The current Australian Government at this festive season 2014 should pay attention to what has been written in "The Aboriginal Gift" by Eugene Stockton
In Australia´s past, there have been 360,000,000 Aboriginal people living in this land. In the same period there have been 40,000,000 non Aboriginal people, more than half of them being here for under 2 generations, a ratio of 9:1. From possibly as early as 70,000 years ago ----
“Australia´s Aborigines began a long, continuous and peaceful occupation of an island continent by one people, which has no parallel in the rest of the earth.
The history of the human race in the other parts of the world is the story of turbulent jostling between peoples, with conflict, advance and retreat, oppression and slavery, class struggle and exploitation, diffusion of new technology and ideas, growing apparatus of power and social organisation – the story of development resulting from interaction, both peaceful and violent, between peoples. On present knowledge, during the extraordinary timespan of their occupation of Australia, the Aboriginal people did not know war, subjection of one people by another or inequalities of wealth and power.... We are faced with a purity of race, culture and religion unparalleled in the rest of the world.
Yet neither was there stagnation. From their first appearance in Australia, these men and women had to test their environment.... Up to 47,000 years ago hunters …. (a)cross Australia... it could be claimed that Aborigines occupied every kind of ecological niche.
...A simple model of prehistoric development is also one of humankind´s struggle with the environment: to dominate, manipulate and exploit it, eventually drawing societies into like struggle with each other, individuals in conflict with individuals. In the unique and isolated environment of Australia, her people took another path. In the harshest inhabited continent on earth, they learned to survive by entering into caring partnership with the land, which became a whole way of life, a spirituality. Spiritual development was preferred to the technology in satisfying the basic needs and higher aspirations of a society, moulded as it was like no other and over a greater stretch of time in the matrix of a mothering land.
The alternative worked – until British colonists came to settle... The entry of the tall sailing ships into Sydney Cove marked the beginning of the most severe culture clash in history... pouring in ever-larger numbers of settlers, together with their arms, diseases, rum, livestock and structures of power, overwhelming the indigenous inhabitants, their way of life and much of the natural environment... the ruins of an unnoticed genocide... through massacre, dispossession and displacement.... bureaucratic interference and with minutest control of virtual prisoners, wholesale kidnapping of children..., repeated relocation of communities... racism and discrimination..., lost life, kin, land, society, religion, law and culture and dignity... It was expected that they would soon follow … into extinction....
The miracle was that the Australian Aboriginal survived a social environment far harsher than the physical one had ever been. The tide turned... The race is now growing at twice the rate of the non-Aboriginal community. Kinship groups are deserting gulag reserves and missions to pioneer new societies on ancestral homelands, reasserting traditional authority and discipline.... There is an indigenous renaissance of the arts with Aborigines making up a disproportionate 16 per cent of Australian artists today. Community initiatives are tackling welfare needs in an Aboriginal way.
… The recognition of past wrongs does not call for perpetual beating of the breast, but for repudiation of the lie and a reconstruction of the truth...
.. With many others who came later to these shores, Aboriginal people have been one in that deepest part of their humanity which is now pierced by sorrow: with those intimidated for their skin colour, like the Chinese and the Kanakas; with women downgraded and abused in the coarse masculinity of a pioneer society,; with misery led addicts baited for profit; with those fleeing religious persecution and the prohibition of their language; with victims of genocidal policies like Jews and Armenians; with those like the Irish and Italians, who fled poverty and exploitation at home only to find it anew in this land; with those who saw hope in a future farm plot or gold lease, only to lose out to the more powerful; with those forced off the land in failure, helpless against fickle weather and against more fickle markets; with those tied by ignorance and language to labour little better than slaves; with migrants, homesick and misunderstood, living out lonely lives as aliens; with the chronically poor, unplaced even at the bottom rung of society´s ladder and destined to beget children the same; with single-parent families scraping for a living; with the disabled and disadvantaged, denied control over their own lives; with the displaced persons of recent wars, victims of totalitarian authority, separated from family, shunted from camp to camp, refugees wandering without protection of nationality; with indeed all who have been poor, bereft, helpless, hopeless, confused, crippled, pain-ridden, tragic to the end. Together with the children of the land of Australia, their cry, like Abel´s, rises from the blood soaked ground; Cain cannot hear it above the din of traffic and moneymaking, or the clamour of sportsground or concert hall, in the whirr of his expensive toys...
But through all of this turmoil the battlers of Australia have struggled, coped, survived. This is the real history of our people. We have been taught another version: a succession of big names, a history of conquest of nature (and of man!) for monetary gain, of the development of primary and secondary industries, of the growth of commerce, involvement in international trading blocs.
As successive election campaigns have shown, governments (and their coerced electorates)have been preoccupied with fiscal management, but the ailing economy remains a hypochondriac who for all the testing and medication, remains absorbed in his sickness, unenterprising, unwilling to get out of bed and go on living. Our country has been and continues to be portayed as a business enterprise, Australia Incorporated, but the Midas Touch has turned warm human flesh and laughing eyes into chilling gold.
Australia is much more than a commercial concern. It is a particular land and people, and it has a more human story. It is a tale about the majority... who can find their identity and unity around the indigenous core of trials and who, rather than the money-changers, might yet be the foundation of a truly great nation."
Since this is Christmas 2014 it is probably good to remember that some 20 centuries ago, a certain man supposedly said
“Then he will say ..... ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire ... For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
...
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
Matthew 25:41-46.
In Australia´s past, there have been 360,000,000 Aboriginal people living in this land. In the same period there have been 40,000,000 non Aboriginal people, more than half of them being here for under 2 generations, a ratio of 9:1. From possibly as early as 70,000 years ago ----
“Australia´s Aborigines began a long, continuous and peaceful occupation of an island continent by one people, which has no parallel in the rest of the earth.
The history of the human race in the other parts of the world is the story of turbulent jostling between peoples, with conflict, advance and retreat, oppression and slavery, class struggle and exploitation, diffusion of new technology and ideas, growing apparatus of power and social organisation – the story of development resulting from interaction, both peaceful and violent, between peoples. On present knowledge, during the extraordinary timespan of their occupation of Australia, the Aboriginal people did not know war, subjection of one people by another or inequalities of wealth and power.... We are faced with a purity of race, culture and religion unparalleled in the rest of the world.
Yet neither was there stagnation. From their first appearance in Australia, these men and women had to test their environment.... Up to 47,000 years ago hunters …. (a)cross Australia... it could be claimed that Aborigines occupied every kind of ecological niche.
...A simple model of prehistoric development is also one of humankind´s struggle with the environment: to dominate, manipulate and exploit it, eventually drawing societies into like struggle with each other, individuals in conflict with individuals. In the unique and isolated environment of Australia, her people took another path. In the harshest inhabited continent on earth, they learned to survive by entering into caring partnership with the land, which became a whole way of life, a spirituality. Spiritual development was preferred to the technology in satisfying the basic needs and higher aspirations of a society, moulded as it was like no other and over a greater stretch of time in the matrix of a mothering land.
The alternative worked – until British colonists came to settle... The entry of the tall sailing ships into Sydney Cove marked the beginning of the most severe culture clash in history... pouring in ever-larger numbers of settlers, together with their arms, diseases, rum, livestock and structures of power, overwhelming the indigenous inhabitants, their way of life and much of the natural environment... the ruins of an unnoticed genocide... through massacre, dispossession and displacement.... bureaucratic interference and with minutest control of virtual prisoners, wholesale kidnapping of children..., repeated relocation of communities... racism and discrimination..., lost life, kin, land, society, religion, law and culture and dignity... It was expected that they would soon follow … into extinction....
The miracle was that the Australian Aboriginal survived a social environment far harsher than the physical one had ever been. The tide turned... The race is now growing at twice the rate of the non-Aboriginal community. Kinship groups are deserting gulag reserves and missions to pioneer new societies on ancestral homelands, reasserting traditional authority and discipline.... There is an indigenous renaissance of the arts with Aborigines making up a disproportionate 16 per cent of Australian artists today. Community initiatives are tackling welfare needs in an Aboriginal way.
… The recognition of past wrongs does not call for perpetual beating of the breast, but for repudiation of the lie and a reconstruction of the truth...
.. With many others who came later to these shores, Aboriginal people have been one in that deepest part of their humanity which is now pierced by sorrow: with those intimidated for their skin colour, like the Chinese and the Kanakas; with women downgraded and abused in the coarse masculinity of a pioneer society,; with misery led addicts baited for profit; with those fleeing religious persecution and the prohibition of their language; with victims of genocidal policies like Jews and Armenians; with those like the Irish and Italians, who fled poverty and exploitation at home only to find it anew in this land; with those who saw hope in a future farm plot or gold lease, only to lose out to the more powerful; with those forced off the land in failure, helpless against fickle weather and against more fickle markets; with those tied by ignorance and language to labour little better than slaves; with migrants, homesick and misunderstood, living out lonely lives as aliens; with the chronically poor, unplaced even at the bottom rung of society´s ladder and destined to beget children the same; with single-parent families scraping for a living; with the disabled and disadvantaged, denied control over their own lives; with the displaced persons of recent wars, victims of totalitarian authority, separated from family, shunted from camp to camp, refugees wandering without protection of nationality; with indeed all who have been poor, bereft, helpless, hopeless, confused, crippled, pain-ridden, tragic to the end. Together with the children of the land of Australia, their cry, like Abel´s, rises from the blood soaked ground; Cain cannot hear it above the din of traffic and moneymaking, or the clamour of sportsground or concert hall, in the whirr of his expensive toys...
But through all of this turmoil the battlers of Australia have struggled, coped, survived. This is the real history of our people. We have been taught another version: a succession of big names, a history of conquest of nature (and of man!) for monetary gain, of the development of primary and secondary industries, of the growth of commerce, involvement in international trading blocs.
As successive election campaigns have shown, governments (and their coerced electorates)have been preoccupied with fiscal management, but the ailing economy remains a hypochondriac who for all the testing and medication, remains absorbed in his sickness, unenterprising, unwilling to get out of bed and go on living. Our country has been and continues to be portayed as a business enterprise, Australia Incorporated, but the Midas Touch has turned warm human flesh and laughing eyes into chilling gold.
Australia is much more than a commercial concern. It is a particular land and people, and it has a more human story. It is a tale about the majority... who can find their identity and unity around the indigenous core of trials and who, rather than the money-changers, might yet be the foundation of a truly great nation."
Since this is Christmas 2014 it is probably good to remember that some 20 centuries ago, a certain man supposedly said
“Then he will say ..... ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire ... For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
...
“He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
Matthew 25:41-46.
