Georgie-Porgie

The obvious: THAI GIRLS!

Well, for once we agree on something. There is nothing wrong with this post, except for the fact that almost all of your posts are anti-American.

Actually, I think that this is interesting and I don't discount his opinion, at all. I only object to you pretending that this opinion proves something.

By the way, I read, think about and enjoy, articles of this type on a regular basis, Whether you want to believe it, or not, I do understand much of both sides of this issue.

I sort of pick and choose as I go along

That is the best way.

Iraq=Iraq

Someday, that might be more important.

I've been here a long time, and all that I can say is, wait and see; One never really knows.

The Gulf War, SARS, Chicken Flu. Under these circumstances, anywhere else, the Government would want to keep around the revenues generated by Farang residents, at least until they really know which way the wind is blowing financially, but here, cutting off one's own nose could be the National Sport.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not at all scared of all the supposed SAS wackos on this site, but Thai politics is a different manner!

Chuan was a true good guy, something that can be difficult to find in certain locales. His problem was being surrounded by people who weren't. Still the Democrats weren't the ones who caused what happened in 97, and they were the ones that paid off most of the loans and cleaned things up - as much as one can here.

All I know, is that it will be a Democrat. He will fix everything up, once again, and then the Thais will elect some other..., #%$#ed-up individual, to start the circle all over again.

Dear George, If you feel this way, you are the big boss. Please do your thing, pull the plug Daddy-O. I am ready to retire ASAP.

being as dumb as you suggest I am Georgie, I wish I was American - I could of become president.

I don't really need to suggest anything. Anyone who reads these pages would realize that, at the most, you are semi-literate; At very most a grammar school education.

Believe me, George Bush might not be a genius, but he would look like one compared to you.

Almost anyone would.

Grammar schools are up market private colleges Georgie.

Is everything the opposite of us over there Doc? How about Elementary School? Is that where you go until you are about 11 years old over there? That is what I mean.

Wrong yet again

Maybe, this time, and only in British English, but you are still illiterate in every language, and that is all that really counts!

I just wanted to apologize to any Australians that I have offended in the last few days. I have already PMed several contributors to this board expressing my regrets. I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings.

I started putting up posts critical of different aspects of Australia, simply to show, the so-called "gentleman" what it feels like to have one's country jumped on and soiled by outsiders.

It worked, he bumbled, had no real answers to any criticism, and it was obvious that he didn't like it, but, unfortunately, I also started to hurt other Australian people, good people.

I thought that everyone would understand what I was doing, but people started answering the posts and, in a few cases, arguing with each other.

Several people contacted me privately and asked me not to tar all Australians with the same brush. They said that there are some people like the "gentleman" in Australia,

" ignorant busybodies", but that there are a lot of good people, people who love their country and can mind their own business, too.

They also said that to join the SAS, one must have a high school diploma, so in the "gentleman"'s case it would be very unlikely that he would be allowed to enlist.

I don't know much about Australian laws, but I know that the U.S. stopped taking illiterates many years ago, but it is possible that the "gentleman" finagled his way in somehow.

I've been told that, sometimes in the U.S., judges will give a defendant a choice between jail or joining the Army as a Grunt soldier. From what I understand, in these cases, sometimes educational requirements can be waved, for what amounts to, future cannon fodder.

Anyway, I had toyed with the idea of sending in critical posts for each and every country, to prove that none of them are innocent, and, perhaps, give some of the "gentleman"'s ilk a taste of their own treatment, but when I saw how strongly good-hearted Australians reacted to this treatment, I knew that I could never sink so low as to do what the jackals on this web-site do, try to make other people feel bad about their countries.

I'll leave that to the squalid, uneducated "gentleman" and Butterfly types, and stick to fighting my war with these vermin, not innocent by-standers.

I have been working all day, and not near a computer, so first of all, are you really so amazingly stupid that you think a interview with one person proves anything?

If you get Donald R., George w. or Dick C. making statements like this, then you have a coup (you know what that is don't you, my brainless little turnip-head?).

There are lefties everywhere in the U.S.. We are a democracy. Everyone has their own opinion, but that doesn't mean that they know what they are talking about.

I've been working all day, and just got on here except for about 5 minutes this morning. I haven't even looked at any posts yet. That utter retard, the so-called gentleman, hasn't won sh1t!

I will, but I seem to recall posts and remarks concerning supposed war atrocities, much like these. Why is it OK for your troops?

Its war.

Just as I thought. According to you, that doesn't seem to be any excuse for American troops.

At least they wern't imported to use as slaves.

They didn't have to be imported, did they?

being as dumb as you suggest I am Georgie, I wish I was American - I could of become president.

I don't really need to suggest anything. Anyone who reads these pages would realize that, at the most, you are semi-literate; At very most a grammar school education.

Believe me, George Bush might not be a genius, but he would look like one compared to you.

Almost anyone would.

Grammar schools are up market private colleges Georgie.

Is everything the opposite of us over there Doc? How about Elementary School? Is that where you go until you are about 11 years old over there? That is what I mean.

###### Posted: Sun 2004-02-08, 01:25:10

Administrator / Whipping Boy

Group: Admin

Posts: 1,396

Member No.: 3,301

Joined: 2003-07-31

I am leaving it alone. I agree with Doc. You are a nutter. Quite harmless, nutter none the less.

More about Dave Yo.

dr_Pat_Pong Posted: Sat 2004-02-07, 23:35:15  

Dr.

Group: Admin

Posts: 4,259

Member No.: 110

Joined: 2002-11-19

You are a complete nutter Dave.

Dave Yo, I don't need to say anything about you. It's already been said!

WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

Genocide in Australia

Report details crimes against Aborigines

By Brett Stone

7 September 1999

Use this version to print

The genocidal practices perpetrated against Australian Aborigines were the outcome of policies adopted and implemented by all Australian governments from British settlement in 1788 until the present. A people who had virtually no contact with the outside world, were suddenly confronted with a hostile and alien force. Aborigines were forced out of their traditional homes, hunted like wild animals, poisoned or shot, and confined to the harshest and most desolate climes. The effect of British settlement upon these people led to near extinction within 120 years.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has published a report detailing this history. Entitled Genocide in Australia, it was written by Professor Colin Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Sydney's Macquarie University.

The report's timing is significant. Its release coincided with the first of the “stolen generations” legal actions brought against the Commonwealth and State governments by Aborigines who were forcibly removed from their families. Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner are seeking compensation from the Commonwealth government for injuries received after they were taken from their families in the 1940s and 1950s. Tatz will provide testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, and thousands of such actions could be undertaken in the future.

The legal guideline for Tatz's study is Article II (a) to (e) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948:

In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(B.) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly removing children of the group to another group.

Tatz's report asserts that the policies adopted by colonial administrations and both state and federal governments, as well as actions by settlers, from British colonisation up until the 1970s constituted genocide against the Aborigines.

He writes: “Genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations. In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four acts of genocide:

“(1) Killing by private settlers and rogue police officers, while the state authorities for the most part stood silently by.

“(2) The implementation in the twentieth century of official state policy, entailing the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from one group to another, with the express intention that ‘ they cease being aboriginal'.

“(3) Twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed ‘half- caste' Aborigines.

“(4) A prima facie case that Australia's actions to protect Aborigines in fact caused them severe bodily or mental harm. (Future scholars may care to analyse the extent of Australia's actions in creating the conditions of life that were calculated to destroy a specific group, and in sterilising Aboriginal women without consent.)”

The report provides compelling material to justify these assertions. Even though no official figures exist, estimates of the Aboriginal population in 1788 range between 250,000 and 750,000. By 1911 the number was 31,000. Aborigines have only been included in the National Census since 1971. In 1996 the National Census recorded that 352,970 or 1.97 of the population were of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent.

Despite the substantial increase in the population of Aborigines since 1911, the conditions of life in which they find themselves remain impoverished and highly oppressive. Tatz states that according to every social indicator available Aborigines are found at the top or bottom. Diseases, such as coronary disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory infections, are far more prevalent than 30 years earlier. Life expectancy is 50-55 years for males, approximately 55 years for females. The likelihood of an Aborigine being unemployed is far greater—22.7 percent as opposed to 8.1 percent. Fewer Aborigines own their homes. For Aborigines fortunate enough to have employment, their income is 25 percent less on average. Large proportions of Aborigines languish in prisons (14 percent of the prison population in 1997) and police watch-houses. This excludes those confined, through economic necessity, to black settlements, like Cherbourg or Yarrabah in Queensland.

The oppressed condition of Aborigines is marked in other ways—a prevalence of personal violence, lack of care for children, increased death from non-natural causes, as well as high levels of alcohol and drug abuse. It should come as no surprise that one manifestation of oppression—alcohol and drug abuse—is commonly offered as the explanation for all manifestations of oppression.

“Killing members of the group”

The report states: “In 1803, Tasmania was settled. In 1806 serious killing began. In retaliation for the spearing of livestock, Aboriginal children were abducted for use in forced labour, women were raped and tortured and given poisoned flour, and the men were shot. They were systematically disposed of in ones, twos and threes, or in dozens, rather than in one systematic massacre. In 1824, settlers were authorised to shoot Aborigines. In 1828, the Governor declared martial law. Soldiers or settlers arrested, or shot, any blacks found in settled districts. Vigilante groups avenged Aboriginal retaliation by wholesale slaughter of men, women and children. Between 1829 and 1834, an appointed conciliator, George Robinson, collected the surviving remnants: 123 people whom were then settled on Flinders Island. By 1835, between 3,000 and 4,000 Aborigines were dead.” And further: “They were killed, with intent, not solely because of their spearing of cattle or their 'nuisance' value, but rather because they were Aborigines.”

Between 1824 and 1908 approximately 10,000 Aborigines were murdered in the Colony of Queensland. “Considered ‘wild animals', ‘vermin', ‘scarcely human', ‘hideous to humanity', ‘loathsome' and a ‘nuisance', they were fair game for white ‘sportsmen'.”

The upshot of this slaughter was the appointment in 1896 of Archibald Meston as Royal Commissioner. In his Report on the Aborigines of North Queensland he wrote: “The treatment of the Cape York people was a shame to our common humanity.” He continued: “Their manifest joy at assurances of safety is pathetic beyond expression. God knows they were in need of it”. Aboriginal people met him “like hunted wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror”. His prescription for their salvation lay in “ strict and absolute isolation from all whites, from predators who, in no particular order, wanted to kill them, take their women, sell them grog or opium”. Needless to say, none of the perpetrators of the slaughter were made to answer for their actions.

”Protection”: Segregation

The events in Queensland and Tasmania were typical of every colony. The result of Meston's Royal Commission was the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. Similar measures were enacted throughout Australia. In some colonies, “protective” legislation, enforced by Protectors, began earlier, from the 1840s.

Like the fences erected to keep dingoes (wild native dogs) off pastureland, similar fences were erected around missions and settlements for Aborigines. The segregation had two aspects, legal and geographic. The law was meant to keep whites out and blacks in. Geographic isolation was to ensure that nobody could get in or out.

The attitude of the Protectors towards Aborigines was one of utmost contempt, in both clerical and scientific guises. Father Eugene Perez, chief policy-maker of Catholic missions, wrote in 1879 that Aborigines corresponded to the Palaeolithic Age. He described them as “primitives dwarfed to the bare essentials of human existence”; people with “inborn cunning”, “lacking interest and ambition” with “undeniable immaturity”, forever seeking “the unattainable EL DORADO coming to them on a silver tray”; people “with no sense of balance or proportion” who “want ‘today' what cannot be given till tomorrow”; people to whom physical goods are “like the toy given to a child, which will soon be reduced to bits, and thrown into the rubbish dump”.

W. Baldwin Spencer, a professor of biology and the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, concluded: “The aboriginal is, indeed, a very curious mixture: mentally about the level of a child who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to violent fits of temper... He has no sense of responsibility and, except in rare cases, no initiative.” Spencer added that, “their customs are revolting to us” and they were “far lower than the Papuan, the New Zealander or the usual African native”. During his posting, he established the Kahlin Compound in Darwin, because he believed that “no half-caste children should be allowed in any native camp”. The Kahlin Compound specifically housed “half-caste” Aboriginal children, removed from their mothers.

Protection was dispensed in remote places such as Yarrabah, Palm Island, Mornington Island, Doomadgee, Bamaga, Edward River, Weipa, Bloomfield River and Woorabinda. Aboriginal morality was supposedly protected by controlling their movements, labour, marriages, private lives, reading matter, leisure and sports activities, even cultural and religious rituals. Income protection was the responsibility of police constables. They controlled wages, withdrawals from compulsory savings bank accounts, and rights to enter contracts of labour or purchase and sale.

In Queensland, protection included internal state banishment for periods ranging from 12 months to life, at the director's pleasure, for offences such as “disorderly conduct”, “uncontrollable” and “menace to young girls”. Other offences could only be committed by Aborigines. These included being cheeky, refusing to work, calling the hygiene officer a “big-eyed bastard”, and leaving a horse and dray in the yard whereby a person might have been injured. Committing adultery, playing cards, arranging to see a male person during the night, and being untidy at the recreation hall were also on the list, as was refusing to provide a sample of faeces required by the hygiene officer. Such offences brought three weeks imprisonment, which could be transformed into six, nine and twelve weeks, as prison terms were not served concurrently.

”Protection”: Assimilation

In 1928, the federal government asked J. W. Bleakley, Queensland Protector of Aborigines, to report on policy, including “half-caste” policy, in the Northern Territory. His report proposed “blood quotas” as a guiding principle. Those who possessed 50 percent or more of Aboriginal “blood” would “drift back” to the black “no matter how carefully brought up and educated.” Those with less than 50 percent Aboriginal “blood” could “avoid the dangers of the blood call” if they were segregated as the prelude to “their absorption by the white race”.

In 1937, 1951 and 1961 official conferences adopted policies aimed at the assimilation of Aboriginal people into the mainstream of society. Tatz points out that these policies were directed towards ensuring the disappearance of the Aboriginal people. Terms such as "breeding them white" indicated a biological solution.

Assimilation policies were not entirely new. Under the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act 1886 “aid” was restricted to “full-bloods” and “half-castes” over the age of 34. All others, regardless of their marital or sibling status, were forcibly expelled from missions and reserves. Children were not exempt. They faced relocation to white foster parents, white adoptive parents and “half-caste” or “assimilation” homes.

Tatz cites three senior officials to illustrate the thinking behind assimilation. One was O. A. Neville, the Chief Protector in Western Australia between 1915 and 1940. He could do nothing for Aborigines, “who were dying out”. However, he could “absorb the half-castes”. Neville had a three-point plan. First, the “full-bloods” would die out. Second, the “half-castes” would be taken from their mothers. Third, “half-caste” marriages would encourage intermarriage within the white community. The Chief Protector promoted the attractiveness of such arrangements. “The young half-blood maiden is a pleasant, placid, complacent person as a rule, while the quadroon [one quarter Aboriginal] is often strikingly attractive, with her oftimes auburn hair, rosy freckled colouring, and good figure”. Elevation of these people “to our own plane” he deemed wise. To this end, Neville established, in 1933, Sister Kate's Orphanage. Its guiding principle was to take in hand those “whose lightness of colour” could lead to assimilation and intermarriage.

The indignities suffered by those taken in hand would have been obvious and many, but a proverbial carrot was dangled before them. The Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 (WA) made it possible for an Aborigine to apply, before a magistrate, for a Certificate of Citizenship. The successful applicant would have to show how “white” he or she had become. Dissolution of tribal and native association was only the beginning. He or she had to have an honourable discharge from the armed forces, or be deemed a “fit and proper person”.

“Fit and proper persons” had to have “adopted the manner and habits of civilised life” for two years and be able to speak and understand English. They had to be of industrious habits and be of a good reputation and correct behaviour. Those suffering from active leprosy, syphilis, granuloma and yaws (framboesia) were denied citizenship.

This outlook formed the basis of Commonwealth policy from the 1930s. The Northern Territory Administrator's report of 1933 said: “In the (Northern) Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of coloured aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.”

Throwing light on the “stolen generations”

This aim continued throughout the period of the “stolen generations” when Aboriginal children were taken from their families. In a 1983 monograph, historian Peter Read cited annual reports of the New South Wales Board: “This policy of dissociating the children from [native] camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem”. By placing children in “first-class private homes”, the superior standard of life would “pave the way for the absorption of these people into the general population”. Further, “to allow these children to remain on the reserve to grow up in comparative idleness in the midst of more or less vicious surroundings would be, to say the least, an injustice to the children themselves, and a positive menace to the State”.

Tatz writes: “In sharp contrast were the memories of the salvaged ones: there was little that was wonderful in the experience; there was much to remember about physical brutality and sexual abuse; and for the majority the homes were scarcely homes, especially in the light of the then healthy practices of kinship, family reciprocity and child rearing in extended families. There is considerably more recorded and substantiated evidence of abuse in the safe homes ... In 37 years of involvement in Aboriginal affairs, I have met perhaps half a dozen men who liked Sister Kate's or Kinchela Boys' Home. I have yet to meet an Aboriginal woman who liked Cootamundra Girls' Home or Colebrook. No one failed to mention the incessant sexual abuse, or the destruction of family life."

