Australia’s history of racism towards Aboriginals is absolutely disgusting.
Until the mid-60s, indigenous Australians came under the Flora And Fauna Act, which classified them as animals, not human beings. This also meant that killing an indigenous Australian meant you weren’t killing a human being, but an animal.
To this day, Australia breaks every code of the Geneva Convention when it comes to indigenous Australians and their human rights. The “public housing” that the government has given them are one-bedroom shacks with no running water, no electricity and no gas, that entire families are forced to live in. These shacks are in communities in the outback, as far away from “civilised” society as possible. Out of sight, out of mind.
Indigenous Australians that live in the city are commonly forced to live in very dangerous and derelict areas that the government gives very little funding towards. Redfern in Sydney is a highly indigenous Australian populated suburb that is rife with crime, unemployment and horrendous living conditions. The government does next to nothing to help these people, either.
Whenever riots have broken out as a result of incredibly low morale, the police and the government are very quick to point all the blame at the indigenous Australians and say that they are the cause of their own problems, rather than looking at what the actual cause is.
Unemployment rates amongst indigenous Australians is astronomical. Crime rates are astronomical. Suicide rates are extremely high within the indigenous Australian community. Death from inadequate living conditions and inadequate health care is common. Brutality towards indigenous Australians is common.
The way many indigenous Australians are forced to live is equivalent to that of what one would expect from a third-world country. Indigenous Australians are considered by the UN to be one of the most horrendously marginalised groups in the world.
And how does the government amend all of this? With a national “Sorry Day”, where white people plant a hand in some designated area of soil as a token of their white guilt, and then continue going about their white privileged day.
On top of that, white people here commonly bitch and complain about how “good” indigenous Australians have it and how “thankful” they ought to be to the white man for improving their quality of life. Meanwhile, indigenous Australians have lost almost all sense of identity and culture because of white colonisation.
What is left of Aboriginal identity and culture has been nearly completely destroyed. And most people in this disgustingly privileged country do not give a single god damn fuck.
Australia is a disgusting country when it comes to racism. I am disgusted by my own country.
Some of the highest suicide rates for ATSIs are those who have been through tertiary education, those who have left their country to study at a university and then returned. There are a lot of speculations about why this may be, but an undeniable factor is that ATSI are expected to forget what language and culture they have left and assimilate to white culture.
And we play at talking about ‘Aboriginal Culture’ to cover up how many ATSI cultures were destroyed by our colonising them. There were over 200 countries in the ‘terra nullius’ Australia, over 300 languages, and every time we talk about ‘the Aboriginal community’, ‘Aboriginal culture’, in the singular, it’s to erase that fact. It’s so we can keep dismissing them as ‘hunter gatherers, not too advanced, barely human, more like fauna’.
And in my state, Tasmania, one of the first things we hear about Tasmanian Aborigines is ‘They don’t exist any more, Truganini was the last one and she died ages ago’. Tasmanian Aborigines do still exist, we’re just repeatedly told that they don’t and anybody who claims to be one is lying, ‘Look at their skin, they’re not dark enough, they’re just doing anything to get an easy ride on the dole.’
And, hey, the Racial Discrimination act was suspended to allow the Northern Territory Intervention Act. They could just turn it off for a few weeks to allow that to happen and nobody gets upset about that, we talk about how oh those NT communities just couldn’t look after themselves, lazy dole bludgers, why can’t they just assimilate to whiteness.
Australia is a disgustingly racist country.
In 2005-2007, life expectancy at birth for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males was 67.2 years, 11.5 years less than that for non-Indigenous males (78.7 years). For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females, life expectancy at birth was 9.7 years less than for non-Indigenous females (72.9 years and 82.6 years respectively).
(via patticak-patticak)
