic hunter-gatherers, who did not grow crops or domesticate livestock for food, and thus were often starving, and were certainly lacking in protein sources. As a result, they turned to eating human flesh, often making a virtue of necessity by endowing the practice with religious significance. Sometimes their cannibalism consisted of deliberately killing and eating small children, women, or the elderly, sometimes of eating enemy warriors slain in battle in the frequent inter-tribal wars and conflicts (which are also almost entirely missing from recent accounts of Aboriginal society). Another means of accomplishing the all-important goal of limiting a tribe’s population to a level which could realistically be supported by the available resources was infanticide, which was widely practised and which has also been excluded from contemporary depictions of Aboriginal life. (On the reasons for Aboriginal cannibalism and infanticide, see my article “Life and Death in Pre-Contact Aboriginal Australia”, Quadrant, October 2020.)

“Mr Willshire declares that infanticide is a very common crime among the natives, and that lubras [Aboriginal women] as a rule kill off their surplus offspring, two being considered a full family. A sable matron once owned to him that she had killed three of her five children immediately after birth, and remarked, ‘me bin keep em one boy one girl, no good keep em mob, him too much wantem tuckout’.” — Review of W.H. Willshire’s The Aborigines of Central Australia, in the South Australian Register, May 14, 1889.

Aboriginal cannibals demonstrated a number of distinctive culinary preferences. It appears that they greatly favoured the taste of Chinese people, whom they found and killed in remote areas of settlement, over the apparently saltier taste of Europeans:

“Urquhart says his boys always told him the blacks did not like the taste of whites much—they were too salt [sic]—but that they relished Chinamen, hundreds of whom were killed while packing provisions across the Peninsula to the Palmer River goldfields [in Queensland] in the days following Mulligan’s discovery of the field. This fact was put down to the salt-beef diet of the early whites, while the Chinese lived more on rice. Urquhart was called out to hunt up the murderers of a Chinaman living in a lonely hut by the roadside … Following up the blacks, Urquhart came upon them while engaged in the preparation of a meal. He and his troopers dashed into the camp and scattered the natives in all directions. On the fire was a looted pot, and simmering inside it was the Chinaman’s foot and some sweet potatoes.”  –-Hudson Fysh, Taming the North (1933), referring to the period after gold was discovered in 1873.

“The blacks west of Cooktown showed me several of the clay white-ant nest camp ovens, where they roasted the Chinese in the old Palmer digging days. On one occasion, I was present where two Chinese were roasted, and cut up, smelling and looking exactly like roast pork, even the yellow skin crinkled like that of pork, the resemblance being astonishing. One man they refused to eat, as he had been an opium eater, and his flesh had the odour of opium.” –“Memories of the Late Archibald Meston”, courtesy of E.A. Meston, in Cummins and Campbell’s Monthly Magazine, December 1936.

Cannibalism apparently became part of the religious practice among at least some of the Aborigines.

“In parts of New South Wales such as Bathurst, Goulburn, the Lachlan or Macquarie, it was customary long ago for the first-born of every lubra to be eaten by the tribe, as part of a religious ceremony; and I recollect a blackfellow who had, in compliance with the custom, been thrown when an infant on the fire, but was rescued and brought up by some stock-keepers who happened accidentally to be passing at the time. The marks of the burns were distinctly visible on the man when I saw him, and his story was well known in the locality.” –– R. Brough Smith, The Aborigines of Victoria, Volume One, 1878.

It would seem, however, that most of the people eaten by the Aborigines had already died, and their bodies were cooked and eaten rather than buried. There are dozens of contemporary reports about this practice, which appears to have been almost ubiquitous in some parts of Australia.

“When anyone dies, provided he or she be not too old, certain of the male relatives take the body out into the bush and cook it in a native oven … When all the flesh is removed—apparently everything is eaten—the bones are collected, and, with the exception of the long ones from the arm, are wrapped in paperbark and handed over to the custody of a relative.”— Walter Baldwin Spencer and Francis James Gillen, Across Australia, 1912.

There are also a great many reports of the cooking and eating of warriors from hostile tribes who had been killed in one of the many and frequent tribal wars and violent clashes.

As noted, however, infanticide appears to have been an important means of population limitation. Nineteenth-century European observers of Aboriginal life in South Australia and Victoria stated that about 30 per cent of Aboriginal infants were killed at birth. According to Gillian Cowlishaw, writing on “Infanticide in Aboriginal Australia” in Oceania (vol. XLVIII, 1978), deformed children were “always killed at birth”, as were “one or both of twins”, and illegitimate children.

In addition to accounts by settlers, reports about cannibalism were made to Australian government officials and accepted by them. For instance, in forwarding to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Stanley, a copy of an account by Charles Sievwright, assistant protector of the Aborigines of the Port Phillip District, dated April 25, 1841, Governor Gipps noted: “It exhibits, perhaps, one of the most ferocious acts of cannibalism on record.” The account, describing the fate of the corpse of a young Bolagher woman, who had been speared by a member of the Targurt people at Lake Terang, west of Melbourne, makes gruesome reading. (I owe this reference to Michael Connor, The Invention of Terra Nullius, Macleay Press, 2005, pp. 91–94):

On being directed by some of the women, who had likewise sought shelter near my tent, to the huts of the Bolaghers, I there found a young woman, supported in the arms of some of her tribe, quite insensible, and bleeding from two severe wounds upon the right side of the face; she continued in the same state of insensibility till about 11 o’clock, when she expired … 

About an hour after the death of the young woman, the body was removed a few hundred yards into the bush by the father and brother of the deceased; the remainder of the tribe following by one at a time, until they had all joined what I imagined to be the usual funeral party. Having accompanied the body when it was removed, I was then requested to return to my tent, which request I took no notice of. In a few minutes I was again desired, rather sternly, and by impatient signs, to go. I endeavoured to make them understand that I wished to remain, and I sat down upon a tree close to where the body lay. The father of the deceased then came close up to me, and pointed with his finger to his mouth, and then to the dead body. I was at this moment closely and intensely scrutinized by the whole party. I at once guessed their meaning, and signified my intention to remain, and, with as much indifference as I could assume, stretched myself upon the tree, and narrowly watched their proceedings. 

With a flint they made a small incision upon the breast, when a simultaneous shriek was given by the party, and the same violent signs of grief were again evinced. After a short time the operation was again commenced, and in a few minutes the body disembowelled.

The scene which now took place was of the most revolting description; horror-stricken and utterly disgusted, while obliged to preserve that equanimity of demeanour upon which I imagined the development of this tragedy to depend, I witnessed the most fearful scene of ferocious cannibalism.

