Inhuman treatment of children by the Australian government

Children on Nauru in desperate need of help

Australian advocates and opposition politicians are campaigning to free 119 children from forced detention on a tiny isolated Pacific Island, only 21 km2 in area, amid warnings that the health of several young refugees is quickly deteriorating.

One 12-year-old boy, detained on Nauru under the Australian government's strict border policies, is seriously ill after refusing to eat for at least two weeks and needs to be transferred to the mainland for treatment, doctors say.

Doctors for Refugees President Barri Phatarfod told CNN the 12-year-old boy was one of several young children on Nauru whose health was progressively deteriorating.

"We can only assume (he has) depression because of his progressive withdrawal from different aspects of life ... We know he refuses to eat and refuses to drink," Phatarfod said.

There are 119 children still living on Nauru after being transferred there under Australia's immigration policy, which bans asylum seekers who arrive by boat from being settled on the mainland.

The Australian government insists the children are no longer in detention, but they and their parents are not allowed to leave. The Australian Border Force was contacted by CNN for comment but did not respond.

More than 30 non-government organizations in Australia came together on Monday to demand the government release the children by Universal Children's Day, November 20.

Roze, 2, is a sociable little girl and likes to play outside, but there is no place for children to play in Nauru, World Vision says.

As part of their campaign, they released images of three children who are living on the tiny island, including two-year-old Roze who has spent her entire life there.

"There are children here suffering. We don't know what our future holds. Our children are like any other little children around the world -- but they are not allowed to be free," their parents said in a statement.

World Vision Chief Executive Claire Rogers told CNN the young people marooned on Nauru had less hope than children she'd seen in refugee camps around the world.

"I never thought I'd have to fight this in my own country, but the things that are going on Nauru have just caught my heart," she said.

George likes to play with his toy car and he loves to write. He was born in Nauru -- the family have been on the island for 5 years.

'Acts of self-harm and depression'

The Australian government started moving hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees, including children, to Nauru after reopening its detention center in 2012. Since then there have been regular reports of physical and psychological damagessuffered by the new arrivals.

A 2016 UN report found many cases of attempted sucide, self immolations, acts of self-harm and depression among children detained on Nauru.

According to Phatarfod, the only way for someone to be transferred from Nauru to Australia for medical treatment is to be at risk of imminent death.

She told CNN a number of children on Nauru were regressing developmentally, showing less ability at their current age than a few years ago.

"There are at least 10 children on Nauru that have been referred to us who display this, and at least seven who are actively suicidal," Phatarfod said, adding that if they'd been in Australia these children would have received "urgent" medical attention.

A second detention center for male asylum seekers on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, was closed by order of a local court at the end of 2017. The majority of the detainees were moved to a new center and have not been allowed to leave Papua New Guinea.

The Australian government maintains that its tough border protection policies are necessary to avoid deaths at sea at the hands of people smugglers. Under the policy, people who arrive in Australian waters by boat are sent to offshore processing centers, and told they'll never be settled on the mainland.

'Stop playing politics'

"(This) is a test of the courage of our political leaders to resolve this situation. If they fail this test, we will not drop the baton in championing these children to be put in a situation where they can grow up as normal, healthy children," Rogers said.

Some members of the Australian Parliament have attempted to speak out to gain help for the detainees trapped on Nauru, including the opposition Labor Party Immigration Spokesman Shayne Neumann.

Neumann wrote to Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on August 20, calling on the minister to accept an offer by New Zealand to resettle some of the refugees as quickly as possible

Speaking in the House of Representatives on August 13, Independent politician Andrew Wilkie called on the government to "stop playing politics with people's lives," listing a dozen cases of detainees in severe need of medical treatment.

"A 12-year-old boy who has overdosed twice in the past fortnight, an 11-year-old girl who is suicidal, an eight-year-old boy with autism in need of substantial support, a 27-year-old woman (who) was sexually assaulted on Nauru and is so afraid to leave her accommodation she has felt forced to urinate in a bucket," he said in a speech.

