Sunday 9 December 2007

Always With the Negative Waves, Man.


For any abused Koori women and children to be able to deal effectively with their tormentors, the groovy assistance of Oddball and his Sherman tanks would certainly give them an edge.



In the 1970’s cheeseball comedy drama film ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ set during World War ll, a motley crew of allied soldiers come together to steal a large amount of gold bullion from a bank behind German lines, as you do. If you have to have a crew make sure it’s motley, I always say. There’s a scene where twenty years before Haight-Ashbury, Oddball, an American proto-hippie tank Commander, played wonderfully by a bearded Donald Sutherland, is reprimanded by one of his crew for his seemingly flaky and relentless optimism.

Myself I prefer seeing things as they are or could be which is not always a matter of negative or positive per se, though it often is, but both or none. In short, facing the world and reality as an adult.

Aah, the negative and the positive of mind are defined by their explanatory styles.  It’s the difference mebbe between seeing everything as either an impossible hurdle or someone else’s fault, or alternatively as a challenge to be relished. It’s also the confidence to see that its effect upon you is something that you can control or can't. To me, the left is one big negative wave of passive and unproductive victim hood, blame and envy, except for the active radical infiltration of everything.

Sutherland as Oddball, answers after a cool and languid pause to the now twitching and red faced compadre, “Always the negative waves, Moriarty, always with the negative waves”. Oddball drives his men to fulfil the mission by concentrating their “positive” thoughts.

That’s when said mission is not collapsing into fiasco due to failure of said happy smiley’s to deliver. Now Oddball is the only hippie in WWll, and he's also fiendishly innovative and effective. Aah, the irony piled upon irony. Sadly, hippie standards I believe, have declined somewhat since the fall of Berlin. And quite frankly, I like the cut of Oddballs jib, yes I do, and that's from someone whose run over several hippies and thinks the film is mostly a crock of lame-o baloney. Yet I can never hear, read or contemplate anything about ‘negativity’ or 'positivity' without thinking of that particular moment and of those lines.

“Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?” Oddball.

“Crap!” Moriarty.

Also consider how assertive action can trump and destroy foolish emphasis on emotions first. So it was when I heard someone on ABC radio say around October, on another typically context and depth free news item, that an important reason for the aboriginal malaise and allied problems is that the Howard government had “a negative attitude” to Aboriginals. Especially with various government officials and some other too rare individuals speaking about changing the methods that over several decades have gone some way to creating said spiral of dysfunction.

“The difference between a stupid man and a wise one is the stupid man's inability to calculate the consequences of the action. The same goes for government”. Brian Penton, journalist.

While a flaky style of optimism worked out pretty well for Oddball in the movie, sadly, in the eternal playtime of activism, things haven’t worked out that way regards the massed cast of real oddball extras straight from Central Casting and their combined effect on Koori society. That’s right, folks, Aborigines are real people who may just want the same standard of living as say, any inner-city Michael Leunig fan. Few humans enjoy living in a cultural museum, no matter how many residents of Brunswick and Carlton find the fantasy of it all so romantic, er, but without the slightest intention of actually living it themselves.

Very few left luvvies appear to actually want to do anything practical to change the lot of Aboriginals as business, education and private property solutions that work for everyone else seem to never occur to them as things for most aboriginals too, whom they see as kind of helpless souls entirely different to er, them. Um, I don’t believe any uni grad boob would let a Koori tell them how to live especially as an eternal victim and thus very badly. Nope, said boob’s idea is to keep a handy pet victim forever and as just that. It’s their own personal voodoo doll for criticizing any allegedly conservative government, Western culture and in the end Labour too, if they ever dare to change their own rotten status quo. Aah, just wait to see if Islam makes some disastrous inroads into Koori culture like L.A gangster junk has and for many of the working class too.

“The best way to help the poor is not to become one of them”. Lang Hancock the mining magnate.

“Er, send me a couple of thousand inner-city frauds, a hundred thousand activist freaks high on fun slogans sans any responsibility n' Quality Control and plenty of socialist professional misfit aboriginals all angry and permanently out of their depth, thanks”.

Earnest activism is always such an unsexy drag, especially when you realize that a large part of the Australian sense of humor is simpatico to aboriginal humor. After more than thirty years of ever diminishing returns on the steady incline to full-blown Koori disaster, it still doesn’t seem to publicly worry a lot of those who say loudly how much they care when they demand more of the same disastrous failed policies.

“Hey, what do we want?! More of the same! When do we want it? Now and forever!”

