Сочинение: Future of aboriginal Australians

The piebald lay dead. He was a most peculiar freak, normal in physique, build, and intelligence, but his dusky skin was patched here and there with healthy, pinkish-white areas.

A later massacre

Kennedy was filled with a fierce rage and urged the speedy following up of the murderers. This was the last straw. The killing of his cattle was bad enough, but the loss of his partner ... showed that nothing but a terrible lesson would suffice. ...

The blacks were finally located in a gorge and, though showing some hostility at first by hurling spears in an attempt to stay the approach of the party, they broke and fled at the first sign of rifle fire. There were natives behind boulders, behind trees, and up trees, and every now and then they made attempts to sneak away to better cover when the opportunity occurred. One small party got away over the spur of a hill, being assisted in their flight by the cracking of the carbines, which stirred up the dust around their feet. Kennedy borrowed Urquhart's horse, Hamlet, and went off in pursuit. ... Kennedy was like hell let loose that day ...

Some natives who had remained in hiding bobbed up here and there as they made a dash for better cover. One fellow jumped up from behind a boulder and raced for the nearest creek, and Kennedy, who was on foot at the time, sprang after him. Reaching the steep bank the native jumped into the water, meaning to make for the opposite bank. As Kennedy reached the edge he took careful aim with his carbine, but the weapon failed to go off. Hurling the carbine in after the native, Kennedy jumped into the water, and commenced to grapple with his enemy.

Urquhart fired just in time to prevent serious consequences, for Kennedy could not swim. Two of Urquhart's boys went into the water and brought Kennedy ashore. It took the boys two hours' diving to recover the carbine.

The self-righteous Urquhart even wrote an execrable poem celebrating the second massacre! Hudson Fysh's interest in Kennedy stemmed largely from the fact that Kennedy was one of his first investors in Qantas, and there is a picture in the book of Kennedy as an old man in 1931 getting out of one of the early Qantas planes. Never has Karl Marx's aphorism that modern capitalism comes upon the scene "bloody in tooth and claw" been more clearly demonstrated than in the reverent way Hudson Fysh writes about the bloodthirsty Kennedy.

In a very real sense, part of the initial capital to develop the pioneer Australian airline, Qantas, was surplus value derived from this conquest and massacre, that is, from the blood of the murdered Kalkadoons. In my view, as an act of long overdue historical recognition and repentance, Qantas should be renamed Kalkadoon.

No doubt Paul Sheehan has been reduced to appoplexy by recent news that Professor Colin Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquarie University, has prepared a general brief against previous Australian governments for genocide on four major grounds. One of these is that the colonial authorities stood by or authorised settlers or police to slaughter 4000 Aborigines in Tasmania from 1806 to 1835, and some 10,000 in Queensland between 1824 and 1908.

P.P. McGuiness, as an "expert" on Aboriginal affairs

The editor of Quadrant and Sydney Morning Herald columnist, the irascible, arrogant, pompous and chronically self-congratulatory P.P. McGuiness, has in recent times appointed himself as a bit of a pundit on Aboriginal affairs. One of his preoccupations is ridiculing all notions of past genocide, which is a pretty tall order, considering all the evidence for past massacres — of which the incidents recounted above are only a few — many of which have been documented by Henry Reynolds.

McGuinness associates this rejection of past genocide against Aborigines with throwaway remarks questioning the genocide involved in the recent massacres of Kosovar Albanians and East Timorese. He seems to have a particular soft spot for the "civil rights" of "alleged" practitioners of genocide such as the white British conquerors of Australia, the Serbian dictator Milosevic and the Indonesian military. To each their own!

McGuinness's other unpleasant obsession is his ridicule of the notion that thousands of Aboriginal children were stolen from their parents. He claims that (1) it wasn't a matter of government policy, despite Robert Manne's documentation of national meetings of public servants in Aboriginal affairs, where such lines of policy were implicitly endorsed, and (2) he ignores or ridicules the personal testimony of the many hundreds of Aboriginals who assert that they were forcibly removed from their parents.

This second obsession is very offensive indeed to those who were forcibly removed and to many thousands of other Australians. McGuiness's approach reached a kind of high point in the notorious ABC program in which he gratuitously insulted Lois O'Donoghue, one of the stolen children herself, in his most arrogant way, by pouring contempt on the idea that any children were stolen. His extraordinary performance on that occasion took many people's breath away.

Michael Duffy, another "expert" on Aboriginal affairs

The Murdoch tabloid directed at the less formally educated sections of society, the Daily Telegraph, retains three rabidly right-wing populist columnists whose function is to cater to the perceived prejudices of the paper's audience, to whit, Piers Ackerman and the Janissary journalists Miranda Devine and Michael Duffy.

On the Telegraph opinion page of January 5, 2000, Duffy has a carefully worded piece headed, Keep the H word out of our history. He goes out of his way to stress the Jewish origins of a number of prominent public critics of Australian racism against Aborigines, while of course disclaiming any anti-Semitism, in singling out these Jews.

Apparently Jews are more sensitive on these things because they got here more recently and their familiarity with the Holocaust directed at the Jews of Europe has made them overly preoccupied with such matters and led them to exaggerate the magnitude of the atrocities perpetrated on Australia's Aboriginal population. Get the message! Rootless cosmopolitans don't understand Australian history as well as older "real Australians" such as Duffy, who properly understand in their bones that our treatment of the Aboriginals wasn't all that bad.

Duffy is worried that the Labor side of politics may be gaining some momentum among liberal-minded Australians by its defence of Aboriginal rights, and he bemoans the fact that the vigorous defence of Aboriginal rights, and a vigorous focus on past wrongs done to the Aboriginal population, is dividing Australia. He says:

The last thing Aborigines — or those genuinely interested in their wellbeing — need is for their future to be affected by the introduction of concepts and words which inflame and confuse our view of those horrors which did happen here.

And, later:

In the meantime, the best thing the rest of us can do is resist attempts to polarise Aboriginal matters. This includes attempts to change the meanings of words in common use.

Elsewhere he makes the extraordinary statement:

Most people would now agree that One Nation was in fact not a racist phenomenon.

So we had all better get the message. Pauline Hanson is not racist, and anyway, many of the people making a fuss about Aboriginal oppression are a just a bunch of Jews. British Australia did some bad things to the Aboriginal population, but we shouldn't exaggerate it. After all, the main danger in Aboriginal affairs is not really the oppression of the Aboriginal people, but the damaging possibility that inflaming anger about injustices to Aborigines will interfere with the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

In the Telegraph a bizarre competition is developing between Duffy and Piers Ackerman, with the two tabloid columnists trying to outdo each other in the vicious extravagance of their comments on Aboriginal affairs. Well, Duffy now has to be way in front in this contest, with his contribution on March 25 to the debate on mandatory sentencing. The following extract is something of a new low in nasty tabloid treatment of these matters:

It is particularly nauseating that this new racism has been practised in the name of virtue. Many of these sanctimonious whites, this small army of lawyers, anthropologists, public servants and journalists, have lost touch with the spiritual roots of their own culture and have tried to redeem themselves by feeding off Aboriginal issues, which they pervert to suit their own decadent spiritual requirements. Their new religion is anti-racism, and everything is interpreted as a racial issue, no matter how wrong and destructive of Aboriginal interests this might be. It is time these white moral maggots were shaken off the body of black Australia, from which they have sucked so much life.

White maggots, indeed! White maggots of Australia unite! Within a couple of days of Duffy's extraordinary outburst in his column, an opinion poll was published in the newspapers of March 28, showing that more Australians opposed mandatory sentencing than supported it, and many more again opposed mandatory sentencing of adolescents. I'm considering having a badge made for public sale, with the slogan, "I am a white maggot".

It almost goes without saying that it would be fascinating to get Duffy down on a couch and try to draw out of his mind by psychoanalysis what ghosts and demons are running around in his head about "rootless cosmopolitans" and "white maggots" "interfering in Aboriginal affairs".

The saga of Jack and Lallie Akbar

A brutal and instructive episode in both Aboriginal affairs and Australia's race policy relating to Asians, sharply refutes McGuiness's proposition that no state policy was involved in the stolen children saga. A moving and informative book by Pamela Rajkowski called Linden Girl, a story of outlawed lives (UWA Press, 1995) recounts the extraordinary saga of an "Afghan" (actually an Indian Muslim from the Punjab), Jack Akbar, who married a young Aboriginal woman, Lallie, in Western Australia in the 1920s.

This scholarly and thorough book documents how the notorious Western Australian "Protector" of Aborigines, Auber Octavius Neville, had Jack Akbar and Lallie, who ultimately produced a family of three children, imprisoned several times for the "crime" of marrying each other. It is an extraordinary story of human courage and endurance. The devoted couple escaped a number of times, on one occasion making an extraordinary journey across the Nullabor Plain with Lallie pregnant, and which they only survived because he was an experienced camel driver and she, coming of a tribe of desert Aborigines, was used to living off the land.

Eventually they beat the rap, so to speak, for their marriage "crime", and lived happily for many years after the Department of Aboriginal Affairs eventually gave up trying to separate them out of exhaustion.