An Open Plea to White Australia

Once a year I like to say why we should have Australia Day any day except January 26th.

But lately I don't just despair on behalf of Indigenous Australians: Australia is so unlike the country my (white) grandparents’ and parents’ generations fought so bloody hard to defend that the thought of celebrating anything Australian just makes me feel foolish. These days I imagine someone like my father, an enlisted soldier, thinking about fighting to save this country, and possibly deciding “nah, fuckit”.

If you haven't already seen it, here's the new “It’s not an Australia Day ad” ad. This lot deserve a free plug here just for ditching the original script they planned to use, which was unbelievably offensive.

Opinion about this ad is divided. At last someone’s taking a step towards truth in history; acknowledging the British were not the first to “discover” Australia, and that the country was already occupied when the British claimed it. And I kind of like the little digs about the boat people.

But is it promoting an ideal, or simply reinforcing mass delusion?

Of course, some pratt ruined it before even I had a chance to ruin it, complaining that the ad should mention Australia Day. His “reasoning” went like this;

The blacks would still be living under bark just surviving without the English. Now they have the rule of law.

This is such a common, negative opinion of Indigenous Australia that it proves the barbecue ad IS fantasy - too many Australians still believe that before the First Fleet arrived, Indigenous Australians couldn’t even organise a barbecue.

Okay. Not really his fault he is so ignorant

a) he might not have gone to school here or

b) he went to school here and he hasn't learnt anything in all the years since he left

Let's review all 3 of his key ideas

1) living under bark;

2) just surviving; and

3) the wonderful benefits of law.

History, Truth and Stereotypes

If those great twats Burke & Wills proved nothing else, they proved it takes something special to survive in Australia's harsh interior. (Burke shooting at the Aboriginal trying to help his dying arse was not the right sort of special).

Rob, you dickhead. What'll I do now?

Australia is vast and its ecosystems are varied; the native flora and fauna did not lend themselves to the development of western style agriculture. But just because there was no "western style" agriculture, this doesn’t mean all Indigenous Australians always lived on the edge of starvation or a purely hunter gatherer lifestyle – far from it.

1) Pre-invasion, the styles of Indigenous dwellings varied - people did not only live under simple bark humpies. There were stone dwellings in places like Dampier in WA, and at Lake Condah in Vic, and permanent dwellings elsewhere made of other materials.

Sometimes the crude bark slabs we see in pictures were the equivalent of a garden shed on an allotment – somewhere to stay out of the sun while gathering food until it was time to go back “home” to a more substantial dwelling.

Mr Australia Day's stereotype is of a stupid black man unable to do more than put one sheet of bark over his head after 60,000 years of trying. Like most lazy thinking, it’s just rude.

2) Aquaculture was practised in many places in Australia before elsewhere in the world, and agriculture too. Grains of local seeds rather than European grains were found stored, and stores of other foods were found by those who first arrived after 1788. All of this early food production and storage by Indigenous Australians was recorded by early explorers but NOT included in the history we were taught at school.

Instead we were given the "smooth the dying pillow" model of Indigenous Australia.

I used to wonder why the few Indigenous people I met never told me stuff but I realise now that the sheer volume of lies and the distortion I had been fed at school was so overwhelming; they would not have known where to begin, or how anyone could have believed them without the portable library the internet now makes possible.

How does a sketch of one tiny, quaint handwoven fish net in a schoolbook compare to a whole, re-designed river system that breeds fish?

As well as the extensive work involved in setting up aquaculture systems, firestick farming was used to sculpt the landscape – in the example below there was scrub providing cover to attract kangaroos, and once there they could be smoked out and herded into an open space where they were easily hunted down.

We came along and failed to recognise what was deliberately done over many years with careful planning and design, and we destroyed it. Funny no one told us this when we were at school. Funny most people still don't know.

Western culture is built around the Biblically entrenched assumption that mankind must actively manipulate and control the environment - almost demands, in fact, that we do it as destructively as possible. In contrast, we have been taught to think of Indigenous Australians as the passive victims of their environment. If we credit them with being in tune with the environment it almost seems a negative. Yet traditional land and resource management was both active and environmentally sensitive - it had to be to succeed, and it is something future generations will envy.

