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writing history with a slanted white quill...
Who would have thought the mere suggestion that Captain Cook did not in fact discover Australia would be so controversial?
It seems to have taken some people by surprise, the idea that people were here for more than 60,000 years before the Endeavour dropped anchor.
What were we doing all that time, just waiting for white people to find us?
And to dare challenge this "discovery"; how impertinent. I can hear someone saying "know your place".
It has certainly ignited a debate and that is a good thing. History is not dead, it is not past or redundant, it is alive in all of us: we are history.
Responding to the tearing down of racist monuments in the Unite
And it is a choice. The French historian Michel De Certeau wrote of history as the writing of absence — a therapeutic exercise that fills in the gaps, that allows us to construct a story that suits our ends like artefacts arranged in a shopfront window.
An empty land with an empty pastWhere the Americans appear consumed by race, we prefer silence.
There is a history in Australia of not wanting to talk about the darker parts of our shared past.
It is written in our DNA, it is buried in the soil.
When a nation is founded on a doctrine of terra nullius — literally empty land — then it becomes too easy to ignore the people of that emptiness.
We don't have to reckon with the treatment of Aboriginal people because they are invisible. Indigenous people become a postscript to Australian history.
History itself becomes a hymn to whiteness
This is what Captain Cook's statue in Sydney's Hyde Park tells us.
The inscription that Cook "Discovered this territory 1770" maintains a damaging myth, a belief in the superiority of white Christendom that devastated Indigenous peoples everywhere.
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-23/stan-grant:-damaging-myth-captain-...
see also:
"The Age of Deceit"
Picture at top: Endeavour — Captain James Cook's ship (replica) in Sydney, Sydney Maritime Museum. Gus Leonisky
- By Gus Leonisky at 23 Aug 2017 - 6:32pm
- Gus Leonisky's blog
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unrecognised dreadful war was a massacre...
The Australian War Memorial's refusal to acknowledge the Frontier Wars between Indigenous Australians and white settlers is historically dishonest and is holding back reconciliation, writes Alan Stephens.
The Australian War Memorial is one of Australia's most visited and influential national institutions. Seven hours a day, 364 days a year, it is filled with children and adults from all parts of the country.
For many, the AWM provides their main exposure to the story of war - indeed, to Australian history.
According to the Memorial's website, its mission is "to commemorate the sacrifice of those Australians who have died in war".
In order to fulfil that mission, the AWM should both honour and educate. That is, it should illustrate and acknowledge the experiences of the men and women who have served; and it should tell us clearly and honestly why we have gone to war, and what that has meant for our nation.
It is within that context that the refusal of the people who control the AWM - politicians, the governing council, and retired generals - to recognise the most important conflict ever fought by Australians is nothing less than a national scandal.
That conflict was of course the Frontier Wars, fought from 1788 to the 1920s between Indigenous Australians and an invading coalition of white settlers, militia, police, and colonial soldiers.
A standard diversionary tactic used by deniers of the Frontier Wars is that it was not a "real" war, an assertion the director of the AWM, Dr Brendan Nelson, has made on numerous occasions.
Yet most of our leading historians have no doubt that the first Australians' defence of their land, rights, and values was conducted in the manner of a "war".
Henry Reynolds presents an overwhelming case for that conclusion in his recent book, The Forgotten War; while John Connor has described the 140-year-long struggle as a "sustained conflict that can only be defined as war".
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-07-07/stephens-reconciliation-means-recognising-the-frontier-wars/5577436
the first white man...
The City of Sydney council has referred to its Indigenous board concerns about a statue inscription claiming Captain James Cook discovered Australia.
The Cook statue in Hyde Park has been criticised for ignoring tens of thousands of years of Indigenous history in Australia. Its inscription reads: “Discovered this territory 1770.”
But councillors have warned against reducing discussion of Aboriginal dispossession to a narrowly focused “culture war”.
The ABC broadcaster and Indigenous editor Stan Grant this week called for the statue to stay but the inscription to be changed. He said it was a “fiction” that spoke to the emptiness and invisibility of Indigenous Australians.
“Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, defending Australia Day this week, said it is also a day we honour Indigenous Australians,” Grant wrote in a piece for the ABC. “If he is serious then what could be more apt than to correct a monument that tells us, still, that in 1770 we did not exist?”
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/aug/23/sydney-under-pres...
creating history with a cannon...
tool of the trade...
creating history with a cannon... or two...
more statues in the firing line...
A statue in the northern Queensland city of Townsville has raised the ire of Australian South Sea Islanders, who say it should be changed to better reflect the region's slave history.
A bronze statue of colonial-era businessman Robert Towns, who made his name by 'blackbirding' South Sea Islanders in 19th century Queensland, stands in Townsville's main street.
The South Sea Islander community is calling for the site to include a plaque and statue to pay tribute to those who were kidnapped, brought to Queensland and forced into labour on the cane fields.
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-24/townsville-statue-whitewash-slave-...
Below is another statue that might offend a few sensitivities, from The New Yorker circa 1960s...
touché... malcolm shoots himself in the foot...
“Trying to edit our history is wrong. All of those statues, all of those monuments, are part of our history and we should respect them and preserve them – and by all means, put up other monuments, other statues and signs and sights that explain our history.”
The prime minister said efforts to change the date of Australia Day, and to edit statues, was a fringe preoccupation. “I don’t think this has got much momentum, this is very much the Labor, Green, left sort of fringe.”
“The vast majority of Australians are as horrified as you and I are that we would go round rewriting history, editing statues, changing the inscriptions on statues, deleting Australia Day – I mean what are these people thinking?
“This is the greatest country in the world. We should be so proud of Australia and its history and on Australia Day, we celebrate all of our achievements”.
Turnbull said every Australia Day ceremony started with a welcome to country, and an acknowledgement of Indigenous people, and ended “with a baby in the arms of a migrant mother becoming an Australian citizen”.
“You don’t rewrite history by editing stuff out.”
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/aug/25/changing-colonial...
Yes Malcolm... “You don’t rewrite history by editing stuff out.”... Except a lot of this country's history has been edited out by white historians. This is why we need to ADD STUFF IN to the so-called historical record... Stan Grant is not after us taking down the statues but about setting the "record" with a bit more balance on the statues, especially in regard to the Aboriginal nations and Terra Nullius...
Meanwhile:
The Australian government remains committed to eradicating slavery but there is still no time frame for adopting a Modern Slavery Act.
Foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop said a key outcome of the Bali Process in Perth on Friday was that business leaders had committed to a work plan, and the meeting had also helped the commonwealth become better informed for a Modern Slavery Act.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/25/australian-ggovernment-com...
the one sided-history...
A. Dirk Moses is Professor of Modern History at the University of Sydney and senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.
"A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism," wrote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the famous opening to their Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Little could they have imagined that their observation would hold almost 170 years later in Australia where conservative pundits and politicians, including the prime minister himself, are flinging the epithet of "Stalinism" at local government councils, Aboriginal people and the political opposition.
This time, however, it's not revolution that is spooking the establishment but the colonial past.
Two local councils propose to cancel Australia Day celebrations, while Indigenous people like journalist Stan Grant are suggesting that the plaques on monuments of colonial "founding fathers" be amended to reflect historical accuracy.
The Labor opposition agrees that it is absurd to claim that Captain James Cook "discovered" Australia in 1770 when Aboriginal people had been living there for 60,000 years. (Few take seriously Keith Windschuttle and George Brandis's quaint belief that the discovery claim refers solely to eastern Australia.) Yet, for conservatives, these "revisionists" are "airbrushing history," and engaging in "moral vandalism" and "political correctness on steroids."
If anything, however, Indigenous claims are being ignored, thereby repeating the silences that led to the erection of these monuments in the first place, and concealing a truth that dare not speak its name.
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/09/01/4727499.htm
Unfortunately, our heroic beacons are one-sided illusions of the whole...
In fact, the Turnbullshitters do far more vandalism than deface a statue. They destroy the concept of necessary study and sciences in order to make an offering of saving cash to the god of capitalism. See turnbull vandals...
not just an english thingy...
History tells us that Les Rennais (the inhabitants of Rennes) have a penchant for dissent, pyromania and disaster. In 1720 the Great Fire consumed 945 half-timbered houses, leaving 8,000 homeless. Remarkably, a few houses survived and still pepper the old town.
In January 1789 Rennes was the venue for one of the first skirmishes of the French Revolution. In 1800 the Opera burnt to the ground. Opposite stood a statue of Anne de Bretagne kneeling before the king. This was politically unacceptable to Breton separatists, who in 1932 blew it up.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2001/feb/04/france.travelfoodanddrink...
The statue was judged to be "colonialist"...
of aussie day...
I have real issues with Australia Day. The idea of holding a joyous celebration on the day that Europeans first asserted control over this continent in order to establish an offshore detention centre lacks both sensitivity and context.
Australia Day’s status as a day of national identity rightly causes hurt to our first peoples whose prior ownership was ignored by law for 200 years and is still not subject to a treaty. One of my earliest political actions was on the bicentenary marching from Redfern to the city as part of the Invasion Day challenge to the harbour festivities.
Indeed, I have issues with the whole idea of celebrating the nation-state, undoubtedly the single biggest cause of death and destruction since humans cooked up the idea of sovereignty. Right now true patriots are threatening to add to this record.
But I have even bigger issues with any campaign that would change the date of our national day.
The Change the Date movement is based on a simple premise that Australia Day celebrates dispossession of Australia’s first peoples. It calls for boycotts of all Australia Day events, music festivals and for businesses to ask their staff to work.
Currently there is a logjam of progressive causes with wide public support: marriage equality and climate action at the top of the list. Both these issues have shifted opinion over a sustained period of public campaigning by committed activists and built an inexorable movement for change.
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/05/shifting-australia...
When I arrived in Australia, back in the early 1970s, "we" were invited to mark Australia Day with the literati (mostly socialist, communist, anarchist writers) while the entire country ignored the date, apart from some people taking the day off to go to Bondi for a swim. For us, it was an occasion to eat scones and get pissed while "reminiscing" (or being versed into) about the awful days back then, when the land was invaded and convicts thought "China was on the other side of the Blue Mountains".
Captain Cook himself and his crew, including Joseph Banks, only "landed" in Botany Bay (Stingray Bay) and left Port Jackson alone. It was only once the Americas — where the Poms used to send their rejects — had a revolution against the Poms that the area around Botany Bay was thought of as a Penal Colony. The "First Fleet" loaded with soldiers and convicts arrived in 1788 in Botany Bay and soon realised there was a better place to settle a few miles northward. The "invasion" had thus started softly. America and Australia were then mostly populated by the rejects of the Mother England — the thieves, the hungry, the rare murderers, the Irish, the recalcitrants. These were tough people eager to survive in the most difficult conditions. The Sydney settlement could have folded any moment as reported by hardly literate soldiers, officers and convicts — and their keepers. The relationship with the Aborigines was tenuous to say the least — and skirmishes soon turned into sheer brutality, and eventually savagery from the new settlers, to protect a few sheep...
Our grand Turd Abbott (apparently Turnbull called him a cunt on a VIP flight to Kanbra) denied this early history by glossing over the invasion with the rightfulness of the white man's boots (forget the woman)...
Thus Australia day is a mixed bags of feelings about what happened back then. Another day? Possibly the same difference. A better historical record and a time to make amends? for sure.
Took us away...
And they took us from our family.
Took us away
They took us away
Snatched from our mother's breast
Said this was for the best
Took us away.
Read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2017/09/11/4732636.htm
the quill of history is slanted to the far right...
There is deep anger over the Prime Minister's decision to walk away from the historic Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Malcolm Turnbull's statement on the issue was an "egregious" dog whistle, said Cape York leader Noel Pearson, who blamed Tony Abbott for pushing Mr Turnbull "further and further to the right".
In a statement, Mr Turnbull said "the Government does not believe such a radical change to our constitution's representative institutions has any realistic prospect of being supported by a majority of Australians in a majority of states".
