Historic ignorance on show
The Australian illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write but those who cannot unlearn lies fed to them by activists and seek out the knowledge they have been conditioned to reject.
In 1953, crowds of thousands gathered – entire towns – to make a public pledge of loyalty to the newlycrowned Queen. This week, on the National Day of Mourning, nearly 70 years later, workers in taxpayerfunded, independently-run organisations in regional Australia were told if they felt “triggered” or found the day “offensive”, they could take the public holiday as time-inlieu on any other day they chose.
It is common to give people who have to work public holidays an extra day in lieu, but not if they disagree with it philosophically.
The government-funded ABC told us the public holiday was “over the top” and “offensive” even as they sent an enormous cohort to London to cover the Queen’s funeral.
The “triggered” included those who at protests burnt the Australian flag and wore shirts declaring the Queen a “dumb dawg”, fostering a fantasy that she was a colonial war lord, when there has never been a woman in history who has played a more pivotal role in the decolonisation of her empire.
The end of British rule began in Kenya when she inherited the crown and was followed by Rhodesia, Cyprus, Sudan, Ghana, Malaya, Singapore, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Hong Kong, among others.
It is typical for each side of the conflict to rewrite their history to blame the other. But at what point do you begin to accept that the treatment of Indigenous Australians occurred not because of the Queen but because of the British before her and Australian leaders who thought they were doing the right thing, including Indigenous-led land councils who are still at loggerheads with the communities they are supposed to serve today?
More than 14 years before the
Queen was born, NSW and Queensland each had Aboriginal protection boards.
The 1911-12 NSW Annual Report for the Board for Protection of Aborigines shows an expenditure of £28,579 – for blankets, salaries, books, medicines, clothing, and medical care for a census headcount of 5253 Indigenous people.
The NSW Department of Public Instruction in 1911 reported Indigenous children’s “writing is very good, spelling is strong”.
At Grafton Common School: “The work done compares favourably to the white children attending there, and also other schools.”
At Terry Hie Hie School: “The children are cheerful and very happy in their school life and the best of relations exists between them and their teacher.”
They were taught gardening, beekeeping, carpentry, sewing, along with reading and writing.
By 1914, the Queensland Chief Protector of Aboriginals wrote that for a “native in one district to be paid
only 2 shillings for a week” of work where one in a neighbouring district, “where conditions were in every way similar” men received £1 a week “was absurd and unfair” and the result was they brought in a graduated minimum-wage scale.
These were not the rantings of colonising racists. These were the deliberations of senior public servants who saw neglect and mistreatment and worked to fix it.
Of course, the system then – as it is now – was far from perfect.
But how would we look back on our history if we never offered young Indigenous girls education to read, write, sew their own garments, and clothe themselves?
How would we look back on ourselves if we did not extend Western medical knowledge to Indigenous groups but somehow thought it was romantic to allow them to die of preventable diseases such as rickets?
How would we look back if we saw women treated as chattels and ignored it as a cultural predicament
of the time? Settlement for Indigenous Australians and convicts was brutal. The early 1800s in rural Australia was defined by squatters, bushrangers, hangings, beatings, savagery and disease in a life of unmeasurable hardship by today’s standards.
For many, a white life back then was hardly the charmed life of the conqueror.
Shepherds, white convicts or exconvicts employed under the 1828 Masters and Servants Act, were flogged and returned to their masters if they absconded their post.
They often died alone from a combination of syphilitic madness and alcoholism.
The same activists and Greens politicians who shout that the Queen is a coloniser, do so as if it was the emancipated or the convict and their descendants oppressing Indigenous people, when they were also powerless – left in remote paddock huts and brutally flogged if they escaped.
Violence in remote Indigenous
communities was not perpetuated by the nonagenarian Queen, but by the residents themselves.
High Indigenous youth suicides now are because of their lived trauma, not that of their ancestors in the 1800s, or anything the Queen did.
The Queen did not neglect babies and children.
Their mothers and fathers did, with no shortage of governmentfunded but Indigenous-run community organisations deployed to assist.
If you found the public holiday to mourn the Queen’s passing “triggering”, you should not have taken it, or the day in lieu, or accepted the public holiday pay rates.
National holidays are based on events of significance to our history.
If you believe the Queen should not be mourned because of a filtered and incorrect interpretation of her history as a coloniser when she relinquished territories, don’t take it.
Don’t let your greed get in the way of your hypocrisy.