Das Testament.

Any reading of the annals of human history, it’s achievements and failings, in both majestic endeavour or mean deception, will uncover the heroic alongside the cowardice of the spirit of humanity indelibly written into the texts and transcripts recorded in those annals..even an attempt to hide or disguise the facts of a moment of importance cannot be forever obscured .. there is no hiding from history.

The primary sources of Roman history are well served with examples of both. Tacitus will record with both pride in deed and shame in action those annals he has written for the elucidation of posterity. His candid revelations without fear or favour can be an inspiration to those who follow and would like to record their own interpretations of their own contemporary histories, an example most encouraging. Even the everyday chattering of the Diary of Samuel Pepys gives sublime clue to the machinations of his times.

There are those moments when researching contemporary history that certain discrepancies in what one can remember being taught in primary or secondary school can be revealed .. and revealing most alarmingly a betrayal of honour by those educators entrusted with the teaching of an accurate and honest history of one’s own State or region. The revelation of which can be more than a shock to the system. The lie about the Governing class of South Australia, in that it was a honest, well-meaning if a tad unknowlegable about Indigenous peoples and affairs .. that it had the best interests of the State and people at heart .. that the colony was run on a tight rein by competent administrators right through till the end of the 2nd WW … well .. this was a lie .. from the start to the finish .. a complete fabrication carefully constructed by theives, speilers, con-men and killers .. AND all of them the most political conservatives.

These ruling conservatives, of whom many of the streets of Adelaide are named after, used their political and financial networks to corrupt and destroy the original intentions of the Letters Patent written for the British Parliament and signed off by the King of England .. While there is but obscure evidence of unbridled corruption in the official documents, we can see within the signed off letters between the board members and their agents, some of them quite subversive, that there is the agenda of intent to profiteer from their favourable situation .. and after all is said and done, under all the pomp and ceremony of the official documents, we see nothing but a collegiate of cowboy entrepreneurs , spivs and speculators.

The entire official history is open to capricious interpretation and in dire need of total overhaul. The activities in the latter decade of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth century of shady political organisations like The National Defence League, ostensibly a lobby- group for the conservative conspiracy operating in a covert manner to block social policy, usurp the procedures of democratic governance and to frustrate fair taxation in the state.

As we go about the mundane and banal business of our everyday lives, we are sometimes suddenly, in the midst of any one of those everyday chores, in between those activities of boring methodology of habit, we are confronted with a moment of such sublime beauty .. perhaps an intrusion of natural sights, sounds or actions .. like the movement of an obscure lizard or caterpillar that attracts our eye .. or the sudden syrupy call of an obscure bird nearby .. the movement of a kangaroo if you are in the country or even some domestic animal that you have petted rubbing about your leg .. and all of a moment, putting aside those mundane chores you are doing, to either listen or look, a door of perception can open to you .. a pause to gaze through that door into an ethereal world full of distracting mystery and strange reward. A world so different to that of the everyday, that one has to hold it in abeyance so as not to be too distracted from the work at hand…a kind of pause and reset moment.

We are dreamers by nature, imaginers by desire for what can be unattainable and indeed .. given a bit of thought .. perhaps not really wanted .. but desired all the same .. a kind of sweet-sorrow .. as “the bard” would have it! But the strangest thing is, that all those visions that delight us, that provoke such emotional hunger and desire in us are really no more than an exercise of gazing into that which is already in our hearts..already inside us. Such moments happen in historical research where a flash of light can suddenly illuminate a confusing jumble of historical detail and reduce to hard-core evidence that which has been in some doubt for a long time … like the below.

Letters Patent establishing the Province of South Australia 19 February 1836 (UK) .. :
“ … Provided Always that nothing in those our Letters Patent contained shall affect or be construed to affect the rights of any Aboriginal Natives of the said Province to the actual occupation or enjoyment in their own Persons or in the Persons of their Descendants of any Lands therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives In Witness whereof We have caused these our Letters to be made Patent Witness Ourself at Westminster the Nineteenth day of
February in the sixth year of our Reign.
By Writ of Privy Seal
Edmunds”

 

In my recent research into the pioneer Germanic settlers of this region, called by some with more an eye of an acolyte’s hunger for approval than to interest of knowledge as ; ”white-bread contemporary history”, a research that has given me access to a cache of pictures and documents archived by a local historian of good research repute, I have been sifting the many pictures of schools and churches and residences of those hardy settlers .. when I came upon one picture of a group of school-children in the year of 1930, varying in age from about ten years old to mid-teens. Upon first glance, they appear to be the usual mix of grinning or scowling kids under instruction to “smile for the birdy!” .. and then I noticed one boy, mostly hidden behind the first row who looked different than the blond-haired Germanics, standing in the shadows there .. and sure enough, upon enlargement of the frame I saw that he was an indigenous child .. and going through the names so gratefully written under the pic, I see his name as ‘Mervyn Sumner” … and that is all.

Having a familiar knowledge with the surnames of many families of this region, THAT particular name did not ring any bells .. I started to research through Trove and elsewhere and there he was, sadly recorded in another state (Victoria) in a police inquiry.

(The Argus/ Melb Feb 4th 1936)
“Pending the receipt of further Information
from the South Australian authorities it is
practically certain that the half-caste aborigine
youth who died on Lock Island last week and
Is believed to have been poisoned was Mervyn
Sumner who escaped from the Edwardstown
Industrial School After the Inquest was
opened and adjourned two fruit-pickers who
arrived during the week-end stated that they
knew Sumner well. The Inquest was reopened
mid one of the pickers Identified the body as
that of Sumner. The hearing was then again
adjourned to a date to be fixed.”

(The Age/ Melb 30th March 1936)
“MILDURA.
The deputy coroner (Mr. H. F. Paul)
concluded an inquest on Saturday into
the death of a half-caste, Mervyn Sum
ner, who was found dead on 30th
January at Lock Island, Mildura. A
finding was recorded that death was due
to strychnine poisoning, but there was
not sufficient evidence to show how It
was administered.”

 

( Children in State Care Commission of Inquiry.)
“In 1921 a two-year-old boy was placed in State care until
the age of 18 for being illegitimate. When he was 14, he
absconded twice from subsidy placements and , at 15,
from the Edwardstown Industrial School . He died 11
months later in Victoria in 1936. His SWIC recorded ‘died’
and the Mortality Record Book ‘sudden – poison’. No
coronial files were held in South Australia because the
death occurred interstate.
The Inquiry obtained department files relating to the boy .
One file contained a report on absconding from the
superintendent of the industrial school, which said the boy
absconded in February 1935. The police were notified and
a warrant issued. Eleven months later, the department
received information from the police regarding an unnamed
per son dying from poisoning in Mildura . According
to an informant , the person had given himself a different name
but stated that he had come from an Adelaide orphanage .
He told the informant that he had twice previously escaped
from the orphanage and that he had no intention of
returning to SA until he turned 18. Fingerprints taken from
the deceased matched those of someone with a different
name again . A photo was then sent to the department,
which identified the boy . It appears he had used at least
two false names after he had absconded.
A newspaper article on the file refers to the circumstances of the death .
The boy had been camping on the River Murray with two
other youths. He wandered on to an island and what
happened next was not known, but later the boy came
running from trees and collapsed , saying, ‘I am dying’. He
died ‘in agony almost immediately at [the boys’ ] feet’ . The
article said that a swiftly acting poison caused the boy’s
death . The file contained no official document s following
up the circumstances of the boy ’s death .”

The above records give a lie to the Royal and Parliamentary proclamation of allowing the indigenous peoples land to be “enjoyed by such natives thereof . . . “ The deliberate actions extant in the files of The South Australia Company, to exploit both persons and land of the new colony from the beginning to the end give testament to their culpable actions to enrich themselves and their colleagues at the expense of the labouring settlers and the indigenous peoples. These so-called Administrators were nothing .. NOTHING .. more than a bunch of entrepreneurial “free-enterprise” cowboys with good connections and no idea, who found an opportune moment to be in on a good thing! .. And when it all went pear-shaped, they manipulated the situation so as to be bailed out by the British government of the day with taxpayer money yet leaving themselves still “in situ” to profiteer on their already swindled and plundered estates … no different than these times .. not the slightest difference at all.

My studies into the early and subsequent multi-culture immigrants to this country has shown a coordinated discrimination and crushing, one-culture-at-a-time, NOT necessarily by a dominant CULTURE, but certainly by a DOMINATING middle-class capital/financial system .. and THAT was and IS the ONLY flag of allegiance such entrepreneurs and swindlers fly .. it is their State, their Nation, their Empire, their Tyranny.

Starting with their own duped labourers, then the innocent indigenous peoples, then the Germanic peoples who migrated here in good trust to SA .. with the isolation & discrimination wherever possible, using poverty as a weapon of persuasion , then, when the hardiest of them all could no longer be ignored because of their success, bringing those selected from among them with the most adaptability to a “consciousness of kind” … into the tent to control the others and so on and on with the other ethnic peoples, the Italians, Greeks, Slavic peoples, Baltics, Asian and middle-eastern . . . and even now as we witness these days with certain indigenous individuals.

Each people, one ethnic group at a time .. the same procedure: invite, contain, divide, reject their culture .. introduce debt along with aspiration & expectation until cultural and financial control does the rest until capital/material obsession becomes the new culture .. with the help of those among their own who will work with and perhaps for the masters in that “consciousness of kind” cooperation.

Until those unique cultures become a pastiche of the original .. a blancmange confectionery of the real thing .. one culture at a time till we are all looking and sounding like a Dutton, an Abbott or a Hanson or a Howard. We must revive our individual cultures within our multiculturalism .. and THAT includes that most crushed of all the imported cultures : Those of the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish and including the Celts…Look now how successful the indigenous peoples are being against EXTREME oppression in holding and restoring their cultural tribes … It’s still one hell of a fight and it is one we must win!

Cultural Renaissance now!