Our abuse of the Aboriginal race

Most of us will have had some experience of abuse in our life.  A bully at school, a belittling parent, a date that goes that bit too far.  Sometimes the most trivial event can give us that cold feeling in the stomach for years afterwards when we recall the incident.  And there are some of us who have suffered years of physical, mental or sexual abuse.  Often imposed by an authority figure – priests, teachers, parents.  I think we can all understand that it can take years to recover from such abuse.  Perhaps more difficult to understand is that sometimes recovery simply never occurs and sometimes the abusers abuse themselves and abuse people whom they now have authority over.  Often this abuse within a family can go on repeating itself for generation after generation.

Now imagine, if you can, that you live in a whole society that has been abused for generations.  Where your recent ancestors have been murdered, raped, enslaved and belittled to the extent that their government - the ultimate authority figure – could not even be bothered to count them in its census, let alone allow them the right to vote.  And where that government continued to deny responsibility for decade after decade, reinforcing the guilt of the abused. 

For the founders of our country that is no imaginary exercise.  It is the day to day life of so many of our Aboriginal community. And what do we do?  Do we offer them the love, encouragement and protection that is so important when helping other abused individuals?  Do we make them feel wanted?  Valued?  Needed?  Do we give them time to heal themselves?

Or do we blame them?  Tell them to ‘pull themselves together’?  Punish them?  Lose patience with them?  And when all else fails, do we just throw money at them, as though buying an abused child a new toy will assuage their guilt and heal their pain. 

Our treatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is one of the most shameful episodes in the world over the last century.   There have certainly been events that have caused greater death and suffering on a race - the holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the killing fields of Cambodia – but what makes the treatment of the founders of our county so bad is that it has been carried out, not by some despotic dictator or ruthless regime, but by a democratically elected government in a developed country.

For the Jews, the Tutsis and the victims of Pol Pot there was a clear cause of their suffering.  A person to point to.  A regime to blame.  And a world that brought their abusers to justice.  Even with that, many of them still live the life of the guilty and a life of shame.  Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have little of that.  There has been no global process to impose justice on their abusers, no trials, no one who accepts responsibility.  So they are left with just more reinforcement of their guilt and their shame.

Given their history and suffering it is surprising how many of them have lifted themselves out of the cycle of abuse, but it will take far more from our government and far more from those of us who live the idyllic Australian life for the majority to begin to start healing themselves.