The bowels and entire viscera having been disengaged from the body, were at first portioned out; but from the impatience of some of the women to get at the liver, a general scramble took place for it, and it was snatched in pieces, and, without the slightest process of cooking, was devoured with an eagerness and avidity, a keen, fiendish expression of impatience for more, from which scene, a memory too tenacious upon this subject will not allow me to escape; the kidneys and heart were in like manner immediately consumed, and as a climax to these revolting orgies, when the whole viscera were removed, a quantity of blood and serum which had collected in the cavity of the chest was eagerly collected in handsful [sic], and drunk by the old man who had dissected the body; the flesh was entirely cut off the ribs and back, the arms and legs were wrenched and twisted from the shoulder and hip joints, and their teeth employed to dissever the reeking tendons, when they would not immediately yield to their impatience. The limbs were now doubled up and put aside in their baskets; and on putting a portion of the flesh upon a fire which had previously been lit, they seemed to remember that I was of the party; something was said to one of the women, who cut off a foot from the leg she had in her possession, and offered it to me; I thought it prudent to accept of it, and wrapping it in my handkerchief, and pointing to my tent they nodded assent, and I joyfully availed myself of their permission to retire. They shortly afterwards returned to their huts with the debris of the feast, and during the day, to the horror and annoyance of my two boys, and those belonging to the establishment, they brought another part, and some half-picked bones, and offered them to us. The head was struck off with a tomahawk and placed between hot stones in the hollow of a tree, where it has undergone a process of baking, and it is still left there otherwise untouched. 

“I regret to state that I know of 44 non-Christian infants who have been killed by their mothers at birth, and one child even of four years of age who was killed and eaten by its mother: now the latter is a Christian. I always let the blacks know when I visit their camps that I am fond of their children, and offer them so much rice and flour for any infant they do not want.”  — Report of Father Nicholas, Parish Priest in Broome, in Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives, Parliamentary Papers 5 of 1905, Perth.

“Since their baptism the missionaries are informed of many matters which were formerly never admitted. New-born children are frequently killed by their mothers—of twins the female, or if [of] one sex the weaker, also all the children who are feeble or cripples, and many bastards.” (Report by Friedrich Krichauff, MP, on the Finke River Mission Station, in the South Australian Register, 1 July 1889.)

That cannibalism was widely practised by Australian Aborigines was a commonplace in virtually all accounts of their society down at least to the 1950s. As late as 1957, Frederick McCarthy, an eminent anthropologist and the Foundation Principal of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, could assert as a matter of fact in his Australian Aborigines: Their Life and Culture that “Cannibalism existed not only as a part of death and mourning rites, but also in the custom of infanticide.”

By around 1970 or slightly later, however, such assertions were conspicuous by their absence from newly published accounts of Aboriginal society, with nothing said about cannibalism and infanticide. Anyone making such assertions would be condemned. A typical example of this may be found online, in a biographical account—by Lauren Gawne, posted in 2016 on something termed the “Dangerous Women Project”—of the career of Daisy Bates (1859–1951), who spent several decades living with outback Aborigines and wrote several well-known books and 270 newspaper articles on Aboriginal life. Dr Gawne was there described as “a linguist working on the documentation of linguistic diversity, particularly in Nepal”, and is now Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Linguistics at La Trobe University. According to her, Bates’s “reports of cannibalism among the Aborigines of Australia were discredited during her lifetime, to her embarrassment … These stories of cannibalism illustrate Bates’s slippery relationship with the truth. Julia Blackburn, in her very perceptive biography, is direct in her appraisal: ‘Daisy Bates was a liar, of that I am sure’.”

Speaking of liars, the situation since the 1970s has, as noted, changed utterly, and a wholly mendacious work like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu can be hailed as the gospel truth about pre-contact Aboriginal societies simply because it credits them—wholly falsely—with a structure which has moved beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, a mode of development outgrown in the West several thousand years earlier.

Not only is criticism of the Aborigines now utterly taboo, but they are seen as embodying the highest of social values. For instance, another award-winning book, Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (2012) claims that they created “parks” and “estates” whose aesthetic sensibility was apparently very similar to that shown by Capability Brown when he laid out gardens for eighteenth-century English dukes and earls. The Aborigines demonstrated this remarkable artistic sense despite the fact that there was no equivalent of Blenheim and Althorp around which to set out these gardens: there was, in fact, not a single permanent building of any kind in pre-contact Australia.

The exaltation and veneration of the Aborigines is, blatantly, a new weapon by the Left to undermine the moral and political worth of mainstream Australian society and of the values of the West. It bears no relationship to the historical truth, and ought to be exposed relentlessly with truthful and accurate depictions of the nightmarish brutality of Aboriginal society, some of which has been explained in this essay, whose examples will surely be completely new to most readers, and which only scratch the surface of the actual facts.

William D. Rubinstein acknow­ledges the assistance of, in particular, Peter Bridge. Dr Rubinstein held Chairs of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales, and is a frequent contributor to Quadrant.

Historical Treatment Of Aboriginal Women

The Mistreatment of Women in Aboriginal Society 

"The treatment which women experience must be taken into account in considering the causes which lead to the extinction of the native tribes. Amongst them the woman is an absolute slave. She is treated with the greatest cruelty and indignity, has to do all laborious work, and to carry all the burthens [sic]. For the slightest offence or dereliction of duty, she is beaten with a waddyu or yam stick and not infrequently speared. The records of the Supreme Court in Adelaide furnish numberless instances of blacks being tried for murdering lubras. The woman’s life is of no account if her husband chooses to destroy it, and no one ever attempts to protect or take her part under any circumstances. In times of scarcity of food, she is the last to be fed, and the last considered in any way. That many die in consequence cannot be a matter of wonder …” — George Taplin, The Native Tribes of South Australia, 1878, pp. xvii–xviii

“After marriage, the women are compelled to do all the hard work of erecting habitations, collecting fuel and water, carrying burdens, procuring roots and delicacies of various kinds, making baskets for cooking roots and other purposes, preparing food, and attending to the children. The only work men do, in times of peace, is to hunt for opossums and large animals of various kinds, and to make rugs and weapons.” (James Dawson, Australian Aborigines: The Language and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria, Australia, 1881, pp. 36–37.)

“A great man, or ‘turrwan’, might have two or three or even four wives … They were useful in carrying burdens from one place to another. A woman, because she was a woman, always carried the heaviest load. A man took his tomahawk, his spear, and waddy, and that sort of thing; a woman humped along with the weighty kangaroo and ’possum skin coverings, the dillies with eatables, and sometimes also a heavy little piece of goods in the form of a child. At times, too, she would carry tea-tree bark on her back for the humpies [makeshift tents], while ever and anon as they travelled along the men enjoyed themselves hunting and looking for ‘sugar bags’ (native bees nests), etc.” (Tom Petrie’s Reminiscences of Early Queensland, 1904, p. 61.)

“In 1849 I saw a battle where about 500 of the Narrinyeri met some 800 of the Wakanuwan, and it was very evident that if the conflict had not been stopped by the colonial authorities the Narrinyeri would have been signally defeated by their opponents. They bore a special enmity to [their opponents] because these latter had a propensity for stealing fat people and eating them. If a man had a fat wife, he was always particularly careful not to leave her unprotected, lest she might be seized by prowling cannibals.” (George Taplin, “The Narrinyeri: An Account of the Tribes of South Australian Aborigines”, in Taplin, op. cit., p. 2.)

“The natives told me that some twenty years before I came to Port Macleay they first saw white men on horseback, and thought that the horses were their visitors’ mothers, because they carry them on their back! I have also heard that another tribe regarded the first pack-bullocks they saw as whitefellows’ wives, because they carried the luggage!” (Taplin, ibid., p. 68, footnote.)

“If a man has several girls at his disposal he speedily obtains several wives who, however, very seldom agree well with each other, but are continually quarrelling, each endeavouring to be the favourite. The man, regarding them as mere slaves than in any other light, employs them in every possible way to his own advantage. They are obliged to get shellfish, roots, and eatable plants. If one [man] from another tribe should arrive having anything he desires to purchase, he perhaps makes a bargain to pay by letting him have one of his wives for a longer or shorter period.” (H.E.A. Meyer, “Manners and Customs of the Aborigines of the Encounter Bay Tribe, South Australia”, in Taplin, ibid., p. 191.)

Virtually every white observer of Aboriginal life in colonial Australia remarked on the endemic and often shocking mistreatment of women almost invariably found in Aboriginal tribes throughout Australia. Women were treated as little better than animals, if that. Women did have a role in tribal life, as gatherers of plant foodstuffs to complement the meat killed and brought to their camps by the men, but, apart from this, and apart from their role as mothers and as cooks, women did most of the heavy carrying as the nomadic tribes moved from place to place in search of food and water. Women’s role as human pack animals—in a society where there were, of course, no beasts of burden or wheeled vehicles—was also invariably noted and condemned by white observers.

But it gets much worse, as the following stomach-churning quotations by well-qualified white observers make clear:

“The First Ceremonial (Female) in the Boulia District: Among the Pitta Pitta and neighbouring tribes … a young girl when she begins to show signs of puberty … Two or three men manage to get the young woman, when ripe enough, all alone by herself away in the bush, and, throwing her down, one of them forcibly enlarges the vaginal orifice by tearing it downwards with the first three fingers round and round with opposum-string … Other men come forward from all directions, and the struggling victim has to submit in rotation to promiscuous coition with all the ‘bucks’ present: should any sick individual be in camp, he would drink the bloody semen collected from her … Among the Ulaolinya, as well as the tribes around Glenormiston, any ordinary corrobboree [sic] is held during the day-time, and the young woman who has been fixed upon … is decoyed by some old woman to come outside the main body of the camp for the purpose of collecting pappa-seeds, etc. She is stealthily followed by two or three men who suddenly pounce upon her, seize her by the wrists while the other bucks, till now in ambush, come rushing upon the scene: she at once realizes her position, and, despite all shrieks and intreaties, is thrown upon her back on the ground, the old chaperone clearing away to a distance. Four ‘bucks’ hold one to each limb while another presses upon her so as to compel her to draw her legs up: her thighs are now drawn apart and her eyes covered so as to prevent her seeing the individual, probably a very old man, who is beckoned from some hiding place to come and operate directly. Everything is now ready. This he does by slitting up a portion of the perineum with a stone-knife, and sweeping his three fingers round inside the vaginal orifice.” (Walter Edmund Roth, Ethnological Studies Among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines, Brisbane, 1897, p. 174; cited in part in Louis Nowra, Bad Dreaming: Aboriginal Men’s Violence Against Women and Children, 2007, p. 15.)

“When a betrothed girl is of a marriageable age, the man to whom she is promised, having received her father’s consent, or even that of her mother, which would suffice, took her away when she was out from the camp with the other women … He was accompanied by a comrade … Having seized her, they dragged her away, she screaming and biting as much as she was able to … No one interfered, the other women looking on and laughing … The marriage was then consummated by the Abaijas [relatives], who remained with her for one or two days of ceremonial dancing, during which there was between her and the men of the camp unrestrained license, not even excluding her father.” (A.W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-East Australia, 1904, p. 193, cited in Nowra, ibid., p. 17.)

Violence against women was thus endemic and pervasive in Aboriginal society. It was witnessed, reported on, often in graphic detail, and condemned by dozens of white observers. Nearly all of them, it must be noted, were highly sympathetic to the Aborigines and often devoted years of their lives to living with them and improving their condition. The books they wrote also show that they were careful and scientific observers of Aboriginal life; many of the books contain detailed accounts of the local Aboriginal languages (often our only record of these now extinct tongues), of their extremely complex kinship and marriage laws, and of their myths and lifestyles.

While it is self-evident that these abominations against women were unknown in the English-speaking world—or indeed, anywhere in the Western world—one aspect of the utterly categorical differences between the West and Australian Aboriginal society was the realistic possibility of growth and improvement which existed in the West but was utterly lacking in Aboriginal society. Their society was wholly static, and without improvement or change, for the whole of its 40,000-year history prior to the coming of the white man. In particular, the possibility of any improvement in the status of women did not exist. This was the opposite of the situation in, for instance, the UK. In the 1830s, literacy rates among women in England are believed to have been around 45 per cent, compared with 60 per cent for men. By 1870, the literacy rates for both sexes were equal, at about 90 per cent. The UK Education Act of 1870 made primary education mandatory for girls as well as boys. The first two institutions of higher education for women, Bedford College (in Bloomsbury and later in Regent’s Park, London) and Royal Holloway College in Egham, Surrey, were founded, respectively, in 1849 and 1879. It need hardly be pointed out that the literacy rates among pre-contact Aborigines of both sexes were also equal, as they had been for 40,000 years: 0 per cent.

As countless reports have shown, and as is well known, violence against Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men occurs at a vastly higher rate than violence against white women by white men. According to the most commonly cited statistic, Aboriginal women are thirty-two times more likely to be hospitalised as a result of family violence, and five times more likely to die in a homicide caused by family violence, than among the rest of the Australian population. (Bronwen Carlson, “No Public Outrage, No Vigils: Australia’s Silence at Violence Against Indigenous Women,” The Conversation, April 16, 2021.) This is now widely recognised by judges when handing down sentences to Aboriginal men for violence against Aboriginal women. For example, Samuel Edwards of Palmerston, near Darwin, was recently jailed for life for killing his female partner after what the judge, Judith Kelly, described as a “prolonged, savage and brutal” attack following an afternoon of heavy drinking. Edwards had thirteen previous convictions for assault. “Justice Kelly ended her sentencing remarks with references to the high rate of violent crimes and sexual offences represented in the majority Aboriginal male prison population in the Northern Territory, saying that most of them were domestic violence related. ‘That translates into a steady stream of Aboriginal women going into hospital, or, like this poor woman, into the morgue,’ she said.” (ABC News Online, October 1, 2021.) Even the left-wing ABC, for whom the Aborigines can do no wrong, reported this prominently and at length: could it really be that violence against women is now beginning to trump their taboo on reporting Aboriginal misdeeds?