None of us like to be invisible, but I wonder how it feels to belong to such a demeaned race? To constantly be reminded you are not valued in the only country you have? How odd that we think of boomerangs as something only tourists buy, but we think dream catchers and items used by First Peoples from other countries are somehow more meaningful.

How odd that, to people like Mr Bark Huts on Australia Day and Proud of It, the First Peoples of almost any other continent are seen as Noble, but First Australians are viewed almost universally as losers, who were too useless to invent housing (untrue), did not trade (untrue), had no laws (untrue), could not navigate (untrue), didn't have alcohol or drugs (untrue), had no medicine (untrue), didn't resist invasion (untrue), had no religion (untrue), could not count (untrue) stood for nothing (untrue)... and when they ask only that the truth be told we tell them in return to "get over it".

The very idea that there was nothing of value before 1788

is the biggest insult of all

but that is exactly what our obsession with 26^th January implies

Other countries celebrate the day they became Independent, or achieved National Unity. Only in Australia would people seriously expect Indigenous Australians to celebrate being invaded - I mean, how stupid are we?

It fails the first rule of marketing - "what's in it for me?" - on Every Single Level.

3) Indigenous law might have seemed cruel, but it was never arbitrary. It was certain, predictable and swift – fair enough, there were no circuit courts with travelling magistrates. Indigenous Australia was not a single nation, it was - is - made up of many, many nations.

In any case, English law itself in 1788 was quite barbaric (don't start me!).

After years in which the replacement system of English law treated lower class whites with contempt, no surprise if we were desensitised to what it continued to do to Indigenous Australians - but what is our excuse now?

When will the Nazi Germany excuse - "we had no idea" - expire for Australia?

We cannot tell Indigenous Australians that they should get over the past, when the past is still happening.

This is footage of a young woman who was DYING in a local police station lock up. She was DYING and someone let her head fall back and slam against the concrete floor of the cell. She was DYING and they dragged her like she was a sack of shit, out into a corridor and picked her up and put her in the back of a wagon to take her to hospital. RELUCTANTLY.

Ms Dhu was dead before she got to hospital. Ms Dhu’s original crimes were swearing in public, and wagging her finger at a police officer, and she got the death penalty.

The Police Officers that treated her in this inhumane fashion were not charged with anything. That’s the way the law works in WA. These Police Officers have since been promoted. It’s a long and complicated story but I have read the coroner’s report and I promise you there is no “but” that makes it okay or understandable. It’s just a disgrace. (For more detail click here)

So much for celebrating Australia Day and the arrival of law. Under traditional law those Police Officers would have been speared or something two years ago, swiftly and quite reasonably. This happened two years ago but I say "now" because Ms Dhu’s family waited two years to learn no one will be charged, and since then, more people have died in custody. Indigenous people.

It happened to us

One of the most bizarre "get over it" arguments I keep hearing is "it happened to us". The "my ancestors were convicts" school of arguments include

·         Some of those whose families arrived here not long after the invasion are of convict stock, victims of a system that treated surplus labour like sub-human detritus.

·         Some are of Scottish descent, victims of the Highland clearances

·         Some are of Irish stock, victims of the unnecessary famines of the mid 19th Century and the evictions.

???Huh???

My ancestors were murdered/ tortured/ robbed/ etc and it didn't hurt them...???

This makes it okay to murder/ torture/ rob others?

This is a reason others should let us murder/ torture/ rob them without saying anything?

Are we to seriously believe that it's somehow more honourable to lose quietly than to go down fighting?

Is this some kind of "who suffered the most and is stupid enough to be chuffed about it" competition?

Yes, the methods of dispossession during the industrial revolution, plus the cultural genocide during the clearances and the evictions were brutal. My father's English ancestors did this to my mother's Irish ancestors eight generations ago. I get over it by blaming the policy makers, while remembering the benefits and costs of that theft flow on and multiply for many generations, remembering the people who suffered, and working hard to stop these things from ever happening again - to anyone.

