No. Don’t talk to me about the Holocaust anymore. I’m over
it. It was a terrible business, but so was Palestine. As was listening to the
lyrics of the theme from Exodus;
“This land is mine, God gave this
land to me.”
Sorry, but I think any decent god making a gift of land to someone would simply hand over the title deed, and need not expect bloodshed as part of the deal.
Though I do believe, with all my heart, that the Holocaust happened. I’m
no denier. And I love that most of you are still, decades later,
moved by references to the Holocaust, moved by stories of the Holocaust, have
visited dreadful places like Auschwitz on your travels, or ask “would you like
to visit the Holocaust museum next time you are in town?”, but, NO. Enough.
No more. Not til you stop living in denial about what is happening in
your own time, on your own watch, in your own country.
In Indigenous Australia.
Until you stop silencing me about Indigenous Australia, I
will silence you about the Nazi Holocaust.
Yes, I know the Holocaust happened because, like you, I saw the newsreels
long before digital technology made it easy to fake stuff like that. I know it happened, because when
I was younger, like you, I saw tattooed numbers on real, living flesh. Because I saw real people
blanche and throw themselves to the floor of a tram the first time they heard
one of those new ambulance sirens.
Mostly, I know the Holocaust happened because I know that
human beings are capable of selective denial about what is going on under their
noses – like what is happening today in Indigenous Australia.
It's much the same as the way I know the other holocaust happened, because I was with young Sarah Jane one day in Gertrude Street when an old man kept telling me in a quiet but urgent voice to hold her hand, to hang on to her, to hold her tight. It wasn't til more than 20 years later, when the Bringing Them Home report was published, that I realised what he had been going on about. Then the other stories made sense. I know it's still happening because I know a government website when I see one; and I can tell sanitised fact from sensation. And our history may be buried in archives, but it is still there, under all the settled dust.
So, No. Just SSHHH. No more.
Stop it.
I get that you don’t get why I care. What I don’t get is
why you won’t.
The WA Coroner
recently released a Report that doesn't guarantee Justice at all for Ms Dhu, who died in Police Custody on 4th August 2014, but it's a perfect case study of how systemic racism works.
The recently published report of the WA Coroner, Ros Fogliani, of her
investigation into the death in custody of Ms Dhu, does not provide any kind of
closure for Ms Dhu’s family. Ms Dhu died in tragic and despicable
circumstances, but the report does not make any clear calls for anyone to lose
their jobs.
Far from losing their jobs, many of the people involved in Ms Dhu’s shameful
treatment have since been promoted. There has been one resignation [circumstances unknown].
As an outsider I can only guess that New Australian law remains, at
times like this, a particularly bitter pill for Indigenous Australians. My
impressions are that traditional people are more respectful listeners than
non-Indigenous people generally, have a keen sense of justice, are puzzled when obvious
wrongs go unpunished, and mourn traditional forms of justice that were swift
and certain.
This
does not mean the Coroner has failed in terms of New Australian law. The
Coroner has, in fact, done an excellent job in speaking not only on behalf of
Ms Dhu, but on behalf of Indigenous Australia. She has sought the truth, acknowledging and seeking to address, within the
limits of her position, white privilege and systemic racism.
There is a TRIAGE system for assessing people in hospital
emergency departments; it includes forms with tick boxes for temperature and
pulse rates. It’s a system that in 2014 gave people wiggle room to treat Ms Dhu carefully, or to judge her as not worth a lot of effort.
There is another system for deciding how WA Police respond
to domestic violence calls. In 2014 it included checking to see whether there are
warrants outstanding for the address the call was made from before attending at
the address, because warrants matter more to the powers that be than the
welfare of the people calling.
And there is a system, in each Australian State or
Territory, for determining the cause of death when somebody dies in Police
Custody. In Western Australia, this is governed primarily by The Coroners Act
1996.
Life in Australia today is governed by one big macro-system
made up of millions of interlocking, smaller micro-systems; by a multitude of forms
and procedures reflecting systems as big and formal as legislation or as small
and informal as the mood of someone having a bad day. At every level from
registering a company to buying a carton of milk, our lives are subject to "ways of doing things"; our lives are subject to "systemic
forces".
On the surface, most systems are the same for all
Australians: In a hospital, the same forms are used for both Indigenous and
non-Indigenous patients. In theory, the same procedure applies when there is a
domestic violence call to the WA Police regardless of who calls, and the same
Coroners Act governs the way a death in custody is investigated, regardless of
who has died. But statistically speaking, measured on a basis of racial
identity, the same systems still provide different outcomes for Indigenous and
non-Indigenous Australians.
If the systems are the same for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, why are the outcomes so different? How can systemic racism exist? The
coroner, in her report into her investigation into the death of Ms Dhu,
provides some excellent clues.
In the real world, a macro system is never simply the sum of
its micro parts. The whole is always other than the sum of its parts because
there are always factors missing from the equation.
Systemic racism flourishes because most formal systems
assume racism does not exist.
Nobody consciously decides “we had better make temperature readings compulsory
in case one of our nurses or doctors thinks Indigenous people, or people with
drug problems, are worth less than other humans.”
A major error contributing to the death of Ms Dhu was that
none of the three people who treated her on August 3rd 2014 used a thermometer to take her
temperature. That was the crucial day doctors had a chance to discover she had a bone infection, and treat her with antibiotics. Knowing her temperature would have been a major clue. After her death, one of the treating nurses went straight out and bought her
own personal heat thermometer for taking temperatures, and now always has one available. I don’t think she was a racist; her failure on that day was prompted by typically poor hospital management of resources, then compounded by the poor character of lots of other people. The rot set in long before Ms Dhu was seen by Nurse Hall, and kept on growing.
Lots and lots of things happened to Ms Dhu in her final 48 hours. Are Indigenous Australians cursed with a gene that causes them bad luck, or did Ms Dhu's exceptionally poor treatment have some other cause? Everyone suffers sometimes from human error or bad luck or bad moods, but white people do not also suffer repeatedly from the consequences of racism as well.
So much of what did happen
to Ms Dhu was unforgivably inhumane, and had nothing to do with human error. Her death was allowed by a system that does not assume racism or inhumanity exists –
or at the very least dismisses it as unimportant. Her death was allowed by a system that believes other things are more important than inhumane treatment; a system that fined and then locked Ms Dhu up for, amongst other things: "...swearing in a public place... waving her right finger in a police officer's face and not moving away from him when warned to do so..." [784] but did not see inhumane behaviour by police officers as offensive enough to justify someone being charged.
The Coroner’s Report into Ms Dhu's death makes for sickening, at times
harrowing, reading. The Coroner has highlighted the personal failures of many
of the people who dealt with Ms Dhu in the final two days of her life, and used
a systems-approach to identify system defects.
The system in WA requires that, in the first instance, when
someone dies in Police Custody, the matter will be handled through a Police
Internal Affairs investigation.
Unless a police officer is caught on CCTV clearly using a
racist expression, it is difficult to “prove” that they were motivated to act,
or not act, by racism. What the coroner has done instead in some cases is use
every English word at her disposal but the R word to describe the appalling
attitudes of some of the people responsible for Ms Dhu’s care at the time she
died.
We have to decide for ourselves whether Constable Matier’s use of the word
“junkie” was his idea of a safe euphemism for something racist. We have to decide for ourselves whether devaluing someone as a "junkie" is a lesser crime than devaluing them based on race. The Coroner
cuts through the lies about Ms Dhu even being in withdrawal at all, and provides us plenty of context for making those decisions.
The efforts of Hospitals and Health workers in Australia are
governed by certification and registration systems that are, like Police operations,
self-governing to a degree, and designed to be self-correcting. The focus is not on
retrospective punishment for failure, but on prevention of future mistakes.
Unless someone actually breaks a statutory law, prosecution is unlikely.
I am particularly impressed that the Coroner, who had no legal
choice but to conclude there was no deficiency in Dr Lang’s “medical treatment”
of Ms Dhu on 2 August 2014, dedicated 42 paragraphs of her report to Lang’s
treatment and testimony, because we get to meet Dr Lang as a person and doctor,
despite the required “conclusion”.
If I had not read what I did about Dr Lang in a Coroner’s report I would find
it hard to believe that a Doctor with so many years’ experience could treat
another human with so much indifference, and remain indifferent to her death or
the circumstances of her death throughout the inquest process. Dr Lang thought Ms Dhu had "behaviour issues". Did this make Ms Dhu feel powerless? Did it influence the medical staff and police officers who had contact with Ms Dhu for the remaining hours of her life?
Ms Dhu had been arrested for non-payment of fines. She was
not in jail, she was in a police cell - a local "lock-up". She was
unwell and asked repeatedly to be taken to hospital. The report tells the story
of her complaints of being unwell, of her being taken to hospital twice, the
medical treatment she received, and what happened at the lock-up before Police
finally, reluctantly, agreed to take her to hospital a third time. The Coroner
believes she probably went into cardiac arrest while being wheeled into the emergency
department the third time.
