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Sorry Day
May 26th was "Sorry Day." It used to be the policy of the Australian Government to remove Aboriginal children from their families and give them a limited education, teach them how to do menial tasks and then "assign" them to a white household to help in the running of that property. Quite often the parents never saw their children again. It was, effectively, the death of the child as far as the family was concerned.
"Sorry Day" is an attempt to get the general population to think about this, and to not necessarily apologise personally, but to feel sorry that it happened, and to acknowledge that it was a terrible thing to do.
Of course, there are bogans who think they have have nothing to say sorry about because they didn't do it. If you were to say to them "Jeez mate, I know you crashed your car but I'm not sorry because I didn't do it, and none of my family did it" they would think you're a bastard.
I'm sorry the government of the day took children away from their families. It should never have happened. I'm sorry Aborigines weren't even counted as citizens until 1960. But most of all, I'm sorry there are bogans who are not sorry.
"Sorry Day" is an attempt to get the general population to think about this, and to not necessarily apologise personally, but to feel sorry that it happened, and to acknowledge that it was a terrible thing to do.
Of course, there are bogans who think they have have nothing to say sorry about because they didn't do it. If you were to say to them "Jeez mate, I know you crashed your car but I'm not sorry because I didn't do it, and none of my family did it" they would think you're a bastard.
I'm sorry the government of the day took children away from their families. It should never have happened. I'm sorry Aborigines weren't even counted as citizens until 1960. But most of all, I'm sorry there are bogans who are not sorry.
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(small amount of space to separate the sentiment from the politics)
It ain't just the "bogans", btw; the Federal Gumbymint has recently appointed Ron Brunton [1] to the ABC Board (http://smh.com.au/articles/2004/05/25/1085461757526.html)...
[1] Along with the likes of Keith Windschuttle (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/10/24/1066631621572.html), Brunton makes a living claiming that the Stolen Generations and Aboriginal massacres never happened...
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And, technically speaking, they're kinda counter-revisionists; they're trying to bury the recently (as in, the past 20 years) acknowledged history and re-establish the old status quo.
When I was in school, the extent of my education in regards to Aboriginal Australia was "Captain Cook discovered Australia and then the First Fleet established a colony. There were some Aboriginal people here already; they used spears, and made up Dreamtime stories. Some of them attacked the settlers and had to be shot. The end."
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and I consider the party in power now to be bogans, for all their suits and ties.
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Our homework for the only class I had that covered anything Aboriginal (which was in early primary school) was "make up your own Dreamtime story"; yes, that's right kiddies, they're just silly made-up stories, not a 50,000 year old oral tradition that was vital to the survival of Aboriginal people (amongst other things, the songlines are the maps; listen to the legends and the one thing you notice is that a lot of the time they mention where to go to find the water...).
Can you imagine them assigning homework of "make up your own Bible story"?
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Shameful.
(I am, however, grateful that you posted in your journal about this, Den. I'm saving all those recommendations for movies.)
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If they had made a white man do it he'd have been dead after two or three days from exposure I bet. What surprised me were the trackers, who were literally returning these children to a live of slavery were aboriginals themselves a good portion of the time.
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It's a mind-blowingly good movie; it focuses on the massacres rather than the Stolen Generations, and it's also the closest thing that's ever been made to an Australian Western.
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In in the Deep South (of the United States). At one time we were a slave owning society. It just boggles my mind to see the practice of slavery mentioned specifically in my country's Constitution. Article IV, Section 2 states "No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." THat meant if a slave escaped, they had to be returned to their owner.
This was part of my country's founding, although we later amended the Constitution to abolish slavery, rending that little bit moot. My great ancestor was a ship captain and slave trader. I'm from the part of the US where slave ownership was practiced the most. Mine is the area of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s.
Now, I'm the only white guy who does my job out of 5 shifts of 3 people each monitoring a telecom network for MCI. My supervisors as likely as not have been black women.
I don't know if I could get behind a similar holiday in the US (unless you consider Martin Luther King day as our own version of "Sorry Day"). At least, not for the descendants of slaves. They've been as free as I am for over 100 years; my own status as a white anglo saxon ex-protestant hasn't exactly done ME any favors. A well connected son or daughter of a black politician, business owner, or doctor/lawyer has more opportunities than I do. I'm not quite "white trash" but unless I was hired as a "token white guy" my skin color has never gotten me anything.
Our own aborigines, the Native Americans... now THERE might be a candidate for an American "Sorry Day." I wonder, who exterminated their aborigines more thoroughly, us or the Australians?
Loxley
(Just throwing this out there for comparison/contrast on how things have gone down in another place)
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(and there is a history of slavery in Australia as well; the aforementioned Aboriginal "domestic servants", the ubiquitous convict labour, and the Pacific Islanders pressed into service on the Queensland plantations...)
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We have a legacy here of "residential schools", removing children from their families and shipping them off to church run boarding schools to be 'whitified'. The legacy of pain and abuse and of loss of culture is horrendous, and it's only a single generation old. The residential schools didn't close until the late 60's early 70's.
There has always been ongoing treaty negotiation and land claims settlements.... the government keeps promising to make it right, and honour the old land claim treaties. They paid millions of dollars for studies in 'self government', that recommended these claims be settled, and to give the aborignal people the power of self determination.... and then they screw them again. But I suppose we're trying.
Still it bothers me deeply, that in 2004, in an area that is so prominently aboriginal.... there is a BIG RED LINE down the middle of this town, the prejudice and mistrust on both sides is so terribly sad.
We Canadians like to pride ourselves on our enlightenedness and tolerance.... you'll sometimes hear about how racism doesn't exist here. That's CRAP. Sure there are worse places in the world, but we aren't lily white by ANY means yet.
Suggestions for movie viewing.... the all Inuit made film
We have a legacy here of "residential schools", removing children from their families and shipping them off to church run boarding schools to be 'whitified'. The legacy of pain and abuse and of loss of culture is horrendous, and it's only a single generation old. The residential schools didn't close until the late 60's early 70's.
There has always been ongoing treaty negotiation and land claims settlements.... the government keeps promising to make it right, and honour the old land claim treaties. They paid millions of dollars for studies in 'self government', that recommended these claims be settled, and to give the aborignal people the power of self determination.... and then they screw them again. But I suppose we're trying.
Still it bothers me deeply, that in 2004, in an area that is so prominently aboriginal.... there is a BIG RED LINE down the middle of this town, the prejudice and mistrust on both sides is so terribly sad.
We Canadians like to pride ourselves on our enlightenedness and tolerance.... you'll sometimes hear about how racism doesn't exist here. That's CRAP. Sure there are worse places in the world, but we aren't lily white by ANY means yet.
Suggestions for movie viewing.... the all Inuit made film
<a href=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285441/ <b>Atanarjuat </b></a>
Or I'm sure you've already heard of "Whale Rider", from New Zealand. I also enjoyed, and it's recommended by my Lakhota language group Thunderheart.
Frankly I like sticking to more positive modelling films :)
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I second the vote for Atanarjuat, btw; it's not paced like a conventional modern narrative, but it is a wonderful movie. And major kudos to Natar Ungalaaq for what he went through for the role; that scene where he fell on his face in the puddle while being chased (naked) across the ice made me wince in sympathy...
I haven't seen Whale Rider yet, but I loved Thunderheart. For more good films covering Australian Aboriginal subjects, try Dead Heart (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116047/), Yolngu Boy (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0266078/) & Australian Rules (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285006/).
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They live on something akin to 'island time', we call it "Nunavut time", patience comes with the territory..... you simply can't HURRY an Inuit. They're used to waiting, they're used to wandering out to the airport, and maybe the plane will come and maybe it won't, and if the one they're waiting for doesn't come, they'll just take the next one that comes along. You get used to it, when the weather can shut down an entire territory for ... 5-12 days at a time.
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Did you read the post?
Canada is behind, not infront.
Ive met many a canadan who seemed to think that there was no native population of Canada.
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Yes I did.
I don't for a moment imagine that Canada is perfect, but Australia at the moment is completely fucked.
Aboriginal health is so screwed that the average life expectancy is about 20 years less than that of the non-Aboriginal population; half of all Aboriginal men die before the age of fifty. Diseases that are generally never seen outside of the third world are commonplace in remote Aboriginal communities.
Aboriginal children are only half as likely to complete high school as non-Aborigines. Aboriginal unemployment rates are three times as high as non-Aboriginal. Average Aboriginal household income is about two-thirds that of non-Aborigines.
(all stats from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (http://www.abs.gov.au/Websitedbs/c311215.nsf/0/CF10E47A0E0D7119CA256E540071B1D6?Open))
The Torres Strait islands are in the grip of a heroin epidemic, as is the urban Aboriginal community in Sydney. Petrol sniffing is a serious problem in northern and central Australia. The latest craze in Wilcannia is intravenously injecting alcohol.
Racism is widespread and strong, particularly in rural regions; "they should all be bloody shot" is not an uncommon sentiment. I've personally seen Aboriginal monuments in outback Queensland covered in swastikas and white-power graffiti.
(note here, however, that it's not that urban folk are particularly better than rural; in most urban areas, Aboriginal people are so scarce that their existence can be safely ignored. Outback folk don't have that "luxury")
Following a riot in Redfern (note for furriners: a suburb of Sydney with a significant Aboriginal population) triggered by the death of an Aboriginal boy fleeing from police earlier this year, the leader of the Opposition in the State Parliament said that they should bulldoze the whole suburb (unsurprisingly, when a horde of elite private schoolboys went on a rampage through a beachside suburb a few months earlier, nobody called for the demolition of the wealthy end of town...).
Despite all this, the Federal Govt has spent most of the last ten years working hard to make it all worse; they've been going flat-out to reverse the gains that were made in the previous twenty years, and they've never missed an opportunity to stir up bigotry for political advantage.
I've never been to Canada, so I can't say for 100% that things are better there than they are here. But, from all I've seen of things such as Canadian land-rights law, and what I know of the Australian situation (my brother is a highschool teacher in the Northern Territory, where roughly half his students are Aboriginal; my stepfather works in the field of Aboriginal health and education, and lectures at Australian Catholic University on the subject; I've done quite a bit of travelling through the central deserts myself), the situation for the indigenous people of Canada is a lot better than the way things are here.
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with 100 years ago and with 215 years ago.
When i was in priamry school the average life
expancy of an aborignal was 35 years less then
that of a white person, and an aborignal compleating
highschool was allmost unherd of.
What i can tell you from Canadains is that in all
areas of aborignal population we are seen as ahead.
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Got any cites for that 35 year figure? Or school completion rates, comparative to the non-Aboriginal population of the time as well as to today's rates?
(school completion rates have risen drastically in the non-Aboriginal population, so you need to take account of that...)
Not saying your figures are false; I don't know.
--
As to Canada...I don't have any comparative stats on Canadians, but table 4.31 & 4.32 (Death rates for selected indigenous groups) on pages 45 & 45 of this (http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/free.nsf/Lookup/A70349F67002D5F6CA256ADA002860AA/$File/33150_1997.pdf) report (Mortality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians) shows that the mortality figures (both adult and infant) for Aboriginal Australians are much worse than those for Native Americans (but fairly close to the Maori figures, which is a touch surprising).
Anyone know how closely the Canadian situation parallels that of the USA? Better or worse?
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Half the time, if someone says, for instance, "I fell and broke my ankle and can't climb Half Dome," and I answer, "I'm sorry," they reply, "It's not your fault."
Sounds like this is along those lines.
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What a lot of people who say that the government shouldn't be made to apologise for the actions of the past don't realise (or don't Want to comprehend), is that it is the same organisation that was largely responsible. Sure, the 'CEO' might have changed a few times, there might have been a few policy changes, but the company as a whole is still the same one.
That's why Howard not saying sorry is such a spineless thing to do, because he's claiming that he PERSONALLY doesn't need to apologise, however, as a body, the Australian Government DOES have something to apologise for.
Now, when I say sorry to the koorie and torres strait island peoples for the possible actions that my ancestors might have committed, either through inaction, or action, against the culture of their people, and I will continue to be sorry for as long as people remember
Sorry Day
I did not know.
I spose all governments have done at one time, or are doing bad things to their people.
Have the best
Empathy
I must admit that I'm disturbed by what I feel is the immature, knee-jerk reaction of some respondents to your post. You don't have to be guilty of something to be sorry that it happened. I think a little compassion, maturity and less defensiveness is in order here, folks.