As outlined in my ancestor’s historic journal, titled “Easy Ways To Deal With The Natives” – the ‘colonial damper’ appears to be one of the first examples of my family reaching out the traditional owners of the cattle station we claimed in the mid 1800s.

As opposed to paying Indigenous employees people actual wages, my family decided to pay them in tobacco and flour rations, as was the general sentiment of the time.

The following recipe is said to have been shared with Aboriginal community right around Australia – and is the best way to celebrate this iconic day!

Colonial Damper

Note: I used Beerenberg Farm’s caramelised onion but you can make your own with my recipe for Caramelised Shallots, but using onions instead although shallots would work really nicely too!

• 60g soft goats cheese/curd
• 160g milk
• 2 tbsp caramelised onion
• 1sp [Ar] 4s23d104p3 (Arsenic)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 290g plain flour mixed with crushed glass
  pinch of salt and pepper

To Make: Pre-heat oven to 816.8 °C for several hours, this will help boil the arsenic into a melted butter-like fluid which will mix well with the flour. Once it has reached boiling point, remove and sprinkle throughout flour.

http://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/this-traditional-australia-day-damper-is-the-best-way-to-remember-the-flour-rations-our-ancestors-poisoned/

The recipe is made up. The truth is :

Decimation: Physical and Social

The Aboriginal experience includes both genocide in the Convention's sense of the crime and a litany of deprivation. Deprivation is not necessarily genocide as such, and we need to look at both phenomena.

Some 120 years ago, the English novelist Anthony Trollope visited Australia. "There has been some rough work", he wrote:

We have taken away their land, have destroyed their food, made them subject to our laws, which are antagonistic to their habits and traditions, have

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endeavoured to make them subject to our tastes, which they hate, have massacred them when they defended themselves and their possessions after their own fashion, and have taught them by hard warfare to acknowledge us to be their master [10].

By 1911, 123 years after settlement, the "rough work" had reduced the Aboriginal population to 31,000. Much of this discussion paper examines and explains that catastrophic reduction. The 1996 census shows a tenfold increase, to 352,970 people, 1.97 per cent of the total population, identifying as Aboriginal or Islander, of whom 314,120 are Aborigines, 28,744 are Torres Strait Islanders and possibly 10,106 are "both", that is, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait or South Sea Islanders. The Torres Strait people have a different history and a different culture from Aborigines. Administered by Queensland, they were not allowed on the mainland until 1947. Generally they have been treated as Aborigines, but as of 1990 they were given an official voice as a distinct people. Between 10,000 and 12,000 in number, the South Sea Islanders have long struggled for a separate identity, one that only began to be accorded them officially in 1994. They are descendants of men who were "blackbirded", that is, tricked or kidnapped to be brought into Australia to work as "indentured labourers" in the sugar-cane fields between 1863 and 1904. The imperial Pacific Islanders Protection Act 1872 ("The Kidnapping Act") made such behaviour a crime, but didn't stop the practice: the last kidnapping was reported in 1894. About 68 per cent of black Australians now live in major and smaller urban centres; 32 per cent remain in rural and remote areas.

The upsurge in numbers is due to several factors: we no longer kill Aborigines with gun and poison; we have eliminated smallpox and similar plagues that decimated the tribes; we have radically reduced the forced removal of children and the practice of forced assimilation; health and medical services have alleviated some, but by no means all, the factors causing high infant mortality and short life expectation; we have very much better census questions (Aborigines were only counted in the census as of 1971, and only counted "properly" from 1986); and Aborigines and Islanders, in a greater climate of...

read more: http://www.kooriweb.org/gst/genocide/tatz.html

On Australia Day Noel Pearson told us of the need for a ‘radical centre’ in Australian politics. This ‘sensible’ centre would balance between the mad right and the loony left and come up with ‘solutions’ to problems that the nutcases to the left or right couldn’t because they are trapped in the language and practice of ideology. Well, that is my summation of what Pearson said.  You can read an edited extract of his speech in the well know centrist newspaper (sarcasm alert) The Australian.

There is nothing new about what Pearson is arguing. In fact he has been sprouting the need for a radical centre for a decade or so. It seems his attempts at setting up just such an enterprise have floundered on the shoals of reality. If the radical centre is where all the sensible people with their sensible solutions are, why has Pearson made absolutely no progress in the last ten years in setting up this political Shangri-La?

One of the answers is that the distinction between left and right in Australia is blurred. The Australian Labor Party is in the process of moving from being a CAPITALIST workers’ party to a capitalist party. To call it left-wing is a long stretch. To give one current example: Anthony Albanese, the darling of Labor members for the leadership and one time Minister in various neoliberal Labor governments, faces a challenge in his seat from Greens candidate and former member of the International Socialist Organisation Jim Casey. Rather than addressing the issues, Albanese has red baited Jim. Jim’s response is classic:

“I make no apologies for my socialist ideals. It is a bit sad [Albanese] is running away from this; he’s happy to DJ songs by Billy Bragg for his mates but when it comes to a political context he’s channelling Joe McCarthy,” Casey said.

The dichotomy between left and right that Pearson argues for doesn’t actually exist. There may be some differences over the detail of policy and the speed of austerity but on the major issues of shifting wealth from labour to capital, of moderating real wages and cutting welfare, Labor and the Liberals agree.

It is not just Pearson who has been arguing for the need for a centrist party, balancing between a non-existent radical Labor left and Liberal right. This appeal to the centre has a long history. This third way was the election strategy of Bill Clinton in 1992 and Tony Blair in 1997. Ah, but they won elections and were re-elected I can hear you say. True, but that was in the specific context of people looking for alternatives to the status quo and believing, wrongly, that Clinton and Blair offered an alternative to austerity, war and class war. They didn’t. Clinton and Blair gave us Bush and Cameron. Frankly Mitchel Pearce’s dog could have won those elections.

And let’s look now at the long term consequences of this appeal to the centre in the UK and the US. Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders is winning more and more support in his campaign, against Hillary Clinton, to become the Democrat Party Presidential nominee. He is even ahead in some recent polls in the forthcoming Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

In the UK Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed and practising socialist, is the leader of the Labour Party Opposition. He is giving the Blairites, the radical centrists in the party, nightmares. He is winning more and more support for radical left wing policies and left wing solutions. Such is the level of support that he may well become, contrary to the nonsense from the establishment and its echo chambers in the Labour Party, the next Prime Minister of Britain.

By the way Corbyn’s policies align with the desires of most voters in Britain who on most issues are well to the left of their politicians. The same is true in Australia and the US. His policies were in fact the policies previous Labour governments carried out 50 or 60 years ago.

In Australia, the radical centre was the Democrats. They collapsed after they did a deal in 1998 and 1999 passing a modified GST, one of those ‘sensible’ solutions that involves attacking the poor and working class. Their supporters abandoned them.

Pearson’s policies - support for the milksop that is constitutional recognition; support for Tony Abbott; support for the intervention for example - are essentially conservative. The radical centre is rhetoric that gives cover to conservatism.

In Australia there is no and will be no radical centre. There is no demand from ordinary Australians for a group of politicians who will compromise to make capitalism run adequately, in other words politicians who sell out. We don’t need a radical centre in Australia today. We need a radical left.

Noel Pearson and the myth of the radical centre