In this piece, a roving correspondent for the BBC went to Sydney to see what is happening with one Aboriginal community in Australia’s most notorious and crime-ridden Aboriginal ubran area, Redfern.
Unfortunately, we get shallow, noble savage rot:
‘I imagined them to be a dark-skinned people, the men with bushy beards, eking out a living in the country’s outback.
Instead I found a lost people, bereft of their culture and struggling to survive as outsiders in a European society they have no real hope of being integrated in.’
This really just shows how ill-informed the writer is about the amazing variety of Aboriginal tribes, languages and ways of life – for example, most Aborigines live in cities or large country towns, not the ‘outback’, which in Australian terms is too non-specific to mean much (Australia is the size of Europe or the US excluding Alaska).
The article also appears to have missed the inquest currently being held into the Hickie death.
Not only does this tendentious, Rousseauvian twaddle miss the successes of Aborigines in Australia (and of course there is still a long way to go), it also betrays the preconceptions of the writer:
‘Just before I left Sydney I went to the opening of the new Redfern community centre. It was ironic that at the launch, the organisers had to bring in didgeridoo players from outside to entertain the guests. There were no local Aboriginals who could provide this service.’
Perhaps that might be because the didgeridoo is not exactly native to inner-city Sydney?
‘It is also ironic that I was unable to find Aboriginal handicraft made in Australia.
Tourists are going home with boomerangs made in China.’
Funny that – my large Aboriginal art collection is all made by Aborigines in Australia. Go to a trashy tourist shop in any city in the world and you will find tourist tat made in China.
When I saw it, this article was on the front page of the BBC news website. Australia’s reputation has already been trashed by the BBC, which paints it as some racist, concentration-camp erecting country off the edge of the world (completely untrue) – this propaganda hardly helps.
‘Just before I left Sydney I went to the opening of the new Redfern community centre. It was ironic that at the launch, the organisers had to bring in didgeridoo players from outside to entertain the guests. There were no local Aboriginals who could provide this service.’
They couldn’t have been looking hard enough. I live 1 km from this centre, and many evenings outside my local supemarket an Aboriginal guy busks playing the didgeridoo. (Go to IGA next to the Dendy in King St, Newtown)
If he would’ve wandered into The Rocks (right across from the Opera House) he would’ve found Aboriginal-made trinkets. That was probably out of his price-range.
‘I imagined them to be a dark-skinned people, the men with bushy beards,..’
I’ll invite her here to Washington to meet me, an arab-american, so that she can be surprised that I don’t commute to work on a donkey or camel…
Obviously Australian Aborigines have no business being integrated, successful members of modern western society. No, they should be roaming the ‘outback’ with their boomerangs like some permanent National Geographic spread in order to feed the ‘Noble Savage’ fantasies of ‘enlightened’ Westerners.