The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21222-2000Jun29.html Australia's 'Stolen Generation' Seeks Payback By Rajiv Chandrasekaran Washington Post Foreign Service Thursday, July 6, 2000; Page A01 SYDNEY –– Terry Olsen joined Australia's "stolen generation" on a routine visit to a clinic in 1973. While his aunt and grandmother sat in the waiting room, assuming the 18-month-old Aborigine with a milk-chocolate complexion and wavy brown hair was getting an immunization, a social worker spirited the toddler out the back door. Unbeknownst to his parents, he was eventually deposited with a white family more than 1,000 miles away under a government program aimed at forcibly assimilating lighter-skinned indigenous people. Stripped of his family and his culture, Olsen was supposed to become less Aboriginal and more like a white Australian. Told that his parents had died, he endured violent punishments at the hands of his foster parents and incessant taunting as the only black student in his new town, a remote farming community in the northeastern state of Queensland. "It was hell," he recalled. "They kidnapped me to change who I was." Today, Olsen, who has been reunited with his parents and teaches Aboriginal dance, figures that, at the very least, the government owes him an apology, along with the thousands of other young indigenous people who were similarly kidnapped between the early 1900s and the mid-1970s. A national commission that has spent the past decade studying ways to promote reconciliation between black and white Australians recently has taken the same view, recommending that the government issue a formal apology for its mistreatment of generations of Aborigines. To many here, both black and white, saying sorry for the stolen generation--for the killings of tens of thousands of indigenous people by early settlers, for the forced relocation of Aboriginal families to fenced-in communities and for years of pervasive racism--seems like a relatively simple but symbolic step that would help promote racial healing. But Prime Minister John Howard has balked, saying he is unwilling "to apologize for things my government and my generation of Australians didn't do." He has argued that an official apology would lead to a flood of lawsuits seeking reparations that could cost the government billions of dollars. Howard's refusal to apologize has escalated into one of the most significant and divisive political issues in Australia's history, raising questions about the government's commitment to improving race relations and fueling threats of embarrassing protests during the country's biggest moment on the world stage--this summer's Olympic Games in Sydney. For Aboriginal activists, the Olympics, with a global television audience in the billions, offers the ideal opportunity to highlight their plight for fellow Australians and the rest of the world. Aboriginal leaders say they do not plan to disrupt the Games, but they vow to get their message across through large street protests. "Saying 'sorry' is a psychological, spiritual, symbolic thing that will act as a catalyst for us to discuss all the problems between us," said Charles Perkins, an Aboriginal activist in Sydney who has promised to lead demonstrations during the Olympics. "But if this country can't do something as basic as apologizing to its indigenous people, then we will reveal Australia for what it is--one of the most racist countries in the world. This country may wear a nice suit, but it has dirty underwear." Although Australia is one of the world's most affluent nations, much of its Aboriginal population lives in Third World squalor, in inner-city ghettos or ramshackle rural settlements where levels of education, health, income, housing, employment and life expectancy are far lower than those of white Australians. For instance, the official unemployment rate for Aborigines is 23 percent, although Aboriginal leaders say it is closer to 51 percent, compared with 6.9 percent for all Australians. At the same time, Aborigines have the nation's highest rates of imprisonment, welfare dependency, alcoholism and drug abuse. Aborigines, who make up about 2 percent of Australia's 19 million people, also lack political clout; only one member of Parliament and one judge are Aboriginal. "The conditions for indigenous people in Australia are deplorable," said Geoff Clark, chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, a quasi-governmental agency that oversees indigenous affairs. Clark and other Aboriginal leaders are not just pushing for an apology. They want the government to sign a treaty with the indigenous population that would provide for financial reparations and limited autonomy for Aboriginal communities. Such treaties, they argue, have been signed in other countries with large indigenous populations, including the United States, Canada and New Zealand. "A treaty would give us a blueprint on a range of issues including our heritage, compensation and law and order," he said. "It would help us solve a lot of problems." But Howard has rejected that request as well, arguing that a treaty would be too