Where's the outrage and urgency from the left for any immediate and realistic action regards ending the abuse of Koori children? Like they would expect for their own children. Hey, if we just send out positive vibes, everything should work out just fine. Thus the utterly bogus, meaningless and self-reverential sentimental narcissism of the mass Sydney Harbor Bridge walk. I’m afraid that intentions, however er, 'good' they may seem even if only for you, can count in harsh reality about as much as parsley.

“Crazy! I mean like so many positive waves maybe we can't lose! You're on!” Oddball.

Half a million or more deluded fantasists 'takin’ it to the bridge' but not for any actual physical achievements like education, infrastructure, professional training, medical standards or child welfare services. Nope, not one of those things but the two drivel words of “sorry” and “reconciliation”. Um, all very sentimental but what happens then? Er, too late folks! All the Saints and Saviours have gone to a nice café to feel pretty damn good about themselves. So basically nothing.

“But don’t it feel good? I’m walking on sunshine, who-oh!”

Gee, didn’t Fred Hollows DO something very specific and focused regards his eye specialist work, not just um, feel something? But it’s all about feelings, passions, moral vanity and self regarding cant, innit? The inner-city café set saves the world one bumper sticker at a time. It’s funny how little Noel Pearson’s support for John Howard's NT intervention is taken seriously if it registers at all. I guess he’s not the ‘right kind’ of aboriginal spokesman and activist. He’s sincere, imperfect, moral, clear spoken, pragmatic and has no Che’ the child killer Guevara T-shirt affectations as far as I can tell. Which is ironic, because every pin head against the intervention in aboriginal communities and for the neo-apartheid of tribal “self determination” as it’s so fraudulently termed, is ipso facto for child rapists and killers continuing unhindered.

“A Sherman tank can give you an edge”. Oddball.


This whole empty posturing minus any action plan beyond pend more taxpayer money, is perfectly illustrated by a dull and entirely predictable cartoon by the neurotic, relentlessly deluded Michael Leunig at ‘The Age’ newspaper, for Wednesday December 05. Newspaper is it? How can ya tell?

It’s a classic and unintentional parody of moral inversion, of intent and posture as a replacement for actual measurable achievement. it shows five panels of a liberal [conservative] politician saying he won’t say “Sorry”. Riiight. The lefts Marshall Plan is parroting a single word. The last panel has our hero responding to his wife’s greeting of “How was your day darling?” with “It was a day of successful achievement and positive visionary enterprise as usual, thank you dear”.

Aah, the automatically smug disdain for the comic relief of genteel speech patterns, always ripe for chuckles and an easy bohemian rebel credit. So for Leunig the drag king, the definition of empirical action is either beyond him, bogus or can be replaced entirely by either not saying sorry, or saying sorry. Whatever. Much if not all of the passions of the left are abstractions built in a stratosphere of conceit and an imaginary future wonderland . “Imagine no possessions; it’s easy if you try”. Yep, it’s easy to be in favor of anything if you ain’t paying for it.

“Keep your hands off a my stash”, is a little more like it.

Why don’t the left apologize for the damage of over thirty years of what has been their own damaging socialist policies inflicted on aboriginals? Hmmmm? Instead, the PM of the last eleven years should apologize on behalf of whom and for what exactly? Isn’t that what your mother used to say? “Now you’ve said you’re sorry, but what are you sorry for?” Apologizing for all of random history is essentially irrational, absurd and meaningless. Hey, that’s leftism for ya.

“May as well be here we are, as where we are”. Koori saying.

“Those who lose dreaming are lost”. Koori proverb.


And many Kooris are exactly here, according to the ‘The Victorian Government Indigenous Affairs Report 2006-2007’.

It found: "Aboriginals died on average 17 years younger than non-indigenous Victorians, were more vulnerable to crime, poverty and chronic disease. The cycle begins at birth, with lower birth weight.

Koori kids are nine times more likely to be exposed to child abuse and 40% live in single parent families. Less than one quarter finish high school and 14% don’t make it past year 9.

Education deficiencies soar into later life, limiting job prospects and income. More than half of households are on low incomes and Kooris have twice the unemployment rate. They are 12 times more likely to be imprisoned and 3 times the chance of being murdered".

From The Melbourne Herald Sun Friday December 07 2007.



Er, this is a self perpetuating low lifestyle or more accurately a deathstyle. Life worth living has everything to do with action taken and not taken, education, attitude, expectation, standards, opportunity, values, principles and social environment etc.

It has NOTHING to do with saying sorry, or making vast tracts of land available but under native title,so that no individual Koori can own or use it for their own initiative or private enterprise, like er, everyone else. It also has nothing to do with the bankrupt ideologies of Leftism or the romantic delusions of urban white people. It's about the last several decades of policy that the left and many alleged conservatives seem to not only want to keep, but reinforce.

