Whose Australia?

Australia Day was on the January 26th

Australia  was home to about a million peoples of, at least, 200 nations that traced their ancestry back 60 millennia when it was invaded.

The imperial wars and massacres (guns vs spears) such as those at Hawksbury, Nepean Richmond Hill, Risdon Cove, Appin, Bathurst, Port Phillip, Swan River (Battle of Pinjarra), Gravesend, Vinegar Hill, Myall Creek, Kinroy, Rufus R, Long lagoon, Dawson River, Kalkadoon, Cape Grim, the Black war, McKinley River, and West Kimberely were resisted by Aboriginal warriors like Pemulwuy, Winradyne, Multuggerah, Yagan, and Jandamarra. These wars, along with starvation and Western diseases decimated the dispossessed Aboriginal population to about 70,000 by 1920.

Australia's First Peoples were marginalised onto reservations and missions, restricted entry into white towns, exploited as unpaid slave labour, their indigenous languages and sacred rituals forbidden, and mixed blood children (The Stolen Generations) were forcibly kidnapped from their parents for resocialisation - ie to be made "white". Until the 1967 referendum in Australia, Aborigines were government property: "The right to choose a marriage partner, to be legally responsible for one's own children, to move about the state and to socialise with non-Aboriginal Australians, were just some of the rights which Aboriginal people did not have."

The Native Title Act, 1993, finally acknowledged that some Indigenous Australians "have rights and interests to their land that come from their traditional laws and customs". But, as mining boomed on resource-rich indigenous lands, corporate colonialism reared its greedy head undermining this landmark act with the Northern Territory Intervention.

It was initiated by the Howard government in 2007 and maintained by successive governments including that of Kevin Rudd who made the historic apology to the Stolen Generations even though indigenous communities were suffering the humiliation of quarantined welfare payments and struggled to survive in third world conditions. The Intervention was imposed "on the pretext that paedophile gangs were operating in Indigenous settlements. Troops were sent in; townships were compulsorily acquired and native title legislation ignored. Yet no prosecution for child abuse resulted, and studies concluded that there was no evidence of any systematic child abuse."

 Australia doesn't give a toss for honouring its obligations under international law. It tossed aside its obligations to the Refugee Conventions with its inhumane offshore asylum seeker policy, forcing asylum seeker boats back to Indonesia and with its refusal to compensate people who have been held for prolonged periods in mandatory detention. It "breached its international anti-race discrimination obligations by continuing for almost three years its intervention policies with indigenous communities of the Northern Territory". It continues to tolerate the high instance of Aboriginal deaths in custody.

From here