“Down with white supremacy,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “No justice, no peace” are familiar battle cries that reverberate across the United States in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and against systemic racism. But more than 9,000 miles away in Australia—the land often referred to as “Down Under”—a similar battle is taking place. And the parallels are often eerie.
We here in the U.S. are familiar with the names of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray. But we are more than likely completely unaware of the name Elijah Doughty, or the names of other indigenous Australians killed as a result of racist violence.
Doughty was a 14-year-old indigenous Australian youth who was run down and killed while riding an allegedly stolen dirt bike, by a white Australian man driving a Nissan Navara 4WD utility vehicle on Aug. 29, 2016. The man was recently acquitted of manslaughter charges, and is now doing three years in jail for “dangerous driving occasioning death.”
After the verdict, journalist Laura Murphy Oates, went to Kalgoorlie in Western Australia to speak with residents and officials, and to look into the violent, anti-Aborigine, and vigilantist hate speech spewed on social media.
There is an interesting twist to Oates’ reportage, which she discusses in an article titled “Reporting on racism as a light-skinned Koori”:
As a light skinned Koori, when you first meet me you probably won’t realise I’m Indigenous. Throughout my life that’s led to some interesting situations, especially as a journalist reporting on Indigenous issues for nearly five years now.
I showed the video to a classroom full of over 100 students this week. All of them who saw it assumed that Oates was a white Australian. Her ability to “blend,” as she puts it, allows her to hear what white people only say to other whites.
While talking to non-Indigenous locals about tensions in Kalgoorlie, I was told, more than once, that an “Indigenous minority” was taking over ... not just the town of Kalgoorlie, but Australia. I was told that the government caters to “the interests of 3%” of the population, over “the other 97%”. In Kalgoorlie I sat silently at a bar as a man told me that “full-blood” Aboriginal people are fine, but it’s the “half-castes” that are “taking over the government”.
My family has been torn apart by racism and the racist policies of the stolen generation. But in Kalgoorlie, I sat silently as a young mother told me it’s time for the government to intervene again, because she’s seen how bad Indigenous people are at being parents. I don’t believe people would have said these things to me if they knew I was Indigenous. Not that I hid that from them – I informed them where I work and answered truthfully if asked. Instead, I heard what people truly think and got an insight into the types of attitudes Indigenous people in Kalgoorlie are up against.
These people said these things to me even after I told them I’m a journalist. I spoke to a bunch of kids around town and heard they hear the same, and worse, on a daily basis. These kids told me about being constantly stopped by security when they’re shopping, while non-Indigenous kids walk by.
Debbie Carmody, the community broadcaster seen in the video, is interviewed here. She points out that in Australia, protests by victims of racism are reported in the white media as “riots.”
If you combine the plight of Native Americans here with that of black Americans, you will perhaps have some sense of it all. Indigenous Australians are peoples of numerous groups, with multiple languages and cultures who have been subject to genocide and discrimination since Australia was colonized. They are referred to as “blacks” along with a series of unprintable racial epithets.
Just as we have a civil rights movement and an American Indian movement, in Australia there is a movement for indigenous rights and increasing protests calling for justice.
John Pilger writes about the history of these murders in “The Killing Fields of Australia - A Matter of Routine.”
He lists names and cases, noting:
Some of these deaths are at the hands of police. Like the death of Elijah Doughty, some are at the hands of ordinary citizens. But all of them have one thing in common - at varying points along the way, the victims and their families were failed spectacularly by Australia's justice system.
The list above represents a tiny proportion of the failures, which are ongoing, and perpetrated in broad daylight. For the past few weeks in Alice Springs - one of only a handful of towns that could rival Kalgoorlie for its endemic racism - local residents have been openly calling for the slaughter of Aboriginal people (in particular children) on social media. That's been going on for years, and attracts the same response from police and authorities. Precious little. People are rarely if ever charged.
Last week in Australia, two white men were finally convicted for the brutal slaying of Lynette Daley.
Daley, a 33-year-old mother of seven, died in 2011 after Attwater and Maris drove her to an isolated beach in New South Wales, where she was subjected to a sexual assault so vicious, a forensic pathologist dubbed her injuries worse than those which occur in even precipitous childbirth.
Despite calls from a state coroner and police to prosecute Attwater and Maris, it took prosecutors more than five years to agree to try the men for the killing. Prosecutors only decided to move forward with the case last year, after media reports of her death prompted widespread public outrage and accusations that officials didn’t care about Daley because she was Aboriginal and her assailants were white.
“No Justice, No Peace” is a cry now being heard more and more in Australia.
The United States is not the only place where statues honoring dead white men who symbolize death for people of color are being protested.
In Australia, activists are calling for the removal of Captain Cook’s statue.
Statues of Captain Cook and other British explorers credited with the discovery and settlement of Australia could be removed or modified, a prospect that has prompted anger from right-wing politicians.
Clover Moore, the lord mayor of Sydney, has bowed to pressure from Aboriginal academics and activists — inspired by protests in the US against statues of Confederate leaders — to consider the removal of some statues and modification of others.
In “8 Facts You May Not Know About the Extermination of Australia’s Aborigines” Dr. Gideon Polya writes:
...roughly 123 years after the arrival of the British, the Black “Indigenous Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after invasion in 1788.” By 1911, 90 percent of the population had been wiped out.
The Aborigines did not die of disease.
To this day, Australian children are taught that no wars or acts of mass violence occurred on Australian soil. However, this notion is hardly the truth. Due to propaganda inspired by the Australian government, media and education system, most of the population has failed to acknowledge the horrendous acts that were inflicted upon the Black Aboriginal population of the region. While many Australian citizens will tell you that Aboriginal individuals died of disease, the indigenous Black people of the continent, for the most part, were murdered. Polya declares that “Australia has always been a deeply racist country and continues to be involved in genocidal atrocities.”
Similar to the movement here in the U.S. to un-whitewash history and confront uncomfortable truths, Australian scholars are examining the lies and silence. One such book was Why Weren't We Told? A Personal Search for the Truth about Our History by historian Henry Reynolds.
Here’s a portion of a review by Robert Foster:
Why Weren’t We Told? is essentially a scholar’s memoir describing two overlapping journeys, the first being a journey from the ‘innocence’ of Reynolds' Tasmanian upbringing in the 1940s and 1950s to the ‘realities of race’ in Northern Queensland, where he moved in the mid 1960s to take up an academic post in Townsville. The second journey took him from the comfortable myths of Australia’s past, to its unsettling realities. The two journeys overlap in important ways, with the ‘realities of race’ clearly motivating Reynolds’ search for the ‘truth about our history’, and his explorations of the past endeavouring to explain the racism he witnessed.
Another text to read is Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, edited by A. Dirk Moses.
From his introduction:
This book was conceived in early 2000 when I arrived in Australia to take up a post at the University of Sydney. In proposing a new course on comparative genocide, I discovered that I could not prescribe my students a book on genocide in Australia: such a book did not exist (in 2001, Henry Reynolds presented his analysis of the subject in An Indelible Stain?: The Question of Genocide and Australian History). At the same time, a lively and at times acrimonious academic and public debate was underway about the topic. Since 1997, it has revolved around past government policies of “removing” Indigenous children of mixed Aboriginal/European descent from their families, ostensibly to “rescue” them from barbarism. In 2000, the genocide controversy turned to frontier conflict in the nineteenth century, which has been the subject of intense research since the 1970s.
I wrote about “The Stolen Generations” of Australian aboriginal children several years ago. Here in the U.S. we have our own ugly history of the removal of Native American children to “Indian Boarding Schools” (see articles here on Daily Kos), a form of ethnocide. Just as activist folk singers like Buffy Sainte-Marie have sung out about the history of injustice against our own first citizens, Aboriginal artists in Australia have done the same, not only inspiring their own people but also raising the issues in the hearts and minds of white Australians and people outside of Down Under.
In that piece I wrote about Archie Roach, one of Australia's most beloved singer-songwriter/activists whose song Took the Children Away has become an anthem for indigenous rights and justice.
Roach is now teaming up with the younger generation of Australian indigenous rappers.
These days, Roach is excited to push his musical boundaries by surrounding himself with the new crop of Indigenous musicians. He recently recorded with Torres Strait Islander rapper Mau-Power. “The song with him has a lot do with what I’ve sung about through the years – the struggles of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It is through these fresh voices in music that a new generation of Australians will become more familiar with Australia’s first peoples."
Roach firmly insists that he gains more from the association with younger musicians than they do. “It’s much deeper and more rewarding than what I could possibly give them.”
Musicians such as Dan Sultan, Jessica Mauboy and Marcus Corowa all get the gold star from Roach, who also mentions rappers such as Tjimba and the Yung Warriors and Yung Nooky.
In that same piece I wrote about Emma Donovan, the youngest member of the Black Arm Band and part of the musical about the Aboriginal resistance movement.
Here is some more Emma:
The official music video for The Dead Heart featuring Emma Donovan, the debut single from "Declan Kelly presents Diesel n'Dub", a music project in support of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation
From the lyrics:
We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken