The Invisible Indigenous

Thought I'd take a quick moment to write a little blurb about the indigenous population of Australia, the Aborigines. Like many nations that were once colonies, Australia has some shameful anecdotes and stories in its history regarding its treatment of the land's original inhabitants. I saw the movie "Rabbit Proof Fence" a few years ago, as I'm a huge Peter Gabriel fan and Gabriel composed the soundtrack. The movie is focused entirely on the historical reality of the "White Australia" principle and the practice of taking children from their Aboriginal mothers to retrain and educate them to be members of white Australian society. The children who were separated from their parents in this manner are known as the Stolen Generations. It's a hard thing to wrap your head around a government taking kids away from their mothers, and the movie can be hard to watch sometimes. Below are two scenes from the movie:


I know that's heavy material. Ready any history on any indigenous people from any part of the world, and their story is always bleak and riddled with atrocities about mistreatment. "Civilization" has not been kind to native peoples. Neither has modernity, for the most part... This story always gets a certain set of my friends all hot and bothered, but we all have these chapters in our history. The idea that the settlers of North America and the native Americans got along is a sad little myth we continue to abuse our children with each time Thanksgiving rolls around. Every government in the world has given the shaft to the original inhabitants of the land. Hmmm...I'll leave you with this quote from Bill Bryon regarding the original ancient inhabitants of Australia....
"At some undetermined point in the great immensity of its past-perhaps 45,000 years ago, perhaps 60,000, but certainly before there were modern humans in the Americas or Europe-it was quietly invaded by a deeply inscrutable people, the Aborigines, who have no clearly evident racial or linguistic kinship to their neighbors in the region, and whose presence in Australia can only be explained by positing that they invented and mastered ocean-going craft at least 30,000 years in advance of anyone else, in order to undertake an exodus, then forgot or abandoned nearly all that they had learned and scarcely ever bothere with the open sea again..."
Bill Bryson, from In A Sunburned Country