I did not intend to imply you were the originator but merely a subscriber to what has become a very widespread and somewhat standardised collection of disparate untruths about Australia and its history.
Different cultures conceptualise and articulate their own behaviour in different - often convoluted - ways. That is not what I was talking about. I was talking about the universal human feeling of outrage experienced when someone takes what one feels is rightly one's own. Because of their different cultures, the Aborigines saw the fish as being rightly theirs, but could not conceive of mobile land animals like sheep with apparent minds of their own being subject to the will of humans. But the reaction to having what they believed to be rightly their own property stolen was the same as that experienced by Europeans in corresponding though different circumstances. Uncultured human babies and even non-humans like chimps share the trait of experiencing outrage when someone tries to take something away from them they regard as theirs.
I don't know about your primary point, but the bit I was responding to was: "Aborigines were an embarrbuttment hanging around because they reminded him he had taken their livelihood away from them. When they speared his cattle it seemed like a good reason to shoot them and contagion their water. It didn't have to be that way but it was. You comfortable with that?"
No, I am not comfortable with that explanation any more than you were happy with Captain Cook's explanation for the NQ aborigines reacting the way they did to the poaching of fish.
I think the Abos who were prone to stealing unattended objects would have been viewed more as nuisances (like dingoes or foxes) than "an embarrbuttment". The reaction to having cattle speared would have been one of intense anger, not just a jolly good reason to shoot them and contagion their water the way you make it sound. You make it seem like the herdsmen were just sitting around bored lookinig for something to do. In fact their whole future depended on being productive enough with their herd to pay back the money borrowed to finance its purchase. Many of those earlier herdsmen were Scots who would see no alternative but to commit dissolution if they were unable to repay their debts. To them, not sitting idly by while someone end their livestock was literally a matter of life and rest. Also the severe shortage of women in early Australia meant that only successful men had much chance of finding a wife. You can't expect a man who isn't getting any younger to say: "Ah well, its only a few cattle, I'll have replaced them in 10 years as long as they don't spear any more. Forty was too young to be thinking of marriage anyway."
Which shows that an unsympathetic observer could just as easily see "racism" in the behaviour of the non-whites *if he wanted to*. The fact that "anti-racists" refuse to see it is exactly that - their deliberate refusal to see what they don't want to see and nothing more. Overall it reinforces my larger point that "racism" is a bogus, not real, explanation for so much of what has happened in our history.
I was talking about the way they related to each other, not their alleged ideas of "law and property rights" which are culture-specific. Indeed, the very idea of "rights" was probably alien to the common people of most 18th century cultures in the region.
