which is the life stories of 13 stolen children told by themselves.
The definitive overview of the whole question of the deliberate disruption of Aboriginal life involved in the stolen children policy, is the magisterial and comprehensive new book, Broken Circles. Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800-2000 by Anna Haebich (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000). p> Another feature of colonial Australia was the intermarriage with Aboriginals of some migrant groups that had few women among them. Quite a few Chinese married Aboriginals. In central Australia very many of the "Afghan" camel drivers (they were mostly actually from the north-west frontier of what is now Pakistan, but crude British shorthand classified them as Afghans) married Aboriginals, and there is a community in central Australia, which mainly forms part of the Aboriginal community, with Pakistani names, who are descendants of these unions. p> The explosion of Aboriginal numbers in the recent censuses is obviously a coming together of the delayed results of all these past practices and events. The antagonistic response to it from some of the more backward and racist white Australians is obviously a product of a very bad conscience about Aboriginal relations in the past. For me, these matters have acquired a strong personal aspect in the last few years, because, as I describe elsewhere, an inquiry by one of my relatives into our family history has produced a hauntingly circumstantial, but difficult to document, inference of some probable remote Aboriginality, from an Aboriginal ancestor who may have deliberately disappeared into the more accepting Irish Catholic working class of the 19th century.
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Indigenous Australia and white Australia
It is obvious that my starting point in these matters is the imperative need for Australians to take a determined stand in defence of the interests of indigenous Australia against the current explosion of racism and attacks on the material interests of Aboriginal Australians. It seems to me absolutely clear that it is a reactionary diversion for essentially conservative people such as Pauline Hanson and Paul Sheehan to make indigenous Australians, Asian migrants and others scapegoats for the problems of modern Australia. Such attempts must be opposed, fought and defeated. p> Hundreds of thousands of white Australians are prepared to defend the rights and interests of indigenous Australia, as is shown by the enormous response to the events such as Sorry Day, Queensland pastoralists who have spoken up for Aboriginal reconciliation, the thousands of people who have spoken out against mandatory sentencing, and even the statements of conservative figures such as Malcolm Fraser.
Nevertheless, having said this, there are real, if episodic, conflicts of interest between some ordinary white Australians and some indigenous Australians, and that is one of the factors that gives momentum to the racist diversions of the people such as Pauline Hanson. These conflicts of interest are real and can't be glossed over. p> For a start, many Aboriginals live either in poorer working class areas of major cities or in provincial cities or country towns of high unemployment, low income and limited facilities and prospects for everyone. Because of past oppression, and current social problems, the unemployment rate among Aboriginal youth, with the concommitant social dislocation, is much higher than that of any other social group.
Problems such as alcoholism and drugs are proportionately higher among Aboriginal youth. The health problems of Aboriginal communities are worse than those of whites, and the life expectancy of Aboriginals is lower than that of whites. In addition to this, and for all the above reasons, the proportion of Aboriginals in the prison system is far higher than the proportion in the community. (This has been the case for the last 30 or 40 years. Before that, for the whole of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, the Irish Catholics numerically dominated the prison system, out of all proportion to their numbers in society at large, much to the mock horror of upper-class British Australia, which got very worked up about the criminal propensities of Catholics. The reason for this over-representation of Catholics in the prisons was exactly the same as the current over-representation of Aboriginals. At that stage Irish Catholics were the poorest of the population, at the bottom of the social heap. In Paul Sheehan's book, he also makes great chauvinist mileage from the proposition that Vietnamese, Arabs, Turks and Maoris (Sheehan's codeword for Maoris is "New Zealanders"), recent immigrants from poor countries or poor circumstances, are somewhat over-represented in the prison system. So what's new?) p> The widespread presence of an often physically obvious indigenous Australasian community, in the poorest secti...