"There could have been a way to say no to this, without all the egregious dog whistling that is present in the Prime Minister's press release," Mr Pearson told RN Drive.
"When you go back to 1999, John Howard at least had the grace to put the public question to the Australian people for their vote.
read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-27/indigenous-leaders-enraged-by-pms-...
not even lip service...
Barely two days after the federal government, under cover of a ministerial scandal, put out the trash with its rejection of Indigenous pleas for a constitutionally enshrined voice to parliament, Malcolm Turnbull’s legacy in black Australia is all but fully defined.
In the linguistically and culturally diverse urban, regional and remote communities that comprise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia, Turnbull will now go down as the prime minister with the tin ear. And the tin heart.
Yes, to many Indigenous Australians Turnbull will now be remembered as the Tin Prime Minister. He is the leader who purportedly asked Indigenous Australians what they wanted ... only to blithely dismiss their answer as soon as they gave it at Uluru in May.
The Uluru statement reflected the sentiment expressed at dozens of earlier community meetings across Australia to roundly reject symbolic acknowledgement of First Nations in the commonwealth constitution.
Much of the establishment media, like the government and the federal opposition – which shrouded genuine mainstream debate in the cloak of bipartisanship, having already reduced “recognition” to a black (yes)/white (no) issue – had little sense (surprise!) such sentiments even existed.
Few bothered to ask why Indigenous people would want symbolic recognition in what many regard as the founding document of the settler state – as opposed to the many practical measures, sadly lacking, that might actually improve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander human outcomes. If such a document was to acknowledge the Indigenous, they were saying, it would have to do so in a way that would amplify – rather than merely note – the black voice.
At the grass roots and at the later Uluru meetings of delegates, there was an overwhelming preference for treaties, a process of national truth-telling about this country’s appalling historical treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – and, not least, that voice to parliament, enshrined in the constitution.
Turnbull’s response? It was, he said, “very short on detail but a very big idea”.
Turnbull, who knows something of referendums from his time in the Australian republican movement, was obviously, from the start, unwilling to dare again. It’s an obvious segue to the general yawning vacuum of conviction politics and reform under his leadership, such as it is. But I’ll leave that to others.
With such a deliberately glib, patronising and ambiguous response after Uluru, however, the proposals for the voice to parliament – regardless of what it might look like – was stone dead from that moment.
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2017/oct/27...
Read from top...
I suppose it went down hill from here...
I have been trying all morning to find some information about "King", the cartoonist here but to no avail. Is he the same person as Jonathan King, the historian, who could have indulged in a few funny drawings?... King was published in the 1960s in the Daily Telegraph. There is not a skerrick of info on the net about King "the cartoonist"... Should someone know about King please send me smoke signals at "contact us"...
Read from top.
constitutional recognition is very difficult...
Cape York lawyer Noel Pearson has revealed he will try to convince a future Labor government to legislate for an Indigenous body to advise Parliament on Indigenous affairs, declaring bipartisanship on changing the constitution to enshrine an Indigenous body is effectively dead.
Key points:In an exclusive interview with RN Drive after publishing his essay titled Betrayal in The Monthly, Mr Pearson said it is his personal view that changing the constitution should be the end goal but, since the Turnbull Government had rejected the Uluru proposal, the nation needed to find an alternative pathway.
"In the absence of bipartisanship, constitutional recognition is very difficult, if not impossible," he told RN Drive in an interview to be broadcast tonight.
Read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/noel-pearson-says-turnbull-governm...
trumble is a whitey whimp...
Aboriginal leaders have accused the Prime Minister of being "deceitful" and duplicitous for privately encouraging them to consult the Australian public on enshrining an Indigenous voice in the constitution before publicly rejecting the proposal.
Key points:At the centre of the feud is a November 2016 meeting Mr Turnbull had with the Referendum Council, which was also attended by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.
Cape York Indigenous leader Noel Pearson and other Referendum Council members are furious about the Prime Minister's answer to a question from Mr Shorten in Question Time yesterday.
Mr Turnbull told Parliament he had warned the council that "a representative body available only to Indigenous Australians" was "inconsistent with a fundamental principle of our democracy".
"I also said, being frank and honest, that I thought the prospects of such an amendment to the constitution being successful were absolutely zero, absolutely zero," the Prime Minister said yesterday.
However, after seeking clarification that they could consult on all models, the Referendum Council believed the PM would genuinely consider all proposals including the voice to Parliament, because he explicitly allowed them to consult on the option in writing.
Last year, Mr Turnbull killed hopes for a referendum to establish an Indigenous advisory body in the constitution, arguing the idea was too ambitious and would not win support across the country.
Read more:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-14/indigenous-leaders-unhappy-with-pm...
Read from top...
the great gift of the australian dreaming...
by Richard Flanagan
I told a friend the other day I was to be speaking here in Canberra today and she told me a joke. A man is doubled over at the front of Parliament House throwing up. A stranger comes up and puts an arm around the vomiting man. I know how you feel, the stranger says.
It’s not a bad joke. But it felt familiar. I went searching my book shelves, and finally found a variation of it in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, set in communist Czechoslovakia in the dark years after the Prague Spring. In Kundera’s version the two men are standing in Wenceslas Square.
Both jokes are about failing regimes that have lost the essential moral legitimacy governments need to govern. We don’t have to like or agree with a government but we still accept it has the right to make decisions in our name. Until, that is, we don’t. And it occurred to me that in both jokes it’s not just those in immediate power but a whole system that is beginning to lose its moral legitimacy.
As a young man I was studying in England, which I didn’t much enjoy, and spent most of my time in Yugoslavia, which I got to know through my wife’s family, who were Slovene, and which I enjoyed very much. Yugoslavia was then a communist dictatorship, but it occupied a curious place, halfway between the Soviet and capitalist system.
Yugoslavs were a well-educated, cultured people. But the system, like that of the Czechs, lost its legitimacy after Tito’s death in the mid 80s. A credit crisis became a full blown economic and then political crisis. Opportunistic politicians, devoid of solutions to the nation’s problems, instead pitched neighbour against neighbour. And suddenly nothing held.
I witnessed a country slide into inexplicable nationalisms and ethnic hatreds, and in the space of a very short time, into genocidal madness.
It made me realise at a young age that the veneer of civilised societies is very thin, a fragile thing that once broken brings forth monsters.
Czechoslovakia took a different route. After the final toppling of the system with the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the revolution’s leader, Vaclav Havel, wrote presciently of how the west should not gloat over the fall of the old Soviet states. Eastern Europe was, he observed, simply a twisted mirror reflecting back a slightly more distorted image of what might come to prevail in the west. If the west only gloated and did not learn from what that image portended of its future, it too might find itself one day facing a similar existential crisis.
In the heady 1990s Havel’s warnings sounded absurd and overwrought. And yet it came to pass as Havel warned: the west did gloat, declaring the end of history, and in its triumphalism dangerous new forces were allowed to fester unchecked, their scale and threat only becoming fully apparent in the past few years.
Now in Russia, in Turkey, in Poland, in Hungary and the Czech Republic we see the rise of the strongman leader, some like Putin, already effectively dictators, others like Erdogan and Orban well on the way. In Slovakia a leading journalist was recently murdered after exposing links between leading Slovakian politicians and the Italian Mafia.
There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon. Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal in disposition, tending to spew a poisonous rhetoric aimed against refugees, Muslims, and increasingly Jews, and hostile to truth and those who speak it, most particularly journalists to the point, sometimes, of murder.
And yet this new authoritarianism is resonant with so many, acting as it does as a justification for rule by a few wealthy oligarchs and corporations, and as an explanation for the growing immiseration of the many.
In Australia though we feel ourselves, as ever, a long way away. We feel we are somehow immune from these dangerous currents. After all, we have had routine forays into populist extremism from the mid 1990s with the likes of Hansonism without it ever threatening our democracy. Our politics may be dreadful, a black comedy pregnant with collapse, its actors exhausted, without imagination or courage or principle, solely obsessed with pillaging the tawdry jewels of office and fleeing into distant sinecures as ambassadors or high commissioners, or with paid up Chinese board posts, while outside the city burns. But it is all very far from a dictatorship.
Leadership nowhere to be found
Our society grows increasingly more unequal, more disenfranchised, angrier, more fearful. Even in my home town of Hobart, as snow settles on the mountain, there is the deeply shameful spectacle of a tent village of the homeless, the number of which increase daily. We sense the rightful discontent of the growing numbers locked out from a future. From hope.
Instead of public debate, scapegoats are offered up – the boatperson, the queue jumper, the Muslim – a xenophobia both parties have been guilty of playing on for electoral benefit for two decades. Instead of new ideas and new visions we are made wallow in threadbare absurdities and convenient fictions: Australia Day, the world’s most liveable cities, secure borders.
Our institutions are frayed. Our polity is discredited, and almost daily discredits itself further. The many problems that confront us, from housing to infrastructure to climate change, are routinely evaded. Our screens are filled with a preening peloton of potential leaders, but nowhere is there to be found leadership.
Holderlin, the great 19th century poet, wrote of the “mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake nations. Increasingly, one can sense that yearning in the overly heated rhetoric of some Australian politicians and commentators. That yearning can overtake Australia as easily as it has many other countries, damaging our democratic institutions, our freedoms and our values.
Politics, which ought to have as its highest calling the task of holding society together, of keeping us away from the chasm, has retreated to repeating divisive myths that have no foundation in the truth of what we are as a nation, and so, finally only serve to contribute to the forces that could yet destroy us. Or worse yet, openly stoking needless fear and, with the refugee issue, a xenophobia for short-term electoral advantage.
The consequence is a time bomb which simply needs as a detonator what every other country has had and we have not: hard times. But hard times will return. And when they do what defence will we have should a populist movement that trades on the established scapegoats arises? An authoritarian party with a charismatic leader that uses the poison with which the old myths are increasingly pregnant to deliver itself power?
The challenge that faces us, the grave and terrifying challenge, is to transform ourselves as a people. This fundamental challenge is not policy, it is not franking credits nor is it tax giveaways or rail links, necessary or not as these things may be. It is to realise that if we don’t create for ourselves a liberating vision founded in the full truth of who we are as a people, we will find ourselves, in a moment of crisis, suddenly entrapped in a new authoritarianism wearing the motley of the old lies.
For we are a people of astonishing perversity.
We are an ancient country that insists on thinking itself new. We are a modern nation that insists our recent arrangements are so time honoured that none of them can ever be changed. We are a complex country that insists on being simple minded. We regard simplicity as a national virtue, and when coupled with language unimpeded by the necessity for thought, is regarded as strong character. Which may explain our treasurer Scott Morrison, but little else.
And for the past two decades we have doubled down and doubled down again on old myths – lies – that become more dangerous the longer we allow them to go unchallenged.
Six days from now, on the eve of Anzac Day, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, will launch a war memorial-cum-museum in France. Costing an extraordinary $100m, the Monash Centre is reportedly the most expensive museum built in France for many years. It will honour those Australians who so tragically lost their lives on the western front in world war one and, more generally, the 62,000 Australians who died in world war one.
Would that someone might whisper into the prime minister’s ear the last lines of Wilfred Owen’s poem about those same fatal trenches:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Owen’s last Latin phrase – the old lie, as he puts it – is from the Roman poet Horace: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
Except the Australians didn’t even die for Australia. They died for Britain. For their empire. Not our country. A double lie then: a lie within a lie.
But, as Tony Abbott asked when, as prime minister, he announced the building of the museum, what was the alternative in Britain’s time of need?
Well, we might answer, staying home for one thing, and not dying in other people’s wars.
And yet the horrific suffering of so many Australians for distant empires has now become not a terrible warning, not a salient story of the blood-sacrifice that must be paid by nations lacking independence, not the unhappy beginning of an unbroken habit, but, bizarrely, the purported origin story of us as an independent people.
