http://www.thepunch.com.au/tags/acara/ Politics, political opinion, world news, sports news and the latest news and views updated live, daily on The Punch - Australia's best conversation. en Copyright 2012 The Punch penberthyd@newsltd.com.au penberthyd@newsltd.com.au Sat, 26 May 2012 20:00:40 +0000 Sat, 26 May 2012 20:00:40 +0000 Politics, opinion, world news, sports news, latest news, views, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Nathan Rees, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Garrett, Barnaby Joyce, Australian, federal politics, opinion polls, election, The Punch, thepunch, punch ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 15 http://www.thepunch.com.au/images/punch-logo-rss.png http://www.thepunch.com.au/ 144 70 Politics, political opinion, world news, sports news and the latest news and views updated live, daily on The Punch - Australia's best conversation. Search The Punch keywords http://www.thepunch.com.au/search/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/taking-off-the-white-blindfold-and-black-armband/ The most dispiriting intellectual spectacle of the past decade would have to be the so-called “history wars”, where academics, politicians and commentators on the extreme left and right battled for domination in telling the story of modern Australia. The history wars were essentially an exercise both in understatement and overstatement. The right-wingers tried to pretend that Australian history was nothing other than a happy story involving the orderly and humane progression of European civilisation on these shores, where no indigenous children were ever stolen, no families ever broken up, and whatever dislocation or hardship Aborigines experienced was at worst an accident, brought about by the purest of motives. The left-wingers retaliated by branding the conservatives as liars, and telling a version of Australian history which reads like a long string of human rights abuses, with repeated acts of savagery against a wholly peaceful indigenous populace. penberthyd@newsltd.com.au (David Penberthy) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/taking-off-the-white-blindfold-and-black-armband/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/taking-off-the-white-blindfold-and-black-armband/#item2516 Sat, 26 May 2012 20:00:40 +0000 M30o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr