THE AGE Anne Frank: The danger of forgetting By ROBIN USHER Tuesday 16 May 2000 Tammy Williams knows what racism means. When her mother was walking her to primary school in the Queensland town of Gympie, the driver of a passing car leaned out and spat at them. In high school, she was shocked to find the word "nigger" written above her photograph in a school magazine. These are recent events. Williams might be only 22 but she is a member of the first generation in her family for nearly 200 years to be able to move about the country and to receive a standard education. "We are the first to be free," she says. Her parents were not stolen from their community but were made to live on reserves - unable to leave or even get married without permission - and to work for no wages. "Racism dehumanises you," Williams says. "All oppression does that - it eats at your soul and prevents people achieving their full potential. We have to acknowledge what has occurred if ever we are going to move beyond it, but so far very few Australians are aware that slavery-like schemes existed in parts of the country." Williams is the only non-European to feature in a human rights exhibition, Anne Frank - A History For Today, that begins a three-year national tour at the Glen Eira City Gallery in Caulfield today. Produced by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the exhibition encourages people to think about intolerance and inequality in today's world, more than 50 years after the Nazi persecution of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped led to the construction of death camps. A previous exhibition, Anne Frank in the World, was seen by more than seven million people in 40 countries. Williams has an answer to those who might claim the horrors of the Holocaust are a long way removed from modern-day Australia. "My people have been repressed. We are survivors of atrocities and racism and have gained strength from our ability to move beyond it," she says. "But racism continues everywhere in various forms and it is crucial to get people to acknowledge it and talk about it. That's what the Anne Frank exhibition is all about - its aim is to make people consider what has happened in the past so that they can learn from the mistakes." The human rights campaigner and UNICEF ambassador for children Justice Marcus Einfeld, who is opening the exhibition, sees it as an important event in Australian history because it demonstrates the evils that can be unleashed when racism becomes state orthodoxy. "These are the same dangers we might face if we do not pull ourselves together just now," he says. "Australia has not been immune from some of this genre of human activity. As the One Nation experience showed, the possibility of serious racial disharmony is very great. It is quite easy for political elements to play on and encourage people's fears so that community harmony can be placed under threat if the truth is not told." Einfeld describes the plight of Aborigines living in below-standard settlements and the continuing disputes over reconciliation as fiascos that demonstrate "a dearth of political leadership". While he stresses this is true for both sides of politics, he calls for a national uprising to reverse the government's refusal to say sorry for what happened to Aborigines over the past 200 years. "This (refusal) only arouses racist tendencies and creates disunity and disharmony. There is no legal or moral justification to say an apology would mean the current generation was to blame for what happened, or that it would open the way to the government being forced to pay compensation." Tammy Williams' mother, Lesley, has received some form of apology for the way she was treated. She was brought up on Cherbourg, a reserve north of Brisbane, and her only education was to prepare her for life as a domestic servant. People who disobeyed officials had their heads shaved and were forced to wear a hessian sack with holes for the head and arms. Those found outside the reserve without a pass would be jailed. Lesley was sent to work as a domestic servant from 6am to 9pm, without holidays, and forced to live in a shed outside the house. Instead of being paid, her salary and that of many others went into government-controlled trust funds and the money was used to fund hospitals and utilities. She was the first to sue to get her salary paid to her and, in 1998, reached settlement with the Queensland Government, as well as receiving an apology. Her daughter, who is now in the third year of a law degree as well as writing her mother's biography, had barely heard of the Anne Frank House five years ago. But she went to see the Amsterdam museum while on a trip to Europe for a United Nations human rights conference after winning an essay competition. Museum officials were intrigued by the way writing had changed her life. The museum, visited by 850,000 people a year, commemorates the site where Frank, a German-born teenager, lived secretly for two years with seven others in a vain attempt to escape deportation by the Nazis to Germany. That is where she wrote her diary that survived the war and has now sold 27million copies and been translated into 55 languages. Frank, 15, her sister and mother died in the camps. Only her father survived to return to Amsterdam and publish the diary in 1947. Einfeld says the exhibition's Australian tour will help to change people's attitudes to racism, which he says is the only way to improve human rights. "You can't pass laws to make decent human beings, you can only educate them. We must get out among the people and give them the facts about racism and tolerance. We must meet falsity with truth," he says. "What Germany did to human decency, not to mention the Jewish people, is indescribable in polite words - yet it must be described over and over again so that people do not forget