Australia is more that trips, beach and beautiful pictures!

Dear all
Australia is not only trips, beach and beautiful pictures…Australia is also sitting on trains at 8 in the morning, it’s being addicted to the coffee to go at the shop of the nice Greek people at the station who stand there, sometimes for more than 12 hours a day, and always have a smile and a joke for you, it’s sitting in the library writing papers, preparing presentations, it’s having dinner with nice people from all over the world, it’s getting home tired and going to bed early, or having long skype conversations with the other side of the world on early weekend hours!
What I mean to say is that my stay in Australia has become something different than the holiday it was the first weeks! And regarding that fact today I want to share with you not what I have been doing, but what I have been learning…

I will not bore you with all the interesting things I have been learning…there is just one thing I want to tell you today, so that maybe, a few more people in this world will think a little bit further than the stereotype! It is regarding the Indigenous peoples of Australia: the Aboriginals.

I wonder how many of you share the ideas I had when I came here: the Aboriginal people are the indigenous people of Australia, who have been completely overwhelmed by the coming of the Europeans and have, like the North American Indians, succumbed to all the bad things the Europeans brought.
During the last weeks I have been immersed in reading about, on the one hand, the amazing cultural complexity of the people we gather under the name Aboriginals and on the other hand the cruel way in which we, or a least our ancestors have been blind to that complexity, have been arrogant enough to think we had a ‘civilization’ to offer them, and the things we torn apart by bringing that ‘civilization’ to them…
There are two things of which I think it is important to think while looking at the situation of Aboriginals today. The first is the importance of the family. I have been learning about the role of kinship in these communities, and without trying to Anthropologically explain the complexity of it to you, I guess I can take a shortcut and just tell you that everything in their ‘culture’ is related to kinship relations. You cannot address someone without knowing how that person is related to you, for it is the place of a person in society that defines his or her name. The worst punishment people could get before the Europeans came was to be banished from a community, for without a community and its relations, one is literally no one!
The second thing is the half-cast child removal policy that was used in Australia between more or less 1930 and 1970. This meant that children who were not fully Aboriginal (and thus were thought to be more intelligent) were removed from their families to be European-style educated. Sometimes the justification was that these children were neglected by their families, but other times ‘being Aboriginal’ was reason enough…These children were grouped together in homes where they got an ‘education’. I will not go on about what happened in these houses…I just want you to think about how it must have felt for those kids, whose identity was so closely connected to their family, to be ripped off from that family, to be told to be ashamed of the color they had and the language they spoke, and to be told that they were lucky to get the chance to become ‘civilized’…These kids forgot their languages, and with the language they forgot the stories they had been told, they forgot names, they forgot who they had been. 1970 was 40 years ago…
Imagine to grow up without a clue where you belong, imagine to grow up in a place where people see you as inferior, imagine to get out of that foster home and not finding a job because you are Aboriginal, imagine to be 20 when you find out who your family is, but you cannot talk to your own mother, because she doesn’t speak English! Imagine the identity crisis…imagine the trauma…Can we judge the people who turn to anything that might anesthetize the feeling of pain and loss?

The thing that shocks me most is that the average Australian seems not to give a shit! It might be the feeling of guilt that builds high walls around people, but I think it’s mainly the stereotype, the shameless silence about these facts in high school teaching curricula and the avid attempts of certain people to paint the history of Australia brighter than it is…
I don’t mean to depict Australia here as a heartless and racist country because it is not (at least not everywhere). I just want to share this little bit of the other perspective with you, so that, if you ever hear that Aboriginals are alcoholics more interested in spending money on alcohol than on the education of their own kids, you think twice…Even in the case of this being true for some people, there is a reason for it…

I could go on an on about this! I could also tell you how amazingly interesting and fascinating Aboriginals are, and how much we could learn from them if only we bothered to listen without a feeling of superiority. But I am afraid that I might already have lost some of you with this incredibly long blog!
For more stories, frustrations and fascinations there is always email or skype!

I wish you all a very happy Easter!
Love

Sara