The growing state-funded cult of Anzac will see $1.1bn spent by the Australian government on war memorials between 2014 and 2028. Those who lost their lives deserve honour – I know from my father’s experience how meaningful that can be. But when veterans struggle for recognition and support for war-related suffering, you begin to wonder what justifies this expense, this growing militarisation of national memory or, to be more precise, a forgetting of anything other than an official version of war as the official version of our country’s history, establishing dying in other people’s wars as our foundation story.
And so, the Monash Centre, for all its good intentions, for all the honour it does the dead, is at heart a centre for forgetting. It leads us to forget that the 62,000 young men who died in world war one died far from their country in service of one distant empire fighting other distant empires. It leads us to forget that not one of those deaths it commemorates was necessary. Not 62,000. Not even one.
Lest we forget we will all chant next week, as we have all chanted for a century now. And yet it is as if all that chanting only ensures we remember nothing. If we remembered would we 100 years later still allow our young men to be sent off to kill or be killed in distant conflicts defending yet again not our country, but another distant empire, as we have in Iraq and Afghanistan?
If all that chanting simply reinforces such forgetting, then what hope have we now in negotiating some independent, safe path for our country between the growing tension of another dying empire, the American, and the rising new empire of the Chinese? Because instead of learning from the tragedies of our past, we are ensuring that we will learn nothing.
The forgetting extends to the horrific suffering of war. The prime minister who will, no doubt, speak sincerely and movingly of the torn bodies and broken lives of the Australians who fell in France, is also the same prime minister who wants to see the Australian arms industry become one of the world’s top 10 defence exporters, seeking to boost exports to several countries, including what was described as “the rapidly growing markets in Asia and the Middle East”, in particular the United Arab Emirates, a country accused of war crimes in Yemen.
Anzac Day, which is a very important day for my family, was always a day to remember all my father’s mates who didn’t make it home. But it was also a moment to ponder the horror of war more generally. But of late Anzac Day has become enshrouded in cant and entangled in dangerous myth. If this seems overstated ponder the bigoted bile that attended Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s tweet last Anzac Day in which she posted “LEST.WE.FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine ...)”
I read this as a plea for compassion drawing on the memory of a national trauma.
Most refugees on Manus Island and Nauru are fleeing war, Syria has half a million dead and more than 11 million people exiled internally and externally because of war, and Palestinians, whatever position one takes, suffer greatly from ongoing conflict.
And yet as the attacks on Abdel-Magied showed, some were seeking to transform Anzac Day into a stalking horse for racism, misogyny and anti-Islamic sentiment. For hate, intolerance and bigotry. For all those very forces that create war. The great disrespect to Anzac Day wasn’t the original tweet but the perverted attacks made on it, in, of all things, the name of the dead. Those who think they honour Anzac Day by forgetting contemporary victims of war only serve to make a tragic mockery of all that it should be.
Freedom means Australia facing up to the truth of its pastWe should, of course, question these things more. We could ask why – if we were actually genuine about remembering patriots who have died for this country – why would we not first spend $100m on a museum honouring the at least 65,000 estimated Indigenous dead who so tragically lost their lives defending their country here in Australia in the frontier wars of the 1800s? Why is there nowhere in Australia telling the stories of the massacres, the dispossession, and the courageous resistance of these patriots?
The figure of 65,000, I should add, is one arrived at by two academics at the University of Queensland and applies only to Indigenous deaths in Queensland. If their methodology is correct, the numbers for the Indigenous fallen nationally must be extraordinarily large.
As one prominent commentator noted, “Individually and collectively, it was sacrifice on a stupendous scale. We should be a nation of memory, not just of memorials, for these are our foundation stories. They should be as important to us as the ride of Paul Revere, or the last stand of King Harold at Hastings, or the incarceration of Nelson Mandela might be to others.”
The commentator was Tony Abbott, announcing the French museum, speaking of the dead of world war one.
And yet how can his argument be said not to also hold for the Indigenous dead? After all, Sir John Monash became a great military leader in spite of considerable prejudice. And so too Pemulwuy and Jundamurra.
Of course, such a reasonable and necessary proposal as a museum for the Indigenous fallen would at first be greeted with ridicule and contempt. Because in the deepest, most fundamental way we are not free of our colonial past. Freedom exists in the shadow of memory. For Australia to find out what freedom means it has to face up to the truth of its past. And it’s time we decided to accept what we are and where we come from, because only in that truth can we finally be free as a people.
Sixty years ago, the scientific consensus was that Indigenous Australians had been in Australia for only 6,000 years. But through a series of breath-taking discoveries, science has confirmed what Indigenous people always knew: that they have been here for at least 60,000 years.
It makes you wonder if the $500m earmarked for renovating the Australian War Memorial would not be more wisely spent on a world class national Indigenous museum that honours a past unparalleled in human history? Surely, when we have the oldest continuous civilisation on Earth, is not such a major institution central to our understanding of ourselves as a people? Is it not necessary, and fundamental to us as a nation?
It is, after all, extraordinary, and beyond a disgrace that there is in the 21st century no museum telling that extraordinary story, so that all Australians might know it, so that the world might share in it, and so that we might learn something of the struggle and achievement, the culture and unique civilisations that were and are Indigenous Australia.
We have turned our back on this profound truth again and again, because to acknowledge it is also to acknowledge the other great truth of Australia: that the prosperity of contemporary Australia was built on the destruction of countless Indigenous lives up to the present day, and with them dreamings, songlines, languages, alternative ways of comprehending not only our extraordinary country but the very cosmos.
And yet if we were to have the courage and largeness to acknowledge as a nation both truths about our past, we would discover a third truth, an extraordinary and liberating truth for our future, about who we are and where we might go.
We would discover that though this land and its people were colonised, a 60,000-year-old civilisation is not so easily snuffed out. And the new people who came to Australia, in their dealings with black Australia, were also indigenised, and, in the mash up, Indigenous values of land, of country, of time, of family, of space and story, became strong among non-Indigenous Australians. Indigenous ways, forms, understandings permeated our mentality in everything from Australian rules football to our sense of humour.
