Is Australia really a multicultural safe haven of equal opportunity? Or is racism more prevalent than ever before? Stan Grant took to the stage for the last IQ2* debate of 2015. His speech is widely acknowledged to be one of the most powerful ever heard at IQ2.
*Intelligence Squared is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization. Intelligence Squared U.S. was
founded in 2006 to restore civility, reasoned analysis, and constructive
public discourse to today’s often biased media landscape.
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Racism is Destroying the Australian Dream: Full Debate at IQ2
The only island continent on earth was taken from
its inhabitants; the euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry
Reynolds, one of few honest Australian historians, one of the greatest
land grabs in world history. He described the slaughter that followed as
“a whispering in our hearts”.
British colonizers brought disease and genocide to an Island off the coast of Australia called Tasmania in 1803. There were as many as 15,000 Aboriginals on the island at the time. By the 1860's only four Tasmanians were left on Tasmania. Truganini (above) was thought to have been the last full-blooded Tasmanian when she died but about four others (including Fanny Cochrane Smith) were eventually discovered living on other islands. After she died Truganini's bones were dug up and placed on display against her expressed wishes. A century later, Truganini's remains were finally cremated and scattered according to her wishes.
By John Pilger
On
26 January, one of the saddest days in human history will be celebrated
in Australia. It will be “a day for families”, say the newspapers owned
by Rupert Murdoch. Flags will be dispensed at street corners and
displayed on funny hats. People will say incessantly how proud they are.
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The Voice of Fanny Cochrane Smith, now considered the last Tasmanian. When she did the Tasmanian language died with her.
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For many, there is relief and gratitude. In my
lifetime, non-indigenous Australia has changed from an Anglo-Irish
society to one of the most ethnically diverse on earth. Those we used to
call “New Australians” often choose 26 January, “Australia Day”, to be
sworn in as citizens. The ceremonies can be touching. Watch the faces
from the Middle East and understand why they clench their new flag.
It
was sunrise on 26 January so many years ago when I stood with
Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians and threw wreaths into Sydney
Harbour. We had climbed down to one of the perfect sandy coves where
others had stood as silhouettes, watching as the ships of Britain’s
“First Fleet” dropped anchor on 26 January, 1788. This was the moment
the only island continent on earth was taken from its inhabitants; the
euphemism was “settled”. It was, wrote Henry Reynolds, one of few honest
Australian historians, one of the greatest land grabs in world history.
He described the slaughter that followed as “a whispering in our
hearts”.
Aborigine at Echo Point, Katoomba (Australia). (Photo by Steve Austin)
The original Australians are the oldest human presence. To the European invaders, they did not exist because their continent had been declared terra nullius: empty land. To justify this fiction, mass murder was ordained. In 1838, the Sydney Monitor reported: “It was resolved to exterminate the whole race of blacks in that quarter.” This referred to the Darug people who lived along the great Hawkesbury River not far from Sydney. With remarkable ingenuity and without guns, they fought an epic resistance that remains almost a national secret. In a land littered with cenotaphs honouring Australia’s settler dead in mostly imperial wars, not one stands for those warriors who fought and fell defending Australia.
This truth has no place in the Australian consciousness. Among settler nations with indigenous populations, apart from a facile “apology” in 2008, only Australia has refused to come to terms with the shame of its colonial past. A Hollywood film, Soldier Blue, in 1970 famously inverted racial stereotypes and gave Americans a glimpse of the genocide in their own mythical “settlement”. Almost half a century later, it is fair to say an equivalent film would never be made in Australia.
In 2014, when my own film, Utopia, which told the story of the Australian genocide, sought a local distributor, I was advised by a luminary in the business: “No way I could distribute this. The audiences wouldn’t accept it.”
He was wrong — up to a point. When Utopia opened in Sydney a few days before 26 January, under the stars on vacant land in an Indigenous inner-city area known as The Block, more than 4,000 people came, the majority non-Indigenous. Many had travelled from right across the continent. Indigenous leaders who had appeared in the film stood in front of the screen and spoke in “language”: their own. Nothing like it had happened before. Yet, there was no press. For the wider community, it did not happen. Australia is a murdochracy, dominated by the ethos of a man who swapped his nationality for the Fox Network in the US.
The star Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes wrote movingly to the Sydney Morning Herald demanding that “the silence is broken”. “Imagine,” he wrote, “watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.
“Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”
Goodes himself had already broken a silence when he stood against racist abuse thrown at him and other Indigenous sportspeople. This courageous, talented man retired from football last year as if under a cloud — with, wrote one commentator, “the sporting nation divided about him”. In Australia, it is respectable to be “divided” on opposing racism.
On Australia Day 2016– Indigenous people prefer Invasion Day or Survival Day– there will be no acknowledgement that Australia’s uniqueness is its first people, along with an ingrained colonial mentality that ought to be an abiding embarrassment in an independent nation. This mentality is expressed in a variety of ways, from unrelenting political groveling at the knee of a rapacious United States to an almost casual contempt for Indigenous Australians, an echo of “kaffir”-abusing South Africans.
Kaawirn Kuunawarn (Hissing Swan), Chief of the Kirrae Wuurong
(Blood Tip Tribe) - (Photographer Unknown)
By John Pilger
The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, "There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would've been hung years ago, wouldn't I? Because (as an Australian Aborigine) you're guilty before you're found innocent." The child's grandmother demands to know why "the stealing of our kids is happening all over again." A welfare official says, "I'm gunna take him, mate."
This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognized abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous Stolen Generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed-race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labor; many were abused.
Described by a chief protector of Aborigines as "breeding out the color," the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997, a landmark report, "Bringing Them Home," disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured "the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation ... the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state." The report called this genocide...
Today, the theft of Aboriginal children - including babies taken from the birth table - is now more widespread than at any time during the last century.