It has everything to do with making it entirely natural for Aboriginals to be part of the mainstream and have all the choices that this inherently means, just like everyone else. I should be so lucky. Why are Aborigines being socially experimented on like some bizarre reinventing of a square and broken wheel? A normalized life works for anyone and abnormal one for no one at all. What an insult to a people with such a unique history of survival in a harsh land that they are viewed as somehow uniquely hapless. All the entirely successful and ordinary Koori people are that way for exactly the same reasons as any other successful person.

To see a more rounded view of Koori character, humor and enterprise, without the burdens of dysfunction, look at their incredible military service history in every conflict, their work in creating and running the network and infrastructure of the outback stations that they in large part built. When one sees healthy and happy aboriginals doing what everyone else does, are they not some of the most joyful and beautiful of people?

Any decent person should drop obsessions with dated, failed, profoundly stupid ideology not long after becoming either acne free or obtaining a mortgage, or whichever comes first. Any serious self-reflection and research should finish utterly the platitudes that see more of the same so badly affecting the lives of real human beings.

But no, I suppose we should leave gangs of ultra misfits to gang rape children, beat their women to death, inflict the barbarism of tribal law, for drunken men to prey on the weak and for corrupt and mediocre aboriginal ‘officials’ to ride a massive Gravy Train to the horizon, because that’d prove how culturally sensitive and sophisticated we are.

“The most intense hatreds are not between political parties but within them”. Phillip Adams, journalist.

Hey, and eternally ABC tenured and unreformed “I was a Teenage Communist” Phil should know. Every time I listen to LNL, it’s like Groundhog Day. “Phil Adams? Is that you?” Put out the music and strike up the band, the Philip Adams Polka... Yep, as Andrew Bolt has correctly stated, the obscene myth of the “Stolen Generations” means for many Koori women and children, an endless hell of dysfunction, failure, misery and death uninterrupted by PC spooked authorities.

Robert Manne, the curious propagandist and disingenuous tenured ABC hack, said there were at least 100,000 Koori victims of a genocide that never happened. Yet he cannot present 10 names and has produced little to no documentary evidence to back this up. But hey, he’s done pretty well out of the whole aboriginal industry, eh.

Bunk helps no one except the parasitical liar industry. It damages the confidence of people and society, especially the young and all for nought.

Today I read how boxing Champ Anthony Mundine thinks the Olympic Champion Cathy Freeman “can’t be a leader” because she works for “corporations”. Aah, the corporation is shorthand voodoo for “evil”, as it’s understood by the simple minded who are beyond understanding anything, especially the economics that they vastly benefit from.

“Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and have their shoes”. Anon.

A corporation is a naturally occurring business entity that was once a small busines in a capitalistic democracy. It’s no more evil than a sports team, a microwave oven or the tax code. The tax code is diabolical, not evil. So Tony the Mundane is so swollen with ideological flatulence, he thinks Cathy Freeman's personal or professional success being wanted by big, effective business is a failure. Er, no. Having nothing to offer because you’ve never achieved anything therefore being entirely unwanted, is failure, and a failure to even try. Why does any Koori have to be not merely a free individual, but a boring “representative” of a race anyway?

So, it’s all about some kinda conformity really, right? Er, tribalism sucks. It’s the original conformist concept. That’s why I never joined the Oak Park Droogs. Of course sometimes the tribe is all you've got, sometimes it's a great, warm family that works like a natural organism, but mostly it's a burden and something to escape from.  I often wondered why so many traditional and tribal peoples could adapt in their isolated world but never really change and progress. There must have been many rebels and individuals who thought of a new, different or better way of doing things. Must have. So what happened if anything? Tribes pretty much depend on everyone conforming for their very survival, so I imagine any Edison or James Dean of the wilderness would have been a fairly unwelcome.

“Shoot straight you bastards. Don't make a mess of it”.
Harry (Breaker) Morant, executed soldier and poet.



Hey, it’s a not a novel idea to indoctrinate people with the irrational political and economic fantasies of a morally collapsed and reality free left. It’s been happening in the USA at least since Wilson in 1913, FDR, LBJ,, the 60's and &0's ad nauseum. Its welfare and the “Culture of Complaint” as Robert Hughes called it and a major part of the destruction of the black family in the US. Add drugs, alcohol and promiscuity, violence and the 'black Muslim' movement, and you’re livin’ the dream.

‘Be careful who your heroes are’. Manufacturing Dissent.

“Ordinary people need to lead and not sit there and think that governments are going to spoon feed them”. Ian Kiernan, organiser of Clean up Australia Day.

“There is nothing so costly to the state as a ruined life”. Catherine Spence, social and political reformer, writer and teacher.