For the Australian Left and for almost all radical feminists, there is one cause of the astronomical rate of male Aboriginal violence against Aboriginal women: the white man. According to Bronwen Carlson, in the Conversation article cited above, “Violence against Indigenous women is deeply ingrained in Australia’s colonial history which condoned the murder, rape, and sexual abuse of Indigenous women.” In other words, this egregious piece of anti-white racism blames the white man for crimes against Aboriginal women, not the Aboriginal men who actually carried out presumably each and every one of these attacks.

According to Liz Conor’s Skin Deep: Settler Impressions of Aboriginal Women (2016, p. 95), there was an “undoubted upsurge in violence towards Aboriginal women, particularly in the two decades following first contact”, which was attributed to Aboriginal men as “an expedient contrivance”. It would be interesting to learn how Conor knows that there was an “undoubted upsurge in violence” in the two decades after first contact, as absolutely no statistics exist, or could possibly exist, about Aboriginal male violence against Aboriginal women in pre-contact Australia. All of the accounts made by well-qualified early white observers of Aboriginal society suggest the exact opposite, that violence and the grossest kinds of discrimination against Aboriginal women by Aboriginal men in pre-contact Aboriginal society were endemic and pervasive, and had been for 40,000 years.

It therefore seems surely to have been the case that a main cause of the extraordinarily high levels of violence by Aboriginal men against Aboriginal women, and in all likelihood, the main cause of it, is to be found in pre-contact Aboriginal society, in which, as George Taplin put it in the extract above, “the woman’s life is of no account if her husband wishes to destroy it”. Once again, the current depiction of pre-contact Aboriginal society by the Left as that of a rustic utopia is the exact opposite of its actual nature, Orwellian in its total distortion of the truth, in the interests of maligning the society which white Europeans have built up in Australia.

William D. Rubinstein held Chairs of History at Deakin University and at the University of Wales. A frequent contributor to Quadrant, he wrote on cannibalism in traditional Aboriginal society in the September issue

Natural disasters?

We’re Safer From Climate Disasters Than Ever Before
Though it receives little mention from activists or the media, weather-related deaths have fallen dramatically.


By Bjorn LomborgNov. 3, 2021 6:20 pm ET





Editor’s note: With November’s global climate conference in Glasgow under way, important facts about climate change don’t always make it into the dominant media coverage. We’re here to help. Each Thursday contributor Bjorn Lomborg is providing some important background so readers can have a better understanding of the true effects of climate change and the real costs of climate policy.

Activists constantly talk about the existential threat climate change poses and the deaths natural disasters inflict—but they never quite manage to total up these deaths. One reason is that it’s easier to bend the data about disaster frequency than to bend death statistics. Death tolls tell a very clear story: People are safer from climate-related disasters than ever before.

As this series of articles has covered already, many of the fearful descriptions you hear of souped-up hurricanes, heat waves and wildfires aren’t accurate. And estimates of costly but increasingly frequent climate damages are typically designed to mislead. One you see repeated often in the media is the National Centers for Environmental Information’s statistic that the number of natural disasters costing over $1 billion in damage is on the rise. But as this series explained in regard to flood costs, only measuring the total damage of natural disasters over time misses the important point—there’s much more stuff to damage today than there was several decades ago.

As the world has gotten richer and its population has grown, the number and quality of structures in the path of floods, fires, and hurricanes have risen. If you remove this variable by looking at damage as a percent of gross domestic product, it actually paints an optimistic picture. The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global GDP to 0.18%. A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disaster. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat and cold.

Still it’s easy to misuse the data to make things seem worse than they actually are. The International Disaster Database—the biggest disaster data depository in the world—attempts to register every catastrophe around the globe using reports from sources ranging from the press to insurance companies to United Nations agencies. But because the internet and proliferation of media has made it so much easier to access information today, the database records small natural disasters from 1980 onward that in prior decades wouldn’t have been recorded.

This skews the database by making it appear there are more total disasters today than the past. (Several U.N. agencies have twisted this data to say just that.) For instance, the database recorded four times as many earthquakes each year on average after 1980 as it did before. As the U.S. Geological Survey points out, when databases show more earthquakes, it isn’t because there are actually more earthquakes, but because they have been recorded better over time. Indeed, almost all of the earthquake increase in the disaster database is composed of small earthquakes that likely just didn’t make the news earlier in the 20th century. You see the same slant with hurricanes: The disaster database recorded far more U.S. hurricanes after 1980 than before—six times as many a year on average. But the historical record from dozens of peer-reviewed studies shows the number of landfalling U.S. hurricanes has actually declined slightly since 1900.

Death totals, on the other hand, are much less pliable. While reports on climate catastrophes multiplied over the last century, large-scale deaths have been consistently recorded. In fact, the disaster database’s death toll is very close to official estimates. And that data tells an incredible and heartening story. A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next 10 decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.


Unsurprisingly, the media this year has been filled to the brim with coverage of natural disasters, from the Northwestern Heat Dome to floods in Germany and China. Yet it has conveniently left out the total death toll. So far 5,500 people have died from climate-related disasters in 2021. Using previous years’ data to extrapolate, climate-related deaths will probably total about 6,600 by the end of the year. That’s almost 99% less than the death toll a century ago. The global population has quadrupled since then, so this is an even bigger drop than it looks.

As has been the case across this series of articles, economic growth and technological innovation get the credit for our improving position. Human beings are pretty good at adapting to their environment, even if it’s changing. Keep that in mind when you see another worried headline about climate disasters.

Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

Covid reflections

No gratitude, no pride, no relief … just quiet seething

GIDEON HAIGH

For the past 18 months, I have been taking the same walk through the same Melbourne ­suburban streets in the same ­direction at roughly the same time every day.

I’ve thought at times of varying it but always refrained. It wasn’t a pleasure, nor was it a “freedom”, except in this word’s modern sense as a privilege granted by a premier. So I wasn’t prepared to perform it other than mechanically, in precisely the mean and grudging spirit of its permission.

I’m well aware this sounds perverse. It is perverse. I don’t care. We each had a way of coping with the world’s most protracted lockdown, and this was mine, with an interior monologue of quiet seething to match.

“It must be unbearable in Melbourne,” friends from interstate would say. No, I’d tell them. It was, just, bearable. You could get by, providing you expected nothing good to happen, everything to take twice as long as it should, and no useful end to be served. I’d note the emptying shopfronts, the increasingly bedraggled gardens, the looks of fellow pedestrians, like Eliot’s crowds flowing over London Bridge: “So many, I had not thought death had undone so many/Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.”

Like a body adapting to starvation, you rationed expectation, postponed pleasure, concentrated on the little you could control in your unkempt lethargy, and thought sympathetically of the worse-off, if in an abstract sense.
For best not to think too much about the businesses being ruined, the proudly independent people being reduced to mendicants, and the volunteers battling on, with nothing to see for their efforts.

