Downer "nation building" was one of Aboriginal genocide

Downer with daughter Georgina

It probably would have been better for Alexander Downer (ex front bench minister in the Howard gov) to have recently shut his mouth. Instead he came to the rescue of his daughter Georgina Downer who's just gone down in a flaming heap in one of the Super Saturday by elections. Little wonder, after living 20years out of state she was parachuted in to save the seat of Mayo, which had been seized by the barbarians from it's rightful Downer owners.

Downer's defence of his daughter came in the form of this ridiculous flurry of words:

I would say our family have been nation builders. We’ve helped make this nation great. And you can abuse us and you can criticise us and we’ll take it. We’ll take it, we don’t mind, because nation building is in our blood. The Australian

Yes, "Nation builders". That's how Alexander Downer see's his family dynasty history in Adelaide. Born to rule, "nation building" in their blood. One would be hard pressed to think of a more self absorbed, pompous and entitled thing to say.

And one thing he should have realised in pointing out his family history in South Australia is that it would be scrutinised. Ironic that he would mention blood in his defence of family, when his family history has such a huge amount of Aboriginal blood on it's hands. Certainly nothing to be proud of.

One of the most notorious of those associated with the slaughter of Aboriginals was Police Inspector Paul Heinrich Matthias Foelsche2, although you would never know this when you read his 1972 biography. In 1881, three drovers had been killed in some sort of exchange with local Aboriginals near the southwestern corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria, where dozens of Aboriginals had been killed at about the same time. Soon after Sir john Downer became Attorney General of the South Australian Government (which then had jurisdiction over what is now the Northern Territory), he received a letter (dated 2 July 1881) from Foelsche. The letter asked the government for immunity from prosecution for his men, so they might kill sufficient numbers of Aboriginals to teach them a severe lesson. He said he wanted to “inflict severe chastisement if the government will legalise it” and to “punish the guilty tribe without trying to arrest murderers”. There were dozens of massacres in the Gulf Country while Downer was attorney-general (1881-1884) and both premier and attorney-general (1885-1887), and in 1885, he ignored a detailed report tabled in parliament that warned Aboriginal people were facing extinction. Downer took no action against those involved in the 1884 massacres, despite some of the names of the alleged perpetrators being published in the Territory press.

 If this was what Alexander Downer meant by his family being nation-builders1, and if he accepts that these massacres were part of whatever it took to build the nation, then he is a poor excuse for a human being. The Blot Report