Australia apologizes to Aborigines...
djsheep
3,620 Posts
I think the new prime minister is iighthttp://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080130/ap_o...T5_I6Yu7BNn.3QAif you want background on the "stolen generations" i suggest watching the movie titled RABBIT PROOF FENCE.peace.
Comments
It's good to see this and Kyoto going down as promised.
Rabbit Proof Fence is unreal. true story and she did it TWICE!
I worked as a postie for 1 year in Redfern Sydney.
I delivered to 'the block' every day. Some days i was the only white person to walk in that area all day, the shit i saw there still haunts me today. I spent many an afternoon in tears after returning from my run: poverty, addiction, abuse, extreme violence, squalor... one day i counted 79 used syringes on the ground in a one block radius.
i saw small Aboriginal children (toddlers) playing with used syringes while policemen watched and laughed. i saw a woman have her head beaten in with a piece of wood while her children watched. i saw people living in conditions that were unfit for any creature. all this in the year 2000 in the city that was hosting the Olympics.
The way those people have been treated is so horrific it is just unbelievable. I sincerely hope that this apology is the first step in a genuine shift in the country's attitude towards its original inhabitants, both officially and on a social level.
There is some serious work that needs to be done; hopefully the government can get their act together to start making a difference.
The fact that a whole race of people live in 3rd world like conditions in a country like this is a national disgrace.
I wonder if this will get much coverage internationally???
I worked for 2 yrs as youthworker in Cairns with 12-18yr olds who sniffed paint and petrol and it was mainly kids from Cape York (Aurukun, Kowanyama) who were mostly full blood and still had their own language and clan connections.
I had many great times and of course some pretty full on ones but it was heartbreaking to deal with kids that had seen so much at such an early age.
We so many times would see how well the kids would respond to a functional loving environment while in our care only to return to a community so caught up in cycles of violence ,alcholism, sexual assaults etc that within weeks they would reoffend.
I have also been lucky to also spend time with some of the powerful old men from Kakadu, Cape York ,Arnhem Land and many of these men have passed over. Some of these Old Fellas can still remember being removed from the bush and marched in chains hundreds of kilometres to Christian run Missions.
They carried with them so much knowledge and understanding that has been lost. The hardest thing for some of these guys was that the younger generation in many cases had no interest in listening to their stories or being initiated into tribal law. Getting drunk,stoned listening to 2pac and trying to be a gangsta was a far more alluring option.
We in Australia have suffered under a right wing goverment for 11yrs that has done nothing towards reconciliation and social justice and I feel a lot more positive with the Labor goverment and what they can achieve if they have the political will.
For those interested in Aboriginal Australian Politics please read this SPEECH
by Noel Pearson made in 2000 as personally I find him extremelly lucid in his arguments
He is an aboriginal activist that has a lot of detractors but is actually doing a lot in his own community to affect change
I used to live in redfern in 2000, Around those parts. It was crazy.
I can never understand the rascism and lack of understanding that goes on in Australia towards Aboriginals, I find Perth worst than Sydney. I hate entering any conversation with people I don't know too well it about Aboriginals and it always happens when you're too drunk to try to get your point across. It's amazing how many people you meet who intially you thought were intelligent, will say the most rascist, ignorant, uninformed shit you've ever heard.
Do you think anti-Aboriginal racism is a generational thing in Aus or are the current 18-30 lot no better? I spent some time in Cairns and Sydney on several occasions, and to be honest, found most folks refreshingly down-to-earth and chilled, across all ages. My wife, who is half-Jamaican, found it the same. People were generally curious as to where she was from, rather than offish with her.
I was also hanging with a crowd who had amongst their number two half ghanain/half polish girls from the UK who didn't really get the amount of racism they expected. I'd be living there now if the wife would leave her family here.
Then, I have another half english/half nigerian friend who was followed around every shop in Surfer's Paradise becuase they thought she was an Aboriginal and expected her to shoplift. She even heard the staff muttering under their breath "You're not supposed to be in here". When she opened her mouth and spoke posh English, they completely changed their attitude but she was on the point of getting a T-shirt printed up with "It's OK - I am English" on it.
Not that that would have always got her better treatment...