Evidence establishes that the Australian Constitution, which does not include Aboriginal people as citizens becomes a death warrant for anyone who still identifies as belonging to First Nations and Peoples, as the horrendous social indicator statistics verify.
Our solution is to establish independence from the colonial power that tries to make us disappear by assimilating us or crushing us. PM Tony Abbott's recent admission that he is a denialist of Aboriginal presence prior to 1788 should surely convince the fence-sitters that as the self-proclaimed 'Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs' we are in an even more precarious situation. On 14 November 2014 PM Abbott perpetuated the terra nullius lie when recently addressing the International Infrastructure Business Breakfast when British PM David Cameron was present just before the G20 began:
Abbott described Australia prior to the landing of the First Fleet as:
“… nothing but bush … the Marines, and the convicts and the sailors … must have thought they’d come almost to the Moon…. Everything would have seemed so extraordinarily basic and raw…”
This was not a one-off PM 'brain-snap' because once again he denied the importance of the oldest continuing living culture in the world by claiming that Britain began:
“... foreign investment … [in] the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land…”
along with:
“… the First Fleet was the defining moment in the history of this continent.”
These statements are indicative of the constant dismissal of anything Aboriginal in this country. Clearly PM Abbott's total disregard is an absolute insult and a smack in the face for the Recognise campaign which is trying to raise support for a referendum to include Aboriginal people in the racist Constitution, we have never been part of.
It is significant that Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes, has used the Australian of the Year platform to argue 'that Australia has been built on a conversation that does not respect the role or place of indigenous people.'
[http://www.thecourier.com.au/story/2693582/goodes-agitates-for-a-fairer-and-more-equitable-australia]
What else needs to happen in this country for our people to realise that no political party or politician is a friend of Aboriginal Peoples when we assert our sovereignty. We are reaching a climax in our struggle for rights and freedoms. This is the moment for all blackfellas of this continent to take a deep breath, exhale slowly and look around at our situation with clarity.
We cannot ignore the fact that we were making steady progress in terms of our rights to self-determination in the 1980s, until PM Bob Hawke and Clyde Holding, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, shut it down. Later their efforts were expanded upon by the Howard government and continued under Labor. It has often been said that Bob Hawke was the best Liberal Prime Minister Australia has had!
Our people must fully understand that neither the ALP nor the Liberal/Coalition parties are our friends and the Greens, for selfish reasons, only want us to go into lock-down and not develop on our own land.
The continued onslaught of repression and targeted destruction of our communities has recently been experienced by our Western Australian brothers and sisters, as Premier Colin Barnett claims there is not enough money to maintain the homelands and communities, even though the mining wealth of WA comes from Aboriginal land.
"So, we think there is a much better future and a different use for Oombulgurri that could satisfy the requirements of everyone."
What Walker failed to mention is exactly what the different use for the land at Oombulgurri is. Is there mining planned for this area? If so, why is that a better use of land than it being somebody’s home? Rampant mining will leave Australia barren and depleted. Aboriginal people have been active, experienced land managers for the last 100, 000 years. Most condone the wholesale, short-sighted destruction of Aboriginal lands for ‘economic progress’.
It is unclear whether the members of the estimated 150 communities will be forcibly evicted, or whether they will be starved out when government services are stopped. There is no precedent in white Australian communities for the government to simply refuse to provide basic services, even in areas where there is high unemployment.
The Kimberley, Perth and other regional WA towns already experience appalling rates of homelessness for Aboriginal people. Premier Barnett knows his gutless decision will cause great distress and cause problems in the towns the newly homeless community members are forced to move to. Colin Barnett said that it was the Federal government who had previously promoted remote communities.
‘There's no doubt that under policies really initiated by the Federal Government, small, isolated Aboriginal communities were promoted.’ [ABC online, October 2014]
‘The reality is that there's no employment prospects in those areas, or very limited.’
In Australia, there are also many non-Aboriginal towns and communities that have few or limited employment prospects. However, in a clear show of apartheid-like bias, only Aboriginal communities have their basic infrastructure stopped. Australia is the new South Africa under apartheid.
I think it is time for Aboriginal people to actively campaign to have other countries of the world to see Australia what it truly is – The Last Bastion of the Aryan Race.
We need to engage the international community to initiate trade sanctions and boycotts, just as they did with white South Africa.
It is disturbing to know that the UN views Australia as a first world country that is fiscally rich. This goes to our demise in the sense that other first world countries are reluctant to make monies available to our under developed communities, because Australia as a whole is not viewed as an underdeveloped nation and it is this concept that prevents our communities from applying for international development aid.
It will be
through our own efforts that we will be able to alter these perceptions,
so as to become eligible for international aid. Australia knows that
this is the case and hides behind this veil, so as to commit genocide on
a scale unequalled anywhere in the modern world.
Closing down our communities creates a condition of life set to destroy the group in whole or in part.
Contact:
Ghillar Michael Anderson
Convenor and Joint Spokesperson of Sovereign Union of First Nations and Peoples in Australia and Head of State of the Euahlayi Peoples Republic
0427 292 492
Sovereign Union of First Nations and Peoples in Australia
Asserting Australia's First Nations Sovereignty into Governance
We must take our sovereignty away from these robber governments
Previous linksunten coverage of Australian Aborigional affairs
Poetic injustice as bid for Indigenous Recognition stalls - Australian Aborigines to meet at a SUMMIT FOR FREEDOM in Alice Springs - Protests against closure of 150 Aboriginal communities - The Disgrace of Western Australia's Treatment of Aboriginal People - "Stop stealing our children!" Aboriginal protest in Brisbane - One thousand demonstrate in Australia about Aboriginal deaths in custody - Aborigines reject nuclear dump in Central Australia - Understanding why Australia's First Peoples are so angry - West Australian plan to close 100 remote and Indigenous communities 'devastating' - Thousands protest G20 Summit in Australia - Mentally ill people jailed in Australia without being convicted of anything - Lessons to be learned from atom bomb tests in Australia - UN Told Australian Indigenous Deaths in Custody Worsen - Take an Aboriginal passport to show respect on your travels - Eight-minute video history lesson about Australian mistreatment of Aborigines - Government cuts off water to remote Australian Aboriginal settlement - 14 skulls returned from Berlin to Australian Aborigines - Star maps point to Aboriginal songlines - Ex-Japan PM disavows nuclear power - Numbers of Indigenous children in care 'a national disgrace' - Western Australian government demolishes Aboriginal homes without consultation - Why Australia should not become the world's nuclear waste dump - Film Review: “Utopia” By John Pilger Exposes Genocidal Maltreatment Of Indigenous Australians By Apartheid Australia - The Real-Life Utopia And The Truth About Our Enduring Silence - How a King's Seal could change land rights in South Australia - Tony Abbott's white settlement remarks offend Indigenous leaders - Slave descendants finally recognised as Australian minority group - Australia in the grip of a ‘new stolen generation’, indigenous children forcibly removed from homes - Old mistakes in New Delhi: Australian irresponsibility and Indian uranium sales - World Suicide Prevention Day – suicide takes more lives than war - Australia's problems start at the top - The Tyranny of Experts - Challenges & Achievements in First Nations Education - Where are all the indigenous faces? (on Australian media) - South Africa, 20 years after Apartheid, doing better than Australia - What has been the psychological impact of the Intervention on Aboriginal people of Australia's Northern Territory? - Racialised imprisonment in Australia - Australian atomic massacre of Aborigines still ignored
The war at home Australians don't want to know about
Forgotten War
by Henry Reynolds
Australia is dotted with memorials to soldiers who fought in wars overseas. Why are there no official memorials or commemorations of the wars that were fought on Australian soil between Aborigines and white colonists? Why is it more controversial to talk about the frontier war now than it was one hundred years ago? Forgotten War continues the story told in Henry Reynolds’ seminal book The Other Side of the Frontier, which argued that the settlement of Australia had a high level of violence and conflict that we chose to ignore. That book prompted a flowering of research and fieldwork that Reynolds draws on here to give a thorough and systematic account of what caused the frontier wars between white colonists and Aborigines, how many people died and whether the colonists themselves saw frontier conflict as a form of warfare. It is particularly timely as we approach the centenary of WWI. This powerful book makes it clear that there can be no reconciliation without acknowledging the wars fought on Australia's own soil.
