The City of Sydney has voted to replace the words \u201cEuropean arrival\u201d in the official record with \u201cinvasion\u201d. The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word in describing how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British. \u201cWe were invaded,\u201d said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. \u201cIt is the truth and it shouldn\u2019t be watered down. We wouldn\u2019t expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2008, the then prime minister Kevin Rudd formally apologised to Aborigines wrenched from their families as children under a policy inspired by the crypto-fascist theories of eugenics. White Australia was said to be coming to terms with its rapacious past, and present. Was it? The Rudd government, noted a Sydney Morning Herald editorial, \u201chas moved quickly to clear away this piece of political wreckage in a way that responds to some of its supporters\u2019 emotional needs, yet it changes nothing. It is a shrewd manoeuvre.\u201d<\/p>\n
The City of Sydney ruling is a very different gesture, and admirable; for it reflects not a liberal and limited \u201csorry campaign\u201d, seeking feel-good \u201creconciliation\u201d rather than justice, but counters a cowardly movement of historical revision in which a collection of far-right politicians, journalists and minor academics claimed there was no invasion, no genocide, no Stolen Generation, no racism.<\/p>\n
The platform for these holocaust deniers is the Murdoch press, which has long run its own insidious campaign against the indigenous population, presenting them as victims of each other or as noble savages requiring firm direction: the eugenicists\u2019 view. Favoured black \u201cleaders\u201d who tell the white elite what it wants to hear while blaming their own people for their poverty, provide a PC cover for a racism that often shocks foreign visitors. Today, the first Australians have one of the shortest life expectancies in the world and are incarcerated at five times the rate of blacks in apartheid South Africa. Go to the outback and see the children blinded by trachoma, a biblical disease, entirely preventable, eradicated in third world countries but not in rich Australia. The Aboriginal people are both Australia\u2019s secret and this otherwise derivative society\u2019s most amazing distinction: the world\u2019s oldest society.<\/p>\n
In its landmark rejection of historical propaganda, Sydney, the country oldest and largest city, recognises black Australia\u2019s \u201ccultural endurance\u201d and, without saying so directly, a growing resistance to an outrage known as \u201cthe intervention\u201d. In 2007, John Howard sent the army into Aboriginal Australia to \u201cprotect the children\u201d who, said his minister for indigenous affairs, were being abused in \u201cunthinkable numbers\u201d. It is striking how Australia\u2019s incestuous political and media elite so often rounds on the tiny black minority with all the fervour of the guilty, unaware perhaps that the national mythology and psyche remain culpably damaged while a nationhood, once stolen, is not returned to the original inhabitants.<\/p>\n
Journalists accepted the Howard government\u2019s reason for \u201cintervening\u201d and went hunting for the lurid. One national TV programme used an \u201canonymous youth worker\u201d to allege \u201csex slavery\u201d rings among the Mutitjulu people. He was later exposed as a federal government official and his \u201cevidence\u201d discredited. Of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, just four were identified as possible cases of abuse. There were no \u201cunthinkable numbers\u201d. The rate was around that of white child abuse. The difference was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs, no white parents were swept aside, their wages diminished and welfare \u201cquarantined\u201d. It was all a mighty charade, but with serious purpose.<\/p>\n
The Labor governments that followed Howard have reinforced the new controlling powers over black homelands: the strict Julia Gillard especially: a prime minister who lectures her compatriots on the virtues of colonial wars that \u201cmake us who we are today\u201d and imprisons refugees from those wars indefinitely, including children, on an offshore island not deemed to be Australia, which it is.<\/p>\n
In the Northern Territory, the Gillard government are effectively driving Aboriginal communities into apartheid areas where they will be \u201ceconomically viable\u201d. The undeclared reason is that the Northern Territory is the only part of Australia where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights, and that here lies some of the world\u2019s biggest deposits of uranium, and other minerals. The most powerful political force in Australia is the multi-billion dollar mining industry. Canberra wants to mine and sell and those bloody blackfellas are in the way again. But this time they are organised, articulate, militant, a resistance of conscience and culture. They know it is a second invasion. Having finally uttered the forbidden word, white Australians should stand with them. The City of Sydney has voted to replace the words \u201cEuropean arrival\u201d in the official record with \u201cinvasion\u201d. The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word in describing how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British. \u201cWe were invaded,\u201d said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. \u201cIt is the truth and it shouldn\u2019t be watered down. We wouldn\u2019t expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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