In the video footage below, she is still alive but dying when, while being handcuffed,
her head falls onto the concrete floor of the cell. No ambulance is called,
instead she is dragged from the cell into a corridor and then lifted into the
back of a police vehicle.
Our legal system is built on two broad ideas that have, for
the past 200 years, become progressively confused;
that governments will pass laws and regulations telling us what we must not do, and
a common law idea that tells us what we must do, which is
show that we all owe a duty of care to each other.
It is precisely because the law cannot - indeed should not
have to - spell out everything we must not do, that the idea of a duty of care
is important.
We should NOT need a law saying don't let the head of an obviously ill person fall back and
hit the concrete floor of a cell.
One human being showing a reasonable level of care for another would not let
that happen.
There is one system for specifying in legislation and
regulations what is unacceptable behaviour, [prosecutable offences] and another back-up system for
demanding people behave in a decent and caring fashion.
The Coroner did not find that anybody who had contact with
Ms Dhu during those final 48 hours in custody broke any laws or statutes in a
way that could be prosecuted.
She did find that lots of people made mistakes and personal errors of judgment,
and that some showed a distinct lack of good character; that they failed to
care.
What I get from the Coroner's Report is a clear message the police who let Ms Dhu's head hit the floor of the cell, and who dragged her around like she meant nothing human to them, did not break a prosecutable law, but they failed in their duty of care.
It is because Duty of Care operates as a back-up system that, although there
have been no prosecutions to date, all might not yet be lost.
The Coroner does not use the expression “white privilege” in her report, but
she was very careful to set out from the beginning just how big the duty of
care was in the special circumstances of someone like Ms Dhu:
Ms Dhu did not have a choice of medical practitioner, or medical
facility. She was not free to go to the HHC [Hospital] when she thought it
appropriate. She was not free to seek a second opinion on her medical
condition, if she had wanted one after being diagnosed with “behaviour issues”.
In presenting at HHC, she was escorted by police. This heightened the power
imbalance and her dependency. The clinicians were tasked with ascertaining
whether she was fit to be held in custody. She was not free to present as a
patient, seeking medical assistance, formulating her own questions for the
doctors.
In respect of all of these matters, Ms Dhu was reliant on police from
the Lock-Up and clinicians from HHC. Her reliance upon them heightened their
duty of care towards her.
[261-2 emphasis mine]
The Coroner has not failed Ms Dhu; she is but the messenger
of an extremely rotten system.
Many of the people who treated Ms Dhu so contemptibly in her
final hours failed to meet their duty of care. In the absence of pre-existing
laws saying things like "do not allow an obviously ill person to smash her
head on a concrete cell floor", the back-up system still allows the family of Ms
Dhu to investigate the possibility of suing those involved for a breach of Duty
of Care, and I sincerely hope they can and do. The Coroner has tried hard to
spell out those failures.
Our current system of justice does not provide reasonable timing, or certainty of justice. And I do not for a moment suggest our current system has proven itself over the last 238 years to Indigenous Australia to be anything other than a smokescreen. Our current Federal and State legal systems are part of bigger systems that provide protection for governments that often don't even pretend to care about the vulnerable. If they cared, current representatives would be making grand announcements about changes to Police Regulations as a result of this Inquest. Their priorities remain clear: "Do not wave your finger at a Police Officer." But the State Coroner herself on this occasion has not hidden behind the system, she has used it to full advantage to do the best she can on Ms Dhu's behalf, and to change the system where possible.
In particular, she has successfully challenged
the assumption that the purpose of taking someone to hospital was only to justify keeping them locked up [i.e. fit for custody indefinitely];
the notion that transport to a hospital is sufficient as opposed to attendance by paramedics [so ambulances will now be called];
She has endorsed a recommendation by Ms Dhu's family that a Custody Notification Service based on the NSW model be put in place. [Late Edit - the Federal Govt has offered to fund this for 3 years but the WA Government has refused the offer]. At every stage of Ms Dhu's story, we have to ask, statistically, what are the odds this would have happened to her if she was a non-Indigenous woman? What are the odds she would have been fined for wagging her right finger at a Police Officer? What are the odds she would not have been able to pay the fine, and would have been locked up instead? What are the odds she would be in an unhappy relationship? Have a drug problem? What are the odds that when she went to the hospital the first time, a Police Officer could so readily plant the idea that she was a junkie, that she was in withdrawal [not true] that she was faking illness [not true] and that this lie would be so readily accepted by so many [not all] of the medical people and so many [not all] of the police officers who dealt with her in the next 24 hours; and this would influence the way people treated her? etc; etc; etc;
I'm not suggesting Indigenous Australians have a monopoly on unhappiness, or making mistakes in life, or being unemployed, but statistically, Indigenous Australians have a lot to deal with. After 60 plus years of living in the wilds of white suburbia I've seen my share of white dysfunction, but I don't see white people arrested or fined for public swearing or other low level offences, I don't see the same suicide rates affecting families, and I don't see white people being so quickly devalued for drug problems unless they are actually behaving badly.
I simply cannot wrap my head around what is in that CCTV footage. At all.
As a little old white lady I can be aware of racism, and
sometimes see it when it is blatant, but I can never know the half of it.
Lots of things make me doubt myself, but racism never does, lots of things make me hesitate sometimes, but racism never does; sometimes I get anxious about the future, but never because of racism.
Perhaps
it’s too easy for me to think the majority of non-Indigenous Australians, however
deluded about their privilege, are not actively racist. I believe the best and most immediate hope for Indigenous
Australia lies with systemic change.
We can help those deluded about privilege understand we are not accusing
them all personally of active racism, by helping them understand the whole system is
other than the sum of its parts and how systemic racism really does work.
The most urgent and useful thing we can do is change the system every
chance we get, to protect people as much as possible from delusion and from
active and passive racism. In system-terms, the quickest path to some success
is "fix the system not the person".
The whole system is rotten, but if the Coroner had
recommended all of the changes necessary to eliminate racism, for example, proposed a
new Federal Constitution, the Report would have been scrapped, and perhaps the
Coroner sacked. Within the constraints of the system as it currently stands,
the Coroner has looked for ways to effect systemic change. This included
questioning the social bias that put Ms Dhu in a lock up for non-payment of
fines in the first place. The Coroner is not the problem - the system is rotten to the core.
---------------------
Weeks later I realise what I was trying to say, in more simple terms, is this:
Racist outcomes are not the result of lots of deliberate or conscious choices. We only need one or two bad choices plus a lot of indifference for the whole system to fail.
One nurse who was ANTI-racist (but did not have her own thermometer)
One police constable who saw Ms Dhu as a person who was sick, but had to fight really bloody hard the whole time for a chance to treat Ms Dhu with respect, was prepared to fight her boss, but could not win on her own
One doctor who really cared but made a human error on the wrong day and is devastated by the mistake he made
Up to 40 people who were neither racist nor anti-racist but were rather ho-hum about what they do from one day to the next
Half a dozen people who were total scum
These are the elements that create systemic racism. We need more people to move from the ho-hum category into the really caring/prepared to fight category for something to change.
When I was a
kid, I was warned not to swallow chewing gum; that it stays in your stomach
forever and swells up, but they didn’t warn me about anti-psychotic medication.
You know how, no matter how old our bodies get, in our minds
we are always 20?
Well, no matter how fat I look, in my mind, I’m thin. If I
do not look in mirrors or shop windows, or see myself the way others see me I’m
the weight I was before I started taking the wonder drug; I’m 30 kilos lighter.
They say, the more effort you expend, the more calories you
burn. If that’s true, I should lose a kilo most days just getting out of bed. Because
mood stabilisers and anti-depressants can smooth out highs and lows and help
you cope, but they can’t cure you.
So this is not the face of madness,
what you see of
me and my tribe from the neck down, this is what madness looks like:
Trying to function on Seroquel is like trying to run through
wet concrete. Trying to function on Seroquel is knowing you’ve lost your mind
so you seek it out and destroy it completely. Trying to live on Seroquel is finally
being propositioned by Sean Connery or Helen Mirren – or your age group’s
equivalent – and realising you couldn’t be fucked.
TRIGGER WARNING
Trying to live without medication is leaving a hotel in the middle of
the night because someone MIGHT be watching you through the mirror on the wall,
even though you know they aren’t, but what if they are? Trying to live without
medication is not being able to wash your hands because there MIGHT be razor
blades in the soap, even though you know there aren’t, but what if there were?
And living with madness, medicated or not, is saying “fine” when people
ask “how are you?”, because if you try to explain about mirrors and razor
blades they don't believe you, or you don't "seem mad enough" or they just tell you to get over
yourself. It's saying "fine" out of fear of the fact that everyone is an expert on mental illness.
