PwC was hired by the Victorian Treaty Advancement Commission to help determine who was an elder. After consulting 201 elders in 19 workshops, '80 per cent of those consulted wanted a way to challenge spurious elders'. This which not only turned out to be impossible, it called into question just how reliable were the 201 elders consulted in the first place!
Australia’s 'educated classes', asserts William J Lines in Romancing the Primitive, have lost their faith in the virtues of Western civilisation. Trapped in a zero-sum paradigm, social justice warriors view the past as a 'purely moral drama of villains and victimhood' and have, accordingly, 'idealised Aboriginal life beyond recognition'. We have come a long way from the liberalism of First Fleet observer Watkin Tench
This book is about civilisation’s discontents, those who have idealised people outside of civilisation, imagining they lead happy, fulfilling lives at peace with one another and in harmony with the world around them. For most of this time, romanticising this ‘other’ constituted one strand in the thick rope of Western thought and reflection and knowledge