For those people who have never seen First Australians, I highly recommend you borrow or buy it and of cause, watch it!
There is a lot of Australian history that some what hides or denies what colonization did to the Indigenous people of Australia. The truth is, we don’t teach ALL of it all. And that is the problem with history; it is written by the winners and can be written in a bias view, tweaked in some ways. So, is history a true recount of what really happened? These are the questions we need to ask ourselves (I will relate further posts on religion soon).
As the Indigenous people of Australia did not farm the land like the Europeans did, the Europeans thought well, no one owned the land (Terra nullius), it must be up for grabs; so they did! The truth is that the Indigenous people did own the land, but did not ‘farm’ the land in the same way. Indigenous people’s land was stolen and so too was their food. When a culture’s land has been stolen and raped, what happens.? Well, they rebelled and killed introduced animals, like cows, in order to survive. In defense, Indigenous people were murdered for stealing.
We also need to remember that Aborigines were nomadic, meaning they moved from place-to-place (no fixed camp). For that reason, they had no written proof or fixed monuments to prove their historically existence. It is noted that Indigenous people have lived in the land we call ‘Australia’ for over 30,000 years; in a land that is dry, barren and very unpredictable in terms of sustainability.
It is quite depressing to what happened during the colonization of Australia; we cannot blame ourselves individually to the past events that happened between 1788 – 1850, however, we need to acknowledge what happened and realise it was wrong.
Some of you may be thinking “it was not ME who did anything so, why should I be sorry?” – well, to a point I can see where you are coming from., but, having this firm opinion is pure ignorance! At least acknowledging what happened was wrong would be the first step in acknowledgment of country.
Think Outside the Cube! 