A review of the book by Geoffrey Blainey

Triumph of the Nomads: A History of Aboriginal Australia

Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1976

In this detailed review of Blainey’s book the reader is treated to the process by which we enlighten our minds with the very same tools designed to draw down the blinds. Books of fawning anthropological primitive worship are intended to distort the record of human achievement and might drive some free thinkers to seek their banishment. However, as demonstrated by Quinn in his brilliant dissection of a book dedicated on its face to fostering misconception, the men and women who investigate previous lives and times are laboring under such inculcated delusion, that they do not necessarily engage in falsification but rather a religious obligation to their cult of guilt.

Quinn is demonstrating in his excellent article the fact that such books are like literary mines which have not been worked, simply shafted and braced, as if precious things had been located and a means constructed for their extraction, only to have the mine abandoned after a brief survey. The material I have extracted for the Plantation America series has come from three types of sources:

-1. Primary: Period sources written in the era under study

-2. Secondary: Modern sources out of establishment academia fraught with false assumptions and conclusions born of indoctrination into a simple secular mythology.

-3. Tertiary: Modern sources seeking the truth. This last source is by far the slimmest. If I were to avoid using deluded secondary sources I would, to follow the mining metaphor, be digging in the dark by candlelight, laboring without the lamp left foolishly behind.

As to the specific value of the study of aboriginal infanticide, murder and cruelty, these facts illustrate the fact that slavery, in its emergent pre-agrarian form, was an act of kindness, a staying of the executioner’s hand at least. It has been routinely demonstrated that the cruelest primitive people in human knowledge were the Aborigine people of Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea and Micronesia. Most other races of pre-agrarian folk treated their slaves better than they would be treated in agrarian and industrial societies, and certainly better than the postmodern slave is treated. For more on this see my 2019 book Paleface.

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