Antinuclear

Abbott and Rudd’s rush to Northern Territory – destructive to Aboriginal culture

Rudd and Abbott charge the north Eureka Street Dean Ashenden |  19 August 2013 Kevin Rudd has now joined Tony Abbott in a charge to the North. The common idea is that a substantial fraction of Australia’s population and economic activity can be pushed up and across the northern half of the continent. The assumption is that northern Australia is ours to do as we like with. In fact, it’s not.

Much of Australia’s Aboriginal population lives in northern Australia, and Aboriginal people make up a far higher proportion of the population there than anywhere else. They own or co-own, in both Western legal terms and in customary law, vast tracts of land, many of which are open to non-Aboriginal people only with Aboriginal permission. In northern Australia, Aboriginal people have constructed a distinctively Aboriginal way of life, as different from the mainstream as it is from ‘traditional’ Aboriginal society.

What the major parties are proposing is not necessarily a bad thing from Aboriginal points of view. What is bad is the assumption about our prerogatives. Official Australia has long looked at the north as a tabula rasa awaiting ‘development’, an unmissable opportunity and an infuriating failure. And apparently it still does………

Comment: Nearly forty years ago our family witnessed the process of European take over Aboriginal lands for mining and national parks. This was top end NT – where ‘consultation’ was a token one way talk in condescendingly broken English (‘leaders’ were largely identified by the Europeans as those closest to European culture) and trinkets were offered in the form of land tenure ‘privileges’ and co investments in mining, tourism amongst others along with employment opportunities and western education. I say ‘trinkets’ because most of this was as meaningless as the shiny mirror of eighteenth century. Today, little has changed except perhaps a few more Europeanised Aboriginal people are accepting opportunities on western terms and that makes the statistics look good for those who need them. Definitive statements on health and education policies and employment prospects are announced – ultimate solutions to persistent commitment to Country and cultural bewilderment leading to too many profound personal tragedies. How familiar these ‘new’ solutions are – nothing new, nothing new. The Top End has a very tough climate: towns are airconditioned refuges more often than not, surrounded by comforting gardens of southern or British plants. It is inhospitable to agriculture (we are to be the next ‘food bowl’ – check out the amount of sprays and fertilisers used to grown western foods). And it is only truly understood as an environment and as a living entity in its own right. – Jane .http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=37087#.UhP0g9Jwo6I

.http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=37087#.UhP0g9Jwo6I

August 20, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | election 2013