Australia Day
Today is the day that white Australians celebrate their
take-over of a continent that had been inhabited by people whose resilient
culture had endured for more than fifty-thousand years. Australia is an
inhospitable place and the invading British were frequently kept from dying of
starvation by the generosity of the indigenous people.
We celebrate that when the British felt secure, they then
started evicting the locals, and when they objected, the British government
made a declaration that Australia was completely uninhabited when they arrived,
therefore the British had the absolute right to take whatever land and
resources they wanted.
Consequently, whenever an indigenous person complained, they
were killed. Entire communities were uprooted and driven from their land,
massacred, starved, poisoned like vermin, imprisoned and forced into slave
labour, raped and left for dead. When the demoralised indigenous people were
reduced to a rump of starving wretched souls living on the refuse heaps of towns,
forbidden to live in decent houses or within the town limits, they were
grudgingly offered work as cowboys on the vast sheep and cattle ‘stations’ now
occupying their land. But they were not to be paid. Food and a vile hovel for
shelter was all they got while the landowners and the British became ever
richer.
Any groups who complained had their children stolen to
become slaves in white houses. No records were kept because they didn’t legally
exist and were not counted in the Census, had no identification, no validity
and were not legally Australians.
Then in 1967 a referendum was held asking the people if the
indigenous people were human, and could therefore be allowed to become
Australian citizens. It passed, but not unanimously, but little has changed. An
indigenous orphan boy of 12 who steals a chocolate bar will get life imprisonment.
It may start off as incarceration in a boy’s prison, but that is effectively
the end, after years of brutalisation, prison is the only place he knows
because there are no jobs for ‘blacks’ . If an indigenous girl doesn't pay her
parking tickets, she goes to prison where, if she gets sick she will probably
die because of the racism of guards and hospital staff. If any other Australian
commits the identical ‘crime’ they won’t even get a slap on the wrist.
We are celebrating that indigenous people do not share our
excellent Medicare health coverage, they have an odd system that provides
little except profits for the whites who run it. We celebrate their continued
neglect and the institutionalised racism in all mass media, as well as by most
politicians and political parties, Law Courts, law enforcement, education,
health and welfare. We celebrate that after more than 200 years, an indigenous
man’s life expectancy is roughly half of the rest of Australians, and he is
more likely than not to spend half his life in jail, where he has a very large
chance of dying.
