{"id":39036,"date":"2017-07-23T01:00:47","date_gmt":"2017-07-23T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=39036"},"modified":"2017-07-13T08:55:21","modified_gmt":"2017-07-13T12:55:21","slug":"qotd-australian-aboriginal-languages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/07\/23\/qotd-australian-aboriginal-languages\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Australian aboriginal languages"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Little moments like that kept adding up, incrementally nudging me away from leftism but not yet to full conversion. In 1988, watching a John Pilger documentary with lefty friends, another such moment occurred.<\/p>\n<p>Pilger, as usual, was complaining about colonialism and racism and Aboriginal injustice, so naturally we \u2014 uniformly white, urban and privileged \u2014 were lapping it up. The documentary then shifted to the former nuclear testing site at Maralinga in South Australia, where seven British bombs were detonated in the 1950s and 1960s. Pointing to a sign warning of radiation danger, Pilger observed mournfully that it was written in several languages \u2014 \u201cbut not in the Aboriginal language\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Startled by this claim, I looked around the room. Everyone was silent, including a few who had studied Aboriginal history in considerable depth, and so must have known that Pilger\u2019s line was completely wrong. So I just said it: \u201cThere is no single Aboriginal language. And no Aboriginal language has a written form.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t last long with that bunch of friends, either. Small note to self: my comrades will deny even their own knowledge if it runs counter to a preferred leftist version of events.<\/p>\n<p>Tim Blair, <a href=\"https:\/\/quadrant.org.au\/magazine\/2017\/06\/setting-leftist-suns\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The Setting of Their Leftist Suns&#8221;, <em>Quadrant<\/em><\/a>, 2017-06-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Little moments like that kept adding up, incrementally nudging me away from leftism but not yet to full conversion. In 1988, watching a John Pilger documentary with lefty friends, another such moment occurred. Pilger, as usual, was complaining about colonialism and racism and Aboriginal injustice, so naturally we \u2014 uniformly white, urban and privileged \u2014 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[331,53,41],"tags":[438,400,107,1020],"class_list":["post-39036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australia","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-firstnations","tag-language","tag-nukes","tag-progressives"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-a9C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39037,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39036\/revisions\/39037"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}