16/06/2020
I’m not perfect. I have said and done very racist things in my past. I repent of them. I still have my own unconscious biases based on race that I am working through. I have been a part of the problem, but am working toward being a part of the solution.
It’s easy to say that this is not our fault, that we’re not racist so we ‘are doing our bit’. But both the racism of the past and the current occurrences of racism in Australia have real world impact on people alive in our society today.
I know it is confronting to many of us, but Australia is a racist country. 75% of Australians have an unconscious negative bias toward Aboriginal Australians:
(https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-09/three-in-four-negative-bias-against-indigenous-australians-study/12335184)
Not only that but for more than 200 years we operated on the legal principle of Terra Nullius, that Australia was unoccupied before European people ‘discovered’ it.
From 1788 until the 1920s, we engaged in a violent war against Aboriginal people and communities in Australia known as the frontier wars, with regular massacres of Aboriginal people where they were shot, bayoneted, poisoned, and marched off cliffs. (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/04/the-killing-times-the-massacres-of-aboriginal-people-australia-must-confront?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other)
Aboriginal people were deliberately separated from their homes and families and moved to missions spread far and wide across the states. They were forbidden from speaking their language or praciticing their culture. If they worked, their wages were paid to the State and they were given rations of flour, sugar, tea, jam, meat and rice. They were not able to work and care for themselves (the state forced them to rely on handouts for generations, and now we call them out for being lazy?). We did this for 150+ years, and now we just expect Aboriginal people to have the same capacity and wealth as non-Aboriginal people? If this were a footrace, we have a 150+ year head start. (http://www.unswlawjournal.unsw.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/32-3-21.pdf)
Throughout most of the 20th Century every state had a policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their parents, resulting in the Stolen Generations and further devastating Aboriginal People’s connection to family, culture and Country. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations)
Until 1973, Australia had a ‘White Australia’ immigration policy that forbid people of non-European origin. It wasn’t the overwhelmingly easy transition you might imagine. Politicians from both sides of parliament waxed lyrical about ‘preserving Australia for the white race’ (conveniently forgetting Aboriginal Australians, Chinese Australians from Gold Rush times, Pacific Islander Kanakas (slaves) and Maori people living in Australia). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy)
This legacy continues in many Australians. Followers of Pauline Hanson, the ‘Love It Or Leave’ brigade and the seemingly everyday Australians who still accuse anybody of Asian appearance of causing COVID.
We push this under the carpet because we don’t see it. We deny it as a society because it doesn’t happen to us. But that doesn't mean that it doesn’t happen.
That is why I am fighting. That is why I will contribute to fight until I’m dead or until everyone is treated with equal respect, has equal opportunity to thrive, has equal safety in the street and has equal opportunity to thrive.
*Note: this photo is from South West Victoria, the site of the Eumarella Wars between the local Gunditjmara people and the European settlers in this land. You can see here the terrain that made fighting a war particularly difficult (rocks, swamps, dense bush).
(https://www.smh.com.au/national/a-forgotten-war-a-haunted-land-20130809-2rnc9.html)