Living with madness is having people ask you “and what do
you do?” and the shame of knowing the answer is “not much”. [I'm a good, kind person is not a socially acceptable answer.] Living with madness is the
embarrassment of being asked how many children you have, and knowing the answer
is “none”, because you think the gene should not be passed on. Living with madness is having unprotected sex with any bloke anywhere, anytime, anyhow, because normal coping methods like cutting yourself or overdosing in back alleys are less appealing.
It’s having the
government tell you to pick two days a week to work and thinking – if you could
just pick and choose which days to be well you would choose to be well seven
days a week [and maybe I could have my sense of humour back?]
This
is not the face of madness, this is the face
of a man who harvested resentment, that’s all. Someone who believed in alternative
medicines, and astrology; someone who loved animals and didn’t eat meat.
Real madness is listening to people pooh pooh
multiculturalism, while they use Arabic numerals to count their money. Real madness
is a culture of bullying kids for being different, then being surprised when
they are so desperate to belong somewhere they sign up with thugs. Real madness is
being a nation of basically good people who, individually, would give anyone
the shirt off their back, but mostly live in denial about how we are
collectively failing each other. Because every nation is other than the sum of its
parts.
Insanity is tolerating the worst parts of this party
because the best of these are crap.
They are crap because they have the mic and they have nothing to say of any interest or importance that anyone wants to hear. They are crap because they have the mic so they don't have to listen. They are crap because they are destroying the environmental and economic and moral legacy of this country's children and grandchildren and subsidising that destruction, the whole time saying "see, we're the good guys, we are not hating our fellow man, we are hating our future man."
To you mainstream pollies I say, being so crap the extremists have the floor is the height of madness... and a total abnegation of responsibility. [I'm watching you, Greens: your website is pretty but the silence is deafening.]
Madness is when racists are the only candidates who seem to have any integrity.
The only people we can trust to say what they mean, however appalling it is. The only people who sometimes do say something we are waiting to hear.
Australia has performed well economically while the rest of the world has
struggled but, I repeat, the whole is other than the sum of its parts, and
while the country has prospered its people have not. Too many people have lost their jobs and, losing their jobs, lost their mortgages, and hope. Too many well people, now unemployed, are sent off to do Mickey Mouse training courses run by corporate mates of elected representatives. [Yes, we did notice how she made her money]. Too, too many tasks that are the responsibility of government have been privatised and offshored: Our money is flowing out of the country in a subsidised pipeline while honest, decent people are being told the age of entitlement is over - by politicians who believe the age of accountability is over.
Do those in the bigger parties, the establishment parties, really think we don’t know what is happening to us? That when
they take jobs away or allow them to disappear without a trace then tell people to
get a job at lower pay in crappier conditions, we do not know we are being, as psychiatrists would put it,
gaslighted?
Who keeps buried, in libraries, the truth about
pre-colonial, Indigenous Australia?: The permanent dwellings? The respect for
human life that governed the way people conducted themselves? The swift but
certain systems of justice? The trade routes, the baking and the aquaculture? The
land management systems, [incredible given the absence of western style plants
and animals and the challenging ecosystems]? Who still teaches us in our
schools, if we learn anything at all, that Aboriginal religion is only “myth”? Who
maintains the silence about successful farms, snatched by white governments?
Houses cared for only to be bulldozed? Endless lessons in the pointlessness of
trying? Who doesn’t want us to hear about heroes like William Cooper, who went to the
German Consul in 1938 after Kristallnacht to protest the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi government of Germany?
Rather than celebrate someone who stood
for something, who threatens a city council for not celebrating
Australia Day on the one day of the year that commemorates illegal occupation,
the declarations of war that followed, the cultural genocide, the stolen
labour, the stolen children, and the ongoing, deliberate, perpetuation of
ignorance? This politician from this political party, who uses his political appointment to assert Australia Day should be apolitical:
Truth is, we have a new national curriculum that makes some of the truth optional for students at years 9 and 10. This means in 20 years time there might be a few people in our parliament who know or care about Australia's real history. Few people in our parliaments today think it is urgent or relevant.
Sadly, I won't be the only one dead before anything changes for Indigenous Australia, but the most insane part of this is that it's a collective loss; reflected in our attitudes to each other, our unwillingness to listen, our disdain for our environment and future generations, and a lack of pride in who we are as a nation. If we made the effort to learn about our Indigenous brothers and sisters, we could learn a lot from them.
