by Jonathan Richards

 ”The Secret War” will be launched by Henry Reynolds at the Avid Reader bookshop, Boundary St. West End (Bris) on Wednesday 19th March 2008 at 6.00 pm.

 From the publisher, University of Queensland Press….……

  Henry Reynolds describes Jonathan Richards’ controversial book, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police, as ‘a major contribution to Queensland and Australian historiography, and to the history of relations between colonists and indigenous people on a global scale’.

The health, housing and employment crisis facing Indigenous people today are a direct result of our white settlement history.

How did Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, from all over Queensland, end up being violently forced to leave their homelands and live in these communities?

Why were Indigenous people so terrified of the police, they allowed themselves to be herded into ‘prisons without walls’?

The release of The Secret War is timely given the new Labor Government’s official apology to the Aboriginal people.

The Secret War tells the story of organised racial violence and lawful mass murder on the Queensland frontier.

For many Indigenous people, white colonisation arrived with the armed men of the Native Police: a brutal force that operated on the 19th-century frontier, killing large numbers of Indigenous men, women and children.

Historian Jonathan Richards has spent ten years researching this contentious subject, picking his way through secrecy, misinformation and supposed ‘lost files’ to uncover and publish the truth.

In this first full-length comprehensive study of the Native Police in Queensland, he argues that they were a key part of a ‘divide and rule’ colonising tactic and that the force’s actions were given the implicit approval of the government and public servants, and that their killings were covered up.

The Queensland government, which so far has avoided blame due to an absence of direct orders to kill Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, stands responsible for the force’s deployment, techniques and ultimately for its genocidal activities.

The Secret War is an authoritative and groundbreaking contribution to our country’s white settlement history.

This is a post I have written for the blog “Public Polity” which is Run by Sam Clifford who is an active member of the Queensland Greens.  http://publicpolity.wordpress.com/   I will be writing regularly for Public Polity. 

 Firstly a note on vocabulary.  When I use the word “white” I am speaking of culture and worldview, I am not talking about skin colour.  White is a psychological, sociological and legal structure which dark skinned people can also be agents of, in fact this is the premise of our immigration policy and citizenship test.

 “Aboriginal” is not a matter of skin colour but of bloodline – a matter of family and that particular family’s connection to particular country.  There were no Aboriginal or Indian or native people in Australia before Captain Cook. There was just families, communities and nations connected to this land.   On this continent today there does indeed exist a colonial and an “Aboriginal” society. The Late Oodgeroo Noonucal coined the term “non-Aboriginal” to turn the colonial perspective around and  define migrant experience by its difference to sovereign Aboriginal Australian reality rather than define Aboriginality by its difference to “normal” colonial society.

The psychological, sociological and legal structure inherent in Aboriginal families and the Australian landscape is not exclusive of non-Aboriginal people.  It is in fact white Australia’s refusal to relate to Aboriginal Australia within the frameworks of Aboriginal society that has caused all the problems.

The history of invasion, genocide and colonisation is not just an Aboriginal story.  Aboriginal people have been the victims of this history but it is predominantly a history of what white people and governments have done.  The smallpox, massacres and poisonings, the missions and reserves, the slave labour, the stolen wages and the stolen generation are all part of mainstream Australia’s history every bit as much as Gallipoli, the Eureka stockade or Donald bloody Bradman.

It is important to understand the history to explain why Aboriginal Australia today is like it is.  But the history of war and colonisation also explains why white Australia today is like it is, how the forces of history built the new nation and our contemporary culture and structures.

Unfortunately, Prime Minister Rudd’s apology and acknowledgement that we got it wrong in the past is overshadowed by his government’s indigenous policy and programs, or at least those that we have had a glimpse of so far.  They are a continuance of 20^th century Aboriginal policy paradigms and I am sad to say so are the Greens indigenous policy frameworks.

The radical departure from colonial bandaids that began with Whitlam and continued through the Fraser, Hawke and Keating years and is embodied in the U.N. declaration on indigenous rights appears to have been forgotten in the 21^stcentury policy framework of the ALP and the Greens.

Notions such as land rights and self determination have been sidelined as secondary considerations to the urgent priority of “Closing the Gap”, an inherently assimilationist campaign/policy that identifies the cause of Aboriginal problems to be inherent in Aboriginal society itself – ill health, not in the white society including government policy. 

  “Close the Gap” applies a bandaid to the symptoms that white society sees (usually on TV) but fails in any way to address the structural factors that cause and perpetuate illness and disadvantage.

