There was always an alleged 'something' to justify an atrocity committed in 'response'.

There were good things too. The elder that told me the sheep story also told another. His country was around Warrnambool on Victoria's south-west coast. He went into a pub for a beer and got picked on by a non-local; quite savagely. He was terribly insulting and vicious in his attacks. Just as this White bloke was about to start giving him a beating, the other local whites gave the white aggressor one instead, threw him out of the pub and told him to never come back: turned out the Aboriginal guy was very well respected in the white community as a good worker etc.

About 3 or 4 months later, the Aboriginal and his wife were sitting down to dinner when there wa a knock at the door. They were surprised because they lived about 10 miles out of town, hard up against the bushland and it was about 8pm in the dead of winter and it was pouring rain outside.

A very bedraggled white bloke was at the door. He was a timber-cutter from a logging camp in the forest and he'd caught a taxi back to camp from town but the taxi driver woulf go no farther than the end of the bitumen road which stopped about 4 or 5 miles shy of the edge of the forest. He'd walked the rest of the way, got lost and fetched up at the only lights he saw - the Aboriginal's house.

Banjo (that was the elder's name) invited him in, gave him dry clothes to wear while his own dried in front of the fire and invited him to have dinner with them. After dinner they had a beer together and sat in the loungeroom. It was then that the White bloke said "I know you don't I?" Banjo replied "Yeah, you do! You're the bloke that wanted to fight with me in the pub a few months back - I recognised you when you came to the door"

"You recognised me then??? And still you invited me in, fed me gave me dry clothes and made me welcome?"

"Why not? said Banjo, "Mate, wer're all brothers under the skin. If I punched you in the face you'd bleed red - so would I. What sort of a person would I be if I left a brother standing in the rain, lost, hungry and cold?"

After the beer they gathered his (now drier) clothes and Banjo drove him out to the camp in his own car - he told him to keep the clothes until he could bring them back. From that point on the white bloke (Banjo never told us his name) became Banjo's best mate. He became a good friend and defender of all the Aboriginals in the area. When Banjo told us the story his "White Feller" mate had been 'Gone to God" as he put it about 10 or so years and Banjo was still mourning him.

Banjo was very philosophical about their situation: His outlook was 'You've only gotta do the right thing. Forget the past 'cause that's what it is - the past. It WOULD be nice if the Fellers in Charge would admit what they've done and just give us a word of apology for it and then we could get on with fixing the rest of the rubbish goin on between us. But I don't think that's gunna happen - those Feller's in charge don't want to believe what their bosses did to us before!"

And there lies the core of the problem. I'd suspect your Grandfather was like that. They were caught up in a belief structure that looked at Aboriginals as non-human: a mindset that existed as Policy into the 1970's in some places and is still a mindset in ordinary folks today.
My sister and I can't have a civil conversation about Aboriginals (she's not the sharpest knife in the drawer anyway) because she despises the ones in the area where she lives and tars Aboriginals all over the country with the same brush. There are scumbag Aboriginals out there ones that even other Aboriginals won't acknowledge. In Coober Pedy, a Central Australian mining town, the Aboriginals who loiter around the town centre and who camp out in the desert are shunned by the Tribal-based Aboriginals in their closed community outside of Potch Gully (a suburb). I have come across Aboriginals that have disgusted me from the word go - but I'd be just as disgusted if they were white too.

I don't know what the answer is, but Banjo's comes up as the best I've ever come across - we simply need to accept that a 'Sorry' for past wrongs acknowledged is due and then move on.

Sad to say that Banjo is now gone too; He has gone back to be with his wife and his best mate. Fortunately his people he mentored in his lifetime continue his ways down in Warrnambool and there is hope.

Muttley