The journalist, John Pilger, has penned a biting indictment of past and present governments of Australia’s racism and the butchery of the Aborigines in Australia.
He writes of how “The richest land on Earth writes Aboriginal people out of history and pushes them to the margins. Like South Africa 30 years ago”
He reminds us of the first prime minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, who drew up the White Australia Policy in 1901. "The doctrine of the equality of man," said Barton, "was never intended to apply" to those not British and white-skinned. Barton's concern was the Chinese, known as the yellow peril; he made no mention of the oldest, most enduring human presence on Earth: the first Australians. They did not exist. Their sophisticated care of a harsh land was of no interest. Their epic resistance did not happen. Of those who fought the British invaders of Australia, the Sydney Monitor reported in 1838: "It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter." Today, the survivors are a shaming national secret.”
More Extracts
The town of Wilcannia, in New South Wales its Indigenous people have one of the lowest recorded life expectancies. They are usually dead by the age of 35. The Cuban government runs a literacy programme for them, as it does among the poorest of Africa.
Jenny Macklin, who refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of $331,144. Macklin recently claimed that in government she had made a "huge difference". This is true. During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased by almost a third, and more than half the money spent on Indigenous housing was pocketed by white contractors and a bureaucracy for which she was largely responsible. A typical, dilapidated house in an outback Indigenous community must accommodate as many as 25 people. Families, the elderly and disabled people wait years for sanitation that works.
In 2009 Professor James Anaya, the respected UN rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people, described as racist a "state of emergency" that stripped Indigenous communities of their tenuous rights and services on the pretext that paedophile gangs were present in "unthinkable" numbers – a claim dismissed as false by police and the Australian Crime Commission. The then opposition spokesman on Indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott, told Anaya to "get a life" and not "just listen to the old victim brigade". Abbott is now the prime minister of Australia.
A GP whose Indigenous patients live within a few miles of $1,000-a-night resorts serving Uluru (Ayers Rock), she said: "There is asbestos in Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government] doesn't care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to these incredible statistics of Indigenous people dying of renal disease, and vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is done. I ask myself: why not? Malnutrition is common. I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn't treat her because she didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest the tablets. I feel sometimes … as if I'm dealing with similar conditions as the English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution."
The historian Henry Reynolds in his book “Forgotten War” explains that in "one of the greatest appropriations of land in world history, more first Australians were killed than Native Americans on the American frontier and Maoris in New Zealand. The state of Queensland was a slaughterhouse. An entire people became prisoners of war in their own country, with settlers calling for their extinction. The cattle industry prospered using Indigenous men virtually as slave labour. The mining industry today makes profits of a billion dollars a week on Indigenous land.”
No comments:
Post a Comment