TITHONUS' DIARY!!
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history ain't changed Ok, I'm writing in reference to this by Miranda Devine and this by caraxus. - Caraxus, you ignorant, self-righteous piece of garbage. Fuck you. - . . . . . . . . . . . . . - Kidding! Sorry, I would have kept the joke up for longer but I was scared you'd really go for it. - Seriously though, I agree and disagree. I should probably start by saying, I am part-Aboriginal, but you'd never know it to look at me. My uncle and grandfather on my mother's side both look distinctly and inescapably Koori, but I think my dad just had much more dominant genes or something, because I've got blue eyes and pale skin and, as any diarylanders who've met me will attest, you'd never in a million years think I was an indigenous Australian. - Anyway, if you've read Caraxus' thing on this then you'll basically have the idea that we have all these wonderful hardworking cops and that the boongs are just out to make trouble because they're ungrateful good-for-nothings who aren't interested in improving themselves. Well, he didn't put it quite like that. Anyway, I felt I just had to put up an answering point, which is something like this: if you kill a member of a cultural group, then the group may suffer but in the long run, they carry on. People die and are born anyway; sufferring is just part of life. If you uproot a group of people from their homeland and they are forced to look for other places to live, then again, much sufferring will ensue, and perhaps some changes to their cultural system will be necessary to accommodate the upheaval. But it's survivable; culture resides within us, and so long as we move in groups, and we can carry some of our memories with us as stories, or in books, then from the perspecive of the cultural group the upheaval is only temporary. - What happens, though, to people who are members of a cultural group that has been radically detatched from its cultural heritage? It's probably not a question you can answer by referring to your own experience. But the historical answer is, I think, that there are two general results. If you are an individual or a small group of people, then you forget the old culture and you assimilate to the local culture of wherever you happen to have ended up. It's a sad thing in some ways but it's not such a tragedy in the long run, at least for the individual. But if you are a larger cultural group than that... well, it's complicated. But it's the basis of an experience that is common to black people in the US, to American Indians, the Inuit, the Aleutians, the Australian Aborigines... you basically live forever after in hell. I'm deadly serious about this. Because you basically have enough of a shared cultural heritage to make you clearly "different" from the dominant culture that you exist alongside. And there are enough other people like you around that you will naturally identify with those people, regard them as being your "us" and the dominant culture as being "them". But at the same time, you've lost all of the rich cultural heritage that would normally make your membership in that group a meaningful thing. The Koori languages are virtually all gone. The religion, the rituals, the stories and traditions... there's a few here and there in isolated places, but effectively for the people living in The Block, all that stuff is gone. What's left to fill the gap is basically just a huge fucking well of resentment for the people who took all that away from you. But resentment can't act as the basis of a living culture. See the dilemma? You're stuck between an identity that's no longer really viable because the guts of it have been ripped out, and another identity that is based on "assimilating" with a bunch of fuckers who you regard as being responsible for the death of your culture. If those people would even take you, which, frankly, most of the time most of white society wouldn't. It's not easy to assimilate when a huge majority of Australian society is extremely bloody racist. - See, I really don't want to define this in terms of good and bad people and right or wrong sides. I believe in a common humanity which means that I believe that if I were made to live in the kind of circumstances in which TJ Hickey or any of those Aboriginal kids lived, then I would be doing the same kind of stuff they are doing... and if I were made to live the kind of life that the white racists of Australia have lived then doubtless I would be a white racist too. I'm not looking for a moral high ground that I can claim for myself here... but... well, without mercy, without compassion for each other, we're all doomed to live in hell. - I think there's something more I need to say here that's unsaid, but, well, I guess if it's important enough I'll think of it later. - "The world looks just the same And history ain't changed 'Cause the banners, they are flown in the next war" - The Who |
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