Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Aboriginal

  • Invasion Day

    The Queen should say sorry. One of the most pungent ideas from today’s pre-march speeches and an opportunity for her to be truly generous, gracious, timely, influential, and just.

  • we need to talk about the war

    “The local press spoke with the unrelenting language of a war front. ‘We have seized their country by the right of might and by the right of might of whites will continue to possess it’, promised the Moreton Bay Courier in 1847. Aboriginal retribution, conducted ‘in the mere wantonness of patriotism’, it reasoned, simply forced white settlers, in the spirit of ‘conquest’ and ‘self-protection’, to ‘rise en masse and take the law into their own hands.’ Colonists needed to be more ‘cruel and cunning’ than their Indigenous foes, it counselled in 1848: ‘With a gun in your hand keep them at bay… Shoot… (them) though the head if you can’. The ruling presumptions of this undeclared land war – escalatory and indiscriminate, pre-emptive and retaliatory – could not have been spelt out any more clearly. For the most part it was a markedly asymmetrical struggle, with the whites having the advantage of increasing numbers, superior economic support, and an improving military technology. Yet Aboriginal resistance was fierce and determined and, waged with enhanced environmental knowledge and bigger initial populations, was sometimes capable of driving white settlement out and back.”

    In Mackay by 1870, “half the local Aboriginal population of four large ‘tribes’ had either succumbed to illness or been shot down… (…) It was a similar tale all over the colony. A settler at Laidley on the Downs wrote in 1876 that the local ‘tribes’ had dwindled from many hundreds to two or three individuals, adding: ‘the work of extermination is virtually an accomplished fact… They have been shot and poisoned wholesale, not by black troopers but by white settlers. And now the same work is going on elsewhere and there is no general outcry against it.’ (…) Frontier newspapers were replete with advice like that offered in the Cooktown Courier of July 1874 to northern settlers to ‘shoot every blackfellow they found’ in spite of ‘the pseudo-philanthropists’ in the south. Lyrics to a tune in a Queensland camp-fire songbook (sung to the melody of ‘Happy are we darkies so Gay’) ran:

    ‘I’ve been out exploring in search of a run
    With my packhorse, and pistol, my compass and gun.
    We feasted delicious, ha, ha, hah.
    And shot black-fellows vicious, ha, ha, hah.”

     

    ~ Raymond Evans, A History of Queensland

    We need to talk properly about the war. We need to negotiate treaties and start to make peace. Let the past rest at last. Let people mourn and grieve. Stop murdering Aboriginal men in prisons and watch houses. C’mon Australia.

  • Survival Day

    Survival Day gleanings. This is what I cleaned out of my bag after we got home. Started out to hear the speeches and to march, ended up with our hearts broken and opened up all over again, robust in anger and delicately rejoicing, heart flooded like mangrove roots with a myriad various Indigenous faces including people I’d had warm contact with in the past and hadn’t thought of as Indigenous until we met again in this context, fringes of greenery shaping the old wood lace under the eaves of beautiful Jagera Hall every time I looked up to give my mind a digestion break from John Pilger’s movie, bellyful of sweet crumbling smooth bunya nuts and lilipillies, whole handsful of intensely beautiful gleanings from overhead and underfoot. The ones that caught my eye today were the colours of blood, resistance, kidney, heart, lung, fury. Oh and we brought home a bird. Just a tiny baby wattle bird, who fell down out of the overhanging tree onto a lane of the road as we passed and was kept alive in a sun hat filled with grasses and fed on pulped lilipilly and coaxed to take little beaky sips of water fed to it on a stalk of grass. He seemed to bond instantly with my companion and rode home serenely – we walked, under starlight and bursts of fireworks – on an outstretched finger. By the time we had reached the river he was asleep, with his scrappy head tucked into his fledging feathers, bobbing gently as we went along. Yesterday he rode around the house on his new, male, mum’s shoulder and began to let out lovely peeps. Today he is feeling more adventurous and is being given flying lessons, in German, by a man with no feathers, no beak, and no wings.

  • hot pink banners

    hot pink banners

    Tomorrow I take the train back to Berlin, traversing again this ancestral landscape. What a beautiful week it’s been, I’m so thankful. A girl in a sunstruck cafe told me that Denmark is the happiest nation on earth. “Our third year running!” Every time I remember our conversation I mishear it as “friendliest” and have to correct myself. We got to talking because as I was falling into drowses in the afternoon sun through the window a buoyant demonstration flowed past, stopping and starting in laughing clots. It resembled a dance party or flash mob. Lots of young people dressed in black & carrying hot pink banners. What were they so, uh, angry about? She looked wry. She almost sneered. “Well, they are students – like me – only I live in an apartment and pay my own rent – these guys live with their parents and the money is so good, unbelievably good – the government’s cutting it back – we are so lucky – the world is in recession.” I studied her, she was very beautiful. What are you studying? “Law,” she said. I thought of all the Aboriginal students in outback Queensland who would love to go to university or even high school. The little girls in Afghanistan who are barred from owning books. Malala. Those of us who have this spilling, squandering, golden good fortune ~ let’s be kind with it. It may not last and it’s really not rightfully ours. Let’s keep handing it on, like coin. Hand to hand.

    H2O HoL archway to the castle

  • Felix Nussbaum

    Felix Nussbaum

    Today I saw the paintings of Felix Nussbaum who because he was born Jewish was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. My friend described how ‘we Germans’ had done ‘the worst thing’ by industrializing mass murder. I had never thought of it this way. Apparently Himmler watched a group of detained Jews digging their own mass grave and then vomited each time one was shot and tipped into it. His response was, we need to find a cleaner way of doing this; so the gas chamber was devised. (Why not, “we need to stop doing this”?) Standing in front of Nussbaum’s sensitive portraits and seeing from the dates he had less than five, four, three years to live it was impossible not to weep. We wept and choked and kept our tears silent. The museum gave onto neat German houses through a series of crooked windows, it is called the Museum with No Exit.

    Afterwards it took a very long time to come to grips with my anger and fear and sense of terror and loss, with the grief, the resentment and yes, incipient hatred. I resented all of us for being here when so many sensitive and feeling people have died. I resented my own country, built on the backs of its own native populations and still dishonest about the murders in police custody and in jails. I could feel in my responses how easy it is to start blaming people and how delicate and difficult is the work of keeping one’s heart free of the pernicious weeds of resentment, envy, fear, and suspicion. How easy it feels to start to build on the seemingly empowering intoxication of self-righteousness. They, they, they. We, we, we. All the way home. Alright.