Republican News · Thursday 17 January 2002

White and Off-White

Aborigines and Travellers: A shared legacy of discrimination

BY ELLA O'DWYER

I spent Christmas in Australia courtesy of Murdoch University Perth, the venue for a recent conference on Race and Prejudice. As with most excursions abroad, the overall experience told me more than anything I could bring to the actual event.

On Christmas Eve I was at an outdoor café in Freemantle, sipping coffee and smoking a fag. It was a savagely hot day. A group of evidently disadvantaged locals were sitting under a tree at the far side of the road. These are the Njunga people, whom whites generically call Aboriginals. One of the men came over and asked for a cigarette. No sooner had he lit up than the proprietor ran out and hunted him away. The episode reminded me of the way the housewife in rural Ireland might 'shoo' away a bunch of hungry dogs from the kitchen door; the involuntary deliverance of relentless pests that, like the poor or the weather, will always be with us.

Apartheid originated in Australia, an Aboriginal professor assured me, affirming its enduring reality when it comes to the treatment of indigenous Australians. In fact, as illustrated in the café incident, Apartheid there is unsystematic, being so ingrained in Australian society that system and policy are unnecessary. This is deep-set prejudice in a country that is otherwise notable for its relative classlessness and its considerable history of multiculturalism. White Australia is expert at assimilation in this respect and assimilation has served the colonising purpose behind the history of the continent as we meet it today.

The indigenous Australian talks of The Stolen Generation. This refers to a time when Aboriginal babies with anything like the white man's appearance; half black - even off-white complexion were taken from their parents and fostered/given to white people. The tactic of assimilation short-circuited the notorious strategy of Apartheid; Apartheid by proxy - and it worked. The colonisers absorbed the indigenous culture and way of life at every turn.

The black person in Australia has been prey to discrimination at all levels. English and Irish convicts shot Aborigines in Tasmania on the orders of their guards, while the 'sporting' white man used them for target practice.

The question of Race and Prejudice is a big one in Australia and one that is being challenged internally at many levels from the political to the academic. At the opening of the conference, the Premier of West Australia, Geoff Gallop, announced the imminent introduction of anti-racist legislation in his part of the continent. Australian premier John Howard, however, has not brought himself to apologise for the tragedy visited on the Aboriginal people by colonialism, saying that this generation could not accept responsibility for what was done in the past. Who, after all, accepts responsibility for the kind of prejudice that sees humans treated like dogs, simply because they're black?

The total demolition of the Aboriginal way of life represents colonisation at its worst. From their status as proud owners of a continent, the indigenous Australian now numbers one in five of the population. They are too scattered and disparate to organise the kind of resistance with which we are accustomed in this part of the world. The Aboriginal professor who opened the conference stressed education as the only hope. "The whites are ignorant," he said, "and we must educate them."

Some things about Australia reminded me of Ireland, not least the sunny weather. The disadvantaged Aborigines lying under a tree reminded me the Travelling people in this country. I wonder in what decade or century will it occur to us that the Travellers too deserve - maybe a conference, an apology, or even a statement of regret for the discrimination that has dogged them for generations.

Falling short of an apology, Australia's Howard managed an expression of personal sorrow for the suffering of the Aborigines.

Travellers aren't black but they don't share the stature of the white man in Ireland. The issue isn't black and white. In good old Irish terms, it's more a matter of the orange, green, white and off-white.