|
|
| From | Message | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
anomalocaris 03-Dec-07, 22:20 |
 australian riotsBy Michael Perry Mon Dec 3, 9:20 PM ET SYDNEY (Reuters) - About 200 people armed with spears, knives and sticks, rioted in an Australian outback aboriginal town after an argument in a tavern, police said on Tuesday. The argument, possibly between feuding families, started in the tavern at Aurukun, an isolated aboriginal community in northern Queensland state, on Monday. "The argument started in the tavern and moved onto the street where about 200 people, some armed with spears, sticks and knives, started fighting," a police spokesman told Reuters. "One man suffered serious head injuries when he was attacked by three people," he said. A police tactical response squad was flown to Aurukun overnight to help stop the fighting. "We do not yet know what started it. It could be something to do with feuding families," said the police spokesman. "We may transport people out of there in a view to talking to them, but if there was alcohol involved we will have to wait until they sober up." Aurukun has been hit by a number of alcohol-fuelled riots in recent years. Australia's 460,000 Aborigines make up 2 percent of the 20 million population and have a life expectancy 17 years less than white Australians. They have far higher rates of unemployment, imprisonment, alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence. A report this year found a "river of grog" or alcohol was destroying black communities in the Northern Territory and fuelling violence against women and children. The government sent police and troops to stop the violence and banned alcohol in the aboriginal camps. In an effort to stem alcohol abuse the Aurukun Shire Council runs the looks like with all their superior intellect Australians cant do much better with minorities |
||
|
musket33r 04-Dec-07, 01:21 |
However aborigines neglect themselves. 1. We give them money, they buy beer, get drunk and paint the town red. 2. We give them freedom, they sniff petroleum and rape kids. 3. We give them education, they wag and neglect school supplies. 4. We give them rights, they exploit them to get more money. 5. We offer to share land, they move in and demand their neighbors territory too. 6. We give them recognition for their culture, they get angry and they demand heritage sights everywhere. 7. We gve them respect and they smash our windows and vandalise property. And finally 8. We give them justice and we get thrown in prison. Im not saying that about all of them. Ive met quite a few that are quite nice. I don't hate their race. I dislike the ones that abide by the above commandments. |
||
|
more complex views regarding white history with aboriginals which many would view as shameful from todays perspectives. Here's a potted history of what white Australia 'gave" them. The stolen generation here: en.wikipedia.org Land rights here: en.wikipedia.org In short europeans invaded, appropriated land and institutionalized the removal of indiginous children from their parents on the grounds that their culture was "savage" and needed to be "civilised". Along with institutionalization, dislocation of family of origin and culture, there was for many a new situation of abuse, often sexual nat the hands of the new "custodial parents". Indiginous communities consequently carry many wounds and the solutions are complex and multifaceted. |
||
|
anomalocaris 04-Dec-07, 16:11 |
just as i assumed |
||
|
musket33r 04-Dec-07, 22:56 |
I do not hate their race Repeat I do not hate aboriginals as a whole I dislike the ones who do nothing but cause trouble, like the rioters as this forum is about. |
||
|
mark "1. We give them money, they buy beer, get drunk and paint the town red. 2. We give them freedom, they sniff petroleum and rape kids. 3. We give them education, they wag and neglect school supplies. 4. We give them rights, they exploit them to get more money. 5. We offer to share land, they move in and demand their neighbors territory too. 6. We give them recognition for their culture, they get angry and they demand heritage sights everywhere. 7. We gve them respect and they smash our windows and vandalise property. And finally 8. We give them justice and we get thrown in prison." maybe the problem is that taking away their culture and then "giving them" ours is not a viable means of allowing them to regain their self worth and respect? musket, suppose i killed your family and raped your wife, stole your house and land and forced you to speak a different language and wear different clothes and work in a system you do not understand, and then gave you a vacant lot, some thrift store clothes, and a bag of cocaine. would you embrace the new life and be thankful for all i have given you? or, would you, just maybe, be a bit resentful, discouraged, and dis-oriented? musket, your paternalistic attitude ("why don't they appreciate all we have given them?") is a bit insane. |
||
|
leo_london 05-Dec-07, 09:53 |
It was reading about the lives of our recent ancestors that turned me towards socialism. There were terrible social injustices inflicted upon peoples of every race in every country. However, we must get away from this " blame culture ". I am not responsible for the sins perpetrated by our rulers of years ago. These people cannot forever consider themselves " victims ". They now have the opportunity to make something of their lives, education will give them status and thereafter the means to help alter any current social injustices. |
||
|
leo |
||
|
Jeff However, it has happened and there is nothing that "current" people can do about it except provide the means for these people to assimilate and better themselves. The "opportunities" to do that are here in America, and probably elsewhere as well. Many Indians have chosen to do just that and are fitting in nicely. Some have not. We can debate all day long whether it was "right" to do that in the first place. But, given the circumstance, these people need to realize that it is impractical and not helpful to themselves to wallow in misery. They need to begin using the new system. |
||
|
softie |
||
|
