It never ceases to amaze me the way that so many Leftists have a terrible aversion to the truth and how they like to spin their own story when it suits their agenda. Keith Windshuttle has done a bit of digging about the aboriginal connections in Larrissa (I prefer bestiality) Behrendt’s family and who would be surprised that she and her father have at the very least “spun” the story to her advantage?
Both Behrendt and her father claim that his mother, Lavinia Boney, was a member of the Stolen Generations. The archival evidence, however, reveals this is incorrect. According to Boney’s file in the NSW Aborigines Protection Board records, in 1917 when she was aged about 13 and living at the blacks’ camp at Dungalear Station, near Walgett, her mother died. Her father’s whereabouts were unknown, so she was effectively an orphan.
The Aborigines Protection Board found her a job as a domestic servant on a pastoral station at Collarenebri. Her file says this was at “the girl’s own request to get away from camp life”. From 1921 to 1923 Boney was employed in domestic service in hospitals and private homes in Sydney and Parkes. She met the German editor Henry Behrendt at Parkes Hospital. They married and went to live at Lithgow. Lavinia eventually had nine children by him before she died in childbirth. In 1944 Henry placed five-year-old Paul and his surviving siblings in the Presbyterian Church’s Burnside Homes at Parramatta.
Aged 15, Paul left Burnside and joined the Royal Australian Navy. He trained to become an air traffic controller, a profession he later followed in civilian aviation, settling in Sydney. While convalescing from a heart attack in 1980, he decided to pursue his Aboriginal mother’s history. He subsequently became known for his research abilities and his activism in Aboriginal politics. In 1988 UNSW appointed him inaugural director of its Aboriginal Research and Resource Centre. He was also the first chairman of the Aboriginal Studies Association.
In the 1980s, when I was employed at UNSW, my path crossed briefly with Paul Behrendt. Even in middle age he was a good-looking man and it was not surprising many women were attracted to him. Unless you knew, you would not have guessed he was of Aboriginal descent.
In the spectrum of Aboriginal politics, Paul was an ultra-leftist. In 1992, he argued that British colonisation of Australia was illegitimate and that Aborigines still held sovereignty over the continent. He was a joint author with Gerhard Fischer, Michael Mansell and others of the book The Mudrooroo/Muller Project in which he demanded Aborigines be given a separate country, self-governing and with its own laws. Mansell used the book to make similar claims on behalf of the Aboriginal Provisional Government. At this time, Larissa Behrendt was also a member of the Aboriginal Provisional Government. In 1987 and 1988, Mansell had gone to Libya seeking funding for his organisation from Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. He also sought to join Gaddafi’s Mathaba worldwide group of insurgents and terrorists.
Windshuttle has a well deserved reputation for accurate research of the historical records and on this occasion it has shown that the claims that Lavinia Boney, was “stolen” appears to be rather dodgy, you can’t steal someone from their dead (or absent) parents, but you can rescue them from a rather dire circumstance and give them the opportunity to make something of their lives which seems to be what has happened in the case of Lavinia Boney.
The far left have done our indigenous people no favours with their encouragement of separatism and trying to ghettoise the people on those troubled communities. They have pursued an ideological “rights” agenda that has been disastrous and resulted death and despair as men women and children live dissipated lives where they seem to have only one effective right and that is to live and die in misery.
Is it any wonder that those of us who care have more respect for the likes of Bess Price and Noel Pearson rather than the Larrisa Behrendts who trade on their heritage of choice?
Cheers Comrades
Iain Hall's SANDPIT 
Well Iain, I think that accusing Leftists of telling porkies about their family history is a bit over the top. I’m a long-time genealogist and I can tell you that almost every family, no matter their origins, tell lies about their ancestry. Some to hide things, some to aggrandise people and some just because they don’t know better. It is all very well to accuse people and buy-in experts to show that their ideas of their family are wrong using high-priced researchers to do that, but can you afford such people to search your genealogy? Hardly, I would thing, much like most people in Australia today.
And who says what is documented is accurate anyway? I have a small library available to me that says, in essence, that many written records are wrong because the were written down wrongly in the first place, copied inaccurately when they were taken from the parish (or similar) repository and entered into Diocese or State registry and then copied again when complied with other records. Does Keith Windscuttle guarantee in his writing that no mistakes were made by humans recording the details he relied on? I wouldn’t think that a competent researcher would do that and, if he did, one couldn’t call him competent!
Just as a final word, Iain, please don’t write in all capitals. You’re not writing Greek, you’re writing English, and we only read a few words in capitals for titles and headings. Body text is always written like this, in mostly lower-case characters&emdash;especially if you expect people to read it.
Geez, Iain. I set a subscription to your post and I get the following message from you–
Hello dear Comrade
There is another interesting and exciting post at Iain Hall’s blog so what don’t you check it out and let him know what you think?
… so what don’t you check it out…? You see what I mean in the post above. I made two misspellings on purpose to find out how many noticed, but you’ve made a misspelling and never noticed!
Do you now understand how it is so very hard to rely on un-checkable written, so-called, records?
Hi Lin
I have just got back from the Movies with the Kids which is why I have not responded sooner 😉
Last comment first:
The subscription emails are automatically generated and while I find it amusing that you addressed as “Comrade” and I find the spelling mistakes it rather sad
First comment:
True enough and that’s a fair cop Guv!! But the point I was trying to make is that when someone’s family history is used to further their pursuit of politics then its veracity is important, even more so when they have sought redress through the courts because their ancestry has been questioned as is the case with Behrendt.
That to is a fair question but I think a couple of things are worthy of note, firstly Windshuttle has been doing such research for a long time and I am sure he is aware of the issues you raise, Secondly he is dealing with primary source documents so transcription errors are unlikely, there is of course still the the issue of errors made when the issue was recorded but they are unlikely to be that significant.
Its the Template I’m using Lin it converts all headings into block capitals I’ll look into it:)
Windshuttle has a well deserved reputation for accurate research of the historical records
Really? Among the far right, sure. But not generally.
Mr Buns
The issue from the left has never been the accuracy of Windshuttle’s data but rather the interpretation he has drawn form it. But that is the intresting thing about history its all open to interpretation from both the left and the right.
Then there’s the story of Senator Harry Reid, that I sent you some time ago Iain ? Now there was an expert in spinning a yarn ? 😉