Apart from costumes, the only differences are some people have forgotten how low humans can sink, and in the case of Indigenous Australia - IT IS STILL HAPPENING.

Guilt Shmilt

I am not proud of what happened for the first 200 years of occupation, but I do not feel guilty. No one is asking us to feel guilty about the past, we are just being asked to see what is happening now. Believe me, I know how lucky I was to be born in a country with plenty of food, water, and shelter, and not in the middle of some horrible war. And I also know how lucky I was to be born into the dominant race. I'm only beginning to feel guilty that I can't do anything much to stop what is still happening to Indigenous Australians NOW. Well, not on my own.

It is understandable that with a lack of information and communication, with a lack of education, with ignorance and deliberate lies, stuff happened in the past that people often had no idea about. Some whites did know and were complicit, others knew and fought it. (See, digging for the truth means you will find white heroes, too). But the more we knew, the more we fought the bad stuff.

And in 1967, for better or worse, 91% of white Australians - including my parents and grandparents - voted for the federal government to do something to make things better.

In the year 2000, many hundreds of thousands of Australians in large cities all around the country marched across bridges demanding our government apologise to the stolen generations. On balance, we are not evil people at heart.

But now, in the age of the internet, the time has come to move to the next stage. The next layer of truth is available and there is no excuse for ignorance, and ignorance is no longer an excuse. The law that once put chains around the necks of Indigenous Australians has been re-written, but shocking stuff is still happening. The chains have gone but the results are as bad. And the rot is spreading back from Indigenous Australia, with the potential to affect everyone who is standing around doing nothing.

If those of us who are non-Indigenous are so morally bankrupt we can't give a shit about Indigenous Australians, like Mr Bark Huts on Australia Day and Proud of It, must we be too lazy or stupid to care about the mess we are setting up for ourselves?

The country my parents fought for

My parents and my grandparents, were decent people

they would have been outraged by what happened to Ms Dhu

To suggest they fought for a country that thinks this is okay

would be to dishonour them

and the Indigenous Diggers who fought alongside them

The way Ms Dhu was treated was appalling, but the law in WA does not allow for anyone to be charged over what happened. That’s the same law that would apply if it happened to a white person. For some reason, this is just not happening to white people. Yes, whites die in custody, but not like this. For me this raises two important issues.

1) Until we abolish states, we will never have equal treatment before the law for all Australians, regardless of state of residence. (There are lots of reasons to get rid of states, this is just one of them).

Any state can currently pass its own law bringing back capital punishment, making "float people" criminals again, or abortion a crime and so on.
Or dismissing the importance of deaths in custody, like WA does.

2) Assuming a new constitution is too hard, we should call for a Federal Court of Natural Justice while states can still pass laws that allow them to get away with shit like this. When a Coroner is able to prove there has been blatantly inhumane and unprofessional conduct but state laws allow people to weasel out of responsibility, there must be some system to take up the slack.

No wonder Indigenous Australians are pissed off. Justice is never seen to be done.

Starting Over... Again

Democracy is about freedom of speech and opinion. It is about taking a place that is good and finding ways to make it better, not assuming it has always been great and always will be; that it never needs work, and letting it fall apart out of smug pride. Great democracy is not about saying if you don’t like the things that are not so great, you should rack off. Is this why we don't engage with Indigenous Australians? Cos we don't know where to tell them to rack off to?

And I think Australia won’t be the great democracy it could be, more open to truth and to embracing its Indigenous people and heritage, until it stops with the rack off attitude. And we will never have the best we can have until we do embrace our Indigenous brothers and sisters and the rich heritage we could share, including their constantly demonstrated willingness to do the right thing (like help that great berk Burke) despite the way we treat them.

When did we become so scared of hearing a difference of opinion or a new idea?
(The ones doing the silencing are the very people complaining about being silenced.)
Silence is not supposed to be our heritage. Our heritage could be so much more.

Aren’t we all sick of the same basic stuff?