So far there has been no indication the Australian Government will listen to the latest plea for the refugees, but Rogers said they will keep trying no matter what.

"No one's saying this isn't a complex problem, but locking up children is not the solution," she said.

By Ben Westcott and Jo Shelley, CNN

Australia’s Centuries-Long Genocide Against Aboriginal People

For nearly two centuries, Australia pursued deliberate policies of extermination against the native people that have left scars visible to this day.

Writing about the two months he spent in Australia during the around-the-world voyage of the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin recollected this about what he saw there:

Darwin happened to visit Australia at a bad time. During his 1836 stay, all of the indigenous people of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand were in the midst of a catastrophic population crash from which the region has yet to recover. In some cases, such as that of the native Tasmanians, no recovery is possible because they’re all dead.

The immediate causes of this mass death varied. Deliberate killing of native people by Europeans greatly contributed to the decline, as did the spread of measles and smallpox.

Between disease, war, starvation, and conscious policies of kidnapping and re-education of native children, the Australian region’s indigenous population declined from well over a million in 1788 to just a few thousand by the early 20th century.

First Contact

The first humans we know of arrived in Australia between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago. That is an immense amount of time – at the upper end, it’s ten times longer than we’ve been farming wheat – and we know next to nothing about the bulk of it. Early Australians were preliterate, so they never wrote anything down, and their cave art is cryptic.

We do know that the land they traveled to was extremely harsh. Highly unpredictable seasons have always made Australia hard to live in, and during the last ice age huge carnivorous reptiles, including a monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, inhabited the continent. Giant man-eating eagles flew overhead, venomous spiders scurried underfoot, and clever humans took the wilderness head on and won.

By the time British explorer James Cook’s expedition reached Australia in 1788, over a million people – virtually all descendants of those first pioneers – lived in almost complete isolation, just as their ancestors had for a thousand generations.

The consequences of breaking this airlock were immediate and devastating.

In 1789, an outbreak of smallpox nearly wiped out the indigenous people living in what is now Sydney. The contagion spread outward from there and destroyed whole bands of Aborigines, many of whom had never seen a European.

Other diseases followed; in turn, the native population was decimated by measles, typhus, cholera, and even the common cold, which had never existed in Australia before the first Europeans came along and started sneezing on things.

Without an ancestral history of coping with these pathogens, and with only traditional medicine to treat the sick, the indigenous Australians could only stand by and watch as plagues consumed their people.

The Press for Land

With the first large tracts of land cleared by disease, the London-based planners thought Australia seemed like an easy spot to colonize. A few years after the First Fleet dropped anchor, Britain established a penal colony at Botany Bay and started shipping convicts to farm the land there.

Australia’s soil is deceptively fertile; the first farms sprouted bumper crops right away and kept on producing good harvests for years. Unlike European or American soil, however, Australia’s farmland is only rich because it had tens of thousands of years to stockpile nutrients.

The land’s geological stability means there’s very little upheaval in Australia, so very few fresh nutrients get deposited in the dirt to support long-term agriculture. The bounteous harvests of the first years, therefore, were effectively gotten by mining the soil of non-renewable resources.

When the first farms gave out, and when colonists first introduced sheep to graze the wild grasses, it became necessary to spread out and cultivate new land.

As it happens, the children of those who survived the first epidemics occupied the land. Because they had a low population density – partly because of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and partly because of the plagues – none of these Stone Age nomads were in a position to resist settlers and ranchers with horses, guns, and British soldiers for backup.

As such, countless Aborigines fled land that their ancestors may have inhabited for thousands of years, and colonists simply shot numberless tens of thousands others to keep them from hunting sheep or stealing crops.

No one knows how many Australian natives died in this way. While the Aborigines had no way to keep records of the killing, the Europeans seem not to have bothered: Shooting an “abo” became so routine that accurate records are impossible to come by, but the death toll must have been immense as vast new tracts of land opened up to replace exhausted soil every few harvest cycles.

