A New Class of Australians - Aboriginal People of Distant Descent
At Dark Emu Exposed we are getting a steady stream of tip-offs from readers who are sending us details of people who they suspect are ‘fake’ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
In some of these cases we have been able to determine that these suspects indeed appear to be ‘fake’ in the sense that we can find no genealogical evidence that they are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent.
These suspects in question also never provide any independent and convincing evidence to defend themselves and support their own claims that they are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. They just go silent when we expose them, which seems to support our results that they are most probably just ‘fakes.’
Another category of person that is beginning to emerge however, are those Australians who can, under our current convention of the 3-Part Rule, claim to be of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent, where their claimed ancestry arises from only one, part-Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestor. This is an ancestor who they have identified as being from a number of generations way back, usually a single, part-Aboriginal grandparent or X-great-grandparent.
These people were referred to by the academics Watt and Kowal in 2019 as New Identifiers who, ‘were more likely to believe their ancestors – known and unknown – played an active role in defining their identity…[and] were particularly drawn to Indigenous ancestors, it would appear, because they seemed to offer them a sense of deep belonging to the Australian continent, a holistic spiritualism, and a meaningful family history’.
In principle and in normal times, how individual people and their families identify themselves in terms of ancestry is entirely their own business. However, these are not normal times and, as the country enters into The Voice debate and the referendum, the times will become decidedly abnormal.
The widely accepted egalitarianism of Australian society, and the democratic tradition of one person-one vote that Australians have come to consider to be desirable and normal will be challenged by the rise of what we call the Distant Descent Aboriginal. These are a New Class of people who are leveraging their political and economic position as a result of race-based public funding, grants and special political favours. They are part of the 3% of Australians who can trace their ancestry back to at least one ancestor who was resident on the continent, or its offshore islands, before 26 January 1788.
The other 97% of us Australians will begin to realise that we will be in an inferior economic and political position merely because we, or all our ancestors, only arrived in Australia after 26 January 1788.
At Dark Emu Exposed we are deeply worried about the political rise of this New Class of Australian, the Aboriginal people of Distant Descent.
In our opinion, just because you have found a distant ancestor who you identify as being Aboriginal, doesn’t make you ethinically or culturally a ‘real’ Aboriginal person. You are completely entitled to believe that you are, but that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to believe it as well.
It seems to us, that this New Class of the Distant Descent Aborigine, those that have recently become ‘people that identify as Aboriginal’, are not ‘real’ Aboriginal people in the sense most mainstream Australians understand. We can see that these Distant Descent Aborigines don’t have language and they don’t have a large network of Aboriginal kin. They don’t know or practice a distinct Aboriginal culture and neither did their parents or grandparents, who also invariably didn’t believe that they were Aboriginal, culturally or politically, either.
In effect, these Distant Descent Aboriginal Australians are culturally and ethnically the same as the rest of us - they only speak our language - our distinct Australian English - they live by our customs and laws, and ethnically they are a mixture of races and cultures - predominately Australian, European and Asian - exactly like the rest of us. Their only difference is that they have a ‘drop’ of Aboriginal or Torres Strait islander ancestry.
Politically however, they think they can ‘shake the rest of us down’ by leveraging their ‘part-Aboriginality’ to form a New Class to lord over the rest of us. It’s a free country and they are quite entitled to ‘have a go’, but similarly, the rest of us are quite entitled to have a laugh at their antics and ignore their demands. We are completely entitled to push back politically if we so decide.
In our opinion, just to call yourself a ‘proud’ [insert tribal name here] man or woman doesn’t make you Aboriginal. Instead, we just see you as a New Political Class that is coalescing around the financial pot of $30 billion per year that is provided by the tax-payer for ‘Aboriginal Affairs’.
The political power that will also become available to this New Class, should the Voice proposal be passed in the referendum, will only accelerate the number of Australians trawling through the archives looking for a part-Aboriginal ancestor, someone who will thus provide the membership certificate needed for entry into this New Class of Aboriginal people of Distant Descent.
At Dark Emu Exposed, we have started a number of new research programs into the genealogy of some of these Distant Descent Aborigines and the results should make interesting reading and conversation.
So stay tuned!
