Antinuclear

Australia’s second Invasion, Aboriginal land for uranium industry

In the Northern Territory, the Gillard government is in effect driving Aboriginal communities into apartheid areas where they will be “economically viable”. The unspoken reason is that the Northern Territory is the only part of Australia where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights; and here lie some of the world’s biggest deposits of uranium..

……The most powerful political force in Australia is the multibillion-dollar mining industry. Canberra wants to mine and sell, and those bloody blackfellas are in the way again. But this time they are organised, articulate, militant. They know it is a second invasion. Having finally uttered the forbidden word, white Australians should stand with them…..

The invasion of Australia Australia’s forbidden word has been uttered at last. And with it is comes a new Aboriginal articulacy,  John Pilger, guardian.co.uk,  1 July 2011  The City of Sydney council has voted to replace the words “European arrival” in the official record with “invasion”.  The deputy lord mayor, Marcelle Hoff, says it is intellectually dishonest to use any other word to describe how Aboriginal Australia was dispossessed by the British. “We were invaded,” said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal adviser to the council. “It is the truth and shouldn’t be watered down. We wouldn’t expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, so why should we?”….

…The City of Sydney ruling is a very different gesture – different, and admirable; for it reflects not a liberal and limited “sorry campaign”, seeking feel-good “reconciliation” rather than justice, but counters a cowardly movement of historical revision in which a collection of far-right politicians, journalists and minor academics claimed there was no invasion, no genocide, no stolen generations, no racism.

The platform for these holocaust deniers is the Murdoch press, which has long run its own insidious campaign against the indigenous population, presenting them as victims of each other or as noble savages requiring firm direction: the eugenicists’ view. Favoured black “leaders” who tell the white elite what it wants to hear while blaming their own people for their poverty provide a PC cover for a racism that often shocks foreign visitors……..

In its landmark rejection of historical propaganda, Sydney recognises black Australia’s “cultural endurance” and, without saying so directly, a growing resistance to an outrage known as “the intervention”. In 2007, John Howard sent the army into Aboriginal Australia to “protect the children” who, said his minister, were being abused in “unthinkable numbers”. It is striking how Australia’s incestuous political and media elite so often rounds on the tiny black minority with all the fervour of the guilty, unaware perhaps that the national mythology remains culpably damaged while a nationhood, once stolen, is not returned to the original inhabitants.

One national TV programme used an “anonymous youth worker” to allege “sex slavery” rings among the Mutitjulu people. He was later exposed as a federal government official. Of 7,433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, just four were identified as possible cases of abuse. There were no “unthinkable numbers”. The rate was around that of white child abuse. The difference was that no soldiers invaded the beachside suburbs; no white parents were swept aside, their wages diminished and welfare “quarantined”. It was all a mighty charade, but with serious purpose.

Journalists accepted the Howard government’s reason for “intervening” and went hunting for the lurid…..

In the Northern Territory, the Gillard government is in effect driving Aboriginal communities into apartheid areas where they will be “economically viable”. The unspoken reason is that the Northern Territory is the only part of Australia where Aborigines have comprehensive land rights; and here lie some of the world’s biggest deposits of uranium, and other minerals.

The Labor governments that followed Howard have reinforced the new controlling powers over black homelands, the strict Julia Gillard especially ………..The most powerful political force in Australia is the multibillion-dollar mining industry. Canberra wants to mine and sell, and those bloody blackfellas are in the way again. But this time they are organised, articulate, militant. They know it is a second invasion. Having finally uttered the forbidden word, white Australians should stand with them…..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/01/invasion-australia-forbidden-word-aboriginal

July 2, 2011 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | aboriginal issues, New South Wales