Oh, This is Embarrassing! By James Reed

     The ever-eagled eye Andre Bolt has pointed out something mighty interesting that I did not know about, even given my great expanse of “knowledge,” gained from years of dedicated drinking in bars for wisdom, while listening to talk back radio:
  https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/plagiarism-uluru-statement-from-a-congolese-heart/news-story/d315bb99c166c13d93fc1e21246fcb5d

“The Uluru Statement from the Heart, written allegedly by Aboriginal representatives, has quickly become the approved definition of the special nature of Aboriginal sovereignty: This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or ‘mother nature’, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This was presented as a statement straight from the heart of the delegates to a 2017 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Referendum Convention at Uluru:

We, gathered at the 2017 National Constitutional Convention, coming from all points of the southern sky, make this statement from the heart. But whose heart was that statement actually from? Whose definition of this special sovereignty was this really? The key phrase in the Uluru Statement is taken word-for-word from an Algerian judge of the International Court of Justice, as he summed up the argument of a Congolese lawyer in a 1975 case involving disputed land ownership in the Western Sahara:

Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya goes on to dismiss the materialistic concept of terra nullius, which led to this dismembermentof Africa following the Berlin Conference of 1885. Mr. Bayona-Ba-Meya susbtitutes for this a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or 'mother nature', and the man who was born therefrom, remains attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with his ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. Fine, there may well be a similar religious concept in traditional Aboriginal culture, although "mother earth" seems more a New Age concept than a truly Aboriginal one. Yet it is odd that Aboriginal representatives speaking from the heart could not define this allegedly Aboriginal concept other than in the archaically English words of an African, referring to Africans. And there is a further point. This is an expression of a kind of pagan earth-worshipping religion, but is that faith - in so far it was an Aboriginal one - truly still followed by all or even most Aborigines today? I ask this having seen Noel Pearson, one of the chief advocates of the Uluru Statement, repeat those same African words with approval (and often without attribution) and apply them to Aborigines:

And whereas Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the First Nations of the Australian continent and its islands, possessed under ancient laws and customs, according to the reckoning of culture, from the Creation, according to the common law, from time immemorial, and according to science for more than 65 millennia. This is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or mother nature, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with their ancestors. Yet Noel Pearson once told me he was a Lutheran, and confirmed it in writing about Joh Bjelke-Petersen:

We are Lutherans and we share a long history. We have a particular affinity with the German Lutherans of Neuendettelsau, Bavaria, the home of the mission society that sponsored a young 19-year-old missionary, Georg Schwarz, to come to the wild frontiers north of Cooktown in 1887 and stay for 50 years. I assume that Pearson remains a Lutheran, or at least a Christian, in which case he is not a follower of a rival faith that is centred on some concept of "mother earth" with a return after death to one's ancestors. Rather, he would as a Christian be obliged to believe in the concept of Christ, and, upon death, of everlasting life in His presence - or an eternity of banishment in Hell. So, from whose heart does this Uluru Statement actually come?”

     So, unpacking this is, what Bolt has uncovered, and I am assuming that the public domain media report is correct, is that the very statement is “plagiarised” (Bolt’s word) from an African source, and with that comes all of the commitments of the original, including African paganism. Now, no doubt, many supporters of the referendum, especially glazed-eyed white academics would happily support paganism, even if they are atheist for all other working purposes, but surely the right type of paganism is needed, Aboriginal not African. That there is “plagiarism” at the basis of the referendum philosophy, shows to my mind that the entire philosophical basis is flawed. It would therefore not even get a pass grade as a student essay.