#NoDAPL
Angela Valenzuela
c/s
White Australians Celebrate, Aboriginal People Mourn
Every year on Jan. 26, at the height of summer, Australians pull out their flags and barbecues, and raise a glass for Australia Day. But as the nationalism rises with the temperature, so does the anger and alienation felt by Aboriginal people, and increasingly, many other Australians.
The date commemorates the landing of the First Fleet
in Sydney Cove in 1788. Around 1,400 people arrived, half of them
convicts, transported from England to establish a penal colony. In the
aftermath of the American War of Independence, the British needed a new
place to send criminals. The colonizers and their courts considered Australia
“terra nullius” or “land belonging to nobody,” a legal fiction used to
justify the theft of Aboriginal land over the next two centuries.
White
Australians celebrate this as the beginning of their history, but
little space is given to Aboriginal people, like one of the authors of
this essay, Ms. McQuire, who on this day mourn the attempted destruction
of their own nations. Aboriginal people have instead rebranded this as a
day of mourning, calling it “Survival Day” or “Invasion Day.” The time
may be coming when this kind of rebranding captures the attention of a
much broader public.
Conflict
with the local Aboriginal population began almost immediately after the
First Fleet’s arrival. It remained a constant feature of the frontier
over the next century. White settlers poisoned water holes and flour sacks, and they massacred men, women and children with impunity.
But
Aboriginal people fought for their land. For example, the Darug nation,
led by the renowned warrior Pemulwuy, along with neighboring nations,
started a war near what are today the outskirts of Sydney that lasted
more than two decades. Aboriginal clans fought guerrilla battles against
settlers on the southern island of Tasmania with increasing intensity
in the early 19th century.
The
attempted exterminations on the frontier eventually evolved into
official government policy. Aboriginal people were forced off their land
and into missions and reserves. Their children, known as the Stolen
Generations, were routinely taken away from their families as part of an
attempt to breed Aboriginal people out of existence, a practice that
continued into the 20th century.
The
most insidious part of the colonial project was the dehumanization of
Aboriginal people and the attempt to destroy their culture and
knowledge. Aboriginal people had formed a symbiotic relationship with
land, sea and sky over tens of thousands of years, and had developed
complicated systems of land management and agriculture, interwoven with
spirituality. Their children were later told that their people were
simply “hunters and gatherers” and their traditional knowledge, sacred
sites and languages were devalued and destroyed. The truth is that
Aboriginal people are the oldest civilization on earth. There are about 330 known Aboriginal languages, but researchers have found that only 13 are now spoken natively by children.
The
legacy of dispossession is felt starkly today. Aboriginal men, women
and children are incarcerated at shockingly high rates. In the Northern Territory,
for example, 84 percent of the prison population is Aboriginal.
Aboriginal women are the fastest growing incarcerated group nationally,
with the imprisonment rate rising nearly 120 percent since 2000.
Aboriginal children are also tortured behind bars, as was the case at Don Dale Youth Detention Center in the Northern Territory as recently as 2014.
Many
Australians, faced with the reality of what Australia Day symbolizes,
tell Aboriginal people and their supporters to “get over it.” But for
many Aboriginal people, Jan. 26 involves celebrating the symbolic
beginning of a state program of genocide. The massacres, the theft of
land, the removal of children, the attempted assimilation and the mass
imprisonment all trace back to this date.
Without
a proper reckoning with the past, a future reconciliation will be
impossible. The Frontier Wars remain unrecognized in any official
capacity, which is unusual for a country that routinely glorifies war.
The history of Aboriginal resistance to colonization has been largely
erased. Unlike the United States, Canada and New Zealand, Australia has
no treaty with any Aboriginal nation. In 2008, Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd, in a high point of his political leadership, made an official apology
for the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, but he
never offered reparations. The rates of Aboriginal child removal have gone up every year since he promised it would never happen again.
Aboriginal
people continue to fight for justice, but the system is stacked against
them. The legal fiction of “terra nullius” — a land belonging to no one
— was eventually overturned by the High Court in 1992 in what’s
famously known as the Mabo case. That paved the way for the Native Title Act,
which recognizes Aboriginal rights over land, but only in very specific
circumstances, and provides native titleholders with little say in
land-use decisions. The few state and territory policies allowing for
more but still limited rights for Aboriginal landowners are under
constant threat. Too often, laws that govern Aboriginal land rights
favor businesses trying to exploit natural resources over
preservation-minded titleholders.
The
problems facing Aboriginal people require policy makers to work with
communities in good faith, using considerable material resources. In
this context, symbolism is important. Australia must start by changing
the date of Australia’s national celebration.
Increasing
numbers of Australians have joined Aboriginal people in resisting the
celebrations of Jan. 26 and calling for a proper acknowledgment of the
past. Some communities are now discussing whether it is time to find a
new day to celebrate. This particular conversation began in the Western
Australian town of Fremantle, where the local council voted to move the
date. The federal government opposed this proposal, creating controversy but leading the movement to grow.
Maybe,
with Aboriginal people at the forefront, we will see how Australia Day
could be the beginning of something better. It could be a date that
recognizes that the country we now know of as Australia has a history
that is tens of thousands of years old. If we need a celebration of this
kind at all, perhaps it could be on Mabo Day, June 3, the day in 1992
when terra nullius was formally overturned. This would at least be a
more solid foundation from which to build a shared understanding of the
country’s history.
Celebrations of genocide could be confined to the annals of history. In the famous words of the Aboriginal singer and songwriter Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly, “from little things, big things grow.”
