🇦🇺📘 Stop Blaming the Anglo‑Saxons: History Is More Complicated Than Your Slogan T‑Shirt

🇦🇺📘 Stop Blaming the Anglo‑Saxons: History Is More Complicated Than Your Slogan T‑Shirt

There’s a strange new fashion in Australia — and no, it’s not Crocs with socks. It’s the idea that Anglo‑Saxon Australians should walk around in a permanent state of historical shame, apologising for existing, preferably while wearing a sackcloth poncho and whispering “sorry” to pot plants.

It’s a narrative that’s as lazy as it is historically illiterate. And like most lazy narratives, it falls apart the moment you open an actual history book instead of a TikTok comment thread.

Let’s take a quick tour through the parts of history that don’t fit neatly on a protest placard.

🛶 1. The slave trade didn’t start where you think it did

If you believe the memes, the entire transatlantic slave trade was personally invented by a bloke named Nigel from Kent.
Reality is less convenient:

• Portugal kicked off the transatlantic trade in the 1400s.

• Spain, the Dutch, the French, and the English joined later.

• African kingdoms and merchants captured and sold people into the system.

• The trade expanded because of global demand, not one ethnicity’s hobby.

History is messy. It always has been.
But messy doesn’t trend on Instagram.

⛵ 2. Ending the slave trade wasn’t a solo act either

The abolition of the slave trade wasn’t achieved by a single saintly figure descending from the clouds with a quill and a halo. It took:

• activists

• formerly enslaved writers

• religious movements

• legislators

• public pressure

• naval enforcement

Britain’s 1807 abolition law was a turning point, but it was part of a global, multi‑racial, multi‑decade effort.

Funny how that part never makes it into the “Anglo‑Saxons ruined everything” narrative.

🔫 3. Modern violence statistics don’t support the blame game either

If you look at actual data — the kind collected by the AIHW, CDC, and FBI — a pattern emerges:

• Aboriginal Australians are statistically most likely to be assaulted by intimate partners or family members.

• African Americans are statistically most likely to be shot by someone of the same racial group, because homicide in the U.S. is overwhelmingly intra‑racial.

This isn’t about blame.
It’s about reality.
And reality rarely matches the script of a viral outrage post.

🧱 4. Meanwhile, Anglo‑Australian ancestors were… building the country

Let’s state the obvious:
Australia didn’t magically appear because a committee of celestial beings held a working bee.

The roads, railways, farms, ports, institutions, and civic frameworks that underpin modern Australia were built by generations of ordinary people — many of them Anglo‑Celtic migrants who arrived with nothing but calloused hands, a stubborn work ethic, and a willingness to build something better.

Were they perfect? No.
Were they human? Yes.
Did they build the foundations of the country we all live in today? Absolutely.

Being proud of that isn’t disgraceful.
Pretending it didn’t happen is.

📚 5. The real problem isn’t history — it’s historical amnesia

The modern habit of blaming one group for everything is not activism.
It’s intellectual laziness dressed up as moral superiority.

If we want a better future, we need:

• historical literacy

• nuance

• honesty

• accountability across all communities

• and the courage to admit that human history is complicated, shared, and often uncomfortable

Shame doesn’t build nations.
Knowledge does.

🧭 Final thought

If you’re going to blame Anglo‑Saxons for everything wrong in the world, at least have the courtesy to thank them for the roads you drive on while doing it.

Better yet — buy a history book.
It weighs less than a grudge and contains far more useful information.