In 1990 the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care demanded an inquiry into child removal. A blank spot in Australian history was referred to; “the damage and trauma these policies caused are felt every day by Aboriginal people. They internalise their grief, guilt and confusion, inflicting further pain on themselves and others around them. We want an inquiry to determine how many of our children were taken away and how this occurred. We also want to consider whether these policies fall within the definition of genocide in Article II (e) of the United Nations Convention”.

In May 1995 the federal Labor government headed by Paul Keating established the “National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families”. Tatz points to the ambiguities of this inquiry. The use of the term “separation” presupposed a degree of agreement by the families with the removal of their children. Further, “separation” suggests that the removals were of a temporary character with a door remaining open for reunification. This could not be farther from the truth.

In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published the results of the inquiry. It concluded that between 1910 and 1970 between one in three and one in ten indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities.

Genocide and Reconciliation

Tatz's study, Genocide in Australia, insofar as it deals with the historical record, provides a powerfully detailed and documented history of the relationship between Aborigines and official society. One is left in no doubt that what transpired, even within the parameters of the UN Convention, constituted a terrible crime against the Aboriginal people.

The major weakness of the report lies in its political trajectory. Tatz aligns himself with sections of the Aboriginal leadership, various middle class reformers, Governor General Sir William Deane, the church and leading sections of the mining industry and big business in advancing the perspective of reconciliation.

The term “reconciliation” implies that the interests of Aborigines can be squared with the present social order; that in some way, the crimes of the past, as well as those of the present, can be overcome if only the political will exists. What is lacking, claim its advocates, is a formal apology from the Australian government, led by Prime Minister John Howard.

In a revealing passage, Tatz writes: "It may be possible for a ‘softer', re-invented Howard to construct an observable strategy for ‘reconciliation', one that enables better relations with Aboriginal leaders and communities.” But, he continues, “the new strategy cannot work in the absence of a formal national apology”.

The attempt to wipe out the Australian Aborigines was not the result of some racist mindset on the part of unenlightened individuals in positions of authority. It was spawned out of the requirements of establishing private ownership in property, initially in land. Genocide emerged out of the need of the emerging Australian squattocracy to “clear the land”. And the appalling conditions faced by the majority of Aborigines today similarly derive from the requirements of the “market”.

“Reconciliation” accepts the private profit system, which remains utterly incompatible with the rights of Australia's indigenous population to justice, equality and basic human dignity. Indeed, one of the primary purposes of the “reconciliation” campaign is to help cement relations between mining companies, agricultural combines and Aboriginal entrepreneurs to facilitate planned large-scale mining projects and farming of Aboriginal land. Billions of dollars are at stake, with a small share destined for a select few Aboriginal leaders, while the living conditions of most Aboriginal people deteriorate further.

See Also:

Australian parliament "regrets" injustice to Aboriginal people

Behind the politics of "reconciliation"

[30 August 1999]

A damning report on Australian Aboriginal health and welfare

[14 August 1999]

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Yeah, just what I thought. No addressing your own issues. It's all the Americans fault! SURE!!!!

(?) face or if said author was really so interested, the author would get his face rubbed in his own shit which is probably what the author would enjoy anyway.

Hey, Mr. Vietnam, so that's what the dummy really wants! Don't worry about him. Just laugh at his ignorant posts. He is from an insignificant country, obsessed with America, and very, very stupid! You know how guys with little brains and little willys get all obsessed with big, important countries!

Home > Specials > East Timor > Article

Army faces new claims of torture

By Deborah Snow

November 5, 2003

New allegations of torture have been levelled against Australian troops who served in East Timor, with former Timorese militia members claiming they were beaten and kicked and had their heads forced down excrement-filled toilets.

On SBS's Dateline program tonight, two of the men also say they were forced into cubicles where wasps' nests were present, with their Australian interrogators allegedly stirring up the nests so the detainees would be stung.

The group also claims that one of their number, Yani Ndun, is missing, having last been seen alive in the custody of Interfet, the Australian intervention force.

The program reports that the six men were picked up by the Australian Army on or about September 22, 1999, days after the Australians had landed in the strife-racked province.

The six were members or suspected associates of the Aitarak militia, a feared anti-independence group that went on a rampage after East Timor voted for independence from Indonesia in the UN-sponsored referendum of August 30.

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Three members of the group interviewed by SBS say they were marched by their Australian Army captors from the Aitarak headquarters in Dili to an empty football stadium. There they were forced into the wasp-infested toilets and had their heads pushed down toilet bowls.

One of them, Jao Ximenes, told Dateline: "They put our faces in fresh shit in the toilet and they made us sleep there.They pushed our heads into the toilet and put a foot behind our necks so we couldn't move."

At nightfall they were taken to a high school and told to sleep on outdoor tennis courts. There, they say, some members of the group were beaten and kicked and one was struck with a rifle butt.

The army has confirmed it held two of the men, Jao Ximenes and Caitano Da Silva, in custody from "some time prior to September 26" until September 27 in Ximenes's case and until September 29 in Da Silva's.

In written responses to the allegations, the army denies having any information on the missing Yani Ndun. With regard to the claims of torture and beatings, the army maintains the "interrogation techniques used by Australian Interfet soldiers in East Timor were in accordance with the Geneva conventions".

It refuses to discuss those techniques for "operational security reasons".

Previous claims of mistreatment of Timorese detainees were included in a three-year inquiry conducted by the army. Those included reports that prisoners had been held at an Australian Army interrogation centre near Dili and were not allowed food or water or to sleep.

They had been forced to sit blindfolded in stress positions, and had been paraded past the corpses of two Timorese militiamen, it was claimed.

The army report on that incident, released in April this year, admitted the need to improve the "operational procedures" for holding prisoners.

About Australian Aboriginal Culture

Australian Aboriginal culture can claim to be the oldest continuous living culture on the planet.

Recent dating of the earliest known archaeological sites on the Australian continent - using thermo luminescence and other modern dating techniques - have pushed back the date for Aboriginal presence in Australia to at least 40,000 years.

The hallmark of Aboriginal culture is 'oneness with nature'.

In traditional Aboriginal belief systems, landscape had the central importance Christian culture attached to the bible. Prominent rock, canyons, rivers, waterfalls, islands, beaches and other natural features - as well as sun, moon and visible stars - had their own stories of creation and its inter-connectedness. To the traditional Aborigine they are all sacred: environment is the essence of Australian Aboriginal godliness.

Out of this deep reverence for nature Aborigines learned to live in remarkable harmony with the land and its animals.

It seems there's a lot our modern world can learn from these people.

Nomadic Brilliance

Traditional Australian Aborigines lived a nomadic life, following the seasons and the food.

With very few simple tools, used with incredible skill, the Aboriginal learned to live in the harsh and inhospitable Australian outback.

It's possible that the first Aborigines in Australia hunted the Australian megaphone - giant kangaroos, giant wombat etc. to extinction.

Maybe that was when Aborigines learned to take care of natural resources and move to new hunting grounds before the old ones are depleted beyond repair.

When at rest, Aborigines lived in open camps, caves or simple structures made from bark, leaves or other vegetation. Their technology was both simple and sophisticated. Above all, it was appropriate for their way of life - ideally matched to the constraints of nomadic life.

The modern notion of possessions is alien to traditional Aboriginal culture. Material things were shared within groups. The idea that an individual could 'own' land was foreign to Aboriginal thinking.

Clashes with colonists

When Europeans first began to colonise Australia, towards the end of the 18th century AD, they found cultures and environments which, in hindsight, were of incalculable value.

Much of this ancient legacy has been destroyed forever in the subsequent two centuries.

Contact between new settlers, under imperial British rule, and Australia's indigenous people, led to the decimation of many Aboriginal groups due to disease, dispossession and in tens of thousands of cases, outright murder.

As populations declined and were fragmented, many unique linguistic and cultural traditions were lost forever.

Land Theft

Seizure of Australia by British Imperial forces was claimed to take place under British law.

Even at that time, the British legal system had developed some traditions of fair dealings with native populations inside colonies.

These constraints were not applied on the ground in Australia. Invasion and blatant land theft by settlers were justified under the astonishing legal fiction of "Terra Nullius" - the notion that Australia was effectively unoccupied before British colonisation.

The lack of indigenous systems of land ownership (in the European tradition of private land ownership) was used to give credence the idea of Terra Nullius. The basic idea was that it was impossible to rob Aboriginal people of land, as they'd previously never owned land.

Over two centuries, the continent was progressively stolen from Aboriginal people. Settlers moved in and appropriated the overwhelming majority of Australia - either for private use or in the name of the British Crown.

Even after Australia was declared independent in 1901, Aborigines continued to be marginal to the new nation and were debarred from becoming citizens by the 1902 Australian Constitution. Citizenship was granted to Aborigines only following a national referendum in 1967.

Legacy of racism

Racist attitudes to Australia's indigenous population evolved through different phases. In some places and on some occasions, settlers behaved in a quite civilised way. In others, they practiced outright genocide. In between were a range of assimilationist and patronising policies. Many of these helped deepen the plight of Aboriginal people and culture.

As recently as the 1950's, as many as one tenth of Aboriginal babies were removed from their natural parents and taken into foster care by white families, in the belief this was to everyone's benefit.

This quite recent forced removal of children on a massive scale - known as the 'Stolen Generation' - came to widespread attention only in the late 1990's.

The current Australian Government has refused to make a formal apology over the 'Stolen Generation' (in contrast to President Clifton's apology for the historical wrong of black slavery, and successive Australian Governments' demands for the Japanese to give a full apology for crimes committed during World War 2).

Looking forward

Two centuries of dispossession and maltreatment have left deep scars in surviving Aboriginal communities. In life expectancy and key health indicators, Aboriginal Australians as a whole lag far behind the average Australian population. A range of serious social problems confront the leadership of Aboriginal Australia.

Yet there has also been major progress in recent times, as Australia's first peoples develop their own national and regional institutions - and political strength - to meet the challenges of the modern era.

Struggles for Land Rights, for greater autonomy in the management of Aboriginal affairs, and for greater recognition and respect to be given to traditional Aboriginal lore, have all met with partial success.

In 1991 Australia's High Court finally overturned the disgraceful legal myth of Terra Nullius. As a consequence, native title to continuously settled land, which had until then been completely denied to Australian Aboriginal was "rediscovered" in Australian law.

Throughout the 1990's, Australian Governments enacted legislation which greatly limited the applicability of High Court decisions on native title.

This second dispossession of Aboriginal Australians - in favour of big mining and pastoral interests - is a blemish on recent Australian history. It should be challenged in the international courts, as it breaches Australia's international obligations on human rights.

If you're interested, you can explore these issues in much greater detail via the references on the Aboriginal Australia section of the Didjshop's Links Section.

We've also started an Aboriginal News Web log listing some interesting recent media articles available on the web - please check it out.

WSWS : News & Analysis : Australia & South Pacific

Genocide in Australia

Report details crimes against Aborigines

By Brett Stone

7 September 1999

Use this version to print

The genocidal practices perpetrated against Australian Aborigines were the outcome of policies adopted and implemented by all Australian governments from British settlement in 1788 until the present. A people who had virtually no contact with the outside world, were suddenly confronted with a hostile and alien force. Aborigines were forced out of their traditional homes, hunted like wild animals, poisoned or shot, and confined to the harshest and most desolate climes. The effect of British settlement upon these people led to near extinction within 120 years.

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies has published a report detailing this history. Entitled Genocide in Australia, it was written by Professor Colin Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies at Sydney's Macquarie University.

The report's timing is significant. Its release coincided with the first of the “stolen generations” legal actions brought against the Commonwealth and State governments by Aborigines who were forcibly removed from their families. Lorna Cubillo and Peter Gunner are seeking compensation from the Commonwealth government for injuries received after they were taken from their families in the 1940s and 1950s. Tatz will provide testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs, and thousands of such actions could be undertaken in the future.

The legal guideline for Tatz's study is Article II (a) to (e) of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948:

In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(B.) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly removing children of the group to another group.

Tatz's report asserts that the policies adopted by colonial administrations and both state and federal governments, as well as actions by settlers, from British colonisation up until the 1970s constituted genocide against the Aborigines.

He writes: “Genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy, by various means, a defined group's essential foundations. In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four acts of genocide:

“(1) Killing by private settlers and rogue police officers, while the state authorities for the most part stood silently by.

“(2) The implementation in the twentieth century of official state policy, entailing the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from one group to another, with the express intention that ‘ they cease being aboriginal'.

“(3) Twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological disappearance of those deemed ‘half- caste' Aborigines.

“(4) A prima facie case that Australia's actions to protect Aborigines in fact caused them severe bodily or mental harm. (Future scholars may care to analyse the extent of Australia's actions in creating the conditions of life that were calculated to destroy a specific group, and in sterilising Aboriginal women without consent.)”

The report provides compelling material to justify these assertions. Even though no official figures exist, estimates of the Aboriginal population in 1788 range between 250,000 and 750,000. By 1911 the number was 31,000. Aborigines have only been included in the National Census since 1971. In 1996 the National Census recorded that 352,970 or 1.97 of the population were of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent.

Despite the substantial increase in the population of Aborigines since 1911, the conditions of life in which they find themselves remain impoverished and highly oppressive. Tatz states that according to every social indicator available Aborigines are found at the top or bottom. Diseases, such as coronary disease, cancer, diabetes, and respiratory infections, are far more prevalent than 30 years earlier. Life expectancy is 50-55 years for males, approximately 55 years for females. The likelihood of an Aborigine being unemployed is far greater—22.7 percent as opposed to 8.1 percent. Fewer Aborigines own their homes. For Aborigines fortunate enough to have employment, their income is 25 percent less on average. Large proportions of Aborigines languish in prisons (14 percent of the prison population in 1997) and police watch-houses. This excludes those confined, through economic necessity, to black settlements, like Cherbourg or Yarrabah in Queensland.

The oppressed condition of Aborigines is marked in other ways—a prevalence of personal violence, lack of care for children, increased death from non-natural causes, as well as high levels of alcohol and drug abuse. It should come as no surprise that one manifestation of oppression—alcohol and drug abuse—is commonly offered as the explanation for all manifestations of oppression.

“Killing members of the group”

The report states: “In 1803, Tasmania was settled. In 1806 serious killing began. In retaliation for the spearing of livestock, Aboriginal children were abducted for use in forced labour, women were raped and tortured and given poisoned flour, and the men were shot. They were systematically disposed of in ones, twos and threes, or in dozens, rather than in one systematic massacre. In 1824, settlers were authorised to shoot Aborigines. In 1828, the Governor declared martial law. Soldiers or settlers arrested, or shot, any blacks found in settled districts. Vigilante groups avenged Aboriginal retaliation by wholesale slaughter of men, women and children. Between 1829 and 1834, an appointed conciliator, George Robinson, collected the surviving remnants: 123 people whom were then settled on Flinders Island. By 1835, between 3,000 and 4,000 Aborigines were dead.” And further: “They were killed, with intent, not solely because of their spearing of cattle or their 'nuisance' value, but rather because they were Aborigines.”

Between 1824 and 1908 approximately 10,000 Aborigines were murdered in the Colony of Queensland. “Considered ‘wild animals', ‘vermin', ‘scarcely human', ‘hideous to humanity', ‘loathsome' and a ‘nuisance', they were fair game for white ‘sportsmen'.”

The upshot of this slaughter was the appointment in 1896 of Archibald Meston as Royal Commissioner. In his Report on the Aborigines of North Queensland he wrote: “The treatment of the Cape York people was a shame to our common humanity.” He continued: “Their manifest joy at assurances of safety is pathetic beyond expression. God knows they were in need of it”. Aboriginal people met him “like hunted wild beasts, having lived for years in a state of absolute terror”. His prescription for their salvation lay in “ strict and absolute isolation from all whites, from predators who, in no particular order, wanted to kill them, take their women, sell them grog or opium”. Needless to say, none of the perpetrators of the slaughter were made to answer for their actions.

”Protection”: Segregation

The events in Queensland and Tasmania were typical of every colony. The result of Meston's Royal Commission was the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. Similar measures were enacted throughout Australia. In some colonies, “protective” legislation, enforced by Protectors, began earlier, from the 1840s.

Like the fences erected to keep dingoes (wild native dogs) off pastureland, similar fences were erected around missions and settlements for Aborigines. The segregation had two aspects, legal and geographic. The law was meant to keep whites out and blacks in. Geographic isolation was to ensure that nobody could get in or out.

The attitude of the Protectors towards Aborigines was one of utmost contempt, in both clerical and scientific guises. Father Eugene Perez, chief policy-maker of Catholic missions, wrote in 1879 that Aborigines corresponded to the Palaeolithic Age. He described them as “primitives dwarfed to the bare essentials of human existence”; people with “inborn cunning”, “lacking interest and ambition” with “undeniable immaturity”, forever seeking “the unattainable EL DORADO coming to them on a silver tray”; people “with no sense of balance or proportion” who “want ‘today' what cannot be given till tomorrow”; people to whom physical goods are “like the toy given to a child, which will soon be reduced to bits, and thrown into the rubbish dump”.

W. Baldwin Spencer, a professor of biology and the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in 1911-12, concluded: “The aboriginal is, indeed, a very curious mixture: mentally about the level of a child who has little control over his feelings and is liable to give way to violent fits of temper... He has no sense of responsibility and, except in rare cases, no initiative.” Spencer added that, “their customs are revolting to us” and they were “far lower than the Papuan, the New Zealander or the usual African native”. During his posting, he established the Kahlin Compound in Darwin, because he believed that “no half-caste children should be allowed in any native camp”. The Kahlin Compound specifically housed “half-caste” Aboriginal children, removed from their mothers.

Protection was dispensed in remote places such as Yarrabah, Palm Island, Mornington Island, Doomadgee, Bamaga, Edward River, Weipa, Bloomfield River and Woorabinda. Aboriginal morality was supposedly protected by controlling their movements, labour, marriages, private lives, reading matter, leisure and sports activities, even cultural and religious rituals. Income protection was the responsibility of police constables. They controlled wages, withdrawals from compulsory savings bank accounts, and rights to enter contracts of labour or purchase and sale.

In Queensland, protection included internal state banishment for periods ranging from 12 months to life, at the director's pleasure, for offences such as “disorderly conduct”, “uncontrollable” and “menace to young girls”. Other offences could only be committed by Aborigines. These included being cheeky, refusing to work, calling the hygiene officer a “big-eyed bastard”, and leaving a horse and dray in the yard whereby a person might have been injured. Committing adultery, playing cards, arranging to see a male person during the night, and being untidy at the recreation hall were also on the list, as was refusing to provide a sample of faeces required by the hygiene officer. Such offences brought three weeks imprisonment, which could be transformed into six, nine and twelve weeks, as prison terms were not served concurrently.

”Protection”: Assimilation

In 1928, the federal government asked J. W. Bleakley, Queensland Protector of Aborigines, to report on policy, including “half-caste” policy, in the Northern Territory. His report proposed “blood quotas” as a guiding principle. Those who possessed 50 percent or more of Aboriginal “blood” would “drift back” to the black “no matter how carefully brought up and educated.” Those with less than 50 percent Aboriginal “blood” could “avoid the dangers of the blood call” if they were segregated as the prelude to “their absorption by the white race”.

In 1937, 1951 and 1961 official conferences adopted policies aimed at the assimilation of Aboriginal people into the mainstream of society. Tatz points out that these policies were directed towards ensuring the disappearance of the Aboriginal people. Terms such as "breeding them white" indicated a biological solution.

Assimilation policies were not entirely new. Under the Victorian Aborigines Protection Act 1886 “aid” was restricted to “full-bloods” and “half-castes” over the age of 34. All others, regardless of their marital or sibling status, were forcibly expelled from missions and reserves. Children were not exempt. They faced relocation to white foster parents, white adoptive parents and “half-caste” or “assimilation” homes.

Tatz cites three senior officials to illustrate the thinking behind assimilation. One was O. A. Neville, the Chief Protector in Western Australia between 1915 and 1940. He could do nothing for Aborigines, “who were dying out”. However, he could “absorb the half-castes”. Neville had a three-point plan. First, the “full-bloods” would die out. Second, the “half-castes” would be taken from their mothers. Third, “half-caste” marriages would encourage intermarriage within the white community. The Chief Protector promoted the attractiveness of such arrangements. “The young half-blood maiden is a pleasant, placid, complacent person as a rule, while the quadroon [one quarter Aboriginal] is often strikingly attractive, with her oftimes auburn hair, rosy freckled colouring, and good figure”. Elevation of these people “to our own plane” he deemed wise. To this end, Neville established, in 1933, Sister Kate's Orphanage. Its guiding principle was to take in hand those “whose lightness of colour” could lead to assimilation and intermarriage.

The indignities suffered by those taken in hand would have been obvious and many, but a proverbial carrot was dangled before them. The Natives (Citizenship Rights) Act 1944 (WA) made it possible for an Aborigine to apply, before a magistrate, for a Certificate of Citizenship. The successful applicant would have to show how “white” he or she had become. Dissolution of tribal and native association was only the beginning. He or she had to have an honourable discharge from the armed forces, or be deemed a “fit and proper person”.

“Fit and proper persons” had to have “adopted the manner and habits of civilised life” for two years and be able to speak and understand English. They had to be of industrious habits and be of a good reputation and correct behaviour. Those suffering from active leprosy, syphilis, granuloma and yaws (framboesia) were denied citizenship.

This outlook formed the basis of Commonwealth policy from the 1930s. The Northern Territory Administrator's report of 1933 said: “In the (Northern) Territory the mating of an Aboriginal with any person other than an Aboriginal is prohibited. The mating of coloured aliens with any female of part Aboriginal blood is also forbidden. Every endeavour is being made to breed out the colour by elevating female half-castes to the white standard with a view to their absorption by mating into the white population.”

Throwing light on the “stolen generations”

This aim continued throughout the period of the “stolen generations” when Aboriginal children were taken from their families. In a 1983 monograph, historian Peter Read cited annual reports of the New South Wales Board: “This policy of dissociating the children from [native] camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem”. By placing children in “first-class private homes”, the superior standard of life would “pave the way for the absorption of these people into the general population”. Further, “to allow these children to remain on the reserve to grow up in comparative idleness in the midst of more or less vicious surroundings would be, to say the least, an injustice to the children themselves, and a positive menace to the State”.

Tatz writes: “In sharp contrast were the memories of the salvaged ones: there was little that was wonderful in the experience; there was much to remember about physical brutality and sexual abuse; and for the majority the homes were scarcely homes, especially in the light of the then healthy practices of kinship, family reciprocity and child rearing in extended families. There is considerably more recorded and substantiated evidence of abuse in the safe homes ... In 37 years of involvement in Aboriginal affairs, I have met perhaps half a dozen men who liked Sister Kate's or Kinchela Boys' Home. I have yet to meet an Aboriginal woman who liked Cootamundra Girls' Home or Colebrook. No one failed to mention the incessant sexual abuse, or the destruction of family life."