In most of Australia, suicide is no longer a crime. An
enlightened move, we’d think, except the suicide rate in parts of Indigenous
Australia is criminal. When will the past end, and tomorrow begin? Didn’t Moses
keep his people in the desert for 40 years because even he understood,
thousands of years ago, that you can’t build a successful community overnight from traumatised,
reasonably untrusting generations? Because he understood, long before the British Empire existed, that a simple "get over it" would just sound like the "fuck you" it really is?
This is the place where every sitting opens with
the Lord’s Prayer. Three out of ten Australians have no religion at all and not
all believers are Christians but let’s just suppose, for a minute, that most of
the people who sit and talk and belittle each other here in our name, without
exchanging many useful ideas, actually believe in this Middle Eastern bloke and
what he supposedly stood for.
He’s supposed to represent a God of love. A God, the Bible
tells us, that is present in each and every one of us, so that whatsoever we do
to each other, we do to Him. I say, Fuck the poetry of Suck-It-Up Beatitudes; I say, Fuck the
Platitudes that just highlight Un-Christ-Like Attitudes; I see, given what they do or
fail to do, they don't think very much of their Parliamentary Christ-God
at all.
This not the face of madness. This is the face
of a man who harvested resentment, that’s all.
If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that Muslims have been in this
country for nearly 200 years, no worries mate, or that there are over a billion
Muslims in the world and if they all wanted us dead we would be dead already, he would be the one telling us that hijabs
don’t look right; that they are as ugly and confronting as body fat. He would be the one assuming fat people don't deserve medical care because they waste their Sennalink money on unhealthy food and won't help themselves.
If he were alive today he wouldn’t be telling us that we can save a million
dollars on that already wealthy school’s new arts centre and instead do the
Christian thing and help a dozen poorer public primary schools, he’d be the one focused solely on telling us we must choose - that our only choice - is between pensioners and
foreigners.
If he were here today he wouldn’t be proposing that if we don’t want people
seeking refuge here maybe there's a way to help them where they are.
If he were here today he would be the
one framing and narrowing debate and turning those of us, who are already here, against
each other. But he is not here today, so why is it happening?
Living on anti-psychotics is like trying to run through wet
concrete. But trying to live in the real world, unmedicated, now that would be
just plain crazy. .
Back in the day I got sick of blokes [and a lot of women] going on about bra burners, and asking me what feminists were whingeing about and I snapped. It finally hit me that if people really care about an issue, they will make an effort to work it out themselves.
Same thing for being gay and people having no idea this makes you, as Magda puts it, a minority of one in your own family, not to mention the bullying, the extra rape threats, [or if a male the threat of being murdered with no one giving a shit] and not being born with a brand on your forehead so you have no option but to make it personal and a big deal when you ask people to be a little kinder.
And so, after an interesting discussion many years ago about Indigenous Australians, it hit me – if I really cared, I would make an effort to work it out myself. And all the leftard brainless dogooder wanky bullshit abuse and silencing from other whites just for caring leaves me in no doubt it must suck to be an Indigenous Australian.
After ten years most of what I have learned is that Australia’s full history is buried, that most of what we were told and still are told is just plain wrong – a legacy of lies and omissions. So when I heard a new series of First Contact had been made, I was excited.
O.M.G. After 2 seconds I wanted to slap David Oldfield around the head. Not just ignorant, but having him on my screen was like a Parliamentary torture chamber.
But I get it. It’s not sensationalism, it’s necessary for people like me to hear the shit Indigenous Australians have to listen to all the time, though once should be one time too many.
And it’s necessary for people like me to know what it’s like not to have any answers “handy” and so feel, instead, that it would be easier to just give Oldfield a slap around the head…. Because he isn’t listening anyway.
And it also raises points in a way that people like the panel on Awaken are able to provide “answers”, and say some really important and insightful stuff.
Because racism IS simple, but pain is not, suicide is not, struggling to imagine a good tomorrow is not, change is not… and caring is not enough.
This week the
good people at the Freo [Fremantle W.A.] City Council announced that instead of
funding Australia Day fireworks on the 26th of January next year, they would
have a multicultural event called ONE DAY on the 28th instead.
You can find the press release, which is actually quite well put
together, here:
Commercial media wasted no time announcing the council had
scrapped Australia Day celebrations due to Aboriginal “cultural sensitivities”.
This generated a tsunami of outrage, as if someone is claiming that for the
last 60,000 years the 26th of January has been a sacred day to all
Indigenous Australians.