Best not to brood on the educations being undermined, the married couples buckling, the elderly dying alone, the debts being accumulated for future generations to pay for.

Best not even to enquire too deeply into how others were faring, lest you touch on a sore spot or pick a disagreeable theme.

Some in lockdown seemed to thrive on disagreement. Me, not so much. One kept things trivial and superficial, focusing on shared irritations, which drew the day’s sting.

Instead, I grew hypervigilant around language, especially the technocratic bullshit of measures (always broad), steps (always targeted), exposure sites (always that place you had just been to) and community transmission (people living).

Remember when they were suburbs rather than LGAs? Remember when we had not “road maps” but just plans? Alas, the self-inflating propensities of bureaucratic language now preclude anything so simple.

Milestones? Always grim. Deaths of nonagenarians? Always tragic. “The science”? Always guiding. Except for the weird ­anthropomorphism of the virus, variously “cunning”, “clever”, “wicked”, “evil” etc. And who could forget crowd pleasers like “creeping assumptions” and ­Unified Security?

If largely for their own partisan reasons, people bought the idea of one masterstroke after another. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

It remains unclear what Premier Dan Andrews’ reputation as a communicator is based on, except repetition, and his crediting with more than 200 Covid press conferences.

It sounded to me like he conducted the same press conference 200 times, replete with abundances of caution, people working incredibly closely together, and instructions so full of qualifications, exceptions and caveats that one ended up feeling capable of nothing. Did anyone else try the government’s Covid helpline? I’m still on hold. But, of course, this was not the point. The standard Andrews press conference was not a public health message but a political message. Dan good. Dan strong. Dan win.

And it worked. If largely for their own partisan reasons, people bought the idea of one masterstroke after another. There would follow the ritual hoisting of the #DanYay pennant to the top of the Twitter mast for the choreographed mass salute, the denunciation of “traitors”.

Actually, I had to respect this antic enthusiasm, doubtless as therapeutic to the DanStans as my daily walk – so many people with so little else to do! And Matthew Guy, I mean, wow. When he arrives, as they say, it’s like someone else has left. Except that even with a shrug and a grumble, you continued feeling that weight, of curtailment, of disappointment.

So that when some self-consciously perky radio presenter or cheery columnist reminded you again of the importance of keeping positive and enjoying the little things in life, you wanted, frankly, to throw up.

You looked on with corresponding detachment as self-­indulgent lumpenmorons roamed a CBD you only vaguely recalled anyway. You’re angry, are you? Cry me a river.

So, no, let’s just say that these past two years in Victoria haven’t been a vintage period for empathy. But perhaps that goes to Covid’s harshest sting, which has been reversing the standard dynamic of crisis – an instant, by convention, for rushing to one another’s aid, for arms round shoulders, for the sharing of time and belongings.

Instead, the Newspeak of working together by staying apart, unification in isolation, anathematising every visible gathering, however innocent, however necessary. Thus possibly the nadir of lockdown, August’s playground ban, imposed under the guise of protecting children, but later justified by chief medical officer Brett Sutton as because attending adults might “hold de facto meetings” – ie, talk.

Playground equipment was wrapped in crime-scene tape as police patrolled nearby – try explaining to your children that this was in anyone’s best interests, that their very swings and slides were a source of community endangerment.

Nothing, of course, caused more anguish than the lockdown predicament of children, than watching the soi-disant “education state” idly squander irrecoverable years of development and socialisation.

This, sealed up in our homes, suffered in private, is lockdown’s ugly secret: how disciplines around screen use collapsed; how dependence on social media deepened; how kids further absorbed the message of the world being a dangerous, frightening place; how kids already anxious about body image were exposed to it daily on their Zoom screens.

These were the hardest, most exhausted conversations of lockdown, with parents of children reaching the end of Grade 1 having hardly been at school, with parents of screen-deadened teenagers now about to be whirled into VCE exams.
You looked on with corresponding detachment as self-­indulgent lumpenmorons roamed a CBD you only vaguely recalled anyway. You’re angry, are you? Cry me a river.

But here the government showed its meanest, pettiest, and frankly stupidest streak. After all, marathon press conferences are pretty easy to hold when someone else is handling the remote learning, eh?

Even the vaunted “end” of lockdown is more of a tentative first step: basically involving not much more than a few restaurant seats inside, the chance of a haircut, the repeal of a pointless curfew. More dreary days of screen-based busywork await my 11-year-old until school resumes full-time. I still can’t see my mother, in regional Victoria, or my partner, in another state. It also means suffering Andrews’ pivot from tedious admonition to old-fashioned political oiliness. He’s so proud, so thankful, so grateful, so sickening.

Seriously, what’s he got to be grateful for? We did as we were told, to avoid draconian fines for non-compliance. You might as well thank us for obeying the law of gravity.

Still, at least it’s not quite as weird as people’s professions of gratitude to Andrews for their sacrifices. That’s pure masochism.

This doesn’t feel like a moment for gratitude at all, save perhaps to frontline carers, and to supportive friends and family.

The losses have been too great for celebration; the mistakes have been too numerous for congratulation; the future is too uncertain for relief. It’s just another provisional permission slip, maybe for a slightly different walk.

GIDEON HAIGH


SENIOR CRICKET WRITER
Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for almost four decades, published more than 40 books and contributed to more than 100 newspapers and magazines. But who’s counting? He is also co-host of podcast Cricket, Et ... Read more

Covid

The Australian

Covid hysteria built on ignorance, propaganda and incompetence


JAMES ALLAN


From the start, Australia was on track to become the worst handler of the virus in the world

All the Covid hysteria around most of the democratic world, and especially in Britain, New York state, Canada and here in Australia, is driven by two main things.

The first is that many people haven’t got a clue about what the relative risks are. Ask them what they think their chances of dying would be should they catch Covid and most get this massively wrong

– a good few get the odds wrong by two orders of magnitude (answering 30 per cent when at most it’s about 0.3 per cent). And we’re talking about one’s chances of dying before being vaccinated.

Government propaganda has deliberately tried to scare people senseless and hence to distort their relative-risk assessments. That has been a clear and unmistakeable goal, including of all the daily press conferences with the breathless recitation of cases by politicians without an ounce of concern for freedomrelated issues, and by public-health types. And for once, government seems to have got something right because its Covid scaremongering has been very successful.

The second problem has been all the models relied upon by the supine political class. It started with the Neil Ferguson modelling coming out of Imperial College in London and spread out from there.

No one in the press corps seems to care that Professor Ferguson has had an unbroken track record of massively wrong predictions with his models, prophesying things that came nowhere near reality. In 2002, his models predicted 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease). In the event there were 177 deaths.

In 2005, Ferguson said up to 150 million could be killed from bird flu. By 2009, 282 people had died of it. Ferguson was also heavily involved in the modelling around Britain’s foot-and-mouth disease that led to a mass culling of 11 million sheep and cattle in 2001. That time his models predicted up to 150,000 humans would die. You guessed it. There were actually fewer than 200 deaths. And before Boris Johnson’s “Freedom Day” a couple months ago, when the British PM finally summoned up a backbone and ignored the public-health class of fearmongers, Ferguson and a small army of supposed experts (more than 1200 scientists and doctors, including the editor-in-chief of The Lancet) signed a letter predicting carnage if Boris went ahead. All their “this is a murderous, irresponsible opening up” predictions proved woefully wrong.

Ferguson, interviewed later about being off by such a huge margin, replied along the lines that it doesn’t bother him being wrong, as long as he is wrong in the right direction. Let that sink in for a moment. For him, and seemingly the vast preponderance of the modelling caste, the right direction is the one that massively overstates future bad outcomes.

You can keep your jobs no matter how badly off your predictions are, as long as you’re wrong in the overstated direction. Under-predict by even one death, though, and the fear is some pusillanimous politician will give you the axe.

That same attitude seems to be true of virtually all the modelling, including here in Australia. So many models have implausible assumptions built in, such as that no citizens left to their own devices would change any behaviour without the despotic, mailed fist of government ordering them to do so. You will try in vain to find a single model that ended up understating the bad outcomes it predicted.

So now turn to Sweden, with a population of just under 10 and half million. It never locked down at all. No small businesses were forced to close and so bankrupted (and no big businesses were thereby incredibly enriched and allowed to have bumper profits under the sort of crony capitalism that lockdowns deliver). Schools never closed. People were trusted to make smart calls. Oh wait, Sweden may have put a limit of 500 people at big events for a while. That was it.

According to the most recent data I can find, Sweden has had about 1.14 million Covid cases and 14,753 Covid deaths (a sizeable chunk of those happening early on in aged care, for which the overseeing epidemiologist, Professor Anders Tegnell, quickly admitted the country’s handling mistakes). Since May of this year Sweden has had one of the lowest rates of Covid in Europe. Its deaths per million across the whole pandemic are now low enough that the press no longer talks about Sweden. The lockdownistas do not want the country to do well.

Meanwhile, a number of British doctors are now predicting that deaths caused by the lockdowns will end up outnumbering the saved Covid deaths by 10 or 20 to 1. And this in a world where the median age of Covid deaths is higher than the country’s average life expectancy for men and for women.

It’s a world where (according to the latest Stanford study) the survival rate for the unvaccinated for these age ranges is: 0-19 (99.9973 per cent); 20-29 (99.986 per cent); 30-39 (99.969 per cent); 40-49 (99.918 per cent); and the survival rate doesn’t drop below 99.7 per cent until you get to the over-70s.

In a world with that sort of risk of dying, if you are under 70 why would you care in the slightest if someone else chooses not to get vaccinated? You started with those great odds and improved them by getting vaccinated. Give anyone under 75 a choice of whether to get Covid or cancer, heart disease or diabetes, and you’re an idiot if you don’t pick Covid.

The whole vaccine-passport mandate position (full disclosure, to have some hope of seeing my kids who live overseas I’m doublejabbed) is premised on people having no clue at all of their relative risks. Add in a dollop of “take the worst imaginable outcome modelling”. Throw in a media and press corps that is either stupid or longs for the reincarnation of Pravda. Stir. And you have Australia, readers.

We’re not the world’s best handlers of Covid. From early on it was plain we were on a trajectory to be the world’s worst. And with every year that passes, that will become ever more obvious.

James Allan is the Garrick

professor of law at the University of Queensland.

Covid versus Spanish flu

The Australian

It’s making history, but not in a good way

ADAM CREIGHTON

The US reached another “grim milestone” in the never-ending Covid-19 pandemic last week, when the number of Americans who sadly have died from or with the disease surpassed 675,000.

Cue highly politicised fearmongering.

“Covid now deadlier than Spanish flu,” blared Forbes, oblivious to the fact the US population was a little more than 100 million a century ago and the average age of those who died from the flu virus was 28.

CNN suggested “most of the deaths could have been prevented”, in the “deadliest ever pandemic to hit the US”, and that the real reason was the “staggering selfishness” of the populace.

Karl Marx said history repeated, first as tragedy, then as farce.

Comparisons of the Covid-19 pandemic with the Spanish flu are absurd, a sign of how ignorant and hysterical we have become.

John Barry’s 550-page The Great Influenza, a magnificent piece of scholarship first published in 2004, chronicles a humanitarian disaster of epic proportions, the greatest tragedy the world has seen since the plagues of the Middle Ages.

When a new influenza virus wiped out 6 per cent of a 1018-strong French army battalion, incapacitating another quarter, within days in May 1918, the world learned of the unimaginable horror in prospect.

When the British ship City of Exeter transformed into a floating morgue sailing to Philadelphia from Liverpool, a quarter of its sailors dying en route, American doctors braced for a tragedy that was about to tear through the world.

More than 50 per cent of the population of Buenos Aires died, 3 per cent of all Africa and about 17 million Indians in less than a year. Doctors had never seen symptoms so horrific, a disease so deadly.

“It is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white,” US Army doctor Roy Grist wrote, referring to the extreme cyanosis in victims that often drew comparison with the Black Death.

Unlike Covid-19, people died from Spanish flu, never with.

“Blood was everywhere, on linens, clothes, pouring out of some men’s nostrils and even ears while other coughed it up. Many of the soldiers, boys in their teens, men in their twenties – healthy normally ruddy men – were turning blue,” Barry writes of a typical scene at US Army camps in late 1918, where soldiers assembled before heading to France.

At Camp Pike in Arkansas 13,000 of the 60,000 young men stationed there were hospitalised within days. One in 67 American soldiers – more than 50,000 – was killed by the virus within a few months, more than died in the Vietnam War.

The carnage was so horrific, so sudden, many couldn’t take it. Colonel Charles Hagadorn, in charge of 40,000 soldiers at Camp Grant, where thousands died, a veteran of wars in Mexico and The Philippines, committed suicide as bodies piled up around him. In Philadelphia, the worst-hit American city, authorities sent vans around the city to collect the bodies.

Unlike Covid-19, where 95 per cent of American victims have at least four comorbidities and die around age 80, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Spanish flu killed those with the most to live for, the youngest and strongest, those starting their families. New York City quickly had to find homes for 21,000 orphans.

Australian scientist and Nobel laureate Macfarlane Burnet, decades later, put the total death toll between 50 million and 100 million, in a world with fewer than a quarter of the almost eight billion people on Earth today.

More than 5 per cent of the world’s young adults were killed by Spanish flu, Barry estimates. The virus used the host’s immune system to kill the victim; the healthier, the quicker the death.