divisive. "Treaties are between nation-states," said Philip Ruddock, Howard's minister for multicultural affairs. "It might have been okay in the days of the red Indians and the colonialists, but would the United States do such a thing today? I don't think so." Aboriginal leaders say their problems date back to the arrival of the first British settlers--many of them convicts from overcrowded prisons--who landed at Sydney Cove in 1788, 18 years after Capt. James Cook, the famed South Seas explorer, claimed possession of the continent. At the time, anthropologists estimate that between 300,000 and 1 million Aborigines were in Australia, living among several hundred largely discrete, nomadic tribes that did not farm or build permanent settlements. Although the settlers' journals indicate that they saw and fought with indigenous residents, the colonists and the tens of thousands who followed them in the years after occupied the land under a doctrine of "terra nullius," or empty land. Aboriginal people, in the eyes of the settlers, were too primitive to have any claim to the continent. In the following years, the settlers regarded the Aborigines as little more than pests that needed to be driven away or killed. On the island of Tasmania, colonists killed so many Aborigines that the indigenous population was wiped out by 1876. Aborigines did fight back in a low-grade guerrilla war, but their spears and other traditional weapons were no match for the settlers' horses and guns. Those who survived eventually were confined to fenced reservations, often in the most inhospitable parts of the Outback. After Australia became independent in 1901, government officials believed some Aborigines, particularly lighter-skinned ones fathered by settlers, could be assimilated into white society. It was that policy that gave rise to generations of "stolen" children. "The idea at the time was that full-blooded Aboriginal people would die out, while children of mixed descent could be saved," said Andrew Markus, a history professor at Monash University in Melbourne. "They thought removing the kids from their families was doing them a favor." Although an Aboriginal rights movement began in the 1940s, it was not until 1962 that indigenous people were granted the right to vote, not until 1967 that they were counted in the census, not until the early 1970s that Aboriginal orphanages and reservations were closed and not until 1975 that rampant segregation akin to that of the Jim Crow South finally was outlawed. In 1992, indigenous people won their most significant legal battle, when the nation's highest court rejected the notion of terra nullius and ruled that Aborigines could be entitled to reclaim some of their land. The government now spends about $1.5 billion a year on social programs for Aborigines, from job training to housing subsidies and free medical care. "We are putting in an enormous amount of work to improve the conditions of our indigenous people," Ruddock said. "But we are starting from a very low base. We're dealing with an indigenous population that had little contact with the rest of the world. We're dealing with people who were essentially hunter-gatherers. They didn't have chariots. I don't think they invented the wheel." Despite the handouts, most Australian communities remain firmly separated between black and white. In Sydney, for instance, it is rare to see an Aborigine in the central business district. Many spend their days in a decrepit inner-city ghetto called Redfern or in one of several low-income suburbs. In smaller communities, the division is even clearer. In Kempsey, a languid river town of 10,000 people 225 miles north of Sydney and site of a large hat factory, Aborigines make up about 15 percent of the population. But only a handful of Aboriginal people work in the cafes, liquor shops and stores that line the main street. More than 70 percent of the Aboriginal population there is unemployed and on welfare. "The white people, they won't hire Aboriginal people," said Michelle Kelly-Greenup, 18, who said she recently went into three dozen businesses to apply for a job and was rejected each time. "Racism is alive and well here." But many of the town's white residents accuse the Aboriginal population of not wanting to work. "They would rather sit at home and drink," said the owner of a car repair shop. "Why do they need to work? They get plenty of welfare." Others in Kempsey take a more conciliatory view, arguing that reconciliation is a two-way street that requires white Australians to demonstrate more compassion and Aboriginal people to assume more responsibility for their problems. Although the town council last year issued its own apology to Aborigines, interviews with several dozen white residents revealed strong support for the prime minister's refusal to issue a national apology. "We shouldn't dwell on the past," said John Bowel, the town's deputy mayor. "Reconciliation is about looking to the future." © 2000 The Washington Post Company -- ********************************** '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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