Silly really. This has nothing to do with Aboriginal Cultural
Sensitivity and everything to do with White Insensitivity [which, itself, seems
to be a cultural thing].
A lot of people are frightened they might have to rethink their
hitherto unquestioned assumptions about the world. But really, all they have to
do is change them. Thinking is not mandatory.
It seems, at times like this, that non-Indigenous Australians respond with excessive,
defensive outrage to the slightest hint we might be racist. Or we even rush to
shut down a conversation before anyone has a chance to slip the R word in. I get
it – none of us like to feel foolish.
I actually believe to my core that most Australians are better people individually than we ever get credit for. It's just that, collectively, we are failing our Indigenous brothers and sisters. If only we could just get over ourselves and set things right now,
we wouldn’t have to be on edge about it all the time. That uneasy feeling won’t
go away until we do.
Naturally, media trotted out one Indigenous man to announce the
idea was horrible. Well, he is entitled to his opinion, but he does not
represent the whole of the extremely diverse population of Indigenous
Australia, and he does not represent this little old white lady.
Being a respectful sort of person [i.e. coward] I respect the
right of people to insist we never change the date, but respectfully assert my
right of reply with the following:
26 January Happy Not-Australia Day
Alright, alright; settle.
Now, take a dekko at the pikkie and tell me
*the name of the flag [look closely]
*where they landed
*the name of the bloke in charge, [spell his name correctly for bonus points] and
*how many ships were in the harbour.
Please do this without having to do an engine search first… if you are upset about
the date being changed… because ONLY if you know all that stuff without
checking will I believe you really think all the details are too important to
change any of it… Including the flag.
------------
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not Australian, she’s Nigerian, but
she is an awesome writer and I want to share with you a snippet from one of her
novels that I think is indirectly relevant to our discussion about the date of Australia Day;
”But black people are racist too.” Because of course we’re all
prejudiced (I can’t even stand some of my blood relatives…) but racism is about
the power of a group and in America it’s white folks who have that power.
How? Well, white folks don’t get treated like shit in upper-class African
American communities and white folks don’t get denied bank loans or mortgages
precisely because they are white…
…So after this listing of don’ts, what’s the do? I’m not sure. Try
listening, maybe. Hear what is being said. And remember that it’s not about
you. American Blacks are not telling you that you are to blame. They are just
telling you what is. If you don’t understand, ask questions. If you’re
uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking
questions and then ask anyway. It’s easy to tell when a question is coming from
a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard.
Here’s to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.
This
week 9 young Australians were arrested in KL for stripping down to their Reg
Grundies – specifically on this occasion, budgie smugglers made of the
Malaysian flag - and chanting “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi”.
One
of the men arrested works for a political party happy to use the Australian flag as a
symbol on their advertising; a party happy to talk about our sovereign right to
make laws and demand visitors respect our laws when in our country.
When
I commented on social media that the young man should for those reasons have
known better, I was branded a wowser and told to get a life.
Later
someone went into overdrive:
All you wowsers calling for these men to be locked up for
offending Malaysians by stripping down to their undies just remember this is
the same country where female genital mutilation is legal and the political
opposition leader received a lengthy prison term on trumped up sodomy charges.
I don't care if they acted like bogans or one of them was Christopher Pyne's
staffer i will never respect that countries laws until they lift their game.
Firstly,
Australian Government websites helpfully advise travellers that Malaysia is a
predominantly Muslim country, and that it is a good idea to respect the laws of
the countries we visit or expect consequences. So I have no sympathy for these
young men if they are jailed for two years. At least they won't be Indigenous Australians locked in Australian jails, and will probably all live to tell the tale.
Secondly,
there is little they could do to lower Malaysia’s opinion of Australians as
uncultured bogans. The tragedy here is that because one of the young men is a government
staffer, it will not improve diplomatic relations.
Thirdly,
not ALL laws, ours or anyone else’s, are necessarily worthy of respect.
Nonetheless, actions have consequences. Their disrespect for the principle of
sovereign rights weakens the principle of sovereign rights. How do we promote
respect for human rights or democracy when we show no respect for diplomacy or
process?
Fourthly,
it does not matter if FGM is legal in Malaysia. It is not legal here. What
these young men were doing was not fighting against a bad law, they were simply
showing contempt for a law they would demand respect for in their own country,
i.e. respect the flag. Unacceptable hypocrisy.
