Voices that shatter our reconciliation By Wadjularbinna I ADMIRE a woman who stands up and says what she believes, but in my culture, if a person stands up and speaks without knowledge they are thought of as a fool. Ms Pauline Hanson says her views are based on common sense. What is common sense to white Australians is not common sense to indigenous people. It is common sense to white people to have a society in which not everyone is equal, in which there are very rich people, middle-class people and the poor. In our society, if one person is poor, everyone is poor. When there is plenty, everyone has plenty. That is what we call common sense. Ms Hanson says she is speaking for all Australians. She is not. She does not speak for me or my people. Nothing she has said shows she has any knowledge of my people, or of the complex structure that governed our society for thousands of years before white people came here. The fact is, we are different. Ms Hanson and her followers will tolerate black people so long as they behave like whites. This is assimilation. No one has the right to take away the unique identity of a race of people in their own land. In a free country, assimilation must be a choice. To make an individual assimilate against their will is to destroy their very being. To make a race of people assimilate against their will is to commit religious, spiritual and cultural genocide. In her speech in Parliament, Ms Hanson quoted Mr Paul Hasluck who said in 1955 that "we do not want a society in which one group enjoys one set of privileges and another group enjoys another set of privileges". For indigenous people in Australia, it's not a question of privileges. It's a question of recognition. We see white society as a materialistic society. This nation is made up of people first, but we constantly get changes and major decisions made on the basis of money. What happens then is that we lose compassion for our fellow humans. Australia has the highest rate of youth suicide in the Western world. Why does Ms Hanson think this is so? What has she got to say about it? These children are our future. Our future is being destroyed before our very eyes, but no one makes a maiden speech about it in Parliament. Instead, we get a speech that is based not on knowledge, but prejudice about Asians and blacks. Ms Hanson may have meant well, but her speech was shallow and spoken not out of knowledge, but fear. For me, as a black person, the saddest and scariest lesson of what Pauline Hanson has done is that it has shown race relations in this country have not improved. At a time when we thought things were finally going forward, we suddenly became aware that nothing had changed. The other person who has a responsibility in this is Mr John Howard. At a time when black people all around Australia were feeling anger and despair at what Pauline Hanson had said, John Howard did not come out and criticise or condemn her. To me, John Howard is in the same category as Pauline Hanson. He is a person without knowledge of indigenous people and the complexity of their relationship with white society. I am a stolen child, taken from my mother when I was three or four. What I lost was something most white Australians take for granted; having two parents and being able to speak their language and inherit their culture. My marriage was arranged by missionaries. For 18 years, as a station manager's wife, I was forced to live a lie. It was 30 years before I went home again and felt free to be myself. Senator Herron says a lot of black people benefited from being taken from their parents. To me, we were denied the basic human right of all people, to grow up among our own kind and then make our own choices. Senator Herron does not even begin to understand the pain and confusion this policy caused. Imagine if blacks had abducted white babies and done to them what they did to us. Where is reconciliation now? I see it being as far away as it has ever been. All the old prejudices and fears have been re-awakenened, and all Australians, indigenous and non-indigenous, are the losers. I believe white and black Australians can learn from each other, but there can be no learning if there is no acceptance or understanding of the differences between us. White Australia lacks our spiritual connection to the land and to creation, our sense of responsibility towards one another, our spirit of community. Our society has never been founded on money. The answer is education, not only for ordinary Australians but for members of Parliament and prime ministers. Wadjularbinna is a member of the Gungalidda tribe of the Gulf of Carpenteria. (posted by nicole)
