BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY Racism in Australia
Australia today is a multiethnic society and the product of more than two centuries of immigration. Laws forbid racial and other forms of discrimination and protect freedom of religion. Demographic analysis indicates a high level of inter-ethnic marriage: according to the 2006 Australian Census, a majority of Indigenous Australians partnered with non-indigenous Australians, and a majority of third generation Australians of non-English-speaking background had partnered with persons of different ethnic origin (the majority partnered with persons of Australian or Anglo-Celtic background, which constitutes the majority ethnic grouping in Australia). In 2009, about 25.6 per cent of the estimated resident population of Australia comprised those born overseas.[2] Nevertheless, there have been both historical and contemporary incidents of racism in Australia.
For around 50,000 years, prior to the arrival of British Settlers in 1788, Australia was occupied exclusively by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Post-1788, the British Empire applied the European legal precept of Terra Nullius to the Australian continent and imposed political and economic control of it in the lead up to the 1901 foundation of the independent Commonwealth of Australia. Despite theoretical notions of equality contained within British law, Government policy and public opinion in colonial times and the early decades of Federation very often treated Aboriginal people as inferior.
Initially, indigenous Australians were in most states deprived of the rights of full citizenship of the new nation on grounds of their race and restrictive immigration laws were introduced to preference "white" European immigrants to Australia. Discriminatory laws against indigenous people and multiethnic immigration were dismantled in the early decades of the Post War period. A 1967 Referendum regarding Aboriginal rights was carried with over 90% approval by the electorate. Legal reforms have re-established Aboriginal Land Rights under Australian law and in the early 21st century, indigenous Australians accounted for around 2.5% of the population, owning outright around 20% of all land. Intense focus on the impact of historical policies like the removal of mixed ethnicity Aboriginal children from their Aboriginal parent resulted in a bipartisan Parliamentary apology to Aborigines carried in 2008. Aboriginal health indicators remain lower than other ethnic groups within Australia and again are the subject of political debate.
Policies of multiculturalism were pursued in the post-war period and first Eastern and Southern European, then Asian and African immigration increased dramatically and Australia became one of the most ethnically diverse nations on earth. Legislation including the Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the Commonwealth Racial Hatred Act (1995) and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Act (1986) outlaw racial discrimination in the public sphere in Australia. In recent decades, anti-immigration political parties like the One Nation Party have received extensive media coverage, but only marginal electoral support and successive governments have maintained large, multi ethnic programs of immigration. As in other Western nations, tensions in the aftermath of events like the September 11 attacks and Bali Bombing by radical Islamists contributed to strained ethnic relations in some Australian communities.
Indigenous Australians
Indigenous Australians comprise two groups: Aboriginal Australians, who occupy mainland Australia and Tasmania, and Torres Strait Islanders, who occupy the Torres Strait near New Guinea. The small population of Tasmanian Aborigines suffered a rapid collapse following the establishment of Britain's Van Diemens Land Colony in the early 19th century, and their remaining descendants are all of mixed Aboriginal-Settler ethnic heritage. In the past, indigenous Australians were subject to racist government policy and community attitudes. Despite massive shifts in community attitudes, legal reforms and billions of dollars in financial support, many indigenous people continue to suffer from the consequences of the British colonial period and early decades of the 20th century.
At the time of first European contact, it has been estimated the absolute minimum pre-1788 population was 315,000, while recent archaeological finds suggest (unlikely) that a population of 750,000 could have been sustained. The 2011 Australian Census measured
the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population at 517,200 or 2.5% of the total Australian population. In 2009, around 20% of the Australian land-mass (including Tasmania and offshore islands) was owned by Aboriginal people.
Historical relations
The British navigator James Cook claimed the east coast of Australia for Britain in 1770, without conducting negotiations with the existing inhabitants. The first Governor of New South Wales,Arthur Phillip, was instructed explicitly to establish friendship and good relations with the Aborigines and interactions between the early settlers and the indigenous people varied considerably throughout the colonial period — from the mutual curiosity displayed by the early interlocutors Bennelong and Bungaree of Sydney, to the outright hostility of Pemulwuy and Windradyne of the Sydney region, and Yagan around Perth. Bennelong and a companion became the first Australians to sail to Europe, where they met King George III. Bungaree accompanied the explorer Matthew Flinders on the first circumnavigation of Australia. Pemulwuy was accused of the first killing of a white settler in 1790, and Windradyne resisted early British expansion beyond the Blue Mountains.
