For a couple of minutes I was trying to nestle in my snug double-decker bed, when she came in. ‘No, yet another girl imposing herself,’ I thought. Another where-are-you-from what-do-you-do conversation. And then she started talking. ‘Studying?’ ‘Well, already finished – racial politics. I was always interested in the Aborigines.’ ‘Working?’ ‘No, just left my job.’ ‘What did you do there?’ ‘Advertising, media.’ ‘But it has nothing to do with fighting racism!’ ‘Yes, that’s why I quitted, it wasn’t simply my piece of cake.’ You never know whom you are going to meet in a youth hostel abroad.
I always wondered what are all anti-racism or peace activists driven by. How come they believe in what they are doing and find the inner strength to do it? Origins? Not in the case of Kate. Although she might have had some Aboriginal roots, they have never been proven. Idealism? No, not really. She was rather realistic in this matter. Identity?
I asked her a question, ‘How would you define an Australian?’ There was a long pause. She answered with an inquiring tone. I cannot even recall what the answer exactly was. However, it obviously seemed that incessant return to the life of great-grandfathers, to the history of Australia was a focal point in the lives of the Australians. At least this was what Kate did. ‘Aborigines are not my ancestors. But when I was very young, and my mother wanted to buy me a book, I stubbornly asked for one about racism. This Australian issue was always somewhere deep inside me.’
Aborigines had inhabited Australian mainland before the colonizers came for more than 40 000 years. After occasional visits of European merchants and fishermen, the British came there for good in the end of the 18th century. For almost hundred years Australia became the final destination of British convicts, which were sent there by the British Crown. Needless to say, Australia was a place of brutal colonial practice. The diseases brought by the settlers, as well as land appropriation and violence reduced the Aboriginal population to 80% of the original quota amounting to at least 315 000 people.
As Kate underlined a couple of times: ‘Foucault said “Knowledge is power” and this is exactly what has happened in Australia.’ The issue of Aboriginal peoples in Australia is completely unsolvable right now, according to Kate. There are no obvious answers, ‘you can check out what happened in Redfern in Sidney. Read about T.J. Hickey, so you will know what I mean,’ she says.
It all began on Saturday, 15 February 2004, when an Aboriginal youth T.J. Hickey riding a bicycle fell off and impaled himself on a fence. Many witnesses claimed that he had been chased by the police. The Aborigines in the Redfern ghetto didn’t need much more to react. After dark on Sunday they went out on the streets and started rioting. The police managed to put it down the next day only after 40 policemen got injured.
The reaction of Australian government was firm. Prime Minister Bob Carr ordered three separate inquiries. However, he expressed it openly, ‘hot weather and alcohol consumption were among the primary cause,’ he said. Carr also called the rioters criminals and appealed for their immediate arrest.
‘Do you know who introduced alcohol to Aborigines?’ Kate asked me. ‘Of course the colonisers! They gave it to them to numb their minds and facilitate the conquest. Now they are taking the heavy toll.’
The question is how far should the politicians interfere in the Aboriginal communities. The colonizers interfered once and now they can witness the consequences. Will the Aborigines ever get assimilated? Will they want to? Why should they have a craving to identify with a country which has “are you Aboriginal?” question in every identity form?
As famous Aboriginal Australian boxer and rugby player Anthony Mundine said in an interview for ABC television, ‘we live in a racist society and it’s been ingrained in the system ever since the government started here in this nation. So the government, that’s why my people are where they’re at. You know the highest imprisonment rate per capita, the worst health rate, worst housing, highest mortality rate, you know and the list just goes on and on and we’re on the brink. As people we’re on the brink of that triangle, we’re down the bottom and that’s where they want us, that’s why I talk the way I talk, that’s why I hold myself up the way I hold myself up and that’s why I walk the way I walk because that’s the only young black Muslim successful self-made millionaire doing his thing and that’s what they don’t like.’
This is only the tip of an iceberg. In a country where Australian almost never means Aboriginal, where the national identity is still to be found, the solutions are still absent. Having anti-racism classes in school curricula and university programmes only concerned with the subject (which would be impossible for example in Poland), does not necessarily mean finding them. Even Kate after a couple of years spent only at exploring this matter, cannot give simple answers. However, as the saying goes, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Europe should be holding a bird in their hands as Australians do rather than searching for some in the bush.
Author: Hanna Siemaszko