Fifthly,
it took a long time before homosexuality was decriminalised in Australia; thus
far only one state has expunged all convictions, and only one other state will
accept applications to have them expunged. [How very kind of them.] And as many
of these convictions were the result of entrapment they, too, are the result of
trumped up charges. Where is the outrage? Are we free to disrespect ALL our
laws until we lift OUR game?
Finally,
but only because this has to stop somewhere, I’m not a wowser, just a bore. A
real wowser would want to stop car racing, stop people from wearing budgie
smugglers, stop the boozing, and certainly put a stop to the Aussie Aussie
Aussie chant. As much as I fail to see the point in any of it I don’t want to
stop it, and am happy for it to happen anywhere but my back yard if it must
happen at all. Go forth and be bogans if you like, just don’t say it isn’t fair
when you get locked up, and don’t be surprised if visitors to our shore don’t
give a shit about our flag or think all this talk of respect for the democratic
process and sovereign rights is just a lot of hot air.
THE
GONG FOR BEST DEFINITION OF WOWSER
In a
letter to the Sydney Morning Herald back in 1968, H. Fellows of Mosman
explained “A wowser is a man who locks his roosters up on Sundays”.
Seems Aunty ABC is losing the plot. As a special treat, she is letting John Howard explain to us why Robert Menzies was such a great Prime Minister.
As someone who relies heavily on ABC iView and SBS On Demand
for entertainment, distraction and edification, this is disappointing
programming. As much as I like to be exposed to new ideas or points of view, I
don’t like to have my prejudices challenged. I didn’t think much of Howard as a
Prime Minister, and his obsession with the past is laughable.
My memories of the Menzies era are those of a child whose
world was limited by the decisions of others. Menzies’ own obsession with
stamping out communism meant that when we finally had a black &
white television in our home, the already crappy programming was frequently
interrupted while two eyebrows filled the screen so some bloke called Ming
could blurt on about reds under beds.
If my mother detested Menzies, this was not a sign that he
was a bad man, for my mother detested everyone. But she insisted women had
fought hard for the vote and she should take her right to vote seriously, so
when Ming had something to say on the tele, we tuned in. The volume was turned
down though, cos she couldn’t bring herself to actually listen. Of course… it
was probably just another of her sneaky tricks designed to ensure silence reigned in the house for a
while.
When I brought letters home from my local Catholic school urging
her to vote DLP, she threw them in the bin. She claimed to always vote
Communist, because the major parties were full of arseholes but she could not
bring herself to vote informal. She voted Communist because they had no hope of
winning.
What I know about Menzies, really, I learned by reading
after he retired, and when I was old enough to retrospectively understand what
it might all mean. I think we experience our parents’ and
grandparents’ lives, in part at least, by proxy. Although I did not personally live through the
first or second world wars, the everyday concerns and consequences of the
events of those years are very real to me, because they were part of the fabric
of my world when I was growing up. And this provided a context for what I later
read of the Menzies years.
With such a personal context, the decision to sell steel to
the Japanese before WWII takes on a significance for me it might not otherwise have had. One
might think I would watch this show to see how Howard, whose middle name
honours Winston Churchill, deals with that decision, but I am old and crotchety
enough to not care what Howard thinks. After all, anything Howard has to say is
little more than an opinion, and worth no more than my own.
I might, out of curiosity, be tempted to see if mention is
made of the Egon Kisch story, for it is here that I see the greatest echo of
Menzies in the Howard legacy. Kisch was an anti-fascist who, in 1934, was
invited by Australian communists to come to Australia and speak about the
excesses of German Nazism. Menzies was Attorney General in the United Australia
Party before the Liberal Party was born, and part of the move to exclude Kisch
using the infamous dictation test allowed for in the Immigration Restriction Act
1901 – cornerstone of the White Australia Policy.
The Kisch story contains all the elements of a good Australian
drama – anti-hero, freedom fighter, a David fighting Goliath. Australians love to rally behind someone snubbing their
nose at authority… and they did this in numbers. Fluent in 11 European languages, Kisch provided a great test of the dictation test itself.
I suspect Howard was paying attention when Menzies said, in Parliament;
every civilized country has the
right to determine who should or should not be allowed in
When I look at Howard, all I see is someone who probably
spent his early years shaving his eyebrows in the hope that one day he might
look like his hero Menzies. When he opens his mouth, all I hear is unapologetic,
wilful ignorance.
Sorry Aunty, SBS will win again.
For a more detailed blog post about the Kisch story [and
through this, the dictation test];
