Icon 'White Australia has a Black History'
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Green Mtn (view)

There's damned Europeans in the US too, sounds awful familar.

White Australia has a Black History': Sources for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in the National Library of Australia

Written and presented by John Thompson at the Indigenous Research Ethics Conference, 27-29 September 1995, organised by the Centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Participation, Research and Development, James Cook University of North Queensland.

I remember during the bicentennial year of 1988 seeing the slogan 'White Australia has a Black History' spray-painted in large letters onto the concrete walls which surround the base of the new Australian Parliament building in Canberra. It appealed to me greatly as one of the most effective protests by indigenous Australians during that flawed year of celebration, a year which most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, (and probably more European Australians than we might guess), viewed more accurately and appropriately as a year of loss and mourning, recognising the terrible damage done to Australia's indigenous peoples by the historic act of European settlement. In Judith Wright's powerful phrase, this slogan and the protest it represented was 'a cry for the dead'. Its neat ambiguity summed up two important issues central to any understanding of this country. In the first place, it was an affirmation by indigenous Australians that their long history in this country had primacy, legitimacy and a rich and positive integrity of its own. Secondly, it was an accusation, a reminder to those celebrating a mere two hundred years of European settlement, that this celebration was based on a false premise. The slogan was a reminder to the country that a dark pall of shame lay over the history of European settlement in Australia and that until this was recognised and acknowledged the prospects for reconciliation were bleak. It was an unpalatable message and it was one delivered with a kind of 'up your nose' assertiveness which expressed a new confidence and self-assurance by Australia's First Nation peoples.

... there's more here: http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/thomp.html
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“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions.” Wm O. Douglas
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