There has been some discussion tonight about the ongoing tension between lifestyles brought into focus by today’s apology by Kevin Rudd to the Aboriginal people of Australia for the ‘Stolen Generation’. Many are unhappy that an apology has happened, and see the Aboriginal as a lazy, alcohol soaked, drifter.
It puts me in mind of the story of the sleeping fisherman that was in the Guardian Newspaper that my colleague used to get occasionally at Artem. The story begins with a successful businessman walking down a beautiful beach, and as he’s passing a small fishing boat, he catches the eye of the owner of the boat who has been taking a nap. He strikes up a conversation. The businessman asks the fisherman why he’s sleeping instead of fishing. The fisherman replies that he went fishing this morning. The businessman explains the theory of capitalism and how if the fisherman went out again in the afternoons, he’d soon be able to afford to buy another boat. The fisherman listens and asks why? The businessman continues that if he had another boat, he could employ others and gain from their labour as well as his own. He paints a picture of building a successful company. The fisherman asks the businessman why he’d want to do that? The businessman replies with a flourish, ‘because then you could have leisure time, like me’.
The average Australian has subscribed to the businessman’s ideal of working every day and building a career, so that you can eat, feed your family and relax a bit. The work ethic is thoroughly embedded. They simply can’t see that the Aboriginal is ‘like’ the fisherman in the story in as far as, he doesn’t want for more than he already has. OK, the white settlers have brought drink, but was it the white settlers that drove them to it?
We have systematically undermined their rights to do nothing since we came here with an arrogance that is based in the base assumption that our way of life is somehow superior to theirs. Undoubtedly we live a more ‘comfortable’ life, but at a price that they are seemingly not prepared to pay. I get up, shower (occasionally) eat a hurried breakfast, then get into a gas guzzling truck and drive for an hour to work. At the end of the day, I do the trip in reverse along with everyone else, get home, eat dinner and hang out or watch the telly until I fall asleep. I don’t call that living, and I don’t see it as better than the aboriginal traditional lifestyle. Many of the aboriginal peoples of Australia live in ‘reservations’ like lepers almost. They are essentially a dispossessed people and the issues relating to their state of orientation to the system that has put them there are complex and entangled. Yet Australians make very simple attribution errors about aboriginal failure to sign up to the work ethic and the natural feelings of injustice from the whites that Aboriginals are ‘spongers’.
A recent report (corresponding with the election) found that ‘widespread’ paedophilia is occurring in Aboriginal reserves in Northern Territory. Now this is a very emotive subject in our society, though less so in others (Like Afghanistan for example – which is one of the reasons that the US are citing for wanting to invade it – (and a good job they made of the last place they invaded eh?) People are, as a result, calling for governmental intervention in Aboriginal communities. Some are clearly wishing that there could be some way that they could ‘remove’ the kids! Aaargh! Meanwhile, statistics that are equally vague from various other sources suggest that up to 25% of Australians have been sexually abused. These figures, which include the predominantly white Australian population don’t seem to be anywhere near as newsworthy.
Funny that!
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