The causal factors of Aboriginal suffering today  are inherent in white colonial society and are invisible to white colonial society, it is the background normality.

The problem lies in such things as institutional modes of health care, paramilitary (police) and prison deterrence modes of maintaining law and order, exclusive legal title to our own back yard, mining and European modes of farming, welfare programs etc.  All these things that are the front line of the continued impoverishment, ill health and deaths in custody in Aboriginal society are taken for granted by the colonial society.  They are the morally righteous agencies of democracy and market economy.  These things that bring death, disease and dispossession to Aboriginal Australia bring health and prosperity to colonial society.  It is not easy to identify our own sociology as a causal factor in Aboriginal trauma and crisis.

The common Australian notion of reconciliation is a white myth.  Inherent in this myth is the assumption that white and black Australia must find some middle ground, shake hands and begin negotiations.  A simple formula but one that is no more likely to succeed than Palestinian Muslims finding a common ground with Israeli Jews while the state of Israel exists.  All Middle East so-called peace negotiations are not good willed, open-minded exchanges; they are power games where the dominant military and economic power – The U.S. – determines the framework and parameters of negotiations and raw power is played against raw power in the process. 

The whole “peace” process and the management of conflict in negotiations is tightly controlled by the vested interests of the U.S. who designed and maintains the state of Israel in accordance with U.S. interests.

So too with Australia’s reconciliation movement.  It has been designed and managed within the worldview of white Australia, the illegally imposed British state and its entrenched colonial society.   The meetings, petitions and bridge walks of the last 2 decades have been predominantly manifestations of white Australia.  Apart from the Aboriginal spokespeople and committee members, Aboriginal Australia has largely not joined this movement.  The reconciliation process has been a white commentary on black Australia, perhaps easing some of White Australia’s anxieties but it has not connected in any meaningful way to Aboriginal Australia.

The reconciliation movement has achieved no positive change in Aboriginal Australia, except of course for the Apology, which while spiritually significant, does nothing to address issues of Aboriginal poverty, disadvantage and ill health. 

This is a stark contrast with the land rights and self-determination movements of the 60s. 70s and in particular the 80s leading up to the 88 bicentennial protest. This movement was lead exclusively by Aboriginal people and the meetings, marches and other events were well attended by Aboriginal people including tens of thousands from Around Australia gathering in Sydney in 1988.

The early land rights movement of the 60s and 70s, while consistently promoting land rights as the primary agenda, built independent, self managed Aboriginal medical centres, legal services, housing services and childcare services to tackle the exact same issues that we are faced with today. 

As well as struggling for funding for these welfare crisis responses the movement forced on structural reform such as the native title act and ATSIC and the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.  However, despite the existence of the reconciliation movement, all the gains of the 20^th century s have been deconstructed. 

 The mode for engaging in indigenous affairs that the reconciliation movement and presently the Greens and ALP operate in defines both the problem and a prescription for a solution totally within white notions and frameworks.  The essential task of facilitating and empowering the agencies of Aboriginal perspective has been reduced to allowing Aboriginal input into the decisions, policies and programs owned by the white government.

 At present Aboriginal people are only allowed to be part of white programs and policies, there is no funding or support for anything else.  The dominant mode of engagement with Aboriginal people is  “consultation” where Aboriginal people are told what the white policy and program is and are given advice and assistance as to how to conform to it.  The new ALP government and the Green’s policies do not suggest any change to this mode.

The challenge for us non-Aboriginal people, whether we are policy writers or grass roots activists is not to try and develop solutions to Aboriginal problems.

We non-Aboriginal folk should try and solve the problems of white Australia that cause the problems in Aboriginal Australia.

The challenge for indigenous policy and action is to allow and resource Aboriginal people to deal with their own problems within their own cultural frameworks and authorities and in accordance with their own priorities.  – self-determination.

The challenge for the Greens and the ALP, who both enthusiastically endorse the signing of the U.N. declaration on indigenous rights, is to develop policy in accordance with the core principles of the U.N. declaration – land rights and self determination.

Real reconciliation is about the colonial invader society paying reparations for the damage it has done and continues to do, when somehow and somewhere some land, wealth and power is transferred back to the people it was  stolen from.

Bandaids such as “Close the Gap” just won’t stick.

