It is time to give a shout out to a member of the Australian blogging community.
Again I have chosen a blog that is sometimes difficult to read, next month I will direct you towards something a bit lighter.
Australia is a very racist country and anyone that says it isn’t, needs to come down from their ivory tower and have a stint in the real world.
I grew up in a rough and ready working class suburb full of immigrants. My father was casually racist and his language was the language of his peers. I was taught to be wary of wogs, wops, krauts and coons. As kids we were disdainful of those that were different, we were taught British history in school and were confident of our superiority.
Of course when I grew up I moved out of my small suburb and ventured into the wider world. I shed my racist skin and discovered that people were just people.
The media and the political spin doctors would have you believe that Australia has also shed her racist skin, that we are a tolerant country dedicated to the ideal of a fair go and mateship. That she truly will be right and that it is all apples mate. Scratch the surface of working class Australia and you will find men like my father, all too ready to believe that all Arabs are terrorists, that boat people are queue jumpers intent upon stealing their jobs and that the only good Abo is a dead Abo.
Mark “Backchos” Mullins is a human rights advocate and member of the Stolen generation and using his blog Blak and Black, Mark will tell you a story of a different Australia. He writes of an Australia that we try to pretend isn’t real and some people will find it easier to attack Mark and attempt to discredit him rather than hold a mirror to their own faces and see the racist reflected there.
The three posts that I recommend you start your reading with are
A day in the life of an Aborigine,
Men are respectable only as they respect
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We were taught that the Aborigine was simply less evolved than “we” were in our primary school. So… as I grew up and got my own ideas, evolution certainly isn’t one of them.
I think we are all racially “displaced Edenic peoples” and try to put that on my forms whenever possible. 🙂
But really… in practical day-to-day living, we are not all alike, are we? This blog shows things from the other side… and it isn’t always pretty.
A displaced Edenic. I love it.
Kim thank you very much for highlighting my blog on your site, your support is very much appreciated. Cheers Mark
look forward to branching out in the blog world from the safety of my garden and our kitchen….rage against intolerance Kim!
Big thumbs up.
I grew up in a town that still has an aboriginal mission and used to have an immigration camp and is now starting to take refugees.
It’s such a culture of hate. The whites hate the blacks, the blacks hate the whites, the long time locals hate the wogs, the catholics hate the freakin protestants, the poor hate the rich, the public school kids hate the boarding school kids…. it just goes on and on. Makes you wish you could just slap them all the head and wake them all up. We shouldn’t be scared of people who are different in appearance or background or whatever other reasons we discriminate for. People are people and we should get to know each other. One of the things I love about blogs is being able to walk in other people’s shoes. Very powerful and moving stuff in that one. Thanks.
Kim, I have talked to you about this before & I thank you again for highlighting this important issue. Racism was apparent to me within weeks of arriving in Australia, but the gobsmacking part was that people denied its existence! I was told proudly that ever since Aboriginal people were made CITIZENS, and shortly after that the White Australia policy ended–that racism had gone away forever. The idea that generations of prejudice could be erased overnight was unbelievable.
We read a book in book club, set in the American South in the 1920s, in which a man of colour was lynched as “mob justice” for an alleged crime. Comments were along the lines of “Thank goodness that never happened here.” I brought up the fact that Aboriginal people had been shot FOR SPORT in Australia and was told that all of that “was over ages ago.” Same thing when we read A Town Like Alice.
PLEASE keep talking about this…please.