As much as there was a process of colonisation, there was also a history of indigenisation – a frequently repressed, often violent process in which a white underclass took on many black ways of living and sometimes, more fundamentally, thinking and feeling, in which may be traced continuities that extend back into deep time.
We would discover that we are not Europeans nor are we Asians. That we are not a new country. We are in the first instance a society that begins in deep time. That is the bedrock of our civilisation as Australians, our birthright, and if we would accept it, rather than spurn it, we might discover so many new possibilities for ourselves as a people.
A war of extermination
My own island is a good example of both processes. There took place there what was described, not by a contemporary left-wing academic, but an 1830s Van Diemonian attorney general, as “a war of extermination” of the Tasmanian Aborigines. A terrible war of which fewer than 100 people survived, the forebears of today’s 25,000-strong Palawa population.
To this day Tasmanian society is shaped by the tragedy of a land where the English, as a ship’s captain’s wife, Rosalie O’Hare, confided in her diary in 1828, “consider the massacre of these people an honour”.
But it was, for a critical time, also a land where many ex-convicts, to quote a contemporary witness, “dress in kangaroo skins without linen and wear sandals made of seal skins. They smell like foxes.” They live in “bark huts like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus, and small porcupines”. In coming to understand how to live in this strange new world, they took on Aboriginal partners, ways of life and thinking.
No less an authority than John West, the first official editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote in 1856 that whites living outside of the two major Van Diemonian settlements “had a way of life somewhat resembling that of the Aborigines”.
The bush became freedom, and for a time the Van Diemonian authorities feared a jacquerie in which the ex-convicts would make common cause with the Aboriginal population.
It was a messy, often brutal, inescapably human response to extraordinary times and places, out of which emerged a new people. It was a revolution of sense and sensibilities so extraordinary it is even now hard to fully compass its liberating dimensions.
If this history is frequently terrible, it is also finally a history of hope for us all. For it shows we are not dispossessed Europeans, but a muddy wash of peoples made anew in the meeting of a pre-industrial, pre-modern European culture with a remarkable Indigenous culture and an extraordinary natural world
George Orwell once said that the hardest thing to see is what is in front of your face.
This is what is in front of ours.
We became our own people, not a poor imitation of elsewhere.
We pretend that our national identity is a fixed, frozen thing, but Australia is a molten idea. We have only begun to think of ourselves as Australians within living memory. There was no legal concept of an Australian citizen until 1948. Twenty years later, the Australian population was still divided into three official categories by the ABS in its official year book: British: born in Australia; British: born overseas, and foreign.
Indigenous Australia wasn’t even recorded as a general category.
Indigenous Australia has, after great thought and wide discussion, asked that it be heard, and that this take the form of an advisory body to parliament – a body that would be recognised in the constitution.
“What a gift this is that we give you,” Galarrwuy Yunupingu has said, “if you choose to accept us in a meaningful way.”
The gift we are being offered is vast; the patrimony of 60,000 years, and with it the possibilities for the future that it opens up to us. We can choose to have our beginning and our centre in Indigenous culture. Or we can choose to walk away, into a misty world of lies and evasions, pregnant with the possibility of future catastrophe.
But this gift needs honouring in what Yunupingu calls a “meaningful way”. It needs honouring with institutions, with monuments, with this profound history being made central in our account of ourselves and, above all, with what the Indigenous people have asked for repeatedly: constitutional recognition.
In truth, we can no longer go forward without addressing this matter. We cannot hope to be a republic if this is not at the republic’s core, because otherwise we are only repeating the error of the colonialists and the federationists before us.
At a moment when democracy around the world is imperilled we are being offered, with the Uluru statement, the chance to complete our democracy, to make it stronger, more inclusive, and more robust.
And we would be foolish to turn that offer down.
That saying the things that I have said today might be deemed unreasonable, or shrill, or farfetched, should remind us all of how intolerable the situation remains in this country for Indigenous people, how unbearable it must be for Indigenous people to know that their patrimony, their 60-millennia-old culture, which they are willing to share, which has shaped and continues to shape much of what is best in Australia, will, however, continue to be treated as marginal, and they, again, humiliated.
Even if you have no respect for Indigenous Australia, you should care for the future of your country. And now, more than ever, we need ways of bringing us together, not, as, for example, Australia Day presently does, dividing us. We need a large and open vision sustained in truth, not myths that encourages dangerous illusions.
I know these are large ideas. But perhaps they are the ideas for these times. None of these things are easy. None will be quickly arrived at.
But the alternative is worse; the alternative is the slow collapse, it is the many cracks which are already appearing; the inequality; the grounds for an authoritarian revolt, for a hopelessly divided country. It is Holderlin’s yearning for the chasm.
Definitions belong to the definer not the defined. For 20 years Australians lived with the definition that they were selfish, xenophobic, self-interested and incapable of being roused on larger issues.
But the marriage equality debate proved it was not so. Since the marriage equality vote it’s clear that Australians are not the mean and pinched people we had been persuaded and bluffed for so many years that we were.
We are not small-minded bigots. We are, as it turns out, people who care. We are people who feel and who think. Australia is not a fixed entity, a collection of outdated bigotries and reactionary credos, but rather the invitation to dream, and this country – our country – belongs to its dreamers.
And if after more than 20 years of groundhog day we are finally ready to once more go forward as a people it’s time our dreamers were brought in from the cold, and with them Galarrwuy Yunupingu’s great gift of the Australian dreaming.
Richard Flanagan
awaiting the treaty of canberra...
Treaty is a powerful song. The Yothu Yindi anthem never fails to raise fists in the air. It speaks to the heart and an unshakeable belief in justice.
But for all that, it is just a song. "Treaty yeah, treaty now." In the end it is a slogan, no more than "give peace a chance".
Slogans are by their nature simplistic: a call to arms. At best they contain an aspiration: a dream or hope.
The song Treaty can set the heart racing but it doesn't withstand scrutiny. It doesn't speak to the head.
