July 20.
Artwork by Glenn Loughrey
Effect of foreign attitudes and practices
The continued ‘white entitlement’ of the settler state
...the privileging of whiteness remains intrinsic to settler colonialism. Australian settler colonialism can be understood as ‘a system built on white privilege’. [1] From the earliest days of colonisation, the privileging of whiteness simultaneously animated views of Australia as ‘civilised’ and ‘at the forefront of progress’ while also connecting the relative newness of settler culture to ‘the heritage, history, and culture’ of its British settler roots [2]...Even as Australia has become increasingly multicultural and ethnically diverse, whiteness, and its alignment with Britishness, has remained a ‘treasured quality’ for settler Australians.
Whiteness also conveys a degree of entitlement that Indigenous people continue to observe. As Nayuka Gorrie argues, Aboriginal people see ‘the entitlement of white settlers’
in statements about what Australian values are. We see it in discussions around who white Australia allows to come to this country and how they get here. The entitlement to country that their ancestors stole and continue to steal is truly mind boggling. The wilful historical amnesia of forgetting the very boats your ancestors came on while denying the rights of other people on boats is breathtaking. [3]
1. Stan Grant, ‘Four Corners: I can’t see reason, I can only feel anger. And sometimes that’s better’, The Guardian, 26 July, 2016, p.68.
https://www.theguardian.com.australia-news/commentisfree/2016/jul/26/four-corners-i-cant-see-reason-I-can-only-feel-anger-and-sometimes-thats-better>
2. Russell McGregor, Indifferent inclusion: Aboriginal people and the Australian nation, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2011, p.xx.
3. Nayuka Gorrie, ‘Hope is like a key card I perpetually lose and find’, The Guardian, 8 August, 2017, p.20.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/08/hope-is-like-a-key-card-i-perpetually-lose-and-find>
Acknowledgment: Sarah Maddison, The Colonial Fantasy – Why white Australia can’t solve black problems, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2019, p.224.
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The negative effects of invading livestock.
Cattle and sheep were destructive of the environment in other ways as well. Their close cropping of the vegetation destroyed native flora while plants growing in or around waterholes or lagoons were eaten or trampled under hard hoofs. A north Queensland pioneer wrote of the impact of cattle along the Gulf of Carpentaria coastline:
they trample out the signs of turtles found in dried up swamps, the trail of the crocodile to his nest; they eat the tops of yams, and eat and destroy the lilies, all of which make their (the Aborigines) natural food scarcer and harder to find. [1]
Other introduced animals – pigs, rabbits, camels – damaged sensitive local ecologies as well. An Aboriginal woman from the north Queensland coast told a European visitor in 1895 that feral pigs had eaten large amounts of traditional food. 'I think altogether we die soon', she lamented, 'pig-pig eat him yams; plum all fall down, wild pigs too much eat'. [2]
'Bulleta': The Case for Aboriginals, Queenslander, 12 November 1898.
Queenslander, 20 July 1895.
Acknowledgment: Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, pp. 130, 184 n.9, 10.
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We must remember because remembering is a moral duty. We owe a debt to the victims ...By remembering and telling, we...prevent forgetfulness from killing the victims twice.
Acknowledgment: Paul Ricoeur quoted by David Reiff, Against Remembrance p. 45.