In 1990 the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care demanded an inquiry into child removal. A blank spot in Australian history was referred to; “the damage and trauma these policies caused are felt every day by Aboriginal people. They internalise their grief, guilt and confusion, inflicting further pain on themselves and others around them. We want an inquiry to determine how many of our children were taken away and how this occurred. We also want to consider whether these policies fall within the definition of genocide in Article II (e) of the United Nations Convention”.

In May 1995 the federal Labor government headed by Paul Keating established the “National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families”. Tatz points to the ambiguities of this inquiry. The use of the term “separation” presupposed a degree of agreement by the families with the removal of their children. Further, “separation” suggests that the removals were of a temporary character with a door remaining open for reunification. This could not be farther from the truth.

In 1997 the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission published the results of the inquiry. It concluded that between 1910 and 1970 between one in three and one in ten indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities.

Genocide and Reconciliation

Tatz's study, Genocide in Australia, insofar as it deals with the historical record, provides a powerfully detailed and documented history of the relationship between Aborigines and official society. One is left in no doubt that what transpired, even within the parameters of the UN Convention, constituted a terrible crime against the Aboriginal people.

The major weakness of the report lies in its political trajectory. Tatz aligns himself with sections of the Aboriginal leadership, various middle class reformers, Governor General Sir William Deane, the church and leading sections of the mining industry and big business in advancing the perspective of reconciliation.

The term “reconciliation” implies that the interests of Aborigines can be squared with the present social order; that in some way, the crimes of the past, as well as those of the present, can be overcome if only the political will exists. What is lacking, claim its advocates, is a formal apology from the Australian government, led by Prime Minister John Howard.

In a revealing passage, Tatz writes: "It may be possible for a ‘softer', re-invented Howard to construct an observable strategy for ‘reconciliation', one that enables better relations with Aboriginal leaders and communities.” But, he continues, “the new strategy cannot work in the absence of a formal national apology”.

The attempt to wipe out the Australian Aborigines was not the result of some racist mindset on the part of unenlightened individuals in positions of authority. It was spawned out of the requirements of establishing private ownership in property, initially in land. Genocide emerged out of the need of the emerging Australian squattocracy to “clear the land”. And the appalling conditions faced by the majority of Aborigines today similarly derive from the requirements of the “market”.

“Reconciliation” accepts the private profit system, which remains utterly incompatible with the rights of Australia's indigenous population to justice, equality and basic human dignity. Indeed, one of the primary purposes of the “reconciliation” campaign is to help cement relations between mining companies, agricultural combines and Aboriginal entrepreneurs to facilitate planned large-scale mining projects and farming of Aboriginal land. Billions of dollars are at stake, with a small share destined for a select few Aboriginal leaders, while the living conditions of most Aboriginal people deteriorate further.

See Also:

Australian parliament "regrets" injustice to Aboriginal people

Behind the politics of "reconciliation"

[30 August 1999]

A damning report on Australian Aboriginal health and welfare

[14 August 1999]

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being as dumb as you suggest I am Georgie, I wish I was American - I could of become president.

I don't really need to suggest anything. Anyone who reads these pages would realize that, at the most, you are semi-literate; At very most a grammar school education.

Believe me, George Bush might not be a genius, but he would look like one compared to you.

Almost anyone would.

Georgie-Porgie~

Much like yourself, I despised Nixon.  I have come to respect some of what he tried to do.  But I still despise him.  He was basically a thug.  He shamed the office he held and it was too bad he never was sent to prison where he deserved to be.  That would have been a much better lesson to successive presidents than letting him resign and then pardon him.

I disliked Regan but have come to give him his grudging due for taking the Soviet Union to the point it collapsed.  Most people don't think about that much, but if they had lived under a Soviet dominated state as a number of my coworkers have, they would.

Bush, well, he looked better than any of the Clinton crowd to me, including Gore.  Of course I have tried to watch him on TV but usually become to uncomfortable (embarrassed) when he muddles his thoughts/sentences and seems to be on the edge of saying something really foolish.  Kind of like watching a very sedated version of the Jerry Spring Show.  But embarrassing I can deal with.  Not every President has been the cutting edge of wit and erudition.  The WMD issue is going to be something that will ultimately make or break Bush.  He may get back in office, but I think there is a good chance he won't. 

Jeepz

As I said, I despised Nixon, but as an adult I realized that it was largely because everyone else that I knew did. Same as Johnson. Same as Reagon. Same as the left do now with Bush.

That's why I look down on them, the arrogant lefties. They never grew up. It seems to me that as adults they would have woken up sometime and realized that they had never really been that clever. They had never really been that right. They just had fashion on their side.

They never did though, wake up.

I didn't like Bush before he was elected, and I didn't like him afterwards. I felt kind of sick to my stomach actually. I mean he was only elected because of his father, however, after 9/11, I watched how he handled himself. I got the sense that he knew that he was a small man who had gotten "lucky", but he wasn't so lucky any more. He had the fate of the World on his hands and he didn't want it, but it was too late; He had no choice. It was his fate.

So he kept praying to his God, maybe for the first time ever, to help him not to be a small man any more. He wanted to save us. He wanted to be great.

I remember when he announced that the war in Iraq had started. He looked scared to death. He looked like, What the he11 have I done?

I liked that. I liked that he actually realized that what he was doing could destroy all of us;That he gave a sh1t about us; That he wanted to do the right thing.

He wasn't like other politicians. He wasn't like Kennedy. He wasn't like one of these guys who knew that everything that he touched would turn to gold, that he could never lose. Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.

He was scared sh1tless.

A little man, doing the best he could with what he had.

I'm not sure, but I think that, despite all the left-wing jeers and rheteric, this laughable, nervous little man, might end up as one of the few heroes that we've had for a long time.