“We were very proud of our background as pioneers and settlers, hard-working for six days of the week and Sunday was a day of rest… we were the salt of the earth,” writes RICK FORSTER.

I AM a WASP, a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and I was born before World War II, so am now on the sunset side of 80. And I am bewildered.

I come from a farming family as did my parents and grandparents. My four grandparents were born in Canada, England, Australia and NZ so I was a true child of the Empire. We were the salt of the earth. 

Of course, we do not have an Empire any more, just a Commonwealth, which sounds much more democratic and friendly, so why am I bewildered?

We were very proud of our background as pioneers and settlers, hard-working for six days of the week and Sunday was a day of rest. We had neighbours just like us and townsfolk and shopkeepers who we knew and had all formed a community, which was secure and supportive and while we had to battle with the vagaries of the climate, life was orderly and predictive. 

There were indigenous people in the community and they were treated with the respect that was accorded to all, working in various jobs and playing in all the local sporting teams.

What has left me bewildered are the changes of attitudes towards us that have been wrought by this modern, selfish, disruptive and competitive world that has distorted history by imposing modern values and opinions upon those of the past.

All nations were colonised in one way or another, whether it were through the constant shifting borders or power plays in earlier settled countries or claims of property ownership as new lands were discovered. I suppose my native forebears were the ones who coated their bodies blue with pigment from the woad plant before they were colonised by the successive Picts, Jutes, Scots and Romans. 

Settlement of colonies was not smooth as there was fierce competition and battles with the French, the Spanish and the English, amongst others, as well as the skirmishes against indigenous warriors. These were cruel and warlike times and, it may be said, the places that were settled by the British were the most fortunate, inheriting the British systems of law, civil administration and land settlement.

At the end of World War II, Australians were fundamentally an Anglo-Celtic population of around seven million people. Then we had a huge influx of refugees and migrants and these were absorbed into the community with remarkably little disruption and intolerance, and this was a most successful example of a transformation into a multicultural society. 

Very little has been written or recognised about the tolerance of that British and Irish base that has welcomed foreigners to Australia.

In fact, public perception is now distorting history and those who were the salt of the earth are now, according to the “progressives”, the racist, sexist, white supremacist, violent colonists who raped and pillaged and stole the land, slaughtering the indigenous population and ruining the land through their thoughtless European practices of farming and grazing.

I have never raped, pillaged or slaughtered. I loved my country through all the seasons and worked the land to my very best ability for our mutual benefit, as indeed did my father and my grandfather, who also had never personally displaced or injured Aboriginal people. 

As land settlement is now changing to corporate farming, there are the three generations of family settlers who built the foundation of wealth of the Australia that rode on the sheep’s back and who are now largely unrecognised, and in fact are being castigated cruelly and irrationally instead. 

If you want to blame a scapegoat for any problems incurred in the inevitable colonisation process, why do you attack the later heroes upon whose shoulders you now stand? No wonder I’m bewildered.