Aborigine Inhabitancy Of Australia example essay topic

Josh Green, 5 L A Country of Green, Gold and a Forgotten Black. "Dreaming place... you can't change it, no matter who you are. No matter you rich man, no matter you king. You can't change it". It struck me the other day, as I was walking into the dark abyss of yet another school lesson, that I was missing something. And it was, with a certain degree of sentimentality, that I thought of my childhood in, and my subsequent yearly visits to, Australia; the 'New World', a progeny of Captain Cook's passion of exploration, a 'world's teemed in bloody, juvenile, discomposing, (yet oh so rich) history.

A 'world' colonized by the rejects of society; those tending more towards criminal than scholarly aptitudes. A 'world' known for its dry, flat, hot, inhospitable climate, yet comparatively also its gargantuan variation and number of unusual animals, deadly plants, and inspiring marine life. Indeed, it is a nation labelled as 'the most deadly in the world', where after escaping spiders in your shoes, snakes in your garage, scorpions on your doorstep, you can still, whilst having a swim on one of Australia's world-renowned beaches, be attacked by poisonous seashells which, believe me, actually go for you. If you escape those nasties, there is still always the chance of being chomped by a croc, swallowed by a shark, or indeed being drawn out to sea by a deadly ocean current, known as a 'rip'. Despite Australia's inhospitable climate, geography and local inhabitants, I shall never forget the land of my birth.

Everyone who goes to Australia comes back a new person, having scrambled out of their self-centred world of naivety and self-consciousness. There is something about the country, the people, the immensity of the place, that gives a distinct sense of individuality, a sense of loneliness, a sense of being just a small part of something unimaginably large, and a desire to irrevocably force one's way into that world, that dangerous world, that inhospitable world, yet that world of seeming inexhaustible wonders. The Australian people are something of a reflection of this. Just as Australian geography is something unmatched anywhere in the world, so are its inhabitants something unique. It is widely known that Australians are laid-back, good-humoured, affable peoples. However, despite their poise and good nature, all Australians attempt to conceal a discomposing history, full of malignancy and brutality.

As the first Europeans came over to Australia, they found just one obstacle preventing them from colonizing this fantastic country. This obstacle was Australia's indigenous peoples, the Aborigines. The Aborigines, it is believed, had lived in Australia for around 60,000 years, and it is widely accepted that these peoples have the oldest surviving continuous culture in the world. Indeed, Aborigine culture is atypical of any other widely. The Aborigines seem not to have pondered on time, or the changes associated with it. For around fifty thousand years they had lived unharmed and alone; now, within 30 years, from the first visits [by Europeans] to the complete colonisation of Australia, they would have to adapt to the dominance of the white man.

Aborigines were seen as inferior. They were hunted down and killed in their thousands. In fact, historical journals of senior men and women living at the time tell of these atrocities. A diary, written by William J. Lines in the early 1800's, tells of settlers butchering Aborigines for dog food; for lebensraum, 'living space', or purely for sport - in one instance, Europeans chased an Aborigine woman up a tree, and then fired pot-shots at her.

"Every time a bullet hit", says Lines, "she would pull leaves off the tree and thrust them into her wounds, till at last she fell, lifeless, to the floor". In the short 200 years of European existence on the Australian continent, Aborigine numbers were devastated. Indeed, if we take a look at the time span of the Aborigine inhabitancy of Australia, compared to the European inhabitancy, we see that Aborigines had Australia to themselves for 99.7% of the total inhabited history of the country. On the arrival of Europeans, there were between 300-500 thousand Aborigines; today there are just 40 thousand. Sickeningly, this kind of behaviour was not a crime. Indeed, in 1805 the Judge-Advocate for New South Wales, the highest judicial figure in the country, stated that Aborigines were basically too stupid to enter court, and that settlers may administer punishment as merited.

Nowhere else in English history or law is there such a disgraceful statement, a statement as close to an invitation for genocide as thumb to forefinger. Fifteen years later, a law was passed allowing soldiers to shoot any group of Aborigines larger than six, regardless of the sex, age or motives of the group. By the mid 1830's, attitudes were changing. City dwellers were becoming appalled by the complete disregard of human life, and in 1838, a prominent Sydney journalist called Edward Hall tracked down a story about 30 Aborigines being butchered, and brought the perpetrators to court. All nine of them were put to death by hanging. This did not, however, stop the killings - they went on randomly for another hundred years, the most recent of which was in 1928, when a group of 70 Aborigines were killed as a reprisal attack for the suspicious death of a white dingo hunter.

It was not until 1967 that Aborigines were on the Australian consensus; up until this point, they were simply considered not human. As recently as the early 1960's, school textbooks were relating to the Aborigines as "feral jungle creatures". In today's modern society, Aborigines are still not thought of as highly as white Australians. Despite having the same rights as white Australians, they are often looked down upon. They are seen to be stupid, reckless and prone to violence and aggressiveness, a bit like the Iraqi's in France, or, closer to home, the 'ned's' of our own city of Edinburgh.

During my childhood in Sydney, the word 'Abbo', used as a derivation for 'Aborigine', was seen to be derogatory, and for that reason it was often used to describe someone who had just broken something purely out of malice, or someone who was dirty, disgusting or criminally active. It is saddening to say that there are still people in Australia who believe in the superiority of European Australians. In a malevolent society (which, the saddest part being, is just a minority grouping of Australian-style organisations black-naming the rest of Aussies), the Aborigine numbers are dwindling. Aborigines living in communities only of other Aborigines are very rare, and city-dwelling Aborigines are often recluse. The most ironic part of it is that those anti-Aborigine peoples, often sporting fans, openly cheer their favourite football (rugby), NRL or AFL teams, all of whom have many Aborigine players - indeed, the Wallabies (Australian Rugby Union representative team) have at least three big-name Aborigine players, whilst in Rugby League, almost 50% of players are of Aborigine descent, an astonishing figure in comparison to the total percentage of Aborigines to European Australians. Thus, it is with much difficulty that Aborigines survive in a modern Australia.

Often the allures of big-city living and money draw Aborigines away from their ancestral homes, much to the dismay of an already-shrinking traditional Aborigine society. Despite these hardships faced by these amazing people, it is not a completely bleak painting. Education about the Aboriginal life is a large part of any Australian schoolchild, and I remember those lessons fondly. Just the way of life these people choose; there is something remarkable about it. Their wisdom; their closeness with nature; their arts, their beliefs about our origins, gods and spirits. However, what I find most remarkable is their literature.

Their poetry and song is so moving, so emotional, so deep. We can hear their outpouring of feelings in every line, every rhyme, every verse. Their literature is just so individual, so distinctive, that it stirs up the soul. The crimes against the indigenous peoples of Australia will remain a smear on our history as blood on the floor. Blood is thicker than water; and this history, rather than be concealed, must be shared.

Those who do not pay attention to history are bound to repeat it. And, indeed, the destruction of the way of life of a million people over 200 years is a sin, never to be forgotten. "Our story is in the land... it is written in those sacred places. My children will look after those sacred places, that's the law. You can't change it.

My children got to hang onto this story. This important story. I hang onto this story all my life. My father tell me this story. My children, they cannot lose the law.".