Hunting for Sport

In some ways, differing understandings of property can help explain the ranchers’ slaughtering of natives. Colonists complained about traditional hunters poaching sheep that didn’t “belong” to them, and often had other property taken by natives who didn’t grow up with the same ideas about property rights that the English-speaking whites took for granted.

These losses cost the ranchers and farmers dearly and impaired the new colony’s growth, so the authorities eventually decided to let one problem solve another in perhaps the most grotesque way possible: bounty hunting.

In 1833, the Noongar tribe from south of modern-day Perth rose in a minor revolt. They mostly limited their resistance to spearing sheep, which did not amuse the territorial government.

The government placed a £30 bounty on a tribal elder named Yagan, whom settler William Keates eventually ran to the ground. Soon enough, Yagan’s pickled head made its way to London as a curiosity, where it remained until 1997.

This bounty method turned out to be popular and effective. In the early 1830s, governments across the colony offered bounties of £5 per aboriginal adult and £2 per child. By the middle of the decade, it was open season on the native people.

In a single action in 1832, over 5,000 whites formed a human chain in Van Diemen’s Land and drove through the bush as if they were a hunting party. Colonists forced Aborigines who escaped the drive to Flinders Island, where scarcity and disease nearly drove them extinct.

The Lost Generations

This carnage eventually got to be a bit much for the British government, which had undergone a radical shift with the incoming Whig Party. These reformers got elected on a platform of abolishing slavery and limiting various other outrages in the colonies, as well as enacting major reforms at home. The new climate opposed open-air murder, and London started putting pressure on Australia to rein things in a bit.

In response, the Australian government actually charged a handful of whites with murder in the 1838 Stockman Case, which the Crown instigated after a dozen stock ranchers staged an unprovoked attack on a nearby camp of Aborigines. This marked the first time the state had formally charged whites for killing natives, and the whole colony watched to see how it would turn out.

When the court found the men guilty – and worse, sentenced some to hang – the settler population across Australia unfurled in outrage. Many protested and sent letters repudiating the decision, but they didn’t save the condemned men.

Still, the event marked a sea change in the way colonists treated native people. Going forward, the destruction of the native way of life would be far more appropriate for the papers back home — like assimilation.

The Crown government came up with a series of reforms aimed at civilizing the Aborigines. In the past, the native people could come and go as they liked, though at the risk of being shot on sight if they stepped out of line.

Under the new order, from about 1838 onward, they held a legal status akin to children. The Crown established a royal office for Aboriginal affairs, which assigned each group to a specific geographic area and issued permits for travel.

Commissions would approve marriages, along with job assignments and housing arrangements. The government assigned England-trained missionaries to each group to Christianize them. Likewise, colonial governments would routinely remove Aboriginal children from their parents and force them into schools to learn English, with severe punishments for speaking native languages.

The children had to dress, eat, live, and work like white children, which a regimen of physical punishment enforced. On top of the official abuse, the consequence-free environment of these schools invited rampant physical and sexual abuse that went almost totally unnoticed and unaddressed for decades.

By 1920, the children forced into these schools had become known as the “Stolen Generations.”

Much of the culture was lost as well. In 1905, for example, Fanny Cochrane Smith, the last full-blooded native Tasmanian and descendant of a group that had been isolated even from other Aborigines for 10,000 years, died shortly after pressing a wax cylinder of traditional songs. It is the only audio recording of the Tasmanian language in existence.

The Modern Legacy

It goes without saying that populations don’t just bounce back from a century like this, and Australian policy throughout the 20th century didn’t help. The official policy of treating Aborigines like children in the custody of various appointed bureaucrats changed only very slowly, and it hasn’t completely ended even today.

For one, the first version of the Australian constitution excluded Aboriginal people from representation in government, as well as specifically depriving them of the vote. And in a country where it’s against the law to not vote, the government only granted Australians of Aboriginal descent suffrage in 1962, though they remained non-citizens regulated by the Flora and Fauna Act until 1967.

In the 1970s, the governments in Canberra and London made a few largely symbolic gestures to try to put things right, largely by returning the preserved remains of murdered Aborigines who had been put on display in museums and allowing traditional burials for them.

The de facto apartheid state gradually eased until full civil and legal equality was granted in every state, though not without a lot of strenuous objections in Queensland, which has a very high population of native people.

Today, things in Australia continue to move forward, but are still far from fair. Aboriginal artifacts and possessions continue to legally belong to the Crown, and deceased natives’ property still goes into receivership rather than being inherited by the next of kin, though in 2012 the Australian government admitted it was “considering” changing this law.

With a virtually annihilated culture and history, and with extremely tenuous property and voting rights, Aboriginal communities are rife with alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as all of the vices and afflictions common to impoverished ghettos around the world.

Fixing the problems that still kill thousands of aborigines a year does seem to be on the Australian authorities’ agenda, even if only on a “considering it” basis, but progress is slow and prone to reversal.

It is possible that the descendants of Australia’s first people, after 60,000 years of isolation ended with 200 years of deliberate genocide, will continue picking up the pieces for centuries to come.

 By Richard Stockton

https://allthatsinteresting.com/australia-genocide

Nothing to celebrate

While most Australians fire up the barbecue and crack open beers to celebrate national day on Friday, Robbie Thorpe will be marching in the shadow of Victoria's state parliament.

Like many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, he doesn't see anything to cheer on Australia Day, which marks the arrival of the First Fleet in 1778 to establish a British penal colony.

For him, January 26 is "Invasion Day", a reminder of the dispossession, violence, and loss that colonisation inflicted on the continent's first peoples. As far as the veteran indigenous activist is concerned, it's a day for mourning, solemn reflection, and resistance.

"Colonialism is a disease and this country has got a mental health problem known as denial of their genocidal acts," says Thorpe, who will march in Melbourne's annual Invasion Day rally aimed at changing the date of the national holiday.

"If it wasn't for their acts of terror and their policy of genocide, Australia wouldn't exist."

'Want for nothing'

More than simply symbolising a painful history, January 26 serves as a reminder to many of how Aboriginals remain marginalised to this day. Almost 250 years after European settlement, indigenous Australians on average die a decade earlier than the general population and have access to two-thirds the amount of disposable income.

"People don't realise how peaceful and how beautiful this country was when they arrived here," says Thorpe, who hosts a programme on indigenous affairs on community radio. "We had want for nothing."

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, who make up just three percent of the population, have organised en masse against Australia Day since at least 1938, when campaigner William Cooper held the first "Day of Mourning" in downtown Sydney.

More recently, though, the effort to change the date has gained momentum as an increasing number of white and other non-indigenous Australians have become attuned to the sensitivities around the date.

Earlier this month, the leader of the left-leaning Australian Greens, the third force in the country's politics, said moving Australia Day would be among the party's priorities in the coming year.

Richard Di Natale, the son of Italian immigrants, cited growing awareness, particularly among young people, that the day represented "hurt and suffering" for Aboriginal people.

In November, Triple J, a youth-orientated public radio station, announced it would move its popular annual music countdown from January 26 to the following day, pointing to the controversy around the date.

Reproduced from Al Jazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/01/australia-national-day-fuels-debate-colonial-180124153019791.html

The Rainmakers of the Australian outback

By Nicoles Ma

Over the course of 20 years, Tom "Putuparri" Lawford, navigated the deep chasm between his Western upbringing and traditional Aboriginal culture as he transformed from a rebellious young man into an inspirational leader.

His grandfather "Spider" taught Putuparri bush knowledge and the Aboriginal Dreamtime myths. For more than 40,000 years, their ancestors lived a nomadic life, knowing they could always retreat to their sacred waterholes when times were hard.

A process of cultural awakening begins when Putuparri returns to his homeland in the desert with Spider and is shocked to learn that the Dreamtime myths are not just stories.

Spurred into action by what he experiences, Putuparri dedicates himself to reclaiming the land taken from his ancestors and battling bureaucracy and political apathy. He is also under immense pressure to preserve an age-old culture while coming to terms with his own turbulent past.

