Pilger writes: "I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day.
Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a
vast and remote region in the 'red heart' of Australia."
For thousands of years, the Indigenous people of Australia have suffered the
ill-effects of colonization. (photo: Reuters)
Starvation of Indigenous in Australia. Utopia's Dirty Secret
By John Pilger, teleSUR
12 April 16
Black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of Black people in
Apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in
custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing
communities, children as young as 10 take their own lives.
I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of
the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region
in the "red heart" of Australia.
The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient
landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans
who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that
was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the
oldest, most continuous human presence on earth. Rosalie was distressed,
defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a
society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its
singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia,
with a searing description of a discarded people: "We are not wanted in our
own country."
She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia
loathes and fears. A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an
alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly Indigenous
people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program
funded by the Australian government and administered by the regional
Council.
"One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson's received two small packets of
mince meat and white bread," said Ngarla, "the elderly woman living nearby
received nothing."
In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, "The whole community including
children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis."
She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best
they can. This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart
and met Dr. Janelle Trees, a general practitioner whose Indigenous patients
live within a few miles of US$1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru
(Ayers Rock), she said, "Malnutrition is common.
I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would
have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn't treat
her because she didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest the
tablets. I feel sometimes as if I'm dealing with similar conditions as the
English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
"There's asbestos in many Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre
of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government]
doesn't care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to
these incredible statistics of Indigenous people dying of renal disease, and
vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is
done. I ask myself: "why not?"
When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said, "It's not so much the physical
starvation as the traumatizing of my people, of whole communities We are
duped all the time. White Australia sets up organizations and structures
that offer the pretense of helping us, but it's a pretence, no more. If we
oppose it, it's a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are
everywhere. (She gave me details of the suffering in her own family).
They're out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until
there's nothing there anymore."
Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests
that the council is "the poorest of the three tiers of government and is
very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [Federal] governments for
funds to provide such services to the bush. Barbara Shaw, the council's
president,agreed that it was "totally unacceptable that people should be
starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia" and that "it
is disgusting and wrong that Indigenous people experience deep poverty such
as this.
"The starvation and poverty and the division often sewn among Indigenous
people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large
part from an extraordinary episode known as "the Intervention". This is
Australia's dirty secret.
In 2007, the then Prime Minister John Howard sent the army into Indigenous
communities in the Northern Territory to "rescue children" who, claimed his
minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough,were being abused by paedophile
gangs in "unthinkable numbers".
Subsequently exposed as a fraud by the Australian Crime Commission, the
Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists,
the "intervention" nonetheless allowed the government to destroy many of the
vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of
Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights.
Here, they had administered their homelands with the dignity of
self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty
reported, a 40 percent lower mortality rate. Distribution of food was never
a problem.
It is this "traditional life" that is anathema to a parasitic white industry
of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and
often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate
structures imposed on Indigenous organizations. The remote homelands are
seen as an ideological threat, for they express a communalism at odds with
the neoconservatism that rules Australia and demands"assimilation".
It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and
resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a
spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.
I know these communities and their people, who have shown me the conditions
imposed on them. Many are denied consistent running water, sanitation and
power. That basic sustenance should join this list is not surprising.
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the
richest place on earth. Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest
citizens; they like to hang Indigenous art on the white walls of their
offices in the bleakly modern Parliament House. Their self-endowment is
legendary. The Labor Party's last minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny
Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of US$331,144.
During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased
by almost a third. When Professor James Anaya, the respected United Nations
Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous people, described the "intervention"
as racist, the opposition spokesperson on Indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott,
told Anaya to"get a life" and not "just listen to the old victim brigade."
Abbott was promoted to prime minister of Australia; he was evicted last
year. When I began filming Indigenous Australia some 30 years ago, a global
campaign was under way to end Apartheid in South Africa. Having reported
from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the
compliance, defensiveness and indifference of people who saw themselves as
liberal. For example, Black incarceration in Australia is greater than that
of Black people in Apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison,
are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In
despairing communities, children as young as 10 take their own lives.
Yet no international opprobrium,no boycotts, have disturbed the surface of
"lucky" Australia. As Rosalie's call reminds us, that surface should be
shattered without delay.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
For thousands of years, the Indigenous people of Australia have suffered the
ill-effects of colonization. (photo: Reuters)
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Starvation-of-Indigenous-in-Austral
ia.-Utopias-Dirty-Secret-20160409-0024.htmlhttp://www.telesurtv.net/english/
opinion/Starvation-of-Indigenous-in-Australia.-Utopias-Dirty-Secret-20160409
-0024.html
Starvation of Indigenous in Australia. Utopia's Dirty Secret
By John Pilger, teleSUR
12 April 16
Black incarceration in Australia is greater than that of Black people in
Apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison, are beaten up in
custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In despairing
communities, children as young as 10 take their own lives.
had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of
the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region
in the "red heart" of Australia.
