July 7, 2020
Eric Bogle sings, in his iconic ballad “Now I’m Easy”:
I married a fine girl when I was twenty
But she died in giving birth when she was thirty
No Flying Doctors then, just a gentle old black gin
But it’s nearly over now, and now I’m easy.
Eric Bogle’s use of the term “gentle old black gin” evokes the solace gifted by an older woman who shares his trauma and grief over the loss in childbirth of his wife and mother of three young children. There is a sense of respect and gratitude.
In Aboriginal language “gin” is the word for a woman. However, along the way, the use of this term has become derogatory, seriously offensive for Indigenous people. A few kilometres from Rockhampton there is a creek named Black Gin Creek; the local Indigenous people seek to have this name changed because of its derogatory connotation.
So, words are important. It is why we use them. It is also why the context of the words is just as important.
Take the word “primitive”. This word has been used to describe the status of Aboriginal people in Australia at the time of the first white settlement by the British. Damming and derisive, it references the absence the technical and industrial development as undertaken elsewhere.
However, the word “primitive” can reference something totally different, yet still damming in context.
At the beginning of white settlement, the British used Australia as a penal settlement. From 1788 to 1868 some 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia, including 7,000 women. Their crimes were paltry, mostly petty theft of such things as a loaf of bread or a rabbit on gentry’s property. Their punishment was a story out of hell, banishment for life from family and in the new colony, hard labour and flogging for anyone trying to escape.
Well might we call that behaviour primitive. This context has nothing to do with scientific and technological development. It has to do with moral behaviour: the use and manipulation of people by individuals, institutions and governments in any inhumane manner, for the sole gain of those individuals, institutions and governments. This includes the wrongful use and deprivation of personal and physical assets.
John Howard made a famous – and somewhat ironical – pitch in 2001, in reference to stopping the boats carrying illegal immigrants. “We will defend our borders and we’ll decide who comes to this country.” “Yey! Yey!” shouted the gallery. The irony lies in that fact that in 1788 Indigenous people in Australia were not in a position to enforce the same policy upon the British.
I am a true-blue son of Australia and proud of being such. While I am aware my ancestors originated in Ireland, I consider my ancestral land as Australia. Yet when I put myself in the position of an Aboriginal person suddenly confronted beginning 1788 with strange new people appearing on the landscape of my ancestral land, I feel very threatened. Initially curious certainly, but when firesticks were pointed at me, I would be afraid. I would feel invaded. When members of my mob were killed I would either flee or retaliate. Or both.
It was in the very gene of colonial (and pre-colonial) powers to take possession, to own and to use without compensation to First Nation peoples, the goods of the newly acquired property. So, the British were anxious to claim this “new land” before the French could get their hands on it. This is the reality of history and the stories of people. It is integral to the primitive nature we share with our enlightened side.
It is something to wonder that people from one country (whether England, Spain or whatever country) can arrive by boat on the shores of another country – populated for thousands of years by Native/Indigenous/First Peoples – and proclaim: “We take possession of this land”, with the assumption that existing populations have no worth, rights or status.
- The Spanish Empire saw the conquest and subjugation of native populations in the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru, specifically the Aztec and Inca Empires. The famous Christopher Columbus partly funded his discovery journeys by the slave trade. The Spanish also took possession of the Philippines (“The Indies”) without consulting the Filipino people.
- The Portuguese dominated Brazil and brought slave labour from Africa to work their industries. Their attitude toward the Indigenous people of Paraguay is highlighted in the 1986 British film The Mission.
- We recall the British East India Company that subjugated peoples across Asia, created enormous wealth for its members and inflamed disastrous violence in India.
- Cecil Rhodes was the epidemy of the British South Africa Company that enabled him to personally own so much of the wealth of South Africa through his diamond mines while holding the black African population in utter contempt.
- America, newly independent of the English, brought between 10 and 12 million slaves to their land, with some 2 million more dying before they departed Africa or during the sea voyage.
- Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee is the 1970 book that detailed the warfare waged by the American Federal government against the Native American peoples as they sought to destroy their culture, religion, and way of life.
- In the Philippines, following the war of independence from the Spanish, the Americans in 1899 launched their own campaign to “own” the Philippines in a war noted for its savagery against the Filipino people. It was not until 1946 that America “gave back” the Philippines to its own people.
In our present times the gross exploitation of peoples – primitive activity – for the benefit of people in developed countries (ourselves included) continues unchecked. Consider smart phones and electric cars and the essential minerals required for their batteries such as lithium and cobalt.
- The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the worlds largest source of cobalt. Five of the world’s largest tech companies (Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft and Tesla) are being accused in the United States High Court of knowingly benefiting from, and aiding and abetting, the cruel and brutal use of young children to mine cobalt in the DRC.
- Half of the world’s supply of lithium is mined in the Andean region of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina where Indigenous communities have lived for centuries. They now have to compete with international mining companies for their scarcest asset – water – in one of the driest regions on earth with these companies consuming 65% of the water supplies.
- Consider oil: oil refineries in western Europe have been sourcing high-quality crude from the Niger delta, blending it with toxic chemicals to make high-sulphur fuels that exceed Europe’s pollution limits by hundreds of times, and selling it back to Nigeria’s poorly regulated market.
The most primitive – unenlightened – gene we carry is to consider others as lesser people who are different to us, particularly if those people are not as advanced industrially, are not as organised for resistance and who are naïve to accept our intentions as pure. If we consider people as lesser than ourselves, we can throw off any restraint that prevents us from appropriating to ourselves what is theirs and, if necessary, remove them from our history.
Apologists would lament people with “bleeding hearts” taking an unrealistic view of human history and advancement, arguing that’s the way of the world. Such is the sentiment expressed at the end of the film The Mission – referenced above. The Portuguese Hontar laments that what happened (the slaughter of the Indigenous community) was both unfortunate but also inevitable. He states “we must work in the world; the world is thus.” The Spanish Cardinal responds: “No, thus have we made the world. Thus have I made it.”
We cannot change history, even if we tear down all the statues and memorials of famous people who were also infamous, great movers of history and great destroyers at that same time. We cannot unsaw wood.
However, we can – indeed must – recognise the primitive flow within our advancement of civilization. We must recognise that the wood has been sawn, that the course of history has been changed, and that there are two sides to the story. There are winners and there are losers.
Indigenous Australians had lived in harmony with this land for some 50,000 years. The negative impact upon them by white settlement has been devastating and unforgiving. Integral parts of their culture, language, spirituality and way of life have been radically disrupted and, in some places, destroyed.
From the outset of white settlement, Indigenous Australians lost access to country and were subject to loss of life through conflict with settlers, including occasions of massacres and the burning of settlements. Further, the actual reality of Indigenous Australians at the first contact with the British was never recorded in official documents. They were portrayed as “hunters and gatherers” wandering as nomads across the land without formal settlements and without any form of agriculture and fishing industry. This lie has been perpetrated upon us for the last 240 years.
I clearly recall the image I received from my earliest years of Indigenous persons: tall Aboriginal standing on one leg with spear in hand beside a bark humpy. It is only in recent times that real research has revealed the absolute paucity of the image which has demeaned our perception of Indigenous Australians throughout our short history in their land. For those willing to inquire, the evidence of initial explorers and land settlers is there to be found, the evidence debunking totally the “hunters and gatherers” theory, the evidence clearly describing people living in settlements, cultivating plants, storing grain, managing this wild continent, engaged in complex fish farming and the like.
Where are the settlements? Burnt to the ground by first colonists and settlers. Where are the cultivated grounds? Destroyed at first contact by introduced sheep and cattle. Yet there still remains evidence – for those who wish to look for it – to collaborate the findings of those first explorers and settlers. Findings that were not incorporated into official records.
The sense of “country” is integral to the culture and spirituality of Indigenous Australians. As they became dislocated as a people, they lost contact with their livelihood, their language and their songlines, the dreaming tracks that crisscross the land, tracing the journeys of ancestral spirits as they sang the land into life.
From the outset of white settlement, Indigenous Australians lost access to country and were subject to loss of life through conflict with settlers, including occasions of massacres. The sense of “country” is integral to their culture and spirituality. As they became dislocated as a people, they lost contact with their language and their songlines, the dreaming tracks that crisscross the land, tracing the journeys of ancestral spirits as they sang the land into life.
Official government policy was assimilation and the Aborigines Protection Board was vested with power to implement policy, with total control over the lives of Indigenous people: to move Aboriginal people out of towns and into reserves or ‘missions’, install managers and other staff on these reserves, and block the movement of people in and out (including non-Aboriginal visitors). Under these policies, Aboriginal people were expected to live like ‘white’ people, adopting European cultural practices and language and leaving their own culture and language behind.
In addition to the required rejection of their language and culture, a range of other rights and freedoms continued to be denied to Aboriginal people during this time including where they lived, whom they married, and how they spent their earnings. From the 1940s, Aboriginal people could apply for exemption from the Aboriginal Protection Act, whereby they would ‘cease to be Aboriginal’. Any person holding such a certificate of exemption had to live under certain rules, including living like a ‘white’ person, displaying exemplary behaviour, ceasing all contact with non-exempt Aborigines other than immediate family, and carrying their certificate with them at all times. In return, the certificate entitled them to such things as the freedom of movement, the right to drink alcohol and the right to own land.
The most primitive aspect of this policy was the removal of children of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal parents from their homes and placing them into homes where they would be raised ‘white’. This heralded the official start of a period of ‘enforced assimilation’ for ‘part-Aboriginals’. Thus began the creation of the Stolen Generations. The violence against the children and against their family and culture was radical in nature, aimed at cutting the root of Aboriginal life.
If you cut the root of a tree it will die.
In response to the Black Lives Matter movement we have heard – and perhaps some of us have repeated – the phrase “But All Lives Matter”.
Of course all lives matter! My life matters, the life of my family matters as well as that of my parents and grandparents and ancestors back to Ireland. However, this is a diversion from the Black Lives Matter movement; there are some with darker motives who put this statement into the community to usurp the Black Lives Matter movement; for those with such intent, the statement represents a covet rejection of Indigenous history in Australia.
My life – and the life of all those connected with me – has ALWAYS mattered. But the lives of Indigenous People in Australia have not mattered. THAT IS THE HEART OF THE MATTER. While my life has been recognised by the government, protected by the law, and espoused in education and employment opportunities, the lives of Indigenous Australians have not mattered in our history.
Now is the time to ensure that Black Lives DO matter.
We – all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous – now live with the consequences of that history. It is only when non-Indigenous Australians recognise the current situation of Indigenous Australians as inherently the consequence of past policies and actions that any long-term recovery will be possible. This will only happen when non-Indigenous Australians confront any and all primitive attitudes we carry as both an inheritance from our forebears or as attitudes imbedded through unreflected negative experience. It is only in owning our personal attitudes and how they have been formed that we are able to take responsibility for assisting in the road back to a resurrection of common humanity with Indigenous people.
When I think of consequences, I think of a 14-year-old Aboriginal lad charged with manslaughter over the death of his four companions while driving at speed a stolen vehicle that smashed the life out of all of them. And he had just been released on bail. He has been in jail all his life even when out of prison. And among the flowers of condolence on that bloody site there was placed a baseball bat. Was it his or did it belong to another person who wanted to smash him with it? What did that lad – that boy criminal – know of his Indigenous culture, language and history? The root of his tree was cut before he was born.
There is anger in all those communities where young “black kids” steal and vandalise and scorn all life. We are witnesses to 242 years of having the life belted out of the Aboriginal nation giving birth to anger and disorientation on both sides.
When I think of consequences I think of Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It was 1987 when Prime Minister Bob Hawke established a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. It took 4 years before the Royal Commission produced their report. Now in 2020, 29 years later, people are on the streets demanding an accounting for Aboriginal deaths in custody. One step forward, two steps backwards.
The road back from those days has proven to be arduous for our whole nation; like an ongoing pain of childbirth with little new life arising. Instead of a positive continuous movement by all to recover our common history and build a better future it has been a slow limp upon a rocky track. Two steps forward, slowly; one step back, quickly. Sometimes two steps back and quickly.
The root of the tree has been cut, but not severed. The life in the tree is highlighted by the community-based movement by Indigenous Australians to address basic issues and take back control of their own destiny as a people.
Witness to this is the person and story of Dujuan, a 12-year-old Arrernte/Garrwa child from central Australia, who gave a speech at the United Nations Human Rights Council last September 2019. Dujuan is the young star of the documentary, In My Blood It Runs. He travelled to the 42nd session of the UN Human Rights Council with his grandmother and father to share his own experiences with the youth justice system and build support for Aboriginal-led education models.
The following is a transcript of his speech which can be found on the website of the Human Rights Law Centre.
My name is Dujuan, I am 12 years old. I am from Arrernte and Garrwa Country.
I came here to speak with you because the Australian Government is not listening. Adults never listen to kids like me. But we have important things to say.
I am the star in a new documentary, In My Blood It Runs.
The film shows that I felt like a failure at school.
I was always worried about being taken away from my family. I was nearly locked up in jail.
I was lucky because my family they know I am smart. They love me. They found a way to keep me safe.
There are some things I want to see changed:
I want my school to be run by Aboriginal people.
I want adults to stop cruelling 10-year-old kids in jail.
I want my future to be out on land with strong culture and language.
My film is for all Aboriginal kids. It is about our dreams, our hopes and our rights.
I hope you can make things better for us.
Thank you.