By Nicole Ma

My first experience of the Kimberley was in 2001, landing on a red dirt runway and thinking, "Where am I?"

I had never met an Aboriginal person and was here to address the assembled elders at Fitzroy Crossing about participating in a documentary I was making. It was on how communities around the world use dance and music to enter ecstatic states.

I was looking for an Australian component, and I wanted to find out if Aboriginal culture practised going into trance states.

My pitch did not go down well. Instead, they told me that I could go with them on an upcoming desert trip for the "old people" - the people who were born on their country and had lived a traditional nomadic existence - and that I could film that.

After the trip, anthropologist Daniel Vachon gave me his thesis about rainmakers in the Great Sandy Desert. He cited Kurtal as a main ceremonial waterhole where rainmaking rituals were conducted and told me Spider was one of the custodians.

Vachon also gave me a VHS tape of the old people's first trip to Kurtal in 1994. I didn't look at it, thinking, "I've been there, shot that, I don't need ugly VHS footage" and put it away in a drawer

I continued to return to Fitzroy Crossing over the years, working with various Aboriginal NGOs and befriended many of the old women - in particular, Dolly Snell, who took me under her wing.

Dolly understood that film was a way to preserve their culture for future generations and that I could facilitate that, so she asked me to go to significant events. She instructed me on the Aboriginal culture and the complex relationships that exist in it between humans, "Country" and spirit, which I was struggling to understand.

Several years after my first visit I was preparing for a shoot, and I found the old VHS tape.

I had recently met the young Aboriginal man who had shot it. His name was Putuparri. It was an amazing experience watching the tape for the first time as it showed the entirety of a rainmaking ceremony involving a mythical snake spirit and ending with a dramatic thunderstorm.

The "old people" are a vast storehouse of traditional cultural law and Dreamtime stories. Most of them recall their traditional life in the desert with a mixture of joy and sadness.

While there are major issues in Fitzroy Crossing - isolation, a lack of meaningful work, alcohol and drug use, dependence on government funding - I experienced an Aboriginal culture embedded in song and dance, as well as the people's unique connection to Country.

Forgotten genocide, the slaughter of the native Tasmanians in Australia

D.Antón

The island of Tasmania, an Australian state with an area of ​​68,000 square kilometers and 500,000 inhabitants, is known for being one of the main producers of poppy in the world (to make morphine, codeine and other opium derivatives). It is also known because there is an atmospheric observatory measuring the CO2 content of the atmosphere, the Cape Grim Observatory.
There is another reason why the Cape Grim has historical significance. It is not a technical or scientific reason neither. It is the place where the slaughter occurred that ended the lives of thirty members of the last survivors of the tribe Pennemukeer of the Palawa nation (also known as Tasmanians natives).

On February 10, 1828 four white settlers, who raised sheep, killed with muskets several members of this community who were unarmed and defenseless and threw them from a nearby cliff.
The story of the slaughter is narrated by George Augustus Robinson:
"On the occasion of the slaughter a tribe of natives, composed of women and children, had come to the islands Doughboy. Providence had favored them with good weather. They swam to the island leaving their children on the rocks in the care of the elderly. They had prepared their supply of birds, had been tied with grass, had been towed to shore, and all the tribe sat around the fire sharing the fruits of their hard journey. At that time a group of ferocious barbarians thirsting for the blood of the helpless and harmless people pounced. They fled leaving their provisions. Some were thrown into the sea, others wobbled around the cliff and those who remained were killed by monsters. Those poor creatures who had sought refuge at the top of the rock were pushed to the edge of a horrible precipice, were massacred and their bodies thrown down. I went to the foot of the cliff where the bodies had been dumped, and saw several human bones, some of whom brought with me, and a piece of bloody cliff. As the tide came I hurried away from this Golgotha. "
The bay and cliff where these events occurred is now known as Suicide Bay.
Before the arrival of Europeans in 1642, and the founding of the first British settlement at Risdon Cove in 1803, the native population of the island of Tasmania was estimated between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