Of politicians talking about us like we are something on the soles of their shoes? Having no one decent to vote for at election time? Travel rorts? The lack of accountability? Far from democratic laws making it illegal to tell the truth? The silence from opposition "leaders" on issues that matter? No one doing anything about increasing job losses, or the casualisation of labour?

Australia Day is a joke because

this country was not built on a dream

- it was hastily cobbled together out of a nightmare

Not only can I not understand how anyone seriously expects Indigenous Australians to celebrate Australia Day, I don't really understand why the rest of us are supposed to be celebrating. If we were celebrating an achievement it would make sense. Celebrating the day the British - after trying the Americas, various places in Africa and elsewhere - finally found somewhere at the opposite end of the world to dump their human rubbish? As silly as expecting Indigenous Australians to celebrate being invaded.

And I wonder if we don't want to acknowledge the lies we were told about Indigenous Australia because we can't bear to face the truth about our own beginnings; that white Australia too has been built on a lie; a myth that Australia stands for some great human ideal when in fact we have been drip fed just enough crumbs of democracy to hope we are not being conned but we know deep down it's not the real deal at all.

Our State Constitutions and our Federal Constitution were not written with any great ideals in mind. They are essentially administrative documents written for the benefit of those who had the most power in the 19th Century, before ordinary men get the vote, and long before women got the vote, and way before anyone Indigenous was guaranteed a vote. All the protections we rely on are "traditions" being overturned without us being consulted, and even the Federation itself no longer works the way it was originally intended. There is no "contract" between government and people, just good faith gone bad.

This rant opened with an ad that celebrates multiculturalism and diversity, but the truth is in Australia people are valued on a sliding scale:

Our governments believe those in government are more important than those being governed; corporations worth more than the workers, and workers more than those looking for work. We are told to value those in work more than those too old or sick to work. Politicians vilify workers who want tax benefits, yet coddle corporations that pay no tax at all. Whites are definitely worth more than blacks. Asylum seekers are almost sub-human on this warped scale, and it is not just plain wrong it is downright dangerous.

We are de-sensitised, and becoming more so, to the plight of those who are only the tiniest bit different from each of us, as if we are not all the same species. We don't have to want open borders to be concerned about how asylum seekers are treated. We don't have to want to pay massive amounts of welfare to the unemployed to demand governments do a better job of creating jobs.

The way governments are prepared to treat others

shows exactly how they are prepared to treat any of us

When did we stop dealing with people's actions and fall into the trap of judging people based on which group they belong to?

While we celebrate being Australian, while we congratulate ourselves for not being American or having Trump as President of our country, all of the justice and democratic and legal systems that once made us feel safe, that once protected us from being a country just like America, are being steadily eroded. All of the conditions including poor state constitutions that made Trump possible - and the nightmare that is yet to unfold in the U.S. - already exist here.

We can treat the new barbecue ad as a standard of behaviour to aspire to, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking it shows how our laws really see us now - or even how we really treat each other - when governments so often tell us to choose which of us is more important and we are more likely to say "okay" instead of asking "why?"

I hope you care about Ms Dhu as a human being; about the fact that she died an agonising death in jail for some really petty crimes, I hope you're outraged the police officers who treated her so inhumanely were promoted, that it was all legal in a country everybody likes to believe is great, and that nobody "important" seemed to give a shit. Because I need to believe you are the sort of people who would care, if only you knew...

It’s not that the snags are burning on the barbie, mate, the house is burning. This is not the country anybody I ever cared about fought to defend. I probably won't feel like celebrating just because a politician or a TV ad tells me to. I'll feel more like celebrating when - well - when all Australians realise Australia is not its government or symbols of government, but its people; ALL its people. That Australia is really no more or less than what we do for ourselves, and for each other. Not just when we are threatened from outside, but also when we are threatened from within. We are all in this together.

.

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Hopping Mad

 

 Seroquel.
 

Instant obesity, just add water.

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.


.
 

How Fraffly UnAwstrayan

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 26^th 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.

 

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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.