Press release:  Michael Anderson, Goodooga, NSW, 29 January 2008

In a statement from Goodooga in NW NSW, Michael Anderson said today:

“In our family’s experience, my grandmother taken from Angledool, NW NSW in 1914 and had to find her own way home. She always wanted recognition of the government’s cruel judgement to breed out the colour and culture of Aboriginal people.”

“For an apology to be meaningful, there is a lot of history that PM Kevin Rudd has to admit to. He has to say why the Prime Minister and government is sorry and the public has to accept that the sorry statement is necessary for Australia to move forward.”

“In 1937, State and Federal governments convened aconference in Canberra to decide on a policy of what to do with ‘the Aborigines’ – the resulting policy objective was for the complete annihilation of a race of Peoples. The principle method to achieve this was to remove Aboriginal children from their parents and from the influence of customs, traditions and Law/Lore. The primary objectives were to de-Aboriginalise these children and to expunge their colour, because Australia was working towards an Aryan race.”

“It is important to remember that, in 1901, the first Federal Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, argued for a continent that could be free of ‘contamination’ by foreign and unwanted racial impurities. When he led the debate in the House of Representatives on the Immigration Restriction Bill 7 August 1901, he quoted Professor Pearson a noted social commentator of the time by saying: ‘The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes … is in fact, the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience … We are guarding the last part of the world in which the higher races can live and increase freely for the higher civilisation .… The day will come …when the European observers will look around the globe girdled with a continuous zone of the yellow and black races. It is idle to say that if all this should come to pass our pride and place will not be humiliated. We are struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined to belong to the Aryan race; and to the Christian faith; to the letters and arts and charms which we have inherited from the best of times.”

“Many in mainstream cannot plead ignorance as it was a common agreement between State and Federal governments with the policy finalised in 1937 in Canberra. There are many Australians still alive today, who voted and trusted the governments to do right thing, but never questioned what was going on. The policy was genocidal in intent and practice – to create a white Australia without colour.”

“In almost every other country in the world, where colonisation has taken place, reparations in various forms have enabled survivors of gross violations of human rights to locate their niche in society. Reparation funds have made it possible for those indigenous groups to maintain identity, restore dignity, develop strategies and an economic base.”

“Reparation programs have to ensure there is not a white bureaucracy having control over us. We have to get away from mission managers. We do not want to be treated as children. We have never been given opportunity to manage our own affairs without a white bureaucratic ceiling of control and an expectation of assimilation.”

“Aboriginal Peoples can do without the welfare handouts. Our nations have to restore their territorial integrity and Australians have no reason to fear this.”“We must set our own objectives. We have a right to do this. The recent UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms our rights and responsibilities. In Australia, Greeks, Italians, Macedonians have own clubs, churches, languages,schools while integrating into Australian society. Why is it different for us as Aboriginal Nations and Peoples in our own land?”

“If Rudd and his labour government are serious, the detail of a sorry statement must include the true horror of the genocide that was planned against Aboriginal Peoples and what was carried out.”

“To alleviate the Australian governments’ fears of separate development through reparation, they only have to look at US and Canadian models, where the sovereign identity of individual nations is maintained. In the Mabo case, the High Court alluded to the fact that sovereignty can continue to exist among Aboriginal Peoples and we assert that it does. We only ask that this be respected and that we can have co- existing sovereignties.”

“Well may you say God Save the Queen, but nothing will save the governor General”

I just had to say that on remembrance day. Every time I visit Canberra I have to stand at the front of the old parliament house and recite this mantra. Today is a holy day for political junkies.

I find election night television coverage to be a highlight of my viewing year. Every now and then I like to sit in the TAB and make a few bets, there is something mesmerizing about studying the numbers on the screen and trying to make sense of them followed by an exhilarating or disappointing climax as the race is called. I get the same petty buzz on election nights.

My name is John and I am a political junkie.

My craving for more and more is profoundly dissatisfied by this Federal election. I feel I am being subjected to involuntary cold turkey and being denied access to any solid political hits.

I am bored silly with the present election campaign. I agree with Mark Latham’s analysis that this election is a Seinfeld election – all about nothing. Senator Andrew Bartlett makes similar observations on his blog “Empty vessels and hollow men”.  

Kevin Rudd and the ALP have been running fast in all directions to avoid any argument with John Howard and the incumbent government and the substance of all media coverage has been meaningless visits to shopping centres, workplaces, schools and old peoples homes. The media hunts for bloopers and mishaps. When they get such a spontaneous distraction they feature that as the lead story.

