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Post by Nie on Oct 22, 2003 19:18:30 GMT -5
The majority of the Stolen Generation were actually taken between 1870 and 1970. The children they were after mostly were "half-castes", but the government actually just took any Aboriginal children they could get their hands on. After investigation it was confirmed that the Australian Government had knowingly pursued a policy of genocide with respect to the Aboriginal peoples.
As KoKo said, they weren't thought of as being people, they were just part of the Australian fauna and for a while were considered an "Endangered Speices" for a while and were kept on Reserves. They were treated really badly on these reserves, yet even though they were classed as Australian wildlife, they could still be charged with crimes and many of them spent an awful lot of time in prison. The sad part is that while in prison they were treated better than on the reserves. If you can find a copy of the play No Sugar by Jack Davis you'll find it a really good read. It shows you what they were really treated like and what they were thought of as. Is pretty sick and appalling, but I think you would enjoy it En and KoKo.
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Natz
Ravenclaw Alumni
Posts: 4,269
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Post by Natz on Oct 24, 2003 11:02:03 GMT -5
En do you happen to know which museum that it ended up in? Correct me if i am wrong but i am sure that my country sent some people to Australia never to come back again. Thats not a very nice way to treat people if the prisons were better than the reserves then it must have been quite bad. I'm going to have to get a copy of that play. Although it does sound really upsetting.
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Post by Nie on Oct 24, 2003 18:07:52 GMT -5
Yeah Natz. "White" Australians started out here in convict colonies. In Britain there was that much crime the prisons were far too full and they needed a place to keep convicted criminals. They decided to start convict colonies in Australia and so fleets of ships were sent carrying thousands of convicts.
Of course the diseases they brought with them wiped out entire tribes of indigenous Australians to start with, then because the land the Aboriginies lived from was cleared they started to starve and steal food from the settlers, in turn causing settlers to shoot Aboriginies on site. At one point a whole heap of Aboriginies were collected up and taken to Tasmania and put into colonies there, but their water holes were poisoned and hundreds more were killed.
The Goverment nearly did wipe them all out, and on purpose as well, which is why indigenous Australians are often very hateful towards white Australians, even though these days most of them are immigrants who had no knowledge of Australia actually belonging to the Aboriginies.
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Post by En on Oct 25, 2003 9:48:39 GMT -5
(Some of the convicts were actual criminals, but a lot of them were Irish people who... *cue scary music* didn't pay the rent on the land they owned before the British people claimed it )
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Post by Nie on Oct 25, 2003 10:03:05 GMT -5
(Some of the convicts were actual criminals, but a lot of them were Irish people who... *cue scary music* didn't pay the rent on the land they owned before the British people claimed it ) Yep, or innocent people who had to turn to shoplifting and pickpocketing to feed their families. There are records saying who came over here and what crime they had commited, and most of it was petty crime like getting caught stealing a loaf of bread, or not being able to cough up their rent or taxes. There were very, very few actual murderers or big criminals that were sent to Australia as convicts.
But from all that we've ended up being one of the cleanest, freest nations in the world, and one of the few who declared their independance through a vote and not a war. So they can't have all been bad nuts, can they.
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Post by En on Oct 29, 2003 16:19:45 GMT -5
Ireland, the source of several of Australia's better imported nuts, hasn't done so badly either, and it looks like Scotland is interesting in following you folks toward the vote of freedom
Anyway. You know that thing I posted up about proprioception in the Big Yellow Book? The sense of where all the parts of your body are and how much clearance you have and where and how fast you're moving?
I've been reading this book about some of the more interesting cases Oliver Sacks (neurologist) has run into, including people who have lost their proprioception, and I was just reading one last night about some "disorders" (for lack of a better word) that involve hyperactive senses -- so I'm wondering if Nie's thing about knowing other people are in the room is a kind of superproprioception?
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Post by Nie on Nov 5, 2003 17:44:15 GMT -5
Well I just looked up proprioception on dictionary.com and it gave this definition:
The unconscious perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself.
So maybe there are just some people who are concious and aware of it, whereas most people aren't. Some people are just more aware of what goes on around them and what is happening with themselves. And some people take the time to sit and watch and notice these things. Most people, particularly in today's busy society, just don't bother because they are too focused on everything else.
