Реферат: Genocide in Australia

But Howard isn’t really that dumb. His refusal to consider either an official apology or compensation arises out of his determination to pursue a course that involves not only continuing racist oppression, but stripping away some of the gains, small as they are, that Indigenous people have made in recent years.

Howard’s 10-point plan in response to the High Court’s Wik judgement takes away from Indigenous people and gives to the miners and pastoralists, and all the millionaires who stand to make windfall profits from the effective upgrading of pastoral leases to freehold ownership. So Howard’s response (or lack of it) to the Stolen Generations report is entirely consistent. He doesn’t want to acknowledge the past because he plans to continue it in other ways.

A sincere acknowledgment and expression of regret for the wrongs done to Australia’s Indigenous people has nothing to do with guilt. But it does imply that you take responsibility for trying to redress the wrongs by fighting for, or at least supporting, greater rights and a better deal for Aborigines today.

The reason Howard is so obsessed with guilt is that, unlike most of us, he actually does have reason to feel some.

But of course, Howard doesn’t want to be seen as the racist he is, nor does he want the Australian economy damaged by international perceptions of Australia as a racist country. Hence his condemnation of what he calls “the black armband view” of Australian history. Howard prefers what the historian Henry Reynolds refers to as the “white blindfold view”. (And the whitewashing continues. Following the release of Bringing them home , government departments have been instructed not to refer to “stolen” children, but to use the more sanitised term “separated” instead.)

There is no rigid barrier between the past and the present – or between the present and future for that matter. There is a continuity in history – things that happen in one year or decade shape what comes after, as the victims of the assimilation policy know only too well.

“I have six children. My kids have been through what I went through…The psychological effects that it had on me as a young child also affected me as a mother with my children. I’ve put my children in Bomaderry Children’s Home when they were little. History repeating itself.”

The social and economic position of Aborigines today is a direct result of what has happened to them in the past. And on a personal level, the effects ripple through the generations in a vicious cycle of despair and alienation.

In fact, as the report clearly shows, existing laws were often flouted and common law rights were certainly ignored. British common law rights were promised to all the Indigenous peoples of the British Empire. But in far-flung colonies, before the development of mass transportation and communications, local authorities could get away with murder – literally. And the Australian colonies were the most notorious. The report shows how the following common law rights were routinely violated with regard to Indigenous people: deprivation of liberty (by removing Indigenous people to reserves and missions and by detaining children and confining them in institutions); abolition of parental rights (by making the children wards or by assuming custody and control); abuses of power (in the removal process) and breach of guardianship obligations (on the part of Protectors, Protection Boards and other “carers”).

Moreover, a host of special legislation was devised to provide legal cover for the atrocities committed against Indigenous people. For example, a Welfare Ordinance was introduced in the Northern Territory in 1953. Its purported objective was to “subject all Aboriginal people to the same welfare legislation as non-Indigenous people. Accordingly, it made no mention of race, referring instead to ‘wards’. A ward was any person who ‘by reason of his manner of living, his inability to manage his own affairs, his standard of social habit and behaviour, his personal associations, stands in need of special care.’”

These “wards” had no rights whatsoever; they were completely in the power of the Director of Welfare. But when there were protests from non-Indigenous Territorians who feared the Ordinance might be applied to them , the wording was changed to make it clear that only Indigenous children were to be targeted. This was simply done, still managing to avoid any reference to race – people with voting rights could not be made wards. Before the 1967 referendum, this excluded few apart from Aborigines.

Australia voluntarily pledged itself to certain standards of conduct under the banner of international human rights – the UN Charter of 1945, the UN Resolution of 1946 declaring genocide to be a crime against humanity, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and so on. At this time “assimilation” was in its infancy, and it was to continue for several more decades, despite the fact that the policy itself, and practices such as the forcible removal of children, were both generally and specifically outlawed under the various declarations Australia had signed (see also the discussion of genocide below).

Let’s turn now to the treatment of Indigenous children and how it fits with the ideas of the time about the raising and treatment of children.

In our society, the family is held up as the foundation of all that is worthwhile – it is where we are supposed to be nurtured, loved and prepared for life in the wider world. This is not a new idea. Millions of words were written from the 1880s to the 1970s about the damage children suffer when removed from their parents, in particular the mother, and about the problems institutionalised care causes for child development.

In 1951 the United Nations released a report based on studies of maternal deprivation and its effects. The report stressed that the focus of child welfare services should be on assisting families to keep their children with them. This thinking underpins a lot of child welfare policy-making this century.

In 1955 the Australian High Court unequivocally confirmed the rights of parents to keep their children except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

“It must be conceded at once that in the ordinary case the mother’s moral right to insist that her child shall remain her child is too deeply grounded in human feeling to be set aside by reason only of an opinion formed by other people that a change of relationship is likely to turn out for the greater benefit of the child.”

Yet during all these years, in the name of “assimilation” into white society, Indigenous children were deliberately stolen from their families, then systematically lied to in order to keep them out of their families. They were prevented from having any contact with their families by the suppression of letters, being moved to inaccessible places, having their files destroyed, even having their names and birthdates falsified. By and large, these things did not happen to white children who were removed from their families. And indeed, the trend with regard to white children was to return them to their families wherever possible, to arrange fostering if not – at the same time as the pace of removal of Indigenous children was increasing.

“Unlike white children who came into the state’s control, far greater care was taken to ensure that [Aboriginal children] never saw their parents or families again. They were often given new names, and the greater distances involved in rural areas made it easier to prevent parents and children on separate missions from tracing each other.”

Many of the officials who oversaw and implemented the removal of the children tried to justify their actions with the racist claim that family bonds among Indigenous people were not as strong or as important as among whites.

“I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring.”

Yet if this was the case, why did government departments go to such extraordinary lengths to make it difficult for parents to find out where their children were?

“They changed our names, they changed our religion, they changed our date of birth…That’s why today, a lot of them don’t know who they are, where they’re from. We’ve got to watch today that brothers aren’t marrying sisters; because of the Government. Children were taken from interstate and they were just put everywhere.”

“When I finally met [my mother] through an interpreter she said that because my name had been changed she had heard about the other children but she’d never heard about me. And…every morning as the sun came up the whole family would wail. They did that for 32 years until they saw me again.”

Parents and other relatives tried desperately to find or maintain contact with the children, meeting with obstacles and threats at every turn.

Murray’s mother was initially allowed to visit her children (under supervision) at the Townsville State Children’s Orphanage. But the visits were stopped because they had “destabilising effects”:

“That didn’t deter my mother. She used to come to the school ground to visit us over the fence. The authorities found out…They had to send us to a place where she couldn’t get to us. To send us anywhere on mainland Queensland she would have just followed – so they sent us to…Palm Island Aboriginal Settlement…I wasn’t to see my mother again for ten nightmare years.”

Paul’s mother never gave up looking for her son.

“She wrote many letters to the State Welfare Authorities, pleading with them to give her son back…All these letters were shelved. The State Welfare Department treated my mother like dirt, as if she never existed. The department rejected and scoffed at all my Mother’s cries and pleas for help.”

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