Nine’s Today Show report Brooke Boney has said she doesn’t want to celebrate Australia Day because the arrival of the British was “the beginning of – what some people would say – the end.”

“I can’t separate the 26th of January from the fact that my brothers are more likely to go to jail than school,” Boney said. “Or that my little sisters and my mum are more likely to be beaten or raped than anyone else’s sisters or mum. And that started from that day.”

Whose fault is it that aboriginal men commit crime? Whites. Whose fault is it that aboriginal men fail to go to school? Whites. Whose fault is it that aboriginal women are more likely to be beaten and raped (normally by other aboriginal men)? Whites.

It seems for Boney, all the evils started from 26 January. I guess before the arrival of the British the aboriginal culture was all sunshine, rainbows and lollipops.

Not so, according to Missionary John Brown Gribble, who dedicated his life to caring for the Aboriginal people. Gribble described their condition prior to contact as “savagery of the lowest type.”

“As the lowest savages they lived, without clothes, without care, without trouble for temporalities, subsisting on the simple products of nature without let or hindrance. Morally they were extremely dark–so dark, indeed, as scarcely to possess any idea or concept of anything superior to themselves.”

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