With the establishment of European settlement and their subsequent expansion, the indigenous populations were progressively forced into neighbouring territories or subsumed into the new political entities of the Australian colonies. Violent conflict between Indigenous Australians and European settlers, described by some historians as frontier wars, arose out of this expansion: by the late 19th century, many populations had been forcibly relocated to land reserves and missions. The nature of many of these land reserves and missions enabled disease to spread quickly and many were closed as resident numbers dropped, with the remaining residents being moved to other land reserves and missions into the 20th century.
According to the historian Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: "In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse, smallpox, measles,influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation".
From the 1830s, colonial governments established the now controversial offices of the Protector of Aborigines in an effort to avoid mistreatment of Indigenous peoples and conduct government policy towards them. Christian churches sought to convert Aborigines, and were often used by government to carry out welfare and assimilation policies. Colonial churchmen such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop, John Bede Polding, strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity and prominent Aboriginal activist Noel Pearson, who was raised at a Lutheran mission in Cape York, has written that Christian missions throughout Australia's colonial history "provided a haven from the hell of life on the Australian frontier while at the same time facilitating colonisation".
The Caledon Bay crisis of 1932-34 saw one of the last incidents of violent interaction on the "frontier" of indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, which began when the spearing of Japanese poachers who had been molesting Yolngu women was followed by the killing of a policeman. As the crisis unfolded, national opinion swung behind the Aboriginal people involved, and the first appeal on behalf of an Indigenous Australian to the High Court of Australia was launched. Following the crisis, the anthropologist Donald Thompson was dispatched by the government to live among the Yolngu. Elsewhere around this time, activists like Sir Douglas Nicholls were commencing their campaigns for Aboriginal rights within the established Australian political system and the age of frontier conflict closed.
Frontier encounters in Australia were not universally negative. Positive accounts of Aboriginal customs and encounters are also recorded in the journals of early European explorers, who often relied on Aboriginal guides and assistance: Charles Sturt employed Aboriginal envoys to explore the Murray-Darling; the lone survivor of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition, John King, was helped by local Aborigines, and the famous tracker Jackey Jackey accompanied his ill-fated friend Edmund Kennedy to Cape York. Respectful studies were conducted by such as Walter Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen in their renowned anthropological study The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899); and by Donald Thompson of Arnhem Land (c.1935-1943). In inland Australia, the skills of Aboriginal stockmen became highly regarded and in the 20th century, Aboriginal stockmen like Vincent Lingiari became national figures in their campaigns for better pay and conditions.
Stolen Generations
The Stolen Generations are children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by Australian Federal and State agencies and church missions, under acts of parliament. The removals occurred in the period between approximately 1869 and 1969, although in some places children were still being taken in the 1970s. Historians such as Henry Reynolds have argued that this constitutes genocide.
In April 2000, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Herron, presented a report in the Australian Parliament that questioned whether there had been a "Stolen Generation", arguing that only 10% of Aboriginal children had been removed, and they did not constitute an entire "generation". The report received media attention and there were protests.
On 13 February 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented an apology for the "Stolen Generation" as a motion in Parliament.
Recent decades
The White Australia policy was dismantled in the decades following the Second World War and legal reforms undertaken to address indigenous disadvantage and establish Land Rights and Native Title.
1938 was an important year for indigenous rights campaigning. With the participation of leading indigenous activists like Douglas Nicholls, the Australian Aborigines Advancement League organised a protest "Day of Mourning" to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of theFirst Fleet of British in Australia and launched its campaign for full citizenship rights for all Aborigines. In the 1940s, the conditions of life for Aborigines could be very poor. A permit system restricted movement and work opportunities for many Aboriginal people. In the 1950s, the government pursued a policy of "assimilation" which sought to achieve full citizenship rights for Aborigines but also wanted them to adopt the mode of life of other Australians (which very often was assumed to require suppression of cultural identity).