The US in 1918 wouldn’t have noticed Covid-19, which has taken 18 months to kill 4.5 million globally (from or with), having an infection fatality rate of 0.3 per cent at most, including 0.05 per cent of those under 70.

But the contrasts don’t end there. Wartime controls prevented the press from talking about the flu to keep up morale. Fear transfixed the US anyway.

In Phoenix, Arizona, a rumour spread, unfounded, that dogs spread the virus.

“People began killing their own dogs, dogs they loved, and if they hadn’t the heart to kill themselves, they gave them to the police to be killed,” Barry writes.

Almost everyone knew someone who died. Today, the opposite is true. In May this year about half of Americans said they didn’t even know anyone with Covid-19, according to a national survey. Yet at the same time 12 per cent thought they would die if they caught it, a powerful tribute to the power of fearmongering and our servile deference to social media rather than our own eyes and ears.

There are parallels too. The illusion of control was rampant then, as now.

“The masks were useless, the vaccine was useless, the city had simply been lucky,” Barry writes of smug authorities in San Francisco, which had a late 1919 outbreak. School and workplace closures did little to halt the contagious virus, Barry concludes.

And like today, Australia emerged relatively unscathed, losing “only” about 15,000, thanks to a successful quarantine of incoming ships, some of which had lost 7 per cent of their passengers en route.

The Spanish flu changed history, helping end World War I, devastating the German army ahead of its final assault in 1918. And it laid the foundation for World War II.

In Paris for peace negotiations, US president Woodrow Wilson in 1919 resisted France’s determination to extract a punitive settlement with Germany – until he caught the Spanish flu.

Wilson’s 25-year-old aide died within days, but Wilson trudged on, conducting negotiations with French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and British prime minister David Lloyd George. France got its way, helping fuel Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.

Covid-19 also will change history, thanks to the hysterical overreaction and self-inflicted damage of measures. It won’t cause a war but it may have destroyed our liberal democratic society.

American doctors braced for a tragedy that was about to tear through the world

A child centred world

The Australian

letters Friday 6th August 2021

If censorship by big tech is alarming, then the alacrity with which some sections of Australia have embraced cancel culture is more so. We have a generation who faced the perfect storm: a child centred classroom in which woke-infused ideology is favoured over fact; a society that has replaced merit with a celebration of victimhood; and a growing acceptance that words are a form of violence.

We live in a world of child worship. While we continue to deliver exalted little princelings fresh from a child-centred home, we contribute to the problem. While we bestow endless empty praise on our children, we are creating needy adults who require constant approval. While we prioritise our children’s perpetual happiness over their development into likeable, mature adults, they will not learn how to face up to the rigours of life.

We lament the loss of debate, are horrified at the muzzling of those who disagree and are concerned about the fragility of our youth. But if we raise children who never hear the unpalatable, what else do we expect?

Gerard Baker (“What if we’re reliving the ’70s with no Reagan to save the day?”, 3/8) warned us that any reversal of the “tide of progressive hegemony” would have to start with the bottom. And so it does. With us. And with parent-centred homes.

Jane Bieger, Brisbane

The disastrous Whitlam years

The Australian 17thJuly2021

From China to Vietnam, the truth is Gough was a disaster


GREG SHERIDAN


FORMER PM BOB HAWKE
‘The (Whitlam) government became an international laughing stock’

Fifty years after Whitlam’s first visit to Beijing, it’s time to bust Labor’s myth.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese, in a landmark interview with The Australian, has pledged bipartisanship on China, human rights and national security, endorsed Washington’s view of strategic competition with Beijing, and observed that whoever is in government in Canberra will have enormous difficulty re-establishing constructive dialogue with the People’s Republic of China.

This is striking. It also represents repudiation by modern Labor of Gough Whitlam’s approach to China.

Albanese could never say that. No one in the modern Labor Party can publicly question the false god of the Whitlam China legacy.

But in foreign policy, Whitlam was an unmitigated disaster, who nearly broke the US alliance. Almost all his judgments were wrong and he earned the long-lasting enmity of our closest Asian allies.

Australians didn’t like him much either. In 1975, they subjected Whitlam to the biggest electoral landslide loss in Australian history. Bizarrely, Whitlam hung on as leader. In 1977, Australians again voted against Whitlam by essentially the same margin.

Whitlam was wrong on China in important ways. His only positive contribution was to show the Hawke governments how not to govern. Hawke’s success came from being the opposite of Whitlam.

This month is the 50th anniversary of Whitlam’s visit to China as opposition leader and the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

Whitlam’s visit has been lionised, exaggerated and blown out of all proportion in historical myth making which is epic in its inaccuracy and breathtaking in its avoidance of facts.

Whitlam was an impressive individual of great charm and wit. He was also a disastrous prime minister, perhaps the worst we ever had.

He lost control of the budget, he increased federal expenditure at grotesque rates, he summoned up inflation and he made the country so unsuccessful that for the first time since World War II, more Australians left the country than foreign immigrants came in.

He also injected ideological poison into social and cultural debates. He started off as a rightwinger but nearly lost a leadership challenge to the wildly left Jim Cairns, and after that moved ever further to the left.

Whitlam did do some good things in social policy, such as introducing universal health cover. But many of his social reforms – such as free university education taxed working class people to give benefits to middle class people and were reversed by later Labor governments.

In foreign policy, Whitlam was supremely damaging.

The Labor Party of the 1950s and 60s was heavily infiltrated by the Communist Party. ASIO concluded a number of Whitlam’s ministers were background dual members of the Communist Party. Bob Carr has written eloquently about how this infiltration made Labor unfit for government for much of the 1950s and 60s.

When he came to office, Whitlam did not behave responsibly in national security. He refused to allow Labor staffers to be subjected to the normal national security checks. His attorney-general, Lionel Murphy, refused to allow ASIO to bug Russian diplomats’ phones.

In March 1973, just a few months after Whitlam’s election, Murphy organised an extraordinary raid by the Commonwealth Police on ASIO headquarters. All confidential files were impounded, ASIO staff were kept away from their desks and assembled in the building’s auditorium.

Murphy was looking for nonexistent ASIO files on himself and on imaginary Croatian terrorism. During the 1974 election campaign, Whitlam said this raid was his greatest mistake.

Harvey Barnett, who went on to serve as ASIO director-general under Bob Hawke, and in whom Hawke had great confidence, later reflected that the raid “sent shockwaves around Australia and the Western world … Many thought the Westminster system was at risk … Usually the first action radical political regimes take in any sort of coup d’etat situation is to make a grab for the records of the security service … Australia’s overseas allies were aghast and concerned”.

Right from the start, the Whitlam government was beset by appalling indiscipline among cabinet ministers. Labor had opposed Australian participation in the Vietnam War. It is another bit of fictitious legend-making to claim Whitlam withdrew Australian troops from Vietnam. Almost all Aussie Diggers had left Vietnam by the time Whitlam came to power; only a tiny training team and a unit to guard the embassy were left. Whitlam withdrew the training team. That’s all.

The incendiary rhetoric of numerous Whitlam ministers was not merely to oppose Australian participation but to agitate in effect for a communist victory. This in a conflict where 500 Australian soldiers had died. Communist victory in Vietnam meant mass i m p r i s o n -ments in ree d u c a t i o n
camps, widespread persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, and more than 1.5 million refugees. Communist victory in Cambodia meant genocide.

Clyde Cameron, Whitlam’s minister for labour, called the US bombing of North Vietnam the most monstrous act in human history and the policy of maniacs. Another minister, Tom Uren, condemned the Americans’ “mentality of thuggery”, while Cairns called it “the most brutal, undiscriminating slaughter of defenceless men, women and children in living memory”. Whitlam had no control of his own government and this was the beginning of earning deep, and nearly disastrous, hostility in Washington.

Oddly, I became quite friendly with Whitlam for a few years when defending him against the charge that he encouraged the Indonesians to invade East Timor. I asked him once why he never discussed national security matters in cabinet, to which he replied: “Comrade, how could I discuss sensitive national security matters given the people I had in my cabinet?”

Whitlam named a couple of individuals specifically. I won’t repeat their names, but history is clear enough. Whitlam did not trust his own cabinet on national security.

Peter Edwards, in Australia and the Vietnam War, writes: “The Australian-American relationship was closer to a rupture than at any time since the signing of the ANZUS Treaty.” Subsequent historians have added striking detail. Whitlam went within an ace of destroying the US-Australia alliance, yet he is lionised in the Labor myth-making machine. It is as though Americans decided to make Herbert Hoover – a privately impressive individual, known for a time as “the great engineer” but who was a disastrous president completely overwhelmed by the Depression – as their ideal of presidential government.

The Americans waged the Vietnam War incompetently until the late 1960s but as they gave control of the combat effort to the South Vietnamese, these brave non-communists fought heroically and had every chance of national survival until the vagaries of W a t e r g a t e meant that

the Americans withdrew their promised air support. As a result, South Vietnam fell to the communists, not to a communist insurgency but to invasion by regular armoured divisions of the North Vietnamese army supplied by the Chinese.
Whitlam hated the South Vietnamese anti-communists and behaved with spectacular, almost monstrous, cruelty towards them. Thousands of Vietnamese had worked with Australian soldiers and diplomats. The Department of Foreign Affairs had no sympathy for them but even it drew up a list of 2000 who should be brought to Australia as Saigon fell. Whitlam refused, and barely 200 came.

Australian planes took off half empty as our allies and friends were left to a pitiable fate under the communists.

Whitlam said on the ABC that Australia did not want “another reactionary right-wing minority”. Foreign minister Don Willesee pleaded with him to take more. Whitlam replied: “I’m not having those f..king Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political prejudices against us.”

Whitlam opposed the entry of Vietnamese refugees, saying they stirred no sympathy in him. He added: “There will be some resentment about the people coming to Australia at a time of unemployment, and also people from a very different way of life.”

In other words, Whitlam consciously stirred up ethnic and racial prejudice against Vietnamese because he thought they might be politically hostile to Labor.

Denis Warner, the greatest Australian journalist ever to work in Southeast Asia, wrote: “The shame of Australia’s performance in the final days of the Vietnam War, and immediately thereafter, will endure for a long, long time.”

I think there was another reason Whitlam so despised the South Vietnamese. He sometimes championed the underdog in Australia, but internationally he always favoured the strong over the weak, the mighty over the meek, the many over the few, the metropolitan over the distant. Thus he favoured China over Hong Kong, Taiwan or individual human rights. He favoured the Soviet Union over the Baltic States. He even extended de jure recognition of Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic States, breaking the hearts of Australians of Baltic extraction and showing characteristically poor historic judgment, as the Baltic States are all now independent of Moscow.

He favoured Indonesia over East Timor. He favoured the many Arabs over the few Israelis.

Whitlam flattered the powerful; the less powerful found him disagreeable. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew in his memoirs records an arrogant and pretentious Whitlam, often ignorant of the way the region worked. Lee describes Whitlam as “a sham white Afro-Asian” and says it was a relief for Singapore when Whitlam left the prime ministership.

Some of Whitlam’s behaviour was truly grotesque. He personally commissioned Bill Hartley, a radical and disreputable figure who for years took payment from Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya, to seek electoral funds for Labor from the Iraqi Ba’ath party of Saddam Hussein. Whitlam got no money and tried to keep the operation secret. When it came out, he was condemned by the ALP national executive. Two of his former ministers, John Wheeldon and Kim Beazley snr, vowed never to serve on a frontbench led by Whitlam.

Equally bizarre was the loans affair, in which the Whitlam government authorised Tirath Khemlani as its agent. Hawke in his memoirs wrote that Whitlam was “conned by this unimpressive little shyster” who claimed he could raise billions of dollars for national infrastructure. Even after resources minister Rex Connor’s authority to use Khemlani was withdrawn, he kept on, with Whitlam’s tacit approval.

Hawke’s judgment? “The Australian (Whitlam) government became an international laughing stock.”

Whitlam’s 1971 visit to Beijing was good for him in domestic Australian politics. By pure luck he was there a week before Henry Kissinger was there as Richard Nixon’s envoy. Kissinger’s visit had nothing to do with Whitlam but it contributed to the utterly provincial legend of the Whitlam visit as a historic breakthrough.

Whitlam was a great talker, and a few days sounding off in Beijing in front of awe-struck Australian journalists was perfect for him. The former Harvard academic, Ross Terrill, who was with Whitlam at the time, suggests Whitlam at times didn’t know what the Chinese were talking about, thinking they meant Japan when they were referring to the Soviet Union. Terrill makes the more serious charge that because Whitlam was desperate to get the victory of reciprocal diplomatic relations, he negotiated an extremely bad outcome for Australia’s ability to pursue its legitimate interests with Taiwan, a poorer outcome, Terrill says, than more hard-headed countries got.

Extending diplomatic recognition to Beijing was rendered more complex by the CCP’s active support for communist insurgencies throughout Southeast Asia. It was partly solidarity with Southeast Asia which made Canberra hesitant.

Once the Americans decided to establish diplomatic relations with Beijing, it was absolutely inevitable that we would do the same. We were neither pioneers, nor laggards. We got absolutely no extra benefit out of Whitlam’s visit. The real pioneer in the China relationship was Bob Hawke, who saw its economic potential.

Whitlam’s visit instilled in the Labor Party a lot of bad ideas about China diplomacy – that it requires grand gestures, and historic vision; that China is an opaque enigma of mystery and riches to be magically unlocked by the right combination of incantation, gesture and obeisance.

In fact, China is just another very difficult country, best worked at steadily and quietly, and in this John Howard was the gold standard. Whitlam was a majestically talented and well motivated Australian. He was an utter disaster as prime minister.