regardless of colour or background, people generally DON'T do so well in life when they've been separated from primary attachment figures early in life and been subjected to physical, emotional and sexual abuses. Sadly, that was a prevailing theme for many of australias indiginous people under the white oz policy. |
||
|
The "stolen generation issue" is live for a LOT of people still alive today. It's not ancient history. Stolen generation Main article: Stolen generation 'Stolen Generation' is the term controversially used to mean the Australian Aboriginal children who were removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions between approximately 1900 and 1972. The nature of the removals, their extent, and its effects on those removed, is a topic of considerable dispute and political debate within Australia to the point that the term "Stolen Generation" is often referred to in the media as the "so-called Stolen Generation". According to a government inquiry on the topic, at least 30,000 children were removed from their parents and the figure may be substantially higher (the report notes that formal records of removals were very poorly kept). Percentage estimates were given that 10–30% of all Aboriginal children born during the seventy year period Source: en.wikipedia.org |
||
|
Wow... I suppose our Civil War wasn't too long before that, but at least we had a war over it, not a debate over semantics... KoP |
||
|
The Redfern speech- paul Keating at Redfern Park in Sydney on 10 December 1992 (For non-Australians, Redfern is an inner city suburb of Sydney with an historically large Aboriginal population). Australian Launch of the International Year for the World's Indigenous People Ladies and gentlemen, I am very pleased to be here today at the launch of Australia's celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World's Indigenous People. It will be a year of great significance for Australia. It comes at a time when we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed. Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous pople of Australia - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will: our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be - truly the land of the fair go and the better chance. There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things. It is a test of our self-knowledge. Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history. How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia. How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia. Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things. Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much more than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia continues to be our failure. More I think than most Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal Australians affects us all. In Redfern it might be tempting to think that the reality Aboriginal Australians face is somehow contained here, and that the rest of us are insulated from it. But of course, while all the dilemmas may exist here, they are far from contained. We know the same dilemmas and more are faced all over Australia. This is perhaps the point of this Year of the World's Indigenous People: to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity - and our own humanity. Nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than in Australia. We simply cannot sweep injustice aside. Even if our own conscience allowed us to, I am sure, that in due course, the world and the people of our region would not. There should be no mistake about this - our success in resolving these issues will have a significant bearing on our standing in the world. However intractable the problems may seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure - any more than we can hide behind the contemporary viersion of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragged down. That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history. We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us. Didn't Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia? Isn't it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians - the people to whom the most injustice has been done. And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with the act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us. With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask - how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us. If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year. The Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with devastating clarity that the past lives on in inequality, racism and injustice in the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with guilt. Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need. Guilt is not a very constructive emotion. I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit. All of us. Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done - the practical things. There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. The council's mission is to forge a new partnership built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia's indigenous people. In the abstract those terms are meaningles. We have to give meaning to 'justice' and 'equity' - and, as I have said several times this year, we will only give them meaning when we commit ourselves to achieving concrete results. If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in another. And another. If we raise the standard of health by 20 per cent one year, it will be raised more the next. if we open one door others will follow. When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, more happiness - we will know we are going to win. We need these practical building blocks of change. The Mabo judgment should be seen as one of these. By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice. It will be much easier to work from that basis than has ever been the case in the past. For this reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of hysteria and hostility of the past few months. Mabo is an historic decision - we can make it an historic turning point, the basis of a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians. The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians. There is everything to gain. Even the unhappy past speaks for this. Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contributions. Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry. They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia. They are there in the ways. In sport ot an extraordinary degree. In literature and art and mustic. In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity. They are there in the Australian legend. We should never forget - they helped build this nation. And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership. As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imaigined ourselves dispossessed of land we have lived on for 50 000 years - and then imagined ouselves told that it had never been ours. Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in tehworld and we were told that it was worthless. Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight. Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books. Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice. Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed. Imagine if we had suffed the injustice and then were blamed for it. It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice then we can imagine its opposite. And we can have justice. I say that for two reasons: I say it because I believe that the great things about Australian social democracy reflect a fundamental belief in justice. And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our capacity over the years to go on extending the realism of participating, oppotunity and care. Just as Australian living in the relatively narrow and insular Australia of the 1960s imagined a culturally diverse, worldly and open Australia, and in a generation turned the idea into reality, so we can turn the goals of reconciliation into reality. There are very good signs that the process has begun. The creation of the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself. The establishment of the ATSIC - the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission - is also evidence. The Council is the product of imagination and goodwill. ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and self-management. The vision has already become the reality of almost 800 elected Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners determining priorities and developing their own programs. All over Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are taking charge of their own lives. And assistance with the problems which chronically beset them is at last being made available in ways developed by the communities themselves. If these things offer hope, so does the fact that this generation of Australians is better informed about Aboriginal culture and ahievement, and about the injustice that has been done, than any generation before. We are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islander cultures. From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. We are beginning to learn what the indigenous people have known for many thousands of years - how to live with our physical environment. Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their epic story. I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous Australians and how much we have lost by living so apart. I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the Aboriginal view. It can't be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now a marvellous reality and a great reason for hope. There is one thing today we cannot imagine. We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through 50 000 years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of dispossession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation. We cannot imagine that. We cannot imagine that we will fail. And with the spirit that is here today i am confident that we won't. I am confident that we will succeed in this decade. Thank you. |
||
|
Mark |
||
|
musket33r 12-Dec-07, 00:33 |
You think I am to blame for what some other brit did? I am not decended from convicts. My ancestors lived in Oklahoma until 1903. I have nothing against them and I would hope they have nothing against me. Its not their entire race thats the problem, its their youth. And a select few elders who are drunk on power. Do you have any idea how much trouble they cause our community? How many smashed windows, vandalised buildings, trashed civic property. Once we couldn't put out our garbage bins until morning because they would steal them and ride them down the street. I would hope that Australians as a whole would treat them on the majority and not the minority. I know I try to. I wish they would do the same for our communities too. |
||
|
musket "i do not mean to cast blame on those living today. and i agree that people need to, for the most part, work out their own issues. i am not unaware of the self-destructive aspects of many struggling cultures. but one might ask why these peoples, having had a mostly stable culture before their ways of life were destroyed, now have so much trouble adjusting to an alien culture. i am not trying to blame anyone, just trying to explain why simply saying, "that is history, get over it," is simplistic and idealistic. generational poverty and lack of education and a ground in sense of insecurity is bound to create an unhealthy culture and culture is a mighty difficult thing to change." perhaps you should read more carefully. |
||
|
Jeff So, what should someone do about the situation? You write: "just trying to explain why simply saying, "that is history, get over it," is simplistic and idealistic". Well, it is simplistic but not idealistic... it is practical. There is nothing else these people can do except "get over it and move on"... "make the best of it"... etc. It is NOT going to become "undone". That IS easy for me to say, of course, since I have not been in that situation. However, what else should be done? What else can be done? |
||
|
musket33r 12-Dec-07, 20:35 |
(FYI, the above post may not be correct, please don't lecture me, i don't have the time to correct it) |
||
|
musket |
||
|
softie |
||
|
musket33r 14-Dec-07, 19:27 |
|
