Tuesday 5 April 2016

Whitewashed History Goes Black

 
 Of the sail ship Enterprise. 

The University of New South Wales .... in Australia not Wales has been accused of  "rewriting history" because they prefer to use the term invaded when it comes to Captain Cook rather than how he discovered Australia or settled it.
Cook claimed Australia for Britain in 1770 but like America there were already people there. In fact there were 250 tribes of Aboriginal people living there so it wasn't exactly discovered.

A term for this has been called Columbusing obviously after Christopher Columbus who didn't really discover Jack or shit, go ask the Vikings who didn't discover it long before him.

 Cook making friends in Hawaii just before they killed him.

A forced colonization is an invasion if you have to rid yerself of the indigenous population first but back then people of colour weren't classed as being human so fuck em right? Things only mattered to the civilized white man, it was a man's werld, a white man's werld.
In the 1780's 50% of Aborigines died of illness, was this like the small pox blankets given out to Native Americans? Some suspect that natives were exposed on purpose but there isn't any proof. What happens on the far side of the werld stays there.

From the first discovery of Australia right up to the late 1920's there have been many slaughters of indigenous people carried out by soldiers, settlers and local police. Isolated areas have held the story of murder and rape for decades.


Aborigines were classed as flora and fauna and only got the status of being human in 1967. It's a similar story to the Native Americans though they got their rights sooner but rights for ethnic people still have to be fought for a lot of the time. 

All these "native" savages had laws and arts but were seen as primitive to western eyes. The Aboriginal culture was 60,000 years old by the time the white man arrived. When they were going walk about in the bush the Neanderthals were dominant in Europe. 

The Australian Aboriginal people have the longest continuing religion in the world with rock art that is 7,000 years old but depicts plants from 20 - 40,000 years ago. I don't think they needed or wanted to be discovered. 

Sure they were isolated and had stone tools, they also didn't farm because they lived symbiotically with the land and didn't have cities to feed. 



Then there are the Stolen Generations. One such story was from the 1950's, a woman who was taken aged 2 with her sister aged 4. They were playing outside while her mother was inside talking and social services took the children.
The other children were told to not say a thing or they'd be taken too so the mother thought the kids had been killed in the bush. 

The sisters were taken to Marella Mission Farm, a Church of England run home for children run by a white married couple that insisted the children call them mum and dad. While the couple lived in a house the children were housed in a chicken coop. The children mostly ate sandwiches and even baby food.

Older kids looked after the young ones and they worked on the farm and during Christmas holidays they were sent to other families for a couple of weeks. Anything they had been given by those families was taken off them upon return and sold. 
They were told lies such as coming to the farm with sores and covered in lice with abusive parents and many were too young to know better but the older kids that were more like parents to them told them the truth.  

For years the mother had thought that her children were dead but eventually got them back but the trauma prevented them from being a close and happy family. 

Thanks a lot Captain Cook ... dick! 

The history rewriting is more of a revision not told from a conqueror's point of view but from the point of view that everyone involved are human, they are all people. Not the white civilized European and the dirty dark skinned primitive. 

Yeah we invaded and we killed and didn't think anything of it. History needs to be true for all of those involved. 


No comments: