Why, in Australia in 2020, are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the most incarcerated in the world?
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Why do we, as a society, as a community accept these figures?
Why have so few of the recommendations of the 1987 Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody been implemented and those that have, have been done in an ad hoc way?
And what does this say about our values and our attitudes?
About who we are as a nation?
These are questions we need to ask ourselves, individually, as a community and as a nation.
They are questions that take us back to the invasion of this country, to the taking of the land.
To the disregard of previous sovereignty.
To the concept of Terra Nullius.
To the establishment of a ‘new’ country on a racist foundation: a foundation that is still with us today.
A foundation that is both challenging and uncomfortable.
A foundation that we need to understand and acknowledge before we can move forward as a nation.
This is the call of truth telling – the call for us all to understand our past and how the past continues to shape our views and attitudes, both conscious and unconscious, even today.
When Captain Arthur Phillip set sail with the First Fleet, he was heading to the new land to establish a British colony.
His official orders in relation to the inhabitants were to ‘conciliate their affections’, to ‘live in amity and kindness with them’ and to punish anyone who should ‘wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations’.
There was an assumption that the occupants would undoubtedly want to be absorbed into the mighty British Empire. There was no acknowledgement of prior and continuing sovereignty, no inclination towards treaty.
The Eora people of Port Jackson were strong warrior people with complex social and cultural systems. They had no need of British systems of governance and life.
The dawning realisation that these foreigners were here to stay, taking possession of land and resources, regardless of Eora law, set the scene for ‘frontier’ conflict.
Over time, this scenario was repeated with other clans and nations as the British forged further and further into this new land. They considered land was theirs for the taking. They were subduing an “inhospitable country”, and this included subduing those who stood in their way - the original inhabitants.
The language relating to Aboriginal people changed from the earlier, more welcoming wording of Captain Phillip’s orders ‘to live in amity and kindness with them’ to something much darker.
Bruce Elder, in his book, Blood on the Wattle, notes that the first legally sanctioned massacre occurred in 1795, when troops were sent from Parramatta and, ‘in the hope of striking terror, to erect gibblets in different places, whereon the bodies of all they might kill were to be hung’.
The language was now about subduing, punishing and stamping authority on the Aboriginal population. This massacre was not an isolated occurrence and such events continued well into the 20th Century, with the Coniston Massacre occurring as late as 1928.
Aboriginal people became a problem to be overcome. As a race they were deemed to be less than the white colonisers. With the collapse of communities and culture through disease, massacres, dispossession, relocation to missions and removal of children, there developed a view they were a dying race.
This change in language is crucial. It was reflected in the education system in which children vowed allegiance to the British monarch of the day and were taught about the courageous squatters who had to overcome drought, Aborigines and floods to tame the land.
Immediately following Federation in 1901, policies were designed to keep Australia white and British. At the time, our first Prime Minister Edmund Barton stated his belief in white supremacy: “There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races – I think no-one wants convincing of this fact – unequal and inferior.”
Our nation has a racist foundation. It was founded on the basis that white was superior.
So what place did Aboriginal people have in this new, white nation?
Section 51 (xxvi) of the Australian Constitution gave the Commonwealth power to make laws with respect to ‘people of any race, other than the Aboriginal race in any state, for whom it was deemed necessary to make special laws,’ and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people weren’t even counted ‘in reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth...’
The Commonwealth left the management of Aboriginal people to the states.
After the 1937 Conference of Chief Protectors and Boards in Canberra, states began adopting policies designed to “assimilate” Aboriginal people of mixed descent. This was based on the assumption there was nothing of value in Aboriginal culture.
“This Conference believes that the destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin (sic), but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth, and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end . . . The policy of the Commonwealth is to do everything possible to convert the half-caste into a white citizen.”
Aboriginal people weren’t just marginalised politically and economically, they were marginalised in the new nation’s Constitution and marginalised through language. Their “inferior” status was debated in Parliament, in the media and continually taught in schools, shaping the views of generations of Australians. The insidious nature of such language cannot be overestimated.
This is the view many of us grew up with and absorbed into our unconscious. It is a racist view – it is based on Aboriginal people being viewed as unequal, inferior.
The question for us is: does it shape our values and attitudes today?
Has it allowed us to read about Aboriginal deaths in custody and just blame it on the ‘Aboriginal problem’? Has it altered our values so one life is worth less than another?
Has it allowed us to turn away in silence, to ignore?
Has it allowed us to be less of a nation, when we can be so much more?
To learn more, contact your local library to borrow these books: Ibram X Kendi - How to be an Antiracist; Robin DiAngelo - White Fragility; Bruce Elder - Blood on the Wattle (third edition).