When John Howard and Kevin Rudd met for a televised debate the headlines were not interested in any political issues but focused on the sensation of “The Worm”, the perception of the audience. The only exciting news presented about the election to date has been the almost daily release of opinion polls and the endless speculation about the size of the swing to the ALP.

Unfortunately much of the election commentary on the blogosphere has been similarly shallow, often just commenting on the media pulp but more and more  engaging in the esoteric art of psephology (the statistical study of elections).  

Independent psephylitics have been raised to a higher pedestal than political commentators.   The ABC’s Antony Green, the unchallenged Lord of the Psephs, has emerged as the most authoritative election analyst on the web and on the T.V. Journalists of the ilk of Laurie Oakes or Paul Bongiorno who have dominated past election coverage with their inside leaks, policy juxtapositions and eagerness to find or create political conflicts have been sidelined by Lord Antony’s speculative number crunching.

Politics has been reduced to the level of a cricket match. We, the people, sit in the grandstands cheering for one side or the other and watching the scoreboard.  However we will be quickly evicted if we wander on to the pitch. The thing that makes the 2007 election different to other cricket matches is that the ALP is content to bowl under-arm for the whole test. The government is swinging wildly trying to make contact with the ball but it rolls so slow and so low they cant do anything with it.

It is easy to be cynical about politicians detachment from the real world, about their minimal contact with their constituents who have no real power or voice in parliamentary business. Consent is given to these removed politicians once every three (or six) years by way of a cross in a box next to their name on a ballot paper which is the only political engagement required of a “responsible citizen”. It is similarly easy to be cynical about the expansive gulf between policy principles discussed in parliament and the real working (or not working) of government policies and public service delivery in the real lives of real people on the ground.

The only knowledge we have of the exercise of political power comes from a severely refracted, minimalised and biased mass media, not necessarily biased within the parliamentary spectrum but intensely biased in the construction of notions of society, citizenship and politics. The mass media, as our only common cultural experience as a nation defines our notions of “normal”, “reasonable” and “desirable”. The media is biased in favour of a growth/consumerist economy and sociology. Alternative perspectives of the world and the perspectives from on the ground in real peoples lives are simply not represented in the cultural parameters of mass media product.

So, through a combination of detached and alienating parliamentary political process and a one dimensional mass media, mainstream political discussion and activity is simply engagement in this clumsy illusion.

This mass adherence to illusion is a matter of consciousness. It is what we flawed humans do, we adopt or create illusions and then cling to them as if it was absolute reality.

The shallow, mechanical nature of the 2007 election is actively dumbing down the Australian population – and our consciousness, our understandings of what politics is and what is our role in it. We are more and more accepting our position as a passive market rather than an active body-politic.

Public opinion, as expressed through surveys, petitions, political campaigns and focus group research is not used as a basis for democratic policy development but as data that influences the advertising campaigns for undemocratic, unrepresentative policies devised by small elites detached from any public control or even input.

Politics and ideas have been reduced to conversation and “public opinion” (whatever that is). The concept of an idea metamorphosing into action and history is a notion that is not even considered by us ordinary people except within our privatised existence at work or within the fence lines of our home.

It does not matter if our politics is Green, revolutionary socialist, christian, feminist, libertarian or anything else if we engage in politics as simply conversation, ideas detached from existential reality and material history, then our politics is an illusion with no connection to the exercise of power. The adoption of alternative political illusions is not alternative to political illusion itself which, as I mentioned, is a matter of consciousness not ideology.

On matters of consciousness, Jiddu Krishnamerti had something to say on the matter…. “The core of the teachings”

Yesterday John Howard announced that he will, if re-elected, hold a referendum to amend the preamble of the Australian constitution to include a “statement of reconciliation” and to “recognise indigenous Australians”

The first thing to note about the proposed change to the constitution is that it is legally meaningless. The preamble of the constitution contains no specifics and is not a basis for any legal framework. It is just a – preamble. It cannot be referred to to make or amend laws as the rest of the constitution can.

The key legal issues of land rights, customary law and sovereignty will not be included in Howard’s (or copy-cat Rudd’s) “acknowledgement”.

Howard’s media comments today included recognising Aboriginal people as the first “inhabitants” of Australia, which even James Cook and Joseph Banks “acknowledged” on the Endeavor voyage. But like Cook and Banks, Howard is incapable of acknowledging indigenous sovereignty or customary law, not even considering the possibility of “prior” sovereignty.

