BE GLAD IT WAS THE BRITISH
It is, of course an article of faith amongst Aboriginal activists and the grievance industry generally to see ... the running up of the Union Jack by Phillip on that day as the beginning of the end, the start of an invasion, one that would lead to the subjugation of the first inhabitants and the destruction of their culture and way of life.Leo Maglen asks: what do the activists think would have happened to Aboriginal Australia if the British had NOT colonised the continent. Be grateful, because there is no way a land occupied by tribes with no technology and an essentially Stone Age culture would have been left to them.
What this view overlooks, of course, is that such an ‘invasion’, or even a succession of them, was inevitable. On no other continent have the original inhabitants been successful in holding on to their lands and traditional ways of life. Through waves of invasion, conquest, migration, settlement, by people ever more technologically and organisationally advanced, similarly nomadic hunter-gatherers either adapted, or were forced into ever more remote, inaccessible and inhospitable terrain, as in Asia, Africa and the Americas, or driven to extinction, as in Europe and the Middle-East...
So it if hadn’t been the British, it would have been someone else, or a bunch of others, contesting the terrain, carving it up, claiming it as their own...
No-one else in the region, the Papuans, the Javanese, the Japanese or the Chinese, for example, felt so inclined or had the logistics to invade the place. Otherwise, presumably, they would have done so ages before...
By the modern era, therefore, it was most likely that it would be a European maritime power that would do it and, of those, there were only four other real contenders – the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch and the French...
The Spanish and the Portuguese had a record for being less enlightened and more despotic colonisers than the British ever were, and their legacy in the lands they did conquer has not been as stable, democratic or economically as successful...
Had [the Dutch] done so, then perhaps Australian settlement would have been much more like that of the Afrikaaners in South Africa, where they did put down roots, with all that would have entailed, particularly for the original inhabitants...
The French, of course, have had a different attitude to de-colonization to that of the British. They, the French, have been most reluctant to give up any of their colonies, and in those in which the locals have not been able to force them out, they remain to this day, as they do in nearby New Caledonia and French Polynesia....
The other possibility, already mentioned, is that the continent of Australia could easily have been not a single nation, but one divided into competing European colonies, with all the likelihood of frontier disputes and inter-colonial wars.... Not having to share a land border with another nation has bestowed upon us huge benefits, especially in the areas of defence, quarantine, customs, immigration and in terrorism prevention. Australia is its own customs union, free-trade area and common currency block. It has only one official language and a unified legal system...
So, all in all, the country could have done worse than have Arthur Phillip plant the Union Jack on its soil 226 years ago. Although they didn’t appreciate it at the time, Phillip probably gave the first inhabitants as good a chance of surviving in, and adapting to, the global world as any ‘invader’ could have given them, and the waves of immigrants that subsequently came, and are still coming, to these shores, a much freer, safer, fairer, equitable, open, tolerant and prosperous place in which to start a new life than might otherwise have been the case.
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/be-glad-it-was-the-british/news-story/06d326132cf8480e7717019a9d97a6cd
