2008-Feb-14 - The complicated relationship...
My granddaughter in front of a painting by grandpa Roy McIver, called"Tragedy"
2008-Feb-14 - Untitled Comment
Posted by PD
Wil, your comment about perfectly happy children being taken isn't the whole picture. Only a few indigenous people are denying that in the beginning many children were taken because they were suffering terrible abuses at the hands of their family or extended associates. To a degree this continues today, and there is case after case of glue-sniffing, alcoholism, theft, rape and murder even amongst young people.
A current case being reviewed in court involves nine young indigenous boys and teenagers who pack-raped a ten year-old indigenous girl. Early reports suggested she had also been infected with a sexually-transmitted disease.
We'll never know the truth about the genesis of the policy of removal of children; whether it was meant to genuinely protect them and later ran off the rails or whether from the beginning it was meant to be ethnic cleansing. What we know from direct evidence is that whatever the policy intended it became a form of forced assimilation.
At a practical level I believe it was the public servants rather than the legislators who bastardised the intervention. Give a public servant power and they will use it to destroy what they can.
The indigenous people have had a much more difficult time than just the Stolen Generations. There was a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (aboriginal men in the 70s and 80s were dying, usually by hanging themselves, at a much higher rate than any other population group). There were the Redfern Riots in Sydney, but to be fair to all it was the indigenous people themselves who turned it into a slum and a no-go area.
There were the fights for land rights which resulted in the Mabo and Wik decisions and the subsequent return of millions and millions of acres of land back into indigenous control.
There was ATSIC (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission) which was managed by indigenous people and squandered many millions of taxpayer dollars on questionable or illegal enterprises such as buying cars for friends and family, operating bars, pubs and stores where essentially everything was free to mates, and so on. The people whom ATSIC was funded for got precious little except a bad reputation by racial association. Their own leaders did them over.
In these few examples we can see that it hasn't all been whites suppressing blacks in some sort of calculated regime. Often, tribal and community in-fighting have caused incredible havoc and hardship for indigenous people. Alcohol, drugs, glue and petrol-sniffing abuses are rampant and this makes control and policing incredibly difficult, whether it's by parents or family or by the police.
Unfortunately, snap polls here are indicating that up to 76% of Australians who respond to polls disagree with the official 'Sorry'. That may reflect more on the type of people who respond to polls than it does on all Australians, and we'll never know how many people inundated phone-in polls with multiple calls.
Importantly, we can't take these polls at face value in terms of them being 'white against black' votes. Australia is populated by people from over 100 countries so I think it's reasonable to assume that some splinter and special-interest groups also voted negatively because they see their own cause as more important or equally worthy.
The main complaint here is: "I, personally, didn't do it so I don't see why I should apologise." Many people just haven't thought it through well because, let's face it, most people are hard-pushed to think about anything outside of their own selfish interests. I think that if we're not prepared to accept some responsibility for the indigenous mistreatment then we shouldn't accept any credit for the military men and women who died in service of their country in all wars. Celebrating the glories of the past while denying the horrors of it is patently stupid. We have a lot of patently stupid people.
'Sorry' is a start. The now-ascendant culture and the indigenous people have made huge errors and miscalculations and I think we should all - including aboriginals - be sorry for the messes we created. It wasn't all done by one racial group to another. That often seems to be forgotten.
My hope from here is that we will find a different and better way to move forward, but my suspicion is that it will just be more of the same and throwing effort and money after foolishness. All sides are too invested in doing what they've always done. Depressing, I know, but unless and until a new approach is forged I can't see any catalyst for change.
I hope this helps.
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2008-Feb-14 - Untitled Comment
Posted by readerwil
Thank you PD for taking the trouble to comment on my post. Your comment is very important for it shows how complicated the relationship of the indigenous Australians and the Australians who arrived in the 19th century and afterwards. Of course there is also a dark side to either group. Taking away children who are abused is sometimes the only solution. It happens in the Netherlands more often than not, but the parents are allowed to see the children and keep in contact under supervision. These children who were taken away in Australia weren't probably taken away because of abuse, even if they were not all perfectly happy in their communities, many of them felt good with their families. They had an identity, a language, every thing and everybody was familiar.But they were taken away for the wrong reasons.
The main motive was to ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal children into European society over one or two generations by denying and destroying their Aboriginality.
Lime sniffing, alcohol abuse cause the same problems here in Holland. And drugs abuse is the the greatest problem especially in our big cities. Rape,child abuse, moslim girls killed by their father, brother or another male relative to protect the honour of the family, wifebeating, you name it are also our problems. It is not easy at all!! We have over 16 million inhabitants in a country half the size of Tasmania.( The Netherlands 34,000 sq kms, Tasmania 68,331 sq kms) There is no black and white, only good backgrounds and wrong ones. But thank you so much for your comment. I'll send it to my daughter if you don't mind.
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2008-Feb-13 - I was taught to live as a white person, but I was black inside...
This family lived a long time in the mists of a cruel past, which they couldn't cope with.
Now they have a face, a past and an identity...
Actually I should write this on my Foreign Countries'blog or http://ladyoma.efx2blogs.com , but I have the feeling that I only have a few visitors there and I find this message very important.
Last night at 11 o' clock the telephone rang. I thought at once :" Oh, that must be my daughter in Australia". I answered the phone and heard her saying: " Mum in five minutes our
government will start the speech of Kevin Rudd, Australia's premier, in which he apologizes for all the suffering caused by the white Australian government from 1904 till 1970". Children who lived perfectly happy with their parents in the Aboriginal compounds, were taken away sometimes already at the age of 5, and put into the care of white families. They are called the Stolen Generation . They were forced to speak English and weren't allowed to speak their own languages. One mother saw her three children taken by force and she ran with all the other mothers after the truck in which the children were transported to an unknown destination. The mother of the three children died soon of a broken heart.
Of course "Sorry"doesn't make up for all the pain and suffering.For years the Aboriginal elders and leaders have been pleading for the apologies of the government, but the previous Prime Minister John Howard always refused to say "sorry".
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