shame

So. The weekend was a wipeout. We didn't get the bricks we were going to buy for the driveway. We didn't get the new gates. Pretty much anything that needed more than just me didn't get done.

But half a dozen games of spider got solved.

Let's move on.

Our newspapers and telly have been full of a great carry-on about it being the 40th anniversary of the referendum that gave citizenship to our native Australians. (I'm never quite sure what I'm supposed to call them any more. They used to be aborigines, then kooris, then noogyars, or noongars, or nyoongars, then people of aboriginal or Torres Strait Island descent. I seem to have missed what the latest PC name is.)

When white settlers first came to our continent, we treated the native population with total disdain. Some of the things our ancestors did were horrific. The colonist wanted the land and they took it. Whole tribes were eliminated. The natives had neither the numbers nor the resources to prevent it happening. Genocide is probably not too strong a word. They were either killed or pushed out or arrested and jailed. Their women were used for sexual purposes and the resultant offspring diluted their blood.

That being said, the first white Australians probably treated the local inhabitants no worse than colonists all over the world. Our Australian stories are no more heinous than those from the Americas, Africa or the Polynesian Islands. The whites wanted, so they took. And they had the firepower to do so.

With federation in 1901, we Australians thought we were a civilized and advanced nation. And, in most respects, we were. We had laws and a parliamentary system equal to any country in the world. We were liberal and advanced in many ways. (We had the first women in the world given the vote.) Australia was a good place to live.

As long as you were white.

If you were a native Australian, things were a little different. For a start, you weren't an Australian. You couldn't have citizenship. You had no rights. You had no recourse.

The white people treated the aboriginals pretty much the same way we treat animals. They were trained (to accept our religion and our laws), they were penned, they were punished when they didn't oblige. They recieved no respect or consideration, no choices. They were treated as well less than human. For their own good.

We let them work for us (at well under the white wage, if they were paid at all). We let them fight in our wars (but they got no veteran's benefits). We let them be adopted into white families (if they looked caucasion enough, whether their parents agreed or not). We gave them an education for a trade (if you apsired to be a domestic servant or manual labourer). And we gave them God.

In the late 50s, someone noticed that we weren't being very nice to them. A ten year campaign started to get them citizenship. Eventually, in 1967, the (white) Australians got to vote on it. It was a landslide. 90.3% voted "yes".

This year we are celebrating that landmark decision.

And, I am asking "why?".

I think we should be bowing our heads in collective shame that it look us so bloody long to see the humanity in our fellow Australians. In shame that it took 10 bloody years to convince our politicians to put it to a vote. In shame that it took 200 years to give back the very thing that we stole from them in the first place, something that they had for 40,000 years before we arrived. In shame that, for a supposedly Christian nation, we were so bad at recognising our brothers.

No. This is not a time to celebrate. It is a time of shame.