John Howard says constitutional change would include indigenous Australia’s “special, but not separate place within a reconciled and indivisible nation.”

Since the 1967 referendum allowing Aboriginal people to be recorded in the census and empowering the federal government to make laws about Aboriginal people, white Australia has been prepared to accept Aboriginal people as equal citizens; equal to white people, equal subjects of the crown. The racial discrimination laws of the 1970s gave full rights of white Australia to people of all cultures, and outlawed the removal of these “equal” rights, but they did not acknowledge any indigenous rights such as Aboriginal land rights or Aboriginal customary law which are not rights enjoyed by all Australians. The anti discrimination laws are also Terra Nullius assimilation laws.

When Eddie Mabo proved to the High Court that his family owned their block of land since before Captain Cook the court accommodated this in terms of English common law. It refused to acknowledge any legal rights or interests inherent in Torres Strait customary land law and how it connects to all other areas of life. White land law gave white notion of land rights (native title) and black law remained invisible and repressed.

The Howard government has thwarted any possibility of land rights by wrecking native title law, has essentially outlawed customary law and has very recently opposed the U.N. declaration on indigenous rights. What is left for Howard to “recognise”?

Having smashed all legal acknowledgement of indigenous rights this constitutional amendment will be a celebration of the victory of white supremacy, an arrogant assertion that indigenous people now have nowhere to go except into the white mainstream. This is certainly not reconciliation.

As readers may know I am an occaisional writer for the greenish leaning “Dead Roo” blog. I have also begun writing for  “Leftrights”, a leftish leaning blog.

My first post on Leftwrites is entitled “The Eurocentrism of Australian Socialism”

Here is my most recent comment on that discussion……

The point of real connection with Aboriginal Australia is spirituality, not ideology. It is about the heart not the head.

Anyone who has had any cross-cultural experience will realise there are differences in values and logic. It is human spirituality that provides the unity and universalism.

Despite the ignorance and cultural blinkers of, for example the old CPA, it is the fact that they could feel the pain of Aboriginal people and were motivated to action by it. The power of the recent Mulrunji protests was because of the pain of the situation was obvious.

If we have some ideational equation that Aboriginal people fit into as a factor of logic then we have a spiritless, objectified conception that is formed by the ideational equation with no inherent reality. This is the basis of ALP and conservative politics, Aboriginal suffering is reduced to a question of politics – if there is a mass movement such as occured in 1988 or in the backlash to the Palm Island killing then the politicians respond to the mass movement and its potential or threat in terms of the electoral agenda. There is not a spiritual connection that feels the pain, therefore inadequate options become acceptible, as long as the political agendas are satisfied.

What is lacking in both left and right politics as a result of existing in a dysfunctional hierarchical society is spirituality. I am not talking of the illusory Jesus, Bhudda, Mohamad or any other charachter of literature which manifests also as just an ideological equation and institutional framework. I am talking about individual and collective psychological frameworks.

Western society operates with intelect (the head) as the primary motor of human activity. Our spirituality (the heart) is repressed and forced to conform to the constructions of our head. This results in individual mental ill health as well as the collective political directionlessness that our governments and institutions lead us in.

The alternative is to listen to our hearts, individual and collective, and allow it to express itself unrestricted by notions of logic and rationality. Once the perspective of our heart is clear we then use our head to be as clever as it can in facilitating the agendas of the heart. A reversal of consciousness polarity.

Western society has evolved from thousands of years of war, disruption, colonisation, feudalism and capitalism. This is the historical circumstance into which our generation was born. We can see the cultural damage that this has done to Aboriginal people over 200 years yet we have been suffering this same dispossession and degeneration for 10,000 years or more and we have become used to it, accepting it as the normal or baseline condition. In a Pavlovian or behaviourist framework we, as a society, have developed a habitual consciousness to conform to out own alienation and repression.

If socialists, or anyone else fails to transcend the historical consciousness of war, colonisation and dislocation then all they can do is get ever more elaborate ideational equations and models which remain as simply opinion and do not manifest in real terms in history.

If we percieve Aboriginal people as oppressed “just like us” then we are listening to ourselves and not to them and cannot feel/see/hear their pain or their prescriptions for what will relieve that pain. We objectify their spirit and their suffering and appropriate it as logical factors or notions in our own “thinking” – the contained domain of the head.

