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# Mine is a grey-armband, thanks
There can certainly be no comparison between the lot of the Untouchables and Australian Aborigines.
For starters, there never was a policy of genocide. Never.
In Australia there seems to be only two ways of viewing the history of Australian Aborigines post-1788. Either white Australians are the most loathsome people alive for what we did to the Aborigines; or nobody did nothing. What a load of bullshit.
When people like Piers denounce the idea of "black-armband history" they do us all a dis-service. They build a straw man and tear it down with gusto; only the wildest, woolliest claims are of deliberate violent genocide. Even the idea of 10,000 deaths by violence is contentious.
What isn’t contentious is the cold hard fact that the population of Australia Aborigines fell by up to 90% after colonisation. By disease, by violence, by being pushed off land, Aborigines died. This wasn’t genocide. However, to suggest that white Australians did nothing wrong is ridiculous; the Aborigines dies as a direct result of the rapacious actions of our ancestors.
The government before Howard had a policy of reconciliation. This offended John Howard; his is one of the louder voices in denouncing the "black-armband" view of Australian history. He in turn has offended sections of the community by his dismissal of reconciliation entirely. He and they are both wrong. Reconciliation needs to happen; constant demands for Howard to give some formal apology aren’t the solution.
Australia needs instead to accept that what our ancestors did was wrong. Don’t wallow. Don’t derive some masochistic self-loathing of anglo-Australia from it. But stop dismissing it as an attitude from another time. It is, but it doesn’t excuse it.
And when I say ‘we’, I mean all of us, we as a society. White, black, yellow; we’re all Australians, and we have all derived some small benefit from what was done from 1788 onwards.
Maybe once Australia has accepted that some wrong was done, we can move on and start acknowledging that life for most Aborigines is a disgrace. Aborigines have an average life span twenty years less than the rest of Australia; now that’s something we can feel ashamed of.
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# Re: Mine is a grey-armband, thanks
Hear hear. Well said.
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247 days since 24/11/2009