Forever chasing the spotlight like lost moth, Neil Evers is on a Public Relations campaign; unusual behavior for someone putting such effort into presenting the image of a community minded, octogenarian volunteer.
This time around it’s a profile in the Life Stories Section of a local Pittwater free press, Pittwater Life, with an estimated readership of 35,000 unsuspecting souls.
Curiously this paper was founded in 1991, making it a full decade older that the pseudo-Aboriginal group Neil Evers belongs to.
Neil claims here that Laurie and Tony Bimson visited his home in 2005, and told him of Bob Waterer and Bob’s ‘discovery.’
So much to unpack already here.
Lets start with ‘all of a sudden you’re Aboriginal.’
No.
No Person is ever, has ever, or will ever suddenly become Aboriginal.
This is not even close to a thing, and exemplifies the problem it illustrates perfectly.
What Neil Evers and his silly cousins expect us to believe they fail to grasp, even after all this time, is that their ‘discovery’ of a single Aboriginal Ancestor is simply that, and does no more make them Aboriginal that the simultaneous discovery of their German Ancestor.
Yet these men do not claim to be German, do not play as pretending to be their misguided, uneducated, and deeply problematic approximation of German Culture from 235 years past.
Why would they?
No, they instead deliberately and consciously amplify their perceived connection to a single Aboriginal Person, in order to amplify their voices, to platform themselves, and to benefit financially from it, every, single day.
As previously mentioned, to legally be accepted as Aboriginal, descent from a single Ancestor is far from sufficient.
It is a necessary component, but falls short of being the complete package. Often shamefully so.
The three part test accepted by the Courts and Government of Australia contains the following three elements.
- Descent from an Aboriginal Person/Persons.
- Self-identification as an Aboriginal Person.
- Acceptance by the Community as an Aboriginal Person.
Only by satisfying all three of these elements, can a person legally be considered an Aboriginal Person.
It is an all to common experience for people raised with ostensibly White European values, on discovering possible distant ancestry, to engage in the same colonizing behaviors of the non-Aboriginal Settler Ancestors they repeatedly fail to mention.
We are all raised in a culture, and as such take it for granted. The length of time we spend in that culture, that immersion, is not a conscious choice, rather part of the joy of human experience.
To jump from one culture to another culture is a process that can not be rushed, if it can happen at all. There is an incredible amount of unlearning, of decolonizing, letting go of prejudices, mistaken beliefs, not just about who you are, but about your family, your community, your history and your Nation.
Aboriginal history did not pause from 1788 until Neil Evers and his family came along.
We again find that Neil Evers and Laurie Bimson’s claim to Aboriginal descent is solely through a connection to a single Aboriginal Ancestor, Sarah ‘Biddy’ Lewis.
Neil claims this time he was 63 years old when the ‘discovery’ was made, contrasting his 2018 claim that he found out about his Ancestry in 2009, while aged 67.
Back in 2018, Mr Evers described himself as a ‘fifth generation Aboriginal’; apparent obfuscation of the reality that both he and his cousins had but a single Aboriginal Ancestor, ‘forgotten’ by these families for generation after generation, after generation.
Oh yeah, in 2018 Mr Evers also claimed his group “had no elders.”
Yet only 5 years later, Mr Evers is now expressing how fortunate he was to have Elders who have guided him. Curious hey…
He fails to mention that one of the so-called GuriNgai elders was none other than non-Aboriginal man Warren Whitfield (who created the GuriNgai fiction as recently as 2001), and his non-Aboriginal niece Tracey-Lee Howie.
We know that Mr Warren Whitfield only registered Guringai Tribal Link Aboriginal Corporation in 2003, only 2 years on from his 2001 interview with Rosemary Block in which Mr Whitfield admits to cobbling together his pseudo-Aboriginal narrative using a variety of non-Aboriginal academic’s work, and that even in 2001, all the ‘Elders’ were “all are dead now—long dead.”
Returning to Neil Evers, we see in his own words that he and his cousins ‘discovered’ possible Ancestry when in their Senior Years, and then assumed or were told by Whitfield and Howie, this instantly made them Aboriginal.
Then these people of recently discovered Aboriginal descent believed they were Guringai, despite displaying no certainty if the term applied to their language, their clan, their tribe, or their fictional nation.