In 1962, Robert Menzies' Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that all Indigenous people should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (prior to this, indigenous people in Queensland, Western Australia and "wards of the state" in the Northern Territory had been excluded from voting unless they were ex-servicemen). In 1965, Queensland became the last state to confer state voting rights on Aboriginal people. The 1967 referendum was held and overwhelmingly approved to amend the Constitution, removing discriminatory references and giving the national parliament the power to legislate specifically for Indigenous Australians.
In the mid 1960s, one of the earliest Aboriginal graduates from the University of Sydney, Charles Perkins, helped organise freedom rides into parts of Australia to expose discrimination and inequality. In 1966, the Gurindji people of Wave Hill station (owned by the Vestey Group) commenced strike action led by Vincent Lingiari in a quest for equal pay and recognition of land rights.
Indigenous Australians began to take up representation in Australian parliaments during the 1970s. In 1971 Neville Bonner of the Liberal Party was appointed by the Queensland Parliament to replace a retiring senator, becoming the first Aborigine in Federal Parliament. In 1976, Sir Douglas Nicholls was appointed Governor of South Australia, becoming the first Aborigine to hold vice-regal office in Australia. Aden Ridgeway of the Australian Democrats served as a senator during the 1990s, but no indigenous person was elected to the House of Representatives, until West Australian Liberal Ken Wyatt, in August 2010.
In 1992, the High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the Mabo Case, declaring the previous legal concept of terra nullius to be invalid. That same year, Prime Minister Paul Keating said in his Redfern Park Speech that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: "We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practiced discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice". In 1999 Parliament passed a Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister John Howard and Aboriginal Senator Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most "blemished chapter in our international history".
From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia - with works including Alan Moorehead's The Fatal Impact (1966) and Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history Triumph of the Nomads (1975). In 1968, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner described the lack of historical accounts of relations between Europeans and Aborigines as "the great Australian silence". Historian Henry Reynolds argues that there was a "historical neglect" of the Aborigines by historians until the late 1960s. Early commentaries often tended to describe Aborigines as doomed to extinction following the arrival of Europeans. William West garth’s 1864 book on the colony of Victoria observed; "the case of the Aborigines of Victoria confirms …it would seem almost an immutable law of nature that such inferior dark races should disappear."
A great many indigenous Australians have been prominent in sport and the arts in recent decades and Aboriginal art styles appreciated and embraced by the wider population. Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1995) was a famous Aboriginal poet, writer and rights activist credited with publishing the first Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964). Sally Morgan's novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of bringing indigenous stories to wider notice. 1976's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith directed by Fred Schepisi was an award winning historical drama from a book by Thomas Keneally about the tragic story of an Aboriginal Bushranger. In 1973 Arthur Beetson became the first Indigenous Australian to captain his country in any sport when he first led the Australian National Rugby League team, the Kangaroos. Olympic gold medalist Cathy Freeman lit the Olympic flame at the 2000 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Sydney.
In response to the Little Children are Sacred Report the Howard Government launched the Northern Territory National Emergency Response in 2007, to reduce child molestation, domestic violence and substance abuse in remote indigenous communities. It was continued under the Rudd and Gillard Labor Governments. James Anaya, a United Nations Special Rapporteur, alleged in 2010 that the policy was "racially discriminating" because measures like banning alcohol and pornography and quarantining a percentage of welfare income for the purchase of essential goods represented a limitation on "individual autonomy". The Rudd Government, the Opposition and a number of prominent indigenous activists condemned Anaya's allegation. Central Australian Aboriginal leader Bess Price criticised the UN for not sending a female repporteur and said that Abaya had been led around by opponents of the intervention to meet with opponents of the intervention.
In the early 21st century, much of indigenous Australia continued to suffer lower standards of health and education than non-indigenous Australia. In 2007, the Close the Gap campaign was launched by Olympic champions Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe with the aim of achieving Indigenous health equality within 25 years.
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