I have been promising for a while to write something about colonial perspectives and the environment movement. However I got caught up in critiques of socialism and the APEC demonstrations and didn’t get around to it. Then I realised that I have never put the following article on Paradigm Oz. It is an old one that has been published elsewhere but it is relevent to many of my recent posts here.   So here it is…..

Terra Nullius and Ecology

The Green movement has built a concept of wilderness, without consultation with Aboriginal people, we have generalised that concept, politicised it and it is now a significant issue on the Australian political landscape. Yet the way we have described the natural environment bears no resemblance to its ancient reality.Modern Australia began with the legal principle of Terra Nullius, meaning a land with no law or government, no sovereign population. The British declared this continent to be Terra Nullius after Captain Cook “discovered” it, which allowed the British Crown to claim possession of the land in accordance with international law. Terra Nullius of course is a lie and was found to be such by the Australian High Court when Eddie Mabo proved that his family had owned their block of land since before Captain Cook.. Anthropologists and Aboriginal people assert that there was, prior to Cook and up until today, a complex and sophisticated system of law, government, economy and language, all the defining points of a sovereign nation.

Despite the high courts findings, Terra Nullius remains as the legal foundation for the sovereignty of the crown in Australia which in turn is the foundation authority for the parliament, courts, police, military and every other migrant legal institution.

Modern Australian conservationism dovetails with the legal fiction of Terra Nullius. Both deny the reality that this country was and still is occupied by a large complex Aboriginal society.

The conservation values of the Australian Bush are usually articulated in terms of species of plants and animals, geological considerations and often last and least, cultural heritage; usually a description of the history of the European colony and, occasionally, a reference to native title holders or Aboriginal place names (with little understanding of the meaning of either).

The principles of ecology and biodiversity have made us aware of the devastating consequences to an eco system if a particular species of plant or animal is removed. For example if a particular bird becomes extinct, the seeds it used to carry do not propagate and the insects it used to eat swell in numbers. Insect plague and reduced propagation in turn affects an infinite number of other organisms, radically degrading the systems of the ecosystem. The balance of bio-diversity has become an accepted principle in green ideology, yet how much have we considered the devastating consequences of removing the human species from wilderness eco-systems? For thousands of years humans interacted with the bush which provided them with all of the resources of daily life.. Human society and the natural eco systems evolved as one. Today we protect places in national parks and nature reserves and pretend that we are preserving their ancient integrity. Yet the form of bush that is protected in the national parks of today, places without the human species, are a phenomenon of the last hundred years, younger than many Australian urban centres. The removal of human beings from the bush in the last two hundred years has turned our wilderness areas into overgrown untended gardens.

Bushfire management is one example that highlights our misunderstandings of the bush. Conservationists have often argued that preventative burning strategies threaten eco systems; and they are right. Many farmers and fire authorities say the only way to avoid super-fires is to burn forest litter, and they are right also. In the old days the landscape was scattered with sacred campfires burning twenty-four hours a day providing a wide range of functional and spiritual purposes. These fires, along with hunting and cleansing fires, were fuelled solely by forest litter, gently and gradually cleaning the bush in a way that does not disrupt the sacred ecosystems that sustained the fire makers.

It has been a long time between sacred fires in many of our protected areas and as such they have degenerated into dormant infernos awaiting ignition.

Environmentalism tends to subscribe to the notion that the natural habitat of the human species is towns and cities, this is our territory and we should stay out of the territories of the other species. Centuries old notions of the evolution of humanity identify a progression from living in the bush in a savage and unsophisticated consciousness, through the epoch of barbarism into civilised society. This Darwinian notion conforms to the idea that the habitat of the modern human is urbanity. The inherent contradiction of this is it is the city structure that is doing most damage to the habitats of all species, including human. As a product of feudalism, industrialisation and capitalism, cities have grown as ever extending cancers, totally destroying the ecosystems of Europe and almost completing that process in Australia. By the simple evolutionary imperative of survival of the species, industrial civilisation represents a failure, it is our greatest threat as a species. the development of urban civilisation has been a process of ignorantly shitting in our own nests for millennia. Compared to the hundreds of thousands of years or more of sustainable human society in the bush, urban society is a dysfunctional devolution and disintegration.

If we are serious about preserving the Australian environment and indeed the human species we must take direction from Aboriginal people, their traditions of are the only record of the true history and nature of the bush, including how humans manage it. Aboriginal culture itself is a working example of a social ecology, including law and the individual and collective consciousness’ that have been created by the interrelationship between human society and the wilderness.

