Australia is the New South Africa or has it always been that way?
June 9, 2008
In 1977 the Australia my family migrated to seemed such a far cry from Durban, South Africa.
It was hard to adjust for my mother, of course seeing white men dig holes in the ground, road signs that were in English only, not followed by Afrikaans, and the extreme scarcity of cheap African labour.
As I grew older, and the term multicultural become vogue, I started to celebrate a country half my first cousins would not know, a freedom they would visit but never inhabit, for reasons known only to them. A country my father had brought us to, the Lucky Country, the Clever Country, where infinite combinations of nationalities co-existed in equality, like a giant food court. In Australia, had made it. Kids here didn’t have “White” enscribed on their birth certificates in Australia like I did. Their race wasn’t on the document at all.
In 1980 in 3K at Crestwood public, I recall some lessons on Captain Cook and his great discovery of Australia, like a new restaurant the English could all try. It was all about him, the Captain, the First Fleet, and how sick everyone on the boat in order to make this country what it is today, so be grateful. The convicts they carried were benign bread thieves, and their guards were brave soldiers. Both had set sail on a most excellent adventure. When they arrived, they were greeted by the Aborigines, who according to the pictures we saw seemed for the most part grateful that the white man had finally arrived to offer them proper clothes, decent food and civilised conversation.
Many, many experiences with indigenous and non-indigenous folk alike have shown me since then many other perspectives. That’s for another day.
Indigenous people were given the right to vote in 1962 and were counted in the Australian census only 41 years ago. Before then, they were under law in this country, young, free, and gurt by sea, not people. Non-existent. On the basis of the colour of their skin.
And just 40 years after that monumental change, the now defunct John Howard sent the Australian Army into rural indigenous communities and made two sets of laws. One for whites, and one for blacks. Apartheid, which simply means separateness, operated from 1948-1992 in South Africa, with two sets of laws, initially, one for the blacks then one for the whites. But then there were other races that were neither, some the government preferred like the Japanese, and some that could be separated from the the original two groups, and oppressed under the same system, like the Indians.
There is no reason to believe, until the Federal Governement’s Intervention in the Northern Territory is abandoned, and reparations made that Australia is any different from the South Africa of old. Such laws are archaic in the New South Africa, but not here in the Clever Country.
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE…
Comments
Got something to say?