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Post by En on Nov 5, 2003 17:54:49 GMT -5
Oh, well, I meant Oliver Sacks' more specific definition of the brain's unconscious use of nerve data to perceive body placement and stuff -- like, people who don't have proprioception can literally lose their legs -- they actually don't know where their legs are unless they look. And so I was thinking, if most of us have the ability to sense where our own limbs are by pressure and heat sensors and stuff like that, maybe your ability to know a person is in the room with you is because you have really powerful heat sensing nerves -- like, you might have enough proprioception, enough ability to unconsciously interpret body-nerve data, that you feel slight changes in heat or small currents of air and correctly interpret that information as the arrival of a person.
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Post by KoNeko on Dec 17, 2003 9:16:42 GMT -5
Hey, on the flip side of that, is that how some amputees have like, "phantom limbs" and stuff? Because when they had the limb they were so aware of it that somehow their proprioception permanently wrote itself onto their brains so they feel the limb there even if it is not?
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Post by En on Dec 19, 2003 13:10:32 GMT -5
Yeah, it's like how sometimes you get trace sense memories, like you suddenly remember vividly how a certain kind of cracker feels on your tongue or something. It can also be caused by small "events" in the brain -- blood clots, or electrical stimulation, or head injuries or whatever -- which trigger the brain to experience a sensation in a limb that isn't there; which is how you sometimes end up with people who feel like they have extra limbs. That's pretty rare though.
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Post by KoNeko on Dec 19, 2003 23:31:16 GMT -5
*thinks about that X-File episode where the guy who had no arms and legs could concentrate his psychic powers to make a shadow-person to go and kill his ex-officers in the army*
Hmmm, what if by some strange occurrence you had all your limbs, you couldn't be able to sense an extra phantom one could you? Because nothing in your memory banks would have recorded an extra limb (and where it would have been) so you wouldn't be able to "remember" it per se, right? *thinks* This would probably be insanely rare, methinks...
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Post by En on Dec 20, 2003 0:42:49 GMT -5
Yeah, extra phantoms are very rare because either your brain has to get sensations from your real limbs confused, or you have to have some kind of head trauma that causes you to misunderstand your proprioceptive data as it's coming in; but there have been cases of people who are dead convinced they have a third leg they can't shake.
I bet you could hypnotise people into thinking they had extra limbs.
I have such vivid dreams about having wings that I can sort of feel them sometimes when I'm awake. The dreams come about half from my sleeping mind thinking, "okay, Nialle is flying, Nialle must have wings" and about half from me doodling bat-winged angel-type creatures for most of my childhood So then I dream that I have these big skin-covered wings, and when I wake up, sometimes my shoulders feel crampy and weird, exactly the way they would if I had been overexerting very large arm-like protrusions the day before
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Post by Nie on Dec 20, 2003 1:22:23 GMT -5
I've often had the feeling I really have wings as well aftr aking up from a dream where I've had wings. It's a weird feeling but kind of comforting as well.
I have noticed that my neck and throat have felt really different since my surgery, so I don't feel like my thyroid is still there. I guess that you'd be a little less likely to feel internal organs are missing really since most of the time you don't feel them there as much as you feel a limb is there.
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Post by KoNeko on Dec 20, 2003 8:46:09 GMT -5
When I had my wisdom teeth out and I woke up during the operation and felt them drilling at them and picking out the bits of them (don't worry, I was awake but couldn't feel a thing), after they healed, I still sometimes can feel the whole "picking out shattered bits of teeth out of your jawline" sensation, not like I still have teeth there or anything, but just the feeling of having them removed. It's more when I'm stressed or something, maybe because I grind my teeth, or because I was pretty stressed out at the notion of having woken up in my operation...
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Post by Nie on Dec 20, 2003 9:02:18 GMT -5
That's weird. I don't know what would have happened if I'd woken up in the middle of my surgery, but I think I only would have seen a big blue cloth in front of me. They had it there so I couldn't breath on myself while they were operating and cause infection.
Occasionally my scar feels funny and I can still feel the stitch being pulled out cos they just kinda did and internal ziz-zag thing to stitch me up and one big thread was pulled out all at once and it felt really strange. I can sometimes still feel the tubes being pulled out of my throat as well.
The house smells a little odd at the moment cos Dad and Anne have gone to Adelaide for a couple of weeks and it's just me, Tim and David here.
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