“Why do our white compatriots so easily forgive the British for not just stealing the Aboriginals’ homeland but then trying to wipe them out,” asks The Gadfly columnist ROBERT MACKLIN.
I have never met an Aboriginal of any age and either sex whom I didn’t like… immediately and thereafter.
The first bloke I met was a boundary rider on a far northwest Queensland sheep station where I was a rouseabout in the property’s shearing team.
My mate, the team’s wool presser, Alan Blunt and I were hunting plain turkeys in his VW when we crossed paths on the boundary line.
We stopped and after a while he climbed down from his old mare, and we boiled the billy. Turned out he’d had a small part in Jedda the movie and we had a good old yarn. I met his family later and his father showed me how to throw a killing boomerang, the kind that flies flat, doesn’t come back, but can break a kangaroo’s neck at 70 paces.
After that I met the poet Kath Walker who became Oodgeroo Noonuccal when she expanded her artistic and political range beyond her poetry that at the time was only fair to middling. No, I tell a lie; it was awful. But she was a lovely person, and I was a cadet journo on The Courier-Mail. I wrote a piece that helped get her started on her activist path.
Since then, as private secretary to a Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Ralph Hunt, I’ve met and talked with very many of our continent’s forebears; other times as a documentary video maker; then as a Canberra Times columnist initiating our own reconciliation walk across Commonwealth Bridge; and finally while researching my last two books.
I’ve never been disappointed once.
I’m not suggesting they were all paragons of virtue. When the men get a taste for the whitefella booze that offers an escape from the reality of their place at the bottom of the Australian totem pole, they can lash out at the nearest person to them – usually a wife and mother of their children – just like the wife beaters in our own community.
No one’s perfect, but I’ve constantly felt a unique gentility and an instant generous connection that is all their own. Then four years ago, I began work on the biography of a whitefella who gave his life to the Aboriginal cause, a man of immense courage and deep sensibility, named Donald Thomson.
Our first home-grown anthropologist, Donald spent most of his adult life with them and his experience was similar to mine. The book was a joy to write because he felt exactly the same about them.
He was also a writer and newspaper columnist for much of his life. I used a lot of his work in the book and, though he died in 1970, it often felt as though we were sitting side by side, writing together. It was an absolutely joyous experience.
But here’s the thing we can’t understand – and I invite you to answer the question: Why do our white compatriots so easily forgive the British for not just stealing the Aboriginals’ homeland but then trying to wipe them out?
And now that the land and its treasures have made us rich, why are they so reluctant to welcome them into the great councils of government? Why do they select just the “stolen generations” to offer an apology, rather than a treaty and some decent recompense to the survivors of the holocaust our kind visited upon them?
How do they suppress a bitterly ironic laughter when our prime ministers and foreign ministers, from both sides of the political aisle, berate other nations for their human rights’ shortcomings while standing up for “our Australian values”?
I can think of a few answers, but none that really makes sense. The Aboriginal people are our own patriotic forebears in the great south land. They are good people.
Why do we hate them so?
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