These men either took up with a fraudulent operation, or were not educated enough in either Culture to see what is readily apparent; Mr Whitfield and his niece are not Aboriginal, and had only started their operation on the Central Coast a handful of years prior.
Having satisfied the first two elements of the three part test, these new identifiers went for the trifecta by seeking acceptance by the Community as an Aboriginal Person.
They were not accepted by the Aboriginal Community.
They remain, not accepted by the Aboriginal Community.
Reasons for this rejection possibly include the stark fact the ‘tribe’ they claim Ancestral Connection to does not exist.
Or that they appropriated the name of another Group as it was convenient to them.
Or that the founders of the group and many of it’s members are not Culturally, legally, even genetically Aboriginal.
What these add up to is the GuriNgai / Guringai / Garigal / Wannagine / Wannungine / Wannabe of the Northern Beaches of Sydney and Central Coast of NSW are not, and never have been, accepted as Aboriginal, by the Aboriginal Community.
The non-Aboriginal Community on the other hand has had all sorts of financial arrangements with this group, which have been documented elsewhere, and will continue to be documented as new information comes to light – hourly it seems.
Mr Evers thought his grandmother had a really good suntan, because his Grandmother did not identify as an Aboriginal Person, and Neil Evers had no reason to believe anything different.
His Grandmother was not Aboriginal, like Mr Evers, she was a Person of Aboriginal descent. Unlike Mr Evers, at least she could tan.
Mr Neil Evers 4 sons from 3 wives all presumably believe as he does, that they are Aboriginal. This is how this problem spreads in such a short time. From Neil Evers interaction with Laurie Bimson in the mid-to-late 2000’s, this notion that they are suddenly Aboriginal has infected Neil, his current wife Sue, and Evers 4 adult children, 8 grandchildren, and 2 great-grandchildren. One Neil Evers can become 14 Evers with the same indoctrination, in under 2 decades.
Keeping in mind, this is only the Evers, not the Bimsons, the Howies, the Whitfields etc.
No.
If Neal Evers wanted to help people learn about us, about our lives, our history, our Culture; we would not ever have to see or hear, or know of Neal Evers. Instead we are bombarded with Neal Evers, talking about Neil Evers.
Why though? Mr Evers valiantly attempts to persuade the audience of Pittwater Life that he was expected to take on roles and responsibilities that were never his. This was of course never the case.
The reality is people accepted Mr Neil Evers claims that he was Aboriginal, because he made the claims, repeatedly, in public forums, in order for people to believe he was Aboriginal.
Not only did Mr Evers parents not identify as Aboriginal, they were frightened of Aboriginal People.
Gobbling down Whitfield’s pseudo-Aboriginal hodgepodge hook, line and sinker, these distant possible descendants of Aboriginal People were suddenly emboldened to pronounce themselves with vaguely Aboriginal adornments and titles, and to start dictating to others, including actual Aboriginal People, that they had Cultural Knowledge and standing in the Aboriginal Community.
That’s why these quite clearly non-Aboriginal people claim to be Elders, Uncles, Aunties, Bloodline Custodians etc.
They were fooled by non-Aboriginal charlatans, and were/are not Culturally equipped to see through the fiction, despite their long lives of White privilege.
The great irony is that there are Aboriginal descendants of Bungaree and Matora.
We were not tricked into joining the GuriNgai scam, as we already know who and what we are, already have language, Culture, Stories, know where we came from, and where we are going.
We recognised Tracey Howie and Warren Whitfield for what they are on sight, and remain saddened and disappointed that some of our distant non-Aboriginal relatives can not.
Still I spent considerable time and expense unravelling this bizarre mess to uncover just what was going on.
I remain steadfast in my view that had Evers and Bimson any Cultural understanding whatsoever, they would not have, could not have, been so easily hoodwinked by the claims of non-Aboriginal People such as Warren Whitfield and Tracey Howie.
Neil Evers and Laurie Bimson’s every action laid out in A Long Con, Gone On Too Long, demonstrate how far they are from grasping even the fundamental basics of what it means to be an Aboriginal Person.
How they continue to recklessly disregard the great shame they are causing their families, even their very distant Aboriginal Family, their communities and all Australia, remains beyond me.
Frankly it’s beyond all mob, and we’re well and truly fed up.
A Long Con, Gone on Too Long. 
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