Having succeeded in jailing indigenous peoples at rates unseen in any other part of the ‘civilised’ world (3% of Australian population yet 28% of the prison population), we now turn back the clock and steal their children. (We will have that song!)  When the Army, as part of our Government’s racist, culturally genocidal ‘Intervention’ invaded the Northern Territory’s ‘remote settlements’ in  2007 approximately 200 children were in ‘foster care’.  Today the number has grown by a factor of 5 to close to one thousand.  (Read Paddy Gibson’s report here.)  So the Intervention is working!

The major growth industry in the NT is Prisons.  And despite numerous inquiries including the Deaths in Custody report it seems that we are still able to kill indigenous people in custody with absolute impunity.  So what do we do?  We withdraw funding from Aboriginal legal services!

Education – of course.  Education is the answer.  (Although we don’t really know the question.)  This is what we found in a relatively recently closed outstation school in the Tanami region.

Resource Material for Indigenous students in remote NT

So let us all light candles for the two Australian’s on death row.

Refugee and Indigenous injustice inexplicably rolls on with nay a whimper.  (I was at a small dinner where 2 of the guests said they were fed up with all this emphasis on indigenous rights, that we, the invaders, had won, and the indigenous people should just ‘suck it up’.)

However I see it that we owe our extraordinary standard of living as white Australians to the proceeds of the heinous crimes we have committed against fellow human beings, the theft of their land, culture, children, resources and their lives.

 And THAT – living on the proceeds of those ongoing crimes-  that it is our problem,  I think we need to reconcile that amongst ourselves before we can humbly ask for reconciliation with the First Australians.

Cecil Poole

PS. Tomorrow in Poetry Sunday Ali Cobby Eckermann presents her poem Intervention Payback, together with a short essay on its background.  Compulsory Reading!