Reynolds punctures the 'great Australian silence'
Green Left Weekly Monday, November 24, 2014 By John Rainford
In Forgotten War, Henry Reynolds provides evidence to support his claim it was the war of conquest fought against Aboriginal people that made the nation, not the 1915 ill-fated invasion of Turkey.
http://tinyurl.com/kxnl9vu
In August, Prime Minister Tony Abbott attended a ceremony in Sydney to mark the 100 years since the Australian Naval and Military Expedition Force sailed out of Sydney Harbour to German New Guinea shortly after Britain declared war on Germany in 1914.
The occasion was the official start of a four-year-long Anzac centenary of jingoism. Abbott was anxious that we "should know all our great war stories better" by the time the centenary commemorations come to an end.
If history is any guide, these commemorations will never end. As Henry Reynolds reminds us in Forgotten War, what began in 1994-95 as a year-long commemoration marking the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II has already lasted 20 years - courtesy of a permanent government-funded program known as "Saluting Their Service".
The contribution made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the many wars that Australia has participated in since Federation will be recognised in the Anzac celebrations. However, this draws attention away from the armed conflict between settlers and Aboriginals nations.
Aboriginals who fought for the white man are remembered with reverence - the many more who fought against him are forgotten.
Reynolds is one of a pioneering group of historians, anthropologists and others who have transformed our understandings of traditional Aboriginal society and the relationship between Indigenous and settler Australians.
In his latest book, he provides evidence that supports his contention that it was the war of conquest fought against Aboriginal people that made the nation, not the 1915 ill-fated invasion of Turkey.
Conflict came within weeks of the foundation of Sydney and was apparent on every frontier for the next 140 years.
Yet while the large-scale killing of Warlpiri people by police at Coniston in Central Australia in 1928 can be used as a convenient date to mark the end of officially endorsed killing, the brutality has never ended.
The largest military operation in Australia in the 19th century was in Tasmania in 1830. About 550 troops provided the core of a total force of 2200 who mounted a sweep across the island, but failed in their objective of driving hostile Aboriginal bands into the two linked peninsulas in the south-east of Tasmania.
In the late 1850s and early '60s, the fighting in Queensland was often compared to another of the wars of Empire, the Indian Mutiny. The Moreton Bay Courier reported that the conflict with Aboriginal people in Central Queensland "numbered more white victims in these districts than the massacre of Cawnpore".
Parallels were also drawn with the Jamaica Rebellion repressed by colonial Governor Edward Eyre, who killed about 400 people during his reign of terror.
In 1869, a correspondent in the Bowen newspaper the Port Denison Times referred to the public controversy in Britain that Eyre's action provoked, asking: "What then, will the people of England say when they learn that more than this number of natives falls each year in Queensland."
Reynolds records the war waged against Aboriginal people in forensic, harrowing detail. A conservative estimate is that between 25,000 and 30,000 Aboriginal people were killed, and between 2500 and 3000 settlers. By comparison, there were 606 Australians who died in the Boer War, 520 in Vietnam and 339 in Korea.
Reynolds says, "the big question hovering above all these matters is whether the settlers and Aborigines were at war or not. The reluctance of many people to accept the reality of a long but persistent war leaves only one other, infinitely challenging alternative.
"If there was no war then tens of thousands of Aborigines were murdered in a century-long, continent-wide crime wave tolerated by government.
"There seems to be no other option. It must be one or the other."
Reynolds concludes war was inevitable because of the legal fantasies that Australia had not been acquired by conquest, much less treaty, but as a "desert and uninhabited territory". Violence was the only means available to enforce such an annexation.
This means there can be no reconciliation without recognition of the war that began in early 1788.
There are thousands of memorials all around Australia dedicated to those who fought in wars overseas. "Lest we forget" is elevated to sacred incantation, but "Best we forget" is the guiding phrase for Australia's own wars.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/node/57879