Media release from the National Aboriginal Controlled Community Health Organisation – NACCHO

A TIME TO CELEBRATE?

Last night the UN General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous peoples around the world are celebrating but not in Australia said Mr Councillor, Chair of the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation which represents over 140 community controlled health services.

The vote in the 192-member assembly was 143 in favour, four against and 11 abstentions. The four against were Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US. Once again this government has shown its true racist colours.

By opposing this Declaration the Howard government has, once again, signalled to Aboriginal Australians that their rights aren’t worth defending, said Mr Councillor.

Not content with merely voting against the Declaration Mr Howard was also personally instrumental in turning the Canadian government against the policy following their election last year. Canada was a strong supporter of the Declaration until Mr Howard’s visit in May last year following which they became an outspoken critic very much in line with the Australian position.

This vote is the culmination of over 20 years of debate at the United Nations.

This is a non-binding declaration protecting the human, land and resources rights of the world’s 370 million indigenous people. It also recognises the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination and sets global human rights standards for them – in fact, rights of all individuals but as they relate to Indigenous Peoples.

The rights contained in the Declaration are not new. They are rights that have been codified by the UN member states in countless treaties and have existed for the entire life of the UN since the adoption of the universal declaration of Human Rights.

Clearly we can’t trust the Howard Coalition to make life fairer for Aboriginal peoples in Australia. It’s a sad day for the people I represent.

This government has never shown respect for our human rights. Practical Reconciliation has always been a way to avoid recognising human rights. This just confirms this once again said an angry and frustrated Mr Councillor.

For the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to prosper, for the 17 year life expectancy gap to be closed, we need a government that shows respect for our human rights. How can we trust the government to do the right thing if they will not recognise us as equals?

Partnerships are built on trust. Once again Howard and his government have betrayed our trust by denying our basic human rights.

Background:
Read the Declaration in its full version on the Office of the United National High Commissioner for Human Rights website:

Content of the Declaration

The Declaration is a long and complex document with a preamble and 45 articles, divided into nine sections.
 
The text recognises the wide range of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous peoples. Among these are the right to unrestricted self-determination, an inalienable collective right to the ownership, use and control of lands, territories and other natural resources, their rights in terms of maintaining and developing their own political, religious, cultural and educational institutions along with the protection of their cultural and intellectual property. The Declaration highlights the requirement for prior and informed consultation, participation and consent in activities of any kind that impact on indigenous peoples, their property or territories. It also establishes the requirement for fair and adequate compensation for violation of the rights recognised in the Declaration and establishes guarantees against ethnocide and genocide.
 
The Declaration also provides for fair and mutually acceptable procedures to resolve conflicts between indigenous peoples and States, including procedures such as negotiations, mediation, arbitration, national courts and international and regional mechanisms for denouncing and examining human rights violations.
 

Huey P. Newton – interview from jail.                                                                 Thanks to Whenua, Fenua, Enua, Vanua  for drawing my attention to this video.

The Late Dr. Huey P. Newton was one of the leaders of the Black Panther movement in the 1960s and 70s.

There are many differences between the situation African American people and Australian Aboriginal people. The most basic difference being the Africans were stolen from their homelands and transported to another continent. Aborigines have been dispossessed within their own country the same as Native Americans.

However Newton’s perspective on the colonisation of African American communities and the Vietnam war is very relevant to the situation in Aboriginal Australia and Iraq today.

Newton identifies common symptoms of war and colonisation in America and Vietnam.   I would like to identify a common major causal factor in Australia and Iraq. 

There can be no doubt now that the invasion of Iraq was inspired by the profits of global energy corporations lead and facilitated by the Haliburton chain of corporations including the CIA and US military connected engineering company Bechtel.

In Australia Bechtel is involved in the countries biggest energy and water infrastructure developments, specialising in oil, gas, water and industrial waste pipelines.  Bechtels oil pipelines are what the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all about.  Bechtel is also the worlds leader in construction of nuclear power stations and nuclear waste facilities.

The global mining and energy companies rely equally on the suppression of Aboriginal, Iraqi and Afghani people to maintain their profits and growth economies.

The war in Iraq is not an isolated war, it is just one tentacle of the global beast which is alive and well in Australia every bit as much as Iraq.

We can obsess with sensational headlines about foreign wars “out there” and build our peace movement as a knee jerk reaction to these circumstances of other people in other places.  If we do, we  create political movements that are nothing more  than detatched whingers comentating on matters that we have no direct influence over.  

