Death Imitates Art

Advice: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this post may contain images of people who have died.

I was born on Narrunga land, and currently live on Kaurna land. I’d like to begin this post by acknowledging Elders and Aboriginal custodians both past and present.

White Australia has a genocidal history. Not only did we seize our land from those who had successfully thrived here for thousands of years beforehand, we then made every effort to wipe them from the continent completely. Between 1788 and 1901, the Indigenous population of Australia went from just over one million individuals, down to just one hundred thousand. This rapid decrease in population was managed by colonisers cutting off resources, introducing diseases, and outright murdering. When these methods began to be criticised by other nations, the Australian government turned to a different form of genocide. Children were stolen from their parents and were not allowed to marry or have children with other Indigenous people, in an attempt to ‘breed them out’. Indigenous Australians were not even classified as human until the 1960’s, instead classed under flora/fauna as animals. Officially, the Stolen Generation was from 1910 until 1970, however policies still exist to this day that allow Aboriginal children to be taken from their parents and put into the home of a white family. Aboriginal women have a history of being forcibly sterilised.

In modern Australia, Indigenous Australians face a multitude of ongoing issues because of the terrorism they faced in their past. They are more susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse, they have higher unemployment rates, are more likely to be charged for a crime. White settlers brought with them a range of addictive substances and vices to which the Indigenous people had no tolerance or pre-existing knowledge. The British brought their own currency, trade deals, values and goods, and gave the Indigenous people the choice of abandoning their culture, heritage and history to join the colonial world, or to remain in a society that was now outcast, minority, looked down upon and unbelievably more difficult to live than it had been before. This was a system made for Indigenous Australians to lose, and this is still the case today.

Australia Day is not a day we should be proud of and celebrate, given these historical facts. This day inadvertently celebrates the day that Australia was invaded and we made life immeasurably more difficult for the pre-existing custodians of this country. We know better than our ancestors; yes, we are not directly at fault for what happened, but every day we continue to have more benefits and advantages than those to whom this country was originally home.
I have purposefully chosen not to include sources in this post. If you were unaware of anything written here, then going to Google Scholar and searching simple terms might help you understand a bit better the history of Australia and might teach you a lot. Some terms you can search are:

– Indigenous Australians genocide
– White Australia policy
– Stolen Generation
– English impact on Indigenous Australians
– Mental health issues and suicide crisis in Indigenous Australian youth
– Australian Aboriginal colonisation
– Australia Day Invasion Day

“Whether the Blacks deserve any mercy at the hands of the pioneering squatters is an open question, but that they get none is certain. They are a doomed race, and before many years they will be completely wiped out of the land” – Harold Finch-Hatton (1885).