The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient
landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. The first Europeans
who came here, perhaps demented by the heat, imagined a white utopia that
was not theirs to imagine; for this is a sacred place, the homeland of the
oldest, most continuous human presence on earth. Rosalie was distressed,
defiant and eloquent. Her distinction as one unafraid to speak up in a
society so often deaf to the cries and anguish of its first people, its
singular uniqueness, is well earned. She appears in my 2013 film, Utopia,
with a searing description of a discarded people: "We are not wanted in our
own country."
She has described the legacies of a genocide: a word political Australia
loathes and fears. A week ago, Rosalie and her daughter Ngarla put out an
alert that people were starving in Utopia. They said that elderly Indigenous
people in the homelands had received no food from an aged care program
funded by the Australian government and administered by the regional
Council.
"One elderly man with end-stage Parkinson's received two small packets of
mince meat and white bread," said Ngarla, "the elderly woman living nearby
received nothing."
In calling for food drops, Rosalie said, "The whole community including
children and the elderly go without food, often on a daily basis."
She and Ngarla and their community have cooked and distributed food as best
they can. This is not unusual. Four years ago, I drove into the red heart
and met Dr. Janelle Trees, a general practitioner whose Indigenous patients
live within a few miles of US$1,000-a-night tourist resorts serving Uluru
(Ayers Rock), she said, "Malnutrition is common.
I wanted to give a patient an anti-inflammatory for an infection that would
have been preventable if living conditions were better, but I couldn't treat
her because she didn't have enough food to eat and couldn't ingest the
tablets. I feel sometimes as if I'm dealing with similar conditions as the
English working class at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
"There's asbestos in many Aboriginal homes, and when somebody gets a fibre
of asbestos in their lungs and develops mesothelioma, [the government]
doesn't care. When the kids have chronic infections and end up adding to
these incredible statistics of Indigenous people dying of renal disease, and
vulnerable to world record rates of rheumatic heart disease, nothing is
done. I ask myself: "why not?"
When Rosalie phoned me from Utopia, she said, "It's not so much the physical
starvation as the traumatizing of my people, of whole communities We are
duped all the time. White Australia sets up organizations and structures
that offer the pretense of helping us, but it's a pretence, no more. If we
oppose it, it's a crime. Simply belonging is a crime. Suicides are
everywhere. (She gave me details of the suffering in her own family).
They're out to kill our values, to break down our traditional life until
there's nothing there anymore."
Barkly Regional Council says its aged care packages get through and protests
that the council is "the poorest of the three tiers of government and is
very much dependent on [Northern] Territory and [Federal] governments for
funds to provide such services to the bush. Barbara Shaw, the council's
president,agreed that it was "totally unacceptable that people should be
starving in a rich and well-developed country like Australia" and that "it
is disgusting and wrong that Indigenous people experience deep poverty such
as this.
"The starvation and poverty and the division often sewn among Indigenous
people themselves as they try to identify those responsible stem in large
part from an extraordinary episode known as "the Intervention". This is
Australia's dirty secret.
In 2007, the then Prime Minister John Howard sent the army into Indigenous
communities in the Northern Territory to "rescue children" who, claimed his
minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough,were being abused by paedophile
gangs in "unthinkable numbers".
Subsequently exposed as a fraud by the Australian Crime Commission, the
Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists,
the "intervention" nonetheless allowed the government to destroy many of the
vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of
Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights.
Here, they had administered their homelands with the dignity of
self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty
reported, a 40 percent lower mortality rate. Distribution of food was never
a problem.
It is this "traditional life" that is anathema to a parasitic white industry
of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and
often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate
structures imposed on Indigenous organizations. The remote homelands are
seen as an ideological threat, for they express a communalism at odds with
the neoconservatism that rules Australia and demands"assimilation".
It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and
resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a
spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.
I know these communities and their people, who have shown me the conditions
imposed on them. Many are denied consistent running water, sanitation and
power. That basic sustenance should join this list is not surprising.
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth report, Australia is the
richest place on earth. Politicians in Canberra are among the wealthiest
citizens; they like to hang Indigenous art on the white walls of their
offices in the bleakly modern Parliament House. Their self-endowment is
legendary. The Labor Party's last minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny
Macklin, refurbished her office at a cost to the taxpayer of US$331,144.
During her tenure, the number of Aboriginal people living in slums increased
by almost a third. When Professor James Anaya, the respected United Nations
Rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous people, described the "intervention"
as racist, the opposition spokesperson on Indigenous affairs, Tony Abbott,
told Anaya to"get a life" and not "just listen to the old victim brigade."
Abbott was promoted to prime minister of Australia; he was evicted last
year. When I began filming Indigenous Australia some 30 years ago, a global
campaign was under way to end Apartheid in South Africa. Having reported
from South Africa, I was struck by the similarity of white supremacy and the
compliance, defensiveness and indifference of people who saw themselves as
liberal. For example, Black incarceration in Australia is greater than that
of Black people in Apartheid South Africa. Indigenous people go to prison,
are beaten up in custody and die in custody as a matter of routine. In
despairing communities, children as young as 10 take their own lives.
Yet no international opprobrium,no boycotts, have disturbed the surface of
"lucky" Australia. As Rosalie's call reminds us, that surface should be
shattered without delay.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