Too often the public discourse fails to move beyond slogans; rhetoric that relies more on emotion than reason.
Think of that oft-cited mantra:
"Australia is the only Commonwealth country not to have a treaty with Indigenous peoples."
For all its obvious truth, is that an argument to negotiate contemporary treaties? Indeed, it may well just be an argument not to.
It invites the question: why change something that will undoubtedly have unforeseen and unintended consequences?
It would have been simpler — if not necessarily more just or effective — had treaties been signed in the early stages of contact like New Zealand or North America.
But today, we are confronted with a fundamental question: who would such treaties be signed with? Indigenous nations, clans and groups have been dispersed, traditional boundaries have been blurred and new affiliations have been formed.
Who are Indigenous people today? The overwhelming majority of people identifying as Indigenous share mixed racial heritage.
That presents no impediment to identifying and being accepted as Indigenous, but the shifting sands of identity can be a flimsy premise for the political and legal recognition of group rights.
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/stan-grant-indigenous-australia-treaty...
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no show...
Indigenous Australians should not be forced to adopt a compromised position or endure another round of consultation on constitutional recognition because Indigenous affairs minister Ken Wyatt has ruled out supporting a key proposal, Aboriginal leaders have said.
Wyatt, the Labor senator Patrick Dodson and the Cape York leader Noel Pearson were all invited to be panellists on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday, but none attended.
The Labor MP Linda Burney and the APY Lands chairwoman, Sally Scales, criticised Wyatt, four days after he said in the annual Lingiari lecture that a constitutionally enshrined Indigenous voice to parliament would not be considered as part of a referendum on constitutional recognition.
Instead he said he would take a “pragmatic” approach foreshadowed in a joint select committee report last year, and in his press club speech last month.
Enshrining a representative First Nations body in the constitution was one of two key recommendations of the landmark Uluru Statement.
Burney, the shadow Indigenous affairs spokeswoman, said Labor supported the Uluru Statement in full but she would continue to work with Wyatt in a bipartisan way.
She said she was “disappointed” that “Ken made the decision – someone made the decision – that Ken wasn’t appearing” on Q&A, but that only he could explain why he felt a First Nations advisory body should not have constitutional protection.
Scales said Wyatt’s position pushed the debate on constitutional recognition back to 2015, before the idea of a symbolic reform was soundly rejected by national community dialogues.
“We have had eight reports in eight years around constitutional recognition in one form or another,” Scales said. “Do we want to wait another eight years? Do we need another eight reports?”
Asked by host Tony Jones if she or other delegates who signed off on the Uluru Statement in 2017 would be prepared to compromise, Scales said: “I won’t.”
“We have compromised so much already,” she said. “As Indigenous Australians, as First Nations people, we have compromised a lot. So why do we have to keep compromising?”
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/aug/20/qa-indigenous-lea...
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living black...
One of Australia's most prominent Indigenous television hosts has opened up about discrimination during her career, saying she was racially targeted as recently as two weeks ago by police in the Northern Territory.
Key points:Karla Grant — the long-time host of SBS show Living Black — detailed the incident this morning during the Women In Media national conference on the Gold Coast, where she appeared as a guest speaker.
The Adelaide-born media personality also revealed her career stalled early on, and she had to wait several years to get a job in the media after a bad experience.
Grant said she was recently in Alice Springs filming a documentary on a women's choir from Vanuatu, when she was stopped by a police officer who thought she was illegally buying alcohol to re-sell.
Grant said the incident occurred after a long day of filming when she and a non-Indigenous colleague went to get "a bottle of wine and a couple of beers" to have with dinner at a nearby restaurant.
"We walked into this BWS and there was a police officer, a female police officer, right at the entrance," Grant said.
"She focused in on me and said 'have you got any ID? where are you staying?'
"I was so shocked and she didn't ask for my producer's ID, she just asked me, she really focused in on me."
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-13/indigenous-tv-host-karla-grant-hi...
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still victimising aborignal people...
Christian missionaries are causing a fresh wave of upset in outback Australia, promising to bring people back from the dead, and promoting the idea traditional Aboriginal culture is a type of devil worship.
Key points:An investigation by Background Briefing has uncovered dramatic scenes in the Kimberley region, where Aboriginal followers of a Tongan-born preacher have set fire to artefacts considered sacred by many local elders, and dismantled and burned a spiritual law ground.
The approach of some recently arrived evangelists has been slammed by some Aboriginal leaders, including Labor Senator Pat Dodson.
"They are a type of virus that has really got no credibility," he said. "If they really understood the gospel then the gospel is about liberation.
"It's about an accommodation of the diversity and differences that we have in our belief systems."
He believes the destruction of traditional culture is "an act of bastardry".
"It's about the lowest act you could perform in trying to indicate to a fellow human being that you have total disdain for anything they represent."
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-09-20/the-christian-converts-who-are-se...
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See also:
of religious depth, superheroes and wombat cubic shit...http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/36580
from the big bang to strippers: why we need more scientists....
the anti-particle of god... or why your wallet is empty...Oh and these act of vandalism are not performed by "old priests" like in Bran Neu Dae but by cunning well-trained deluded motor-mouthed young people (girls from Tonga?, alla Folau?) with the Pentecostal extremistic faith that claims who does not subscribe to their loony faith is evil...
world indigenous recognition, except australia...
The question of Indigenous recognition has been debated for many years in state and federal politics in Australia.
On ABC's Q&A, opposition spokeswoman for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney said: "The Australian constitution is the only constitution of a first world nation with a colonial history that does not recognise its first people."
"That's the truth," she said.
Is that correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.
The verdictMs Burney's claim checks out.
Fact Check contacted experts for assistance in determining which countries fit the criteria of a "first world nation with a colonial history" and have first people.
The common candidates among these experts were Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States of America.
Fact Check considered and rejected other potential countries, so the list is a short one.
Having said that, Canada, New Zealand and the United States all provide greater constitutional recognition of their first people than Australia.
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-10-10/fact-check3a-is-australia-the-onl...
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racism in nine journalism...