Since the early years of British occupation aborigines were enslaved, their women raped, their communities and victims of organized hunts in order to exterminate them. In 1830 there were fewer than 300 individuals (220 or 72 according to various sources).
The last Palawa woman called Truganini died in 1876 completing one of the most efficient genocides in modern history. Some time later, it was learned that another Tasmanian Aboriginal Truganini had survived. This woman, born in Flinders island in Bass Strait, named Fanny Cochrane, escaped the massacre and had 11 children who were the ancestors of contemporary Tasmanian community that still exists in this sea area.
Belying the proclaimed disappearance of ethnic Tasmanian there are currently still 16,000 people who declared descended from the ancient island nation, demanding recognition and claiming their cultural and historical memory. Errol West, eclared,a young man who expresses tasmanian source puts it:
"As the dust blown across the plain
are the people of the Lunar Bird
And yet, there is no one to teach me the songs
that bring the Lunar bird, the fish
Or anything else
That makes me who I am "

From "Chronicles of the human journey", Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Editions.

Rethinking Aboriginal peoples
D.Anton

There is a tendency for anthropologists and historians to define the people called "Palaeolithic" as "hunters and gatherers". Longtime I disagreed with that classification including all pre-urban peoples as such. First, I think the fishing and seafood consumption has been and is usually the first form of subsistence of pre-urban villages. For example, fishing and collecting shellfish and seabird eggs was the main source of livelihood for Charruas, Bohanes, Guarani and other indigenous nations of the Southern Cone. In addition native South American peoples managed their ecosystems, mainly through fire (which also served them to communicate). Besides, all the native peoples of this region knew how to  plant, and who did not was because they lived in inappropriate places for planting.

Australian Aboriginal peoples were considered "primitive" by some anthropologists and historians, who labeled them as "hunters and gatherers". This qualification  expressed an obvious racism that still is expressed in the brutal discrimination against these cultural groups in Australia even today.
An Aboriginal scholar studying ancient chronicles and documents concluded that aboriginal people managed forests, grasslands and deserts. They were not mere "hunters and gatherers". They planted (no large tracts of monoculture, but small farms) and opened trails in the woods to let herbivores come in. In Australia kangaroos and emus, while in Uruguay and neighboring areas they were deers and peccaries. See article by aboriginal writer Bill Gammage: "The Biggest State on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia".

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bushtelegraph/rethinking-indigenous-australia's-agricultural-past/5452454

Nauru, Australian neo-colonialism

 From the richness of phosphate mining to crowded refugee camps

Danilo Anton

The small island of Nauru in the Pacific Ocean has an area of 21 km2 and about 10,000 inhabitants of Polynesian origin. It is one of the smallest independent states in the world. Before 1896 it was a typical island of Oceania, its inhabitants lived by fishing, several crops imported by the ancient seafarers (breadfruit, taro, coconut) and growing pigs and poultry. The island was annexed by the German Empire in the late nineteenth century. After the German defeat in World War I, Nauru became a protectorate of the League of Nations (administered by Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom). During World War II, it was occupied by Japanese troops. After the end of the war and the expulsion of the Japanese, Nauru again become an Australian protectorate until it gained independence in 1968.

In the late nineteenth century phosphate deposits were discovered and that transformed the economy of the island. The phosphates were exploited first by Pacific Phosphate Company and later the British Phosphate Commissioners, Millions of tons were mined which degraded 80% of the surface of the island. For Nauruans only remained available five square kilometers of land. In 1968, when phosphates were running low, the island received the "independence" and moved from ephemeral wealth to extreme poverty. The Australian government, with a colonialist conception, took advantage of Nauru situation to set up a concentration camp for refugees and illegal immigrants where there are more than 500 people. This further reduced the availability of space for the people on the small island. The refugee situation is very difficult, prisoners and isolated in the middle of the ocean, depending on the willingness of the Australian authorities, not knowing what their future, waiting for months and years, their fate remains uncertain. For many refugees depression increases, and for some, suicide appears as a definitive solution. Meanwhile Nauru, once rich and wealthy, became one of the less fortunate Pacific islands.