Australia is officially the world's smallest continent. Unofficially it is one of the most racist nations on earth. Australia was settled at least 100,000 years ago by Black people usually referred to as Australian Aborigines. Physically, the Aborigines are distinguished by straight to wavy hair textures and dark to near black complexions. In January 1788, when Britain began using Australia as a prison colony, an estimated 300,000 Black people were spread across the continent in about 600 small-scale communities.
The dumping of British convicts into Australia proved catastrophic for the Blacks. The Blacks were butchered and murdered like animals. They were the victims of deliberate poisonings and systematic slaughters, decimated by tuberculosis and syphilis, and swept away by infectious epidemics. With their community structures and moral fibers shredded, the Blacks, by the 1930s, had been reduced to a pathetic remnant of about 30,000 people and perhaps twice that number of mixed descent. Until the 1960s, the Blacks were not officially considered human beings.
When the continent was invaded by Europeans in the nineteenth century, the White historians who wrote about Australia invariably included a section on the Blacks, and acknowledged that, as the original inhabitants of the continent, the Blacks had had an historical role. After 1850, however, few writers referred to the Blacks at all, and they were identified as a "dying race." In 1859, Charles Darwin's book, The Origin of Species, popularized the notion of biological (and therefore social) evolution. Scholars began to discuss civilization as a unilinear process with White people at the top and Black people at the bottom.
It should be noted, that it was during this time that British and Australian scientists ran one of the biggest grave-robbing networks ever organized. Studies by an White Australian scholar researching at Oxford University indicate that the graves of between 5,000 and 10,000 Black people were desecrated, their bodies dismembered or parts stolen to support a "scientific" trade. Even worse, it appears that many Black people were systematically stalked, hunted down and murdered to obtain their body parts as "specimens for science." The Whites involved in this ghoulish traffic apparently had little shame, and some of the documents refer to traffic in Black men's penises.
PART 2
By 1950, general histories of the continent by White Australians almost never referenced the Aborigines at all. During this period, the Blacks, whether part or full-blood, were excluded from all major White Australian institutions, including schools, hospitals and labor unions. They could not vote. Their movements were restricted. They were outcastes in White Australia.
Today, the Blacks of Australia are terribly oppressed, and remain in a desperate struggle for survival. Recent demographic surveys, for example, show that the Black infant mortality rate is the highest in Australia. Blacks have the shoddiest housing and the poorest schools. Their life expectancy is twenty years less than Whites. Their unemployment rate is six times higher than the national average. Blacks did not obtain the right to vote in federal elections until 1961. They did not gain the legal right to consume alcoholic beverages until 1964. They were not officially counted as Australian citizens until after a constitutional amendment in 1967.
Their resistance continues, however. In January 1972, an Australian Black Panther Party was formed in Brisbane, Australia. On July 16, 1990, an Aboriginal Provisional Government was launched. |