Two years after the Queensland government agreed to pay a $30m settlement to the people of Palm Island for police breaching the Racial Discrimination Act, Nine News has broadcast a “major investigation” revealing the recipients of the compensation spent some of their money on cars and boats.
It was a pointless angle which told viewers the bleeding obvious – that people who got money they were owed bought things they needed or wanted – but many Indigenous observers and others heavily criticised the news piece, some claiming it was a racist dog whistle to suggest the community was wasting “taxpayer dollars”.
“New sports cars with custom paint jobs, luxury boats paid for in cash, a taste of what $30m in taxpayer money is being spent on,” were among the items mentioned in the report, which the Indigenous journalist Amy McQuire, among others, savaged on social media.
The report said residents spent “lavishly” on “luxury 4-wheel drives, sports cars, new used and personalised” which were “bought in bulk”.
“[They] worked out a price with us, said we’ll be back in half an hour with the money, and they went to the bank and came back,” a car dealer told Nine.
The lawyer for the claimants, Stewart Levitt, who was interviewed but appeared only briefly, told the First Nations Telegraph the story implied Indigenous people should not have the benefit of damages “awarded to them by the federal court following a lengthy trial, leading to a 560-page judgment delivered in December 2016”.
“It is difficult to think of a better investment by a Palm Islander than in a luxury motorboat, which can provide the triple benefits of being a vehicle for fishing (for business or pleasure), tourism and leisure.”
Nine did not respond to requests for comment.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/may/22/nine-news-palm-island-inve...
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blowing up 46,000 years of history...
Mining giant Rio Tinto has apologised to traditional owners in Western Australia’s north after destroying a significant Indigenous site dating back 46,000 years, saying it is urgently reviewing plans for other sites in the area.
Rio detonated explosives in a part of the Juukan Gorge last Sunday, destroying two ancient rock shelters, which has devastated the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people.
The mining giant was granted approval for work at the Brockman 4 iron ore project in 2013, but subsequent archaeological excavation revealed ancient artefacts including grinding stones, a bone sharpened into a tool and 4000-year-old braided hair.
“We are sorry for the distress we have caused,” Rio Tinto Iron Ore chief executive Chris Salisbury said in a statement on Sunday.
....
WA Aboriginal affairs minister Ben Wyatt has said he was unaware of the blast or concerns beforehand.
The state government hopes to pass its new Aboriginal cultural heritage bill this year, although Covid-19 has delayed the consultation process.
“It will provide for agreements between traditional owners and proponents to include a process to consider new information that may come to light, and allow the parties to be able to amend the agreements by mutual consent,” Wyatt said.
“The legislation will also provide options for appeal.”
Peter Stone, Unesco’s chair in cultural property protection and peace, said the archaeological destruction at Juukan Gorge was among the worst seen in recent history, likening it to the Taliban blowing up the Bamiyan Buddhas statues in Afghanistan and Isis annihilating sites in the Syrian city of Palmyra.
Rio said it was committed to updating its practices.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/31/rio-tinto-apologises-to...
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no "misunderstanding"...
Mining giant BHP Billiton is poised to destroy at least 40 – and possibly as many as 86 – significant Aboriginal sites in the central Pilbara to expand its $4.5bn South Flank iron ore mining operation, even though its own reports show it is aware that the traditional owners are deeply opposed to the move.
In documents seen by Guardian Australia, a BHP archaeological survey identified rock shelters that were occupied between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago and noted that evidence in the broader area showed “occupation of the surrounding landscape has been ongoing for approximately 40,000 years”.
BHP’s report in September 2019 identified 22 sites of artefacts scatters, culturally modified trees, rock shelters with painted rock art, stone arrangements, and 40 “built structures … believed to be potential archaeological sites”.
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jun/11/bhp-to-destroy-at-least...
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please hurry before BHP blows up a few more...
Read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2020/jun/11/australia-co...
Read also: no "misunderstanding"...
update...
Mining giant BHP has announced it will place on hold plans to destroy dozens of sacred sites in WA as part of a major mine operation, following a national backlash over Rio Tinto’s blasting of sacred sites in Western Australia’s Pilbara.
BHP had planned to destroy up to 40 sites sacred to the Banjima people to make way for its $4.5 billion South Flank mine, near Newman in WA’s Pilbara.
The company was granted approval to do so by WA Aboriginal Affairs Minister Ben Wyatt on May 29, just days after Rio Tinto’s destruction of ancient rock shelters became public.
Read more:
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2020/06/11/bhp-halts-destruction-of-sacred-aboriginal-sites-amid-outcry-over-rio-tinto-blasting/
A hold is not "long enough"... We want a permanent DO NOT BLAST ABORIGINAL SITES.
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joining voices...
It is thirty years since a royal commission into black deaths in custody in Australia and the numbers keep rising. And we fail to stop it.
It has taken the death of a black man in America to wake us up to what happens here.
Now we are joining our voices with the voices of black America.
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-13/stan-grant-black-lives-matter-fou...
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we walk the journey together...
Series 2020 I Can't Breathe
In a searing and deeply personal story, Stan Grant gives voice to the frustration and hurt that has defined the life experience of so many Indigenous Australians and explores why George Floyd's death resonates so profoundly.
Read more:
https://iview.abc.net.au/show/four-corners/series/2020/video/NC2003H023S00
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SA allows the destruction of Aboriginal sites...
The South Australian Government has granted a minerals exploration company permission to "damage, disturb or interfere" with a sacred Aboriginal site in the state's outback.
Key points:Lake Torrens does not have any native title protections but it is an important site to several Aboriginal nations.
Kelaray, a subsidiary of Argonaut Resources, made an application to the State Government under Section 23 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act to conduct drilling on the Lake.
That section allows the South Australian Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Premier Steven Marshall, the ability to allow the damage and destruction of Aboriginal sites.
In a letter from Mr Marshall obtained by the ABC, the Premier said he considered Kelaray's mitigation strategies in making his assessment.
Read more:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-05/sa-government-approves-lake-torrens-sacred-site-drilling/13030346
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