The answer for Kooris are the same as for everyone else and it isn't strange and isolated tribalism. Its individual freedom and responsibility, private property rights, education, health and protection under the law. Responsibility, eh? I knew there was something I forgot to have. So, whatever you do, take my advice, but don’t copy my failure.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice". Dr Sidney Freedman from M*A*S*H.

Aah yes. The rhetorical shit Storm. “Aboriginals have been here 40,000 years etc”. Er, I’ve never met one that old. A forty seven year old Koori has been here exactly as long as I have. And being a struggling er, artist type, I’ve been a welfare recipient as much as anyone. Well, I didn’t want to say bum.

Yep, culture, schmulture. Hey, I like culture too including mine, and I don’t always reach for my Luger whenever I hear them mentioned. My English Celtic ancestors used to cover themselves in blue woad and howl at the moon, but once we got an easily frightened parrot, my parents stopped doing this. You know, all cultures have something even if it's only disease and child brides, possessing both good and bad and so on mebbe. Even the Welsh. But all cultures are not equal.

Er, isn’t Tony Baloney Mundine a Muslim? Um, there’s no leader of Islam at all. No Pope or similar. The freaky ‘leaders’ of Islam are often self appointed nut jobs, often just the most dangerous loudmouth with the strongest faction on the block. And er, isn’t the spread of Wahhabist Islam globally, entirely due to the Saudi’s and their trillions of oil dollars?

And golly gee Paw, haven't the majority of what passes for 'moderate' Immans and more individually run Mosques in the world, nearly all been relentlessly replaced by Corporate Saudi money, pushing their Wahabist hardline or what is actually er, true Islam? For example, of Britains over 1200 Mosques, a majority are now run by an extreme Islamist, who just can't wait to cut off the heads of those that insult the filth of Islam...

Gee Tony, sounds just like a God Damned Corporate take-over to me, mate, if ever I saw one. And I'm seeing one now.

And er, isn’t OPEC like um, a Corporation thing?

Gee, Corporations are so bad because they’re a large group of people all bound by certain rules and codes of conduct for a common goal. Er, almost like a tribe but with dividends, Annual General Meetings and the shiny brochures!

Shouldn’t Tony Macaroni, maybe be kind of aware of a little of this? It’s either disingenuous, a lie or just plain dumb, but I would never say that. The past is a great place to learn, but you can’t live there. Hey, Tone! Read a book. They have words and thoughts in 'em.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. L.P. Hartley. ‘The Go-Between’.

“There is no better way of life in the world than that of the Australian. I firmly believe this. The grumbling, growling, cursing, profane, laughing, beer drinking, abusive, loyal-to-his-mates Australian is one of the few free men left on this earth. He fears no one, crawls to no one, bludges on no one, and acknowledges no master. Learn his way. Learn his language. Get yourself accepted as one of him; and you will enter a world that you never dreamed existed. And once you have entered it, you will never leave it”. John O'Grady, Irishman.


The common and repeated canard is that everything that happened in the past was terrible, malicious, state planned and a failure. While yes there were rotten, criminal, awful abuses and crimes, there was no specific public policy for this. Doing something now about the consequences of past actions is entirely different to empty abstractions that result in no good for people who are alive and being born today. When Australia was colonized, there were estimated to be about half a million Aboriginals, about the same amount as today. Er, if there was a “Genocide”, wouldn’t there surely be less people?

In the new Melbourne Museum cum pc parody there is nonetheless, a very large and interesting wall of photographs of aboriginals and mixed blood people. It’s refreshing to see such a wide range of people from accountants, country Doctors, professional soldiers, business people, boxers, from the good to villains and so on. Just like everyone, it’s a diverse portrait and a broad view of real people instead of people as a handy cipher for dreary and useless ideology. Now something went wrong to ruin and dislodge so much of normal Koori society. And that’s why the report in the ‘Swingin’ links’ under “Peter Sutton: The Politics of Indigenous Suffering” is such an insight and essential reading.

Focus on positive action and dealing effectively with any actual negatives and you can ignore the effects of laughably alleged negative waves. The answer is the removal of the true causes of the extreme and criminal dysfunctions that stop many Kooris, especially children, being the free and happy people they can be and the Australians that they damn well are.

“Alone of all the races on earth, they seem to be free from the 'Grass is Greener on the other side of the fence' syndrome, and roundly proclaim that Australia is, in fact, the other side of that fence”. Douglas Adams, Englishman.





The source for many of the quotes is ‘convictcreations.com’ and from the 1970 film ‘Kelly’s Heroes’, starring Donald Sutherland, Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Col. Robert, everytime I come here I'm amazed by the breadth of your interests, intellect and ability to cut through the crap.

GM Roper

Anonymous said...

The picture you're using is from The Dirty Dozen, not Kelly's Heroes.