and so that it can hopefully never happen again." He believes the exhibition could play a crucial role because of the delicate balance of race relations today. "Australia could go either way. Attitudes to racial issues could get even tougher or we could see the light. No sacrifice can be too big to achieve decent race relations." Although many of his remarks seem aimed at Prime Minister John Howard and his ministers, Einfeld says he suspects members of the Labor opposition might hold similar views. "Politicians of all parties read the public opinion polls that purport to show what people are thinking and then adopt policies that won't risk alienating the voters. No one seems interested in explaining what harm the various policies might cause. I think if people knew the extent of the human misery involved, they would accept the need to change." But race is not the only area where Einfeld says Australia's reputation is being damaged. He says the treatment of illegal migrants and such decisions as the forced repatriation of Kosovar refugees is lowering the country's international standing "at a great pace of knots". He believes most Australians would be horrified at conditions at the Port Hedland detention centre in remote Western Australia, where people who arrive without papers on boats from Indonesia are held. "The government paved the way for the way these people are being treated by holding out the threat the country was going to be flooded by 10,000 or 50,000 new arrivals. That was never possible and represents nothing better than scaremongering." He says more than 90 per cent of the refugees are Christians from Afghanistan and Iraq and have now been accepted by the government, a far cry from the "Muslim invasion" that had been threatened. "There is no such thing as an illegal refugee or an economic refugee. People are either trying to escape persecution or not. Others are facing poverty so extreme they cannot keep their children alive. That is why they seek to make their lives elsewhere. Australia in fact takes a very small percentage of boat people compared to Holland and the Scandinavian countries." Refugee policies are set by Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, and Einfeld says he is so concerned by what is happening that he is waiting for Ruddock to retire from politics before resuming their friendship, which extends back years (both once worked in the same fields as Sydney lawyers). "I am incapable of explaining some of the decisions his department has made," he says. He was particularly upset by the government's decision to send the Kosovar refugees back to their Balkan homeland, even though they requested to stay longer in Australia. "We seem to forget all about real human misery once it is off the front page. The government took a narrow, ideological view about sending the refugees back that is just nonsense and an insult to the rest of us. Problems exist long after the fighting ends and unless rich countries like Australia help in the reconstruction, the country will remain in ruins. "What would it have cost to keep the Kosovars a few extra months? But if we insisted they go back, why didn't the government send over equipment to build them some pre-fab houses with food packages and some local money? It would have cost peanuts." Einfeld says decisions seem to be left to a heartless bureaucracy that knows nothing about compassion. "We should remember the Nazis were also extremely efficient bureaucrats. Democracy involves some sacrifices and may not be the most efficient system, but its benefits far outweigh totalitarian bureaucracies like Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia." He says countries such as Australia have moral obligations to maintain. He believes the Anne Frank exhibition is timely because it will serve as a reminder of what can happen when those obligations are forgotten. "I'm not suggesting concentration camps are about to be built in this country, but there is a type of mentality developing that the exhibition confronts directly. It is a reminder that all forms of racism are sinful and evil and have an extremely deleterious effect on the victims." Exhibition organiser Jonah Jones expects about 12,000 schoolchildren to visit the show during the three months it is at Caulfield, and he is confident it will stimulate debate on human rights. He says the exhibition, which consists of a series of modules with photographs and texts about Anne Frank and other Holocaust victims, as well as Tammy Williams, is not designed to be a grand story but to make people examine what is happening today. Jones quotes the Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who wrote: "If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people who died, we would not be able to live." Jones says the exhibition tries to make people concentrate on individuals and the fate that befell them. "No one can cope with figures like the six million people who died in the Holocaust. But this individualises the tragedy so that we can examine all the incidents that led up to it. Instead of being a World WarII horror show, it concentrates on the eternal issues of preserving everybody's human rights. That makes the timing of its Australian tour very appropriate." -- ********************************** 'Click' to protect the rainforest: Make the Rainforest Site your homepage! http://www.therainforestsite.com/ ********************************** ------------------------------------------------------ RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/ To unsubscribe from this list, mail [EMAIL PROTECTED], and in the body of the message, include the words: unsubscribe announce or click here mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20announce This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." 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