Either you "get" steam trains or you don't. I do. So I was mightily pleased yesterday to be sitting on a bench at Kuranda railway station (in the mountains above Cairns) when a great black old steam engine came panting in -- hauling a train of passenger carriages. It has been dragged out of retirement for the tourist trade so that makes me grateful for tourists. Stream engines don't handle inclines well, however, so the trip from Cairns to Kuranda takes twice as long as if the train were hauled by a modern diesel-electric. Anyway, it really choked me up as it slowly pulled out again amid much steam and panting. It was magnificent. Steam buffs would understand.
An historical interest of Kuranda that is now almost completely unknown to almost anybody -- and which is certainly not mentioned to the tourists -- is that the last survivors of Australia's pygmy race were found in the jungles around there. There are still quite a few striking photos of them from around a century ago, but intermarriage between them and other blacks since then has eliminated any obviously distinct modern population of them. Yet 99.9% of Australians would think that there has only ever been one indigenous race on the Australian mainland.
The existence of the pygmies used to be mentioned in the history textbooks but is now almost nowhere to be found. Why? Because the indigenous Australian blacks (Aborigines) that we know today appear to be mainly the descendants of a later wave (or waves) of immigration into Australia -- which means that they are not truly the first "owners" of the country. They are just as much invaders as the whites. And they did a pretty good genocide job on the pygmies -- so, as in Africa, the pygmies survived only in the deep jungle. And that TOTALLY undermines the Leftist guilt industry which says that whites as invaders owe the Aborigines something for being the original inhabitants here. More woes for Australia's Leftist historians. And, yes, it IS the wicked Windschuttle who has shown their deceptions up in this matter as in others.
So what did I see in Kuranda yesterday? I saw only about a dozen Aborigines there but two were remarkably short. Isn't that surprising?
No comments:
Post a Comment