By PAUL OGRESKO
: On Jan. 26, 1988, Australia celebrated its
bicentenary. But for the over 200,000 abo-
riginal inhabitants of Australia there was
nothing to celebrate.

While huge crowds gathered in the city of
Sydney to watch the arrival of the tall ships
that had left England eight months ago to
re-enact the arrival of Australia’s first white
settlers, 15,000 aborigine protestors and
their supporters rocked the city with pro-
tests.

There was an ugly side to this birthday
bash. Hidden under the posters of Paul
Hogan, Foster’s Lager, and frolicking
beachgoers were two centuries of racism
and denial. The aboriginal people who
gathered in Sydney had come not to cele-
brate, but to mourn and to point out that
though Australia was founded as a penal
colony, the European settlers were now free
while its aboriginal inhabitants were still
prisoners of colonialism.

Gary Potts, a leading member of the
Assembly of First Nations of Canada, was
one of several representatives of indigenous
people from around the world who came to
Australia to show solidarity. What he found
was a situation with many similarities to
Canada.

“You're dealing with a situation where a
people’s homeland has been taken from
them and aboriginal people have once more
been shunted aside,” Potts told the Tribune.
“The basic right to self-determination anda
livelihood is being denied. It’s the same
thing indigenous people in Canada are deal-
ing with.”

The contemporary similarities are echoed
in the history of Australia — a history not
unlike Canada’s, where the view presented
in school texts, books and film is the pers-
pective of the conqueror. In Australia, as in
Canada, the aboriginal peoples have been
regarded as “primitive” — an insignificant,
if embarrassing anachronism. They are out-
side the mainstream of Australian society
and, till the recent protests, were conve-
niently ignored.

As in Canada, the story of what has hap-
pened to Australia’s aboriginal inhabitants
is not a pretty one.

Within 30 years of the day when Captain
James Cook first sailed into Botany Bay in
1770, the tribe that greeted him had been
reduced, through slaughter and disease, to
three women and one man. Official
accounts still suggest that the aborigines in
Tasmania somehow “‘died out”; in reality
they were hunted and poisoned, along with
kangaroos, to make room for settlement. In
the words of Australian journalist John
Pilger, the official story of what actually
happened to the aboriginal people is a his-
tory of “suppression, omission and lies.”

The outright genocide gradually gave
way to marginalization and impoverish-
ment. With any rights as citizens denied till
a national referendum in 1967, aboriginal
people faced a cycle of squalor and racism
within the slums of the dominant society or
a traditional lifestyle on land that was
increasingly being encroached upon by min-
ing and agricultural interests.

Statistics reveal the extent of racism
within Australian society and bear an
unavoidable similarity to Canada. The life
expectancy for aborigines is 55, 20 years less
than the national average; unemployment is
four times the national average; in Western
Australia, almost 50 per cent of all prisoners
are aboriginal, in the Northern Territory
that figure is 70 per cent; less than five per
cent finish high school.

In Canada, life expectancy among Native
people is 10 years less than the countrywide
average; the number of Native families liv-
ing below the poverty line is four times the
countrywide average; unemployment rea-
ches 90 per cent on many reserves; in Sas-
katchewan, although they constitute only

16 per cent of the total population, Natives
account for the majority of the prison popu-
lation; 64 per cent for men, 85 per cent for
women. And then there are the Donald
Marshalls, the J.J. Harpers ...

Aboriginal rights are intrinsically linked
to the land. In 1972, as the movement
among Australia’s aborigines for land
rights gained momentum, the Labour
government of Gough Whitlam granted the
first recognition of aboriginal land rights
since contact. It was a bare beginning but it
was a sign of hope.

Then, in 1975, following a now-
documented campaign of destabilization by
the CIA, the Whitlam government was
forced out of office. With it went all land
rights settlements. The Conservative govern-
ment that followed under Malcolm Fraser
was, naturally, more interested in protecting
the “rights” of the major mining corpora-
tions then negotiating aboriginal land
claims.

While the Bob Hawke’s Labour Party
government, which was elected in 1983, has
instituted legislation against racial discrimi-
nation and job denial, it has backed down
on following Whitlam’s steps in recognizing
land rights.

The Labour Party, pressured by the
major mining corporations and always
mindful of losing a vote, turned its back on
aboriginal demands. The opposition Con-
servative party made no pretence that it was
tied wholeheartedly to “industrial devel-
opment” of aboriginal land.

Left with nowhere else to go, aboriginal

Aborigines demonstrate in Sydney during bicentennial celebrations.

people took to the streets. Understanding
full well the frustrations aboriginal peoples
in Canada are going through in dealing with
the Canadian government, Potts could eas-
ily share the sentiment of aborigines as they
chose to protest this “birthday party.”

“There was a sense that as aboriginal
people we have to stand together,” Potts
said. ““We have had to deal with centuries of
colonialism and racism and we have shared
a common pain. Perhaps, by getting
together, we can find some answers.”

The assassination March 29 of the Afri-
can National Congress representative in
France, Dulcie September, is part of a
campaign of assassination of terror
against the ANC “but Botha is dreaming if
he thinks this will force the ANC or the
democratic movement into submission,”
Yusuf Saloojee, ANC representative in
Canada declared last week.

September, the ANC representative for
France, Belgium and Switzerland, was
shot in the head as she entered her office-
apartment in Paris in the morning. Police
stated later that the murder was “the work
of a professional.”

“This is not an isolated incident,”
Saloojee told the Tribune. “It is certainly
not the first incident, and it won’t be the
last.”

He called September a “‘very good, very
dedicated, committed and outstanding
comrade.” Like most ANC representa-
tives around the world, she had been the
target of death threats.

The South African regime has for a
number of years been attacking ANC per-
sonnel and representations around the
world, Saloojee said. The ANC chief
representatives in Zimbabwe and Swazi-
land were shot dead; the first attack out-
side Africa was two years ago, when the
ANC’s London, England, office was
bombed. In 1987, there was a bomb attack
on the ANC office in Sweden. Several
weeks ago, shots were fired at the ANC
representative for the Benelux countries
based in Brussels; he escaped injury. And
only the day before September’s murder,
Belgian police diffused a bomb at the
ANC Brussels office.

“Events of the past few days indicate an
all-out onslaught by the racist regime
against the ANC and its personnel,”
Saloojee said. “A South African refugee
was shot dead in Masero, Lesotho. A rela-

murder of
ANC representative in Paris ‘won't
force ANC into submission.”

YUSUF SALOOJEE

tive’s home was riddled with gunfire and
then set ablaze, killing all five occupants.
And this morning (March 29), there was
an attack on ANC personnel near the
Zimbabwean border”.

“The Botha regime recognizes that it:
has not been able to contain the unrest
that has swept South Africa since 1984.

ANC cites Botha terror campaign

Even the so-called minister of law and
order, Adrian Vlok, admitted this January
that the state of emergency had failed, and
that new measures would have to be
adopted.

“What these new measures amount to is
a new wave of repression both against the
democratic forces inside the country and
the ANC,” he charged.

Saloojee noted that over the past few
months, the Botha regime in South Africa
has imposed banning orders on 18 demo-
cratic organizations and has moved with
increasing repression against religious
organizations, provoking unprecedented
confrontation with the church. In addi-
tion, it has placed harsh restrictions on
trade union organizations, including the
South African Congress of Trade Unions,
and has banned numerous individual anti-
apartheid campaigners.

“We will see confrontation within the
country sharpening”, said Saloojee. “But
if Botha for a single moment thinks that
these measures will force the people, the
democratic movement and the ANC into
submission, he is really dreaming. Because
events in South Africa over a long period
of time indicate that whenever repression
is increased, our people have responded by
increasing their pressure on the apartheid
state”.

The ANC representative said that the
liberation organization expects to see
increased repression over the next several
months. “And not only repressive actions,
but murderous acts, like the one in Paris
today,” he warned.

“But the ANC is not going to sit back
and take these acts of murder, assassina-
tions and attacks lightly,” he declared. “It
will respond accordingly, but not outside
of South Africa’s borders. It will respond
within the confines of South Africa. where
it really counts.

Pacific Tribune. April 6, 1988 « 7

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