Sorry Day

[den]

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.

Comments

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Did you read the post?

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.

[sjwt.livejournal.com]

And compare those statics with 20 years ago,
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.

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Leaving aside the "we used to be even worse, so what does it matter..." argument...

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?