Remembering indigenous resistance

From History of Indigenous resistance

January 26 is the first Invasion Day (Australia Day) since the federal Labor government made the official apology recognising the wrongs suffered by the Stolen Generations - the Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families and lands.

The inequality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians in life expectancy, child mortality and quality of life was also acknowledged in that apology. However, the promised changes it contained have not materialised. In fact, living conditions for some Aboriginal people have grown worse.

On January 26, 2008, with the newly elected Labor government's promised apology close at hand, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said: “Australia Day is a time to celebrate our nation's past achievements and it's a time to embrace our nation's future. We should be deeply proud of our country. Proud of Aboriginal culture, which represents the oldest continuing culture in human history.”

Those comments, made on a date that marks the arrival in 1788 of European settlers and the beginning of 220 ugly years of Aboriginal dispossession, were ironic. It is why many people who oppose the racism that continues to be suffered by Australia's Indigenous population prefer the term “Invasion Day” for this most celebrated of national public holidays.

The government apology to the Stolen Generations had been demanded by the Aboriginal rights movement since 1997.

In 1995-96, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission conducted the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Sir Ronald Wilson and Aboriginal activist Mick Dodson co-chaired the inquiry, with the assistance of co-commissioners in all states.

The inquiry provided many Indigenous people with a long-withheld opportunity to tell their harrowing life stories. It produced, in 1997, the Bringing Them Home report. In that report, which contained 54 recommendations, Social Justice Commissioner Dodson said that any response “was fundamentally flawed without an expression of real regret that would be evidenced by a national apology”.

The demand for a national apology was denied outright by then-prime minister John Howard. Howard tried to deny the extensive injustices suffered by Aboriginal people and to cloak Aboriginal related policy issues in the language of “history wars” in which any acknowledgement of past wrongs was dismissed as a “black armband” view of history.

The now generally condemned removal of Aboriginal children from their families, carried out by governments over many decades, was a tactic adopted only after a much longer period of attempted genocide in the form of dispossession, segregation and assimilation.

The first historically significant act of British colonisation was the widespread dispossession of Australia's Aboriginal people of their land and customs. The doctrine of terra nullius - meaning an empty land without a sovereign power - served as the legal justification for this process.

This claim, that the land belonged to no one - that is, the European concept of ownership was not in force before white occupation - rendered Aboriginal people non-existent and without rights. It also allowed large parts of the country to be declared crown land, with any resistance to this claim rendered an act of rebellion.

Over the next century, with the help of the colonial laws, Aboriginal people were forced off their land by white settlers and became economically and socially marginalised. Any resistance to this process was met with brutal repression and punishment, including horrific massacres. This violence was not merely sanctioned but often mandated by the state.


From Piece of indigenous history recognised

A former work camp in a dusty corner of the outback has been declared an historic site because of its significance to the Aboriginal fight for equality and fair pay.

The Union Camp at Newcastle Waters, about 270km north of Tennant Creek, was home to the first Aboriginal employees and their families to protest for equal rights and pay in 1966.

Although they lost their strike action, their voices started a groundswell of resistance to the appalling working standards imposed on black Australia.

It led to a push for equality by Aborigines and resulted in legislation at both the Northern Territory and commonwealth levels.

Union Camp was on Friday recognised as a site of historical significance under the Heritage Protection Act.

It now includes the remnants of two buildings, several small shelters and the remains of a tank stand.

"The strike focused national attention on the entitlements of workers on pastoral properties across the Northern Territory," said NT Heritage Minister Alison Anderson.

"This strike, and other strikes across Australia, helped build momentum and public awareness of issues such as equal wages, housing, education and land rights."

The camp was established in 1966 after several Aboriginal workers and their families walked off Newcastle Waters Station.

This provided the catalyst for similar action at Wave Hill, where 200 Aboriginal stockmen and their families returned to the bush rather than continue as servants of the British-owned station Vesteys.


From Aboriginal resistance fighters gain recognition

Anarchist Joseph Toscano, who yesterday convened a commemoration ceremony to mark the 167th anniversary of the execution opposite the City Baths, is lobbying Melbourne City Council to erect a monument to acknowledge their place in the state's history.

"Theirs is a great Melbourne story of love, resistance, passion and violence, which is much more significant, in my opinion, than the story of Ned Kelly," Dr Toscano said.

"Everyone in Australia knows about Geronimo and Sitting Bull because of crappy TV, but no one knows about this country's indigenous fathers."

Dr Toscano said Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner were among 16 Tasmanian Aborigines who were brought to Melbourne in 1839 by the protector of Aborigines, George Robinson, to "civilise" the Victorian Aborigines.

In late 1841, the two men and three women, stole two guns and waged a six-week guerilla-style campaign in the Dandenongs and on the Mornington Peninsula, burning stations and killing two sealers.

They were charged with murder and tried in Melbourne. Their defence counsel was Redmond Barry, who questioned the legal basis of British authority over Aborigines. (Thirty-nine years later, Barry would sentence Ned Kelly to hang.)

The women were acquitted and the men found guilty, although the jury made a plea for clemency on account of the "peculiar circumstances".

Judge Willis ignored the request and the men were hanged in front of 5000 people — a quarter of Victoria's white population — from gallows erected on a small rise near what is now the corner of Bowen and Franklin streets. Their bodies are buried under the Queen Victoria Market.


From Civil unrest could undermine Morales's young administration

“Get down on your knees dirty llama-face Indians and swear your allegiance to the city of Sucre” – the words of a group of young men as they forced 50 indigenous men and women to undress in the centre of a town square and burn the flags of their Quechua identity.

Four months later, on September 11th, 2008, 19 indigenous men and women were killed by armed civilians as they attempted to make their way to a demonstration in support of the government of Evo Morales in the province of Pando.

The incident, described in an independent investigation by the Union of South American Nations as a “massacre”, took place in a wider atmosphere of civil violence.

Groups loyal to the opposition, largely located in the country's eastern provinces, occupied and vandalised state property and damaged gas pipelines in an attempt to destabilise the Morales government.

“There are lots of powerful groups in Bolivia with strong economic, political, and social interests,” says Alex Contreras, former spokesman for President Evo Morales.

“Up until three years ago, these groups were the 'untouchables'; they could do whatever they wanted with Bolivia.

“But now that the country is going through a process of change these powerful interests are being affected.”

Most of the opposition is based in the four eastern provinces of the country – Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando and Beni – where a large proportion of the country's material wealth, including oil and gas reserves, is located.