http://www.smh.com.au/news/current/breaking1/index.html The Sydney Morning Herald Breaking News Monday, November 23, 1998 Oldfield defends his comment on Aboriginal history White Australians were being subjected to an Aboriginal propaganda campaign, One Nation adviser David Oldfield said today, while defending his controversial revival of the claim that Aborigines were cannibals. Mr Oldfield made a round of media appearances today following his comments outside a Newcastle polling booth on Saturday that Aborigines had spent 40,000 years killing and eating each other. He accused his critics, including Aboriginal activist Charles Perkins, of trying to censor history for their own ends. "There is this propaganda campaign daily against non-Aboriginal Australians to make us feel guilty, to make us feel ashamed, to make us feel everything possible towards them and their position and the hardships they went through to make it easier and easier for us to keep giving more and more in compensation," he told Sydney radio 2UE. "Australians have to come to grips with the fact that we didn't just come here and steal their kids and steal their land and slaughter them and everything else. "All sorts of things happened on both sides." Mr Oldfield said he regretted some of the things that had happened to Aborigines but he did not see why he should feel guilty for them. Aboriginal cannibalism was an undisputed part of history, he said. "We've got plenty of warts in our history. We've all got warts and history is warts and all," he said. "You can't do like what the Japanese tried to do with not teaching anything about World War II as if there were five years of history that just disappeared." Mr Oldfield said his comment on Saturday, made during an exchange between One Nation's Newcastle candidate Kate Taylor and a member of another party, was never intended to be broadcast. "But once that's made public I will not stand back from it because it is a fact of life ... really, it's why they have to deny it; they're denying it because it is an unpalatable image but we all have unpalatable images in our history," he told the Nine Network's Today show. Later, Mr Oldfield said there was nothing racist about his comment. "It may have been a little unkind, but truth is often unkind," he told Sky News. "We don't need a situation built on lies, and built on what is just this ridiculous notion of this idyllic group that were just sort of wandering around, you know, having picnics and barbecuing the odd goanna." Mr Oldfield also said Aboriginal people had no real history of their own. "The problem is, as I say, the Aboriginal people, with a lot of what they've been told is not correct, and they don't know any better because they have no history of their own really, in any sense which is able to be deciphered," he said. "They have Chinese whispers as history, and we all know how inaccurate that is." - Australian Associated Press This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorised use, copying or mirroring is prohibited. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use."
