Bonjour mes amies,
Je suis desolé something went wrong and this is a few days late….
I was going to do a dispatch contrasting the destruction of a significant Aboriginal site in the Pilbara with the bulldozing of Oombulgurri in the Kimberley Region a few years ago. The bulldozing resulted in the destruction of a community’s social fabric. Oombulgurri’s very existence was erased. Which is worse? Was going to be the theme of the Dispatch.
Oombulgurri has this in common with Yuendumu in that it also was subjected to a massacre, the Forrest River massacre in 1926, only three years earlier than the Coniston massacre.
The Eve of Destruction (1965- the Vietnam War, 2020- Black Lives Matter)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doIuh9Q7d4g
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – the more things change, the more they stay the same.
But I only got as far as typing the title and deciding on the song, when subsequent events overtook my intention.
The Black Lives Matter movement suddenly took centre stage and resonated in Australia. Just like the photo of Alan Kurdi the Syrian toddler washed up on shore five years ago had a now almost forgotten impact on us all, so too the murder of George Floyd has brought into focus what has been called the Great Australian Silence.
Australia’s Indigenous people are subjected to one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, higher than blacks in South Africa during the Apartheid era and higher than African Americans in today’s USA. Once again nearly everyone in Australia has an opinion: “They can only blame themselves,”, “They lack education,”, “they commit more crimes,”, “they’re all drunks,” “they……”. Note, more often “they” than “we”. Rarely do we look into the mirror Aboriginal Australia holds up to us.
Lucky Dube- Mirror Mirror- See them coming, hear them talk, never believe the word they say…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmGpb1PHYjA
The word ‘police’ appears 96 times in the 205 pages of the latest draft of my attempt at a book. I’m tired of ear-bashing people, I’d rather play you a nice song:
…and the words of the prophets….The Sound of Silence…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgTaIOoXr3s
Not for me to tell you what your opinion should be, I’ll simply ask you to watch the 11 minute video half way down an ABC article which you can find by Googling “ABC numbulwar taser” or at this link:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-10/numbulwar-police-station-aboriginal-man-tasered/12319494
Now form your own opinion, but only if you’ve watched past the first calm few minutes.
The young man found guilty of assaulting the police had gone to the police station to pay a fine.
Meanwhile that virtuoso of the dog-whistle, former Prime Minister John Howard’s legacy keeps surfacing. In 2007, John Howard with his accomplice Mal Brough, sprang the Northern Territory Emergency Response on Remote Aboriginal Australia. Sunday is the 13th anniversary of the Intervention.
This from the book attempt (page 154):
“From memory it was $A45M which was allocated to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to investigate Mal Brough’s alleged ‘paedophile rings’. Despite the AFP coming after the alleged perpetrators armed with Star Chamber Powers under the Crimes Act 1914, not a single case of paedophilia was prosecuted. No more were there paedophile rings in Remote Aboriginal Australia than there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Or reds under the beds in 1950s Australia.”
Only yesterday (12th June) Scott Morrison, our current Prime Minister, when discussing Indigenous matters in his usual seemingly sensible conciliatory manner, opined that the ‘Gap’ could not be closed without first dealing with: “…. the abuse, sexual violence, alcoholism and drug abuse in indigenous communities….”. If you blinked you would have missed it … there it was again ‘sexual violence’.
So is John Howard , in his retirement, giving dog-whistling lessons?
In 1983 the Warumpi band released their Jailanguru Pakarnu (out from jail) song in the Luritja language. In the video clip the band is seen breaking the law (riding unrestrained in the back of a ute) and if they’d been caught some of them might have ended up going to jail again. Since 1983 policing on remote communities has intensified. In a 2012 study, based on Yuendumu and Lajamanu, I learned that from mid-2006 to 2010 the incidence of driving criminalization increased 250% in the NT.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1baOxLwccB8
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – only worse.
Community policing has morphed into policing the community…
c’est pas la même
Au revoir,
François
PS- my favourite song from the land of the long white cloud: (Slice of Heaven)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0pWejAnLUQ
I hasten to add my second favourite NZ song: