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Wednesday December 31, 1969

Reclaiming the Dreamtime

By

    'History has changed how our people look at themselves. When the whites

came to this country, they did not make treaties, they started raping and killing and

poisoning. They brought in alcohol, muskets, sabres, strychnine, the flogging whip and

chains. We'd never had hell before. Everything in this sacred land had been sacred and we

were one with all created life until white savages came and called us "black

apes" and "primitive". It's past now but we are products of the past. Our

people have forgotten that there was a time when our men fought them and fought well.. in

the days before our soul was crushed.'

Grandfather Koori from "Living Black"

compiled by Kevin Gilbert.

There was little for Aborigines to celebrate ion Australia's bicentennial jambooree in

1988 that commemorated the arrival of the first white settlers. Since the Englishmen

captain James Cook first 'discovered' their continent in 1770, they have been

systematically robbed of their land, their culture and their dignity. In the nineteenth

century they hunted down like animals for a Sunday's sport and, with their land gone, were

herded into 'missions'; for much of this century, the government took small children away

from their families in an attempt to eradicate all knowledge of Aboriginal language and

culture. This was the 'lost generation' of a 'dying people'; a race the white settlers

determined to expunge from history.

And failed. From the beginning, the Aboriginal fought back against overwhelming odds.

In 1967 they won citizenship and the last 20 years have seen an unprecedented Aboriginal

initiative demanding political and cultural rights and, above all, recognition of their

right to their lands and sacred places. Today they have legal equality but continue to

suffer discrimination and persecution in most fields; infant mortality is three times

higher, suicide rates six times higher, prisoners 14 times greater and life expectancy 18

years shorter than national average.

What Kevin Gilbert calls 'the rape of the Aborigine soul' was so profound the blight

continues in the mind of the most blacks today. Their continuing fight is for more than

land; it is for the return of their history, their soul.

Research by Atanu Roy

Notes:

Note 1: In 1995, legal proceedings for reparation were initiated in the Australian

courts. Almost 70 years after she was removed from her mother, Hilda Muir began an action

on behalf of herself and others of the 'stolen generation', victims of a forced policy of

assimilation operated from the 1920s to 1960s. She claims the policy breached the

Australian constitution and the International Genocide Convention and demands that it be

ruled invalid. If successful, the case could lead to thousands of demands for personal,

cultural and spritual loss. After years of litigation, the UK has agreed to pay around US

$30 million in compensation for the contamination of Aboriginal land and people during

atomic tests in the 1950s. Compensation for the lost lands is still to be won.

Note 2 'Aboriginals see themselves as part of the nature and all things on earth as

part human' For the 40 millenia and more, the aboriginal people lived in a delicate

ecological balance with harsh environment. The land is sacred, essential to their physical

and metaphysical survival; their relationship to it rooted in the dreamtime, a time long

past when earth was first created. Two hundred years ago, the white man decreed their land

to be terra nullius; uninhabited, virgin and therefore open to the settlers' claims. The

Aboriginals lost all title and were driven from the sacred places of their dreaming.

Aboriginal title was finally recognized in 1992 but their land is still not their own: the

land remains at risk from tourism, development and above all mining.

Note 3. 'At the white man's school, what are our children taught? Are they told of the

battles our people fought, Are they told of how our people died? Are they told why our

people cried? Australia's true history is never read, But the blackman keeps it in his

head.'

Note 4. 'Then they got the pox, syphilis, gonorrhoea, colds, pneumonia, TB that

whiteman's ship brought in.' Even today, white Australia has done little to cure the

diseases it inflicted. Systematic neglect, vicious discrimination, insanitary and over

crowded dousing and exclusion from the national health system ensure that the diseases all

but eradicated elsewhere persist among he aboriginal community.

Note 5 Graham Steins , the Christian missionary who was killed while spreading

Christianity among the tribals in Orissa, was from Australia.