Racism in Australia

                                                                                       

                                                                                 

   Xenophobia - a morbid fear of things foreign or strange or different (Greek xenos: strange, and phobos: fear) - seems to be an exaggeration of a reflexive, defensive biological trait which probably exists in all living things.

It is therefore understandable as a primitive protective reflex in lower order organisms and animals - a flock, herd or pack trait - which has probably got a lot to do with the tyranny of genes (everything comes down to sex in the end).                                                                                                                 

However, as Richard Dawkins pointed out: "Homo sapiens is the only species that can rebel against this otherwise universally-selfish Darwinian impulse". 

(Dawkins, perhaps, gives too much credit to the intelligence and evolutionary sophistication of Homo sapiens. 
He has, at least, overestimated the progress of evolution in the descendants of the soldiers and convicts of the "first fleet" in this country, and clearly hasn't encountered Ms Hansen.)

Racism is more complicated than that.
The English invaders of the great southern land in 1788 were the xenos - the strangers, the foreigners - in this country. 
It was the original population, with their proud and majestic ancient civilization, that had first dibs on xenophobia. Theirs was an entirely appropriate, legitimate and justified phobos.
As was their defence of their land and their people.
For the invaders, a self-righteous sense of superiority, entitlement and destiny justified, to them, the casual slaughter of the resisting owners of the land, and the seizure of their lands.
Not xenophobia. Not racism. Just a sense of entitlement.

So what about now? Why is racism the festering sore on the underbelly of the descendants of the English invaders?

I grew up in a large country town in northern NSW in the 1950s.
The Bundjalung people had arrived there from far northern Australia somewhere around 6,000 BC (at the time Britain, whose population was comprised of Palaeolithic and Neolithic nomads, became separated from the European mainland), occupying a region extending south from the Logan River to the Clarence River, and west to the Great Dividing Range. 
                                                                   

The Bundjalung comprised eleven major dialectic groups which were further divided into extended family groups, each family group being nomadic only within their own territory. Life within these tribal groups was generally peaceful and governed by strict social and spiritual lore.

The harbinger of the impending demise of this ancient society arrived in the form of Captain Henry Rous, the second son of the Earl of Stradbroke, who anchored in the mouth of the Richmond River on 14 August 1828. 
By 1845, 21 licences had been granted to squatters (sheep or cattle graziers) for the pastoral runs in the Richmond Valley. Border Police were employed to enforce the Crown Lands Act and to "limit conflict" between Squatters and aboriginal people.

The clearances, a deadly version of the efforts of Lady Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands, had begun.

By the 1950s the survivors of the dispossessed Widyabal owners of the land lived on a government-created reserve outside my home town. There were no indigenous families living in the town. There were no indigenous kids at my public primary or secondary schools. There were no indigenous people in the shops or streets. The only indigenous people I encountered as a child were patients at the hospital where my father worked.

It was truly a de facto economic, social and political apartheid-like segregation.

The undercurrent of racism directed toward the First Nation People is with us still.

It has been at its most overt, gratuitous and ugly at the two rural towns in which I have spent the majority of my adult life.
It is no coincidence that both these places are situated near the sites of horrific and infamous massacres of Koori people in the mid-19th century - at Coutt's Crossing and at Myall Creek - or that the great-grandfathers of a significant proportion of the present population of these town were among the original British settlers.

Kangaroo Creek, Coutts' Crossing - 23 men killed by poison on 28 November, 1847.

Myall Creek - 28 men, women and children were savagely murdered on 10 June, 1838.


It is my belief that racism - a perverted, exaggerated manifestation of xenophobia, is based on unresolved, unacknowledged guilt.


The incessant use of derogatory and dehumanizing names for the descendants of the survivors of the appalling crimes of our grandfathers can only be a subliminal, self-serving attempt to diminish our collective guilt.
                                                                

Admission and acknowledgement of this guilt from those in authority in every town and village in this country and a plea for forgiveness for the crimes of our fathers are essential precursors to reconciliation.
And a treaty is an ineluctable corollary of the sovereignty of the First Peoples.

Only then can we face the future as one united nation.