If we realise that the causes and symptoms of war, imperialism and colonisation are right here, right now in Australia then we can create a response that might have some relevance to the victims of the war as well as confronting and pressuring the beast directly where it  manifests in our own lives and communities.

The blogosphere is now full of self congratulatory reports of the great success of the  Sydney anti-APEC protests.

I am not impressed though.

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was camped at Victoria Park for the duration of APEC but there appears to have been no connection to it or to Aboriginal Australia in any of the protest propaganda before the event or the glowing reviews since the event.

Here are some of my comments around the blogosphere…..

On Leftwrites

“I am astounded that in the context of Howard’s NT emergency and the existence of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Victoria Park the protest movement ignored Aboriginal Australia and Aboriginal issues.

I have asked around other places too, and there seems to have been no connection.

This was a perfect opportunity to embarrass both the govt. and the ALP internationally for their racist and genocidal policies.

It was not that long ago that Chris Hurley’s aquittal for the death of Mulrunji was big international news.

Yet the protest seems to have stayed within the shell of colonial Australia – identifying as part of the global anti-bush movement while remaining blind to the real war, oppression and resistance that is occuring right here in Australia.

There has been a great outrage at the denial of civil liberties to white middle class people but the daily police harrasment and persecution that occurs in Aboriginal communities or to Aboriginal individuals in the streets of any town, plus the constant fear and threat of death in custody, does not seem to be a key issue for the proponents of civil liberty.

It is not just Iraq that has been subjected to war and foreign domination. This is the history of our country too – and none of it has been rectified, resulting in the massive problems today in Aboriginal society.

If the protests were just about the morality and sensibilities of white society then they stand alongside Bush and Howard as symbols of global white supremacy, imperialism and colonisation.”

On Richard Neville’s blog

“There is nothing new about the brutality of the police at this demonstration.

Aboriginal communities around Australia experience the jackboot as everyday policing.

The above article speaks of a “war against history”. There is a war against the history of this country also, a denial and a sugar coating that conforms to the great Australian mode of white superiority, or at least a Terra Nullius consciousness that is blind to Aboriginal people, their history and their contemporary circumstance.

It seems to me that the protests also were a part of this Terra Nullius perspective.

At present the government has waged war against Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory. In their term of government they have wound back all of the Aboriginal gains of the 20th century including land rights, an independent representative body, the reccomendations of the royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and even the Racial Discrimination Act.

APEC was a prime opportunity to put these issues on the world stage, especially since the ALP has not raised even a whimper in opposition to Howard’s Aboriginal agenda.

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was camped in Victoria Park, also protesting against APEC but the protests seem to have failed to connect with them or incorporated any of their demands into the protest.

It is not surprising when the civil liberties of middle class white folk are denied there is a huge fuss kicked up.

But the daily repression of Aboriginal communities including racist and thuggish policing manages to stay under the radar of even the protest movement.”

And on Left Click

“So I take it that there was no link up with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy?

I suggest this is because the protest movement shares the same colonial consciousness as mainstream Australia. Aboriginal people, actions and demands are ignored unless they have some relevance to our own campaigns and issues.

We reduce Aboriginal struggle to meaningless dot points on our own propaganda – although it seems even this didn’t happen at the APEC protest. Please correct me if I am wrong but I saw nothing in the many statements about the protest.

Some communiques refered to inspiring quotes from Aboriginal spokespeople to rev up a sense of militancy, but nobody decided to include Aboriginal demands, let alone connect to the Tent Embassy protesting at the same time and same place.

This is a crucial time in Australian history as we face the possiblity of finally getting rid of Howard. He and Brough have picked a fight about protecting Aboriginal children, in so doing he is provoking the worst of Australian racism in the hope that such negativity will get him over the line just as children overboard did.

But children overboard had a massive reaction – a whole refugee rights movement developed with protests across the country continuing until the present.

But who has built any similar campaign in support of Aboriginal Australia? The ALP has supported the intervention and “the left” or the militant protest movement has done little else than pass polite commentary on the matter in their other campaigns.

As long as Aboriginal demands, political organisation and ways of doing things are ignored by our protest movements, we remain as just another branch of a diverse invader colonial matrix.

We may have our arguments with other sectors of the invader society such as Howard but we are all united in our blindness to Aboriginality and our own responsibilities and opportunities in this Aboriginal country.

It is time to transcend tokenism and white consciousness and join the longest running resistance movement in Australia’s history.”