not the motorcycle diaries

I took a look at the front page of the paper today and almost vomited (I managed to hold back, as it’s not a good look whilst waiting for one’s soy flat white in a quietly trendy Glebe café).

Clearly, I’ve never lived or worked in the Territory, nor do I have much idea what’s going on in Indigenous communities up there except to be sure that a lot of Indigenous people are suffering extreme trauma and life threatening conditions (as they have been since circa 1788).

But I don’t think it takes someone with intimate knowledge to be able to pick a few problems with the PM’s latest exercise of governmental power, not least the fact that he seems to have forgotten there was ever a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and National Inquiry into the Removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. He also seems to have forgotten that Indigenous people have been ‘granted’ certain rights of citizenship and compensation in recent decades; after this land was invaded 219 years ago, its people were murdered to the point of genocide, and their children taken away and enslaved by settlers.

Or we could just listen to Mick Dodson, Lowitja O’Donahue and Judy Atkinson who once again have to remind people about how outrageously punitive (not to mention ineffectual) it is to dock people’s (already below the poverty line) welfare payments, bring more police into Indigenous communities, and single out one community among many. This time it comes with the revocation of recognition of customary law, and re-possession of Indigenous land.

And the paper could quit the gratuitous close-up pictures of brown children’s dewy faces, too. Sebastião Salgado and Anne Geddes ain’t never seen sales like this.