1519: map of Brazil issued by Portuguese explorers.
30 May 2008: “Members of an unknown Amazon Basin tribe and their dwellings are seen during a flight over the Brazilian state of Acre along the border with Peru.” (Sydney Morning Herald).*
* (29 May 2008: “Funai fotografa índios isolados na fronteira do Brasil com o Peru” (National Indigenous Peoples Foundation, the government agency for “protection and education of indigenous peoples”).)
Is this for real? I’m sure I’ve got a drunkenly written film script sitting around somewhere that involves Mal Brough being presented, via Keith Windschuttle, with a medal from a society of the same name.
I couldn’t have scripted for this, though, so it must be true. See you all outside COAG next month.
I received the email below today which is funny for all sorts of reasons, not least that I had intended to go here today to protest the Mexican Government’s recent attacks on Zapatista territory; this also being the day that these protests were held.
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:49:52 -0600
From: Australian_Embassy_Mexico_City@dfat.gov.au
To: Undisclosed Recipients
Reply-to: embaustmex@yahoo.com.mx
Subject: AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION - 24 NOVEMBER 2007 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] (more…)
It’s times like this that I understand why the Zapatistas identify the history of Indigenous struggle against annihilation as being as long as colonization. There’s no closed chapters. There are troubling moments where justice might be done, followed by its vigorous disavowal …
“… whatever happens, the kids have got to go to school, the adults have got to turn up to work, there’ve got to be police and we’ve got to have measures that stop the booze and the drugs and everything else which leads to the horrible things that we now know was happening.”
- Former Minister for Health, Tony Abbott, here.
From the Aboriginal Rights Coalition:
At the last federal election Aboriginal communities overwhelming voted Labor in a bid to end the racist, punitive and paternalistic intervention legislation, implemented by the Howard Government in a desperate attempt to hold onto Government.
Eileen Hoosan, resident of Mt Nancy town camp has argued, “These laws are like apartheid South Africa”, referring to the race based ‘welfare quarantine’ and dubbed these measures another ‘invasion’ that attacks fundamental human rights of Aboriginal people. “It’s reintroducing the ration system from forty years ago”.
Despite claims that the intervention was a response to rampant child sexual abuse no new services have received funding. Instead $88 million has been spent administering the welfare quarantining with 50% of all Centrelink payments to residents of ‘prescribed Aboriginal communities’ being withheld.
The race based intervention has required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act and has overridden the Northern Territory Land Rights Act.
Many women from ‘prescribed communities’ speak of the intense shame they feel and the difficulty people have had queuing with hundreds of others for hours for ration cards with many then missing out. Aboriginal community members must spend the exact amount of quarantined money which can only be spent at a limited range of stores, Woolworths, Kmart or Coles, with any unspent store voucher money returning to the Government.
Community members also complain that the welfare quarantines have caused problems getting food and many people are moving away from their communities to population centres as a result.
While the Federal Labor Government has reinstated some aspects of the permit system it has just announced the extension of welfare quarantining into many more Aboriginal communities, including the urban areas Darwin, Palmerston and Adelaide River, now impacting on some 6,500 people.
Aboriginal communities are calling for an end to this racist military intervention and for the Labor Government to honour its recent commitment stated in the Labor Government’s historic apology and at the ALP National Platform adopted in 2007, to work with Aboriginal communities and to adequately fund services and infra-structure in these communities.
Rally 12:30 Thursday 13 March @ Redfern Centrelink, 140 Redfern St
The Aboriginal Rights Coalition (ARC) meets on Mondays 6pm on the bottom floor of the Redfern Community Centre, on The Block. Contact Greg Eatock on 0432050240 for more details.
Currently on Indymedia Sydney:
Driving 1,500 km to shop - “Rudd should hold his head in shame”
Posted February 17th, 2008
By Diet Simon
Sydney, 17 February 2008 — How would you feel having to drive 1,500 kilometres to buy your household supplies, limited to 60 dollars per person?
How would you feel about police and troops with guns swarming through your community, your house, your possessions totally accessible to them without any legal instrument?
How would you feel about not being able to spend your own or your dead husband’s war veterans pension after he served in Vietnam?
All of that and more is happening in the intervention in the Northern Territory, which is moving up community after community from the South Australian border to the coast, terrifying people.
And now the architect of it, former army man and minister for Aboriginal affairs under John Howard, Mal Brough, has been invited by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to be part of his “war cabinet” to tackle Aboriginal disadvantage.
“The people are screaming in horror at this,” says Aboriginal leader Michael Anderson, “in one fell swoop he has unwound all his good intentions in the sorry speech.”
“People are terrorised by the number of police around them, their limitless powers, soldiers with guns.”
Workshop with elders
The prime minister should hold his head in shame, says Anderson, who workshopped on Tuesday with key leaders from NT communities in Canberra before parliament opened. The workshop was held in the grounds of the Aboriginal Embassy, founded in 1972 by four black power activists, of whom Anderson, aged 56, is the sole survivor.
Those leaders described what was happening in the communities as the imposition of martial law and charged that the media and politicians are misrepresenting the whole situation.
“They told me of extreme police powers, with total access to communities, vehicles, homes – they need no legal instrument to do whatever they want, they can stop and search wherever and whoever they want,” Anderson told me.
Anyone found with an empty beer can in their car faces a fine of $1,000 the first time, $2,500 the second time, Anderson reports from the meeting. “At the third time they are classified as a supplier – without any definition of quantity – which carries a minimum fine of 75,000 dollars.”
No vehicles of white people, just those of Aborigines are searched, the elders told the workshop, which they ran to try to get public attention.
“The quarantining of war widows’ or veterans pensions is hurting in a big way, it’s the biggest hurt,” Anderson quotes the community leaders as saying.
Shopping 750 km away
Most of the people in the communities affected by the intervention have to shop at Centrelink-approved stores a long way from their homes in the bush, up to 750 kilometres in some cases. They’re all Coles, Woolworths and K-Mart stores. They are not allowed to shop in their own community stores.
“The leaders say this is forcing people off their land to come into the cities. They see it as a stealthy move to seize Aboriginal lands,” Anderson quotes from the workshop. “It’s a very well thought-out move.”
To shop and get their welfare benefits, people have to prove their identity to get ID cards, usually by birth certificate. “Most of the old people were never recorded, they don’t have a piece of paper on them. That even applies to some of the younger ones because they were born in the bush.”
“So, they get no card and get no money. How are they supposed to live? And on $60 dollars per person per week no-one can feed and clothe kids. How do they survive? This is worse than the original situation.”
“We don’t need to be treated like this, it’s gone back to the 50s, it’s more of John Howard.”
Anderson, a lawyer by training and the elected leader of the 16 Gumilaroi clans in northwest NSW and southwest Queensland, accused Rudd of “shallow dealing” with Aboriginal affairs.
Talks on the ground
“He has to open his eyes a little wider. He has to talk to the people in the communities, not some bureaucrats in Sydney or Canberra.
“This has to be fixed from the bottom up. He has to get out there and listen to them, community after community. He should just look at his own speech.
“One size does not fit all. There’s been much talk of the culturally appropriate approach. Well, in these communities, not by their choice, there are mixtures of clans and tribes who don’t get on.
“In past mistakes bureaucrats and pollies saw single, homogenous communities and policies have been very divisive.”
Michael Anderson can be contacted at 02 68296355 landline, 04272 92 492 mobile, 02 68296375 fax, ngurampaa@bigpond.com.au.
It’s endlessly fascinating and frustrating to follow the e-debates going on about the apology. I’ve been idly watching the ones going on under news items on the ABC website and that of the Daily Telegraph (if I didn’t have a thesis to write, I just know I’d start up a website like this one).
I am so struck by the way in which ‘debates’ like these open up a space for white settler descended Australians to, seemingly unconsciously, pour out so much of their own hurt and bitterness: ‘My Mum was white and taken away too, where’s her apology?’, in other words, ‘I’ve been so hurt in my life and no one came to help. Where’s my apology?’, ‘Aboriginal kids were taken away because they were NEGLECTED. They are still being NEGLECTED.’, in other words, ‘I have been NEGLECTED. I feel NEGLECTED’. Or, ‘I didn’t do anything, why should I have to apologise?’, i.e. ‘OGOD PLEASE DON’T MAKE ME CONFRONT WHAT THIS MEANS I LIKED THAT JOHN HOWARD FELLOW MUCH BETTER’.
So many seem so unable to give any ground because they are so obsessed with holding onto their own victimage: my ‘personal property’ is painful, poisoned - but goddamn it it’s mineminemine.
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