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.
As a Melbourne Herald-Sun reader points out, the nature and outcome of the trial over the death in custody of Mulrunji Doomadgee would have been much different had Snr Sgt Chris Hurley been the one that died.
But he wasn’t, and so the juridicial apparatus rehearses its colony-bound verdict; and the broader, brutal social context is excised from the picture (despite it being played out in the rest of the H-S reader’s comments). The justice question came down to where fists and knees were precisely placed and what their impact might have been, in a form reminiscent of the debates in the US Congress about what tactics might fall outside of the “cruel and unusual” category. This was bound to happen, for the reasons outlined by Michael Cope:
“The royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody in 1991 made over 100 recommendations - one of them that people shouldn’t be arrested simply for abusing police … had this recommendation been followed, this situation might not have arisen.”
And so, what can we say just now but, power to ya, Gracelyn Smallwood:
“Of course we wanted justice and we never got it … But we’ve had a win because the whole world is watching this country. We don’t want any violence, we want peace and we want everybody to be monitoring the police department.”
ACTIVISM: What Real activists think they do.
SLACKTIVISM: What Real activists think radical-cultural-interventionists do.
LACKTIVISM: What radical-cultural-interventionists think Real activists do.
Dear teeming mass of viewers,
These are some images from Sebastião Salgado’s photoessay, Terra/Land. They all feature people and events associated with the Movimento sem Terra/Landless Movement of Brazil. I’m still thinking and writing about them as part of my thesis. What do you think of them? How do they make you feel? Why is this? Estou curioso.
You can see more of them here, and here.
“The situation of 2001 was traumatic. For people like us it was beautiful but at the same time a lot of people were traumatized, a lot of people were killed by police. It was a strange sensation for people in my generation who were in permanent mobilizations and now have come back to their old model of life. I prefer to use the term trauma than political sadness to describe the psychology of people after 2001. We have had some deep traumas – the first one was in 1976 during the dictatorship, the second one was for us our generation. A lot of people escape in an exodus, the young people escape because it was very unstable, you have your money in the bank and then the United States makes the decision and poof! It’s gone.”
– Federico Zukerfeld, Etcétera, Argentina.
“We need some sort of ‘gap’ between Indigenous and non Indigenous societies, a moratorium, a time of exclusion to allow communities to consolidate their heritage.”
– Kim Scott & Hazel Brown, Kayang and Me, 2005, p. 258.
“Under the societal conditions that we tolerate - or resist, as the case may be - perhaps genuine dialogue between Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists is not possible, or only fleetingly so. Perhaps it is only possible if it is based on a radicalized relationship (such as that manifested under Walker’s treaty), wherein there is a commitment to subvert the conditions of colonialism on an individual and societal level.”
– Clare Land, ‘How non-Indigenous people have tried to help Indigenous people’s struggles in Australia’, A Space Outside Reader, 2006, p. 63
Opining on this is potentially the biggest moral dilemma since Ali G asked Anita Roddick (or some other vegetarian) if she would eat a chicken if he said he would kill another chicken if she didn’t eat it.
Then again, McGowan and Ono could have just made a freakin’ handbill.
