"We're not like white fellas who can take a photograph and say what pretty country it is; we've got song to sing for that country... Country where we live we've got to show, and country with the song. We've got to follow the line from a long way. All we're doing now is still Dreaming, it's still there."
- Mr. Rubuntja, 1988
"We are not savages, sinners or criminals. There is no need for anthropologists, clergymen or police to look after us specially."
- Jack Patten, 1938
Both quotes taken from the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Centre in the Melbourne Museum. There is no photography allowed in the Bunjilaka, but this one young man, who looked like a tourist from Europe, went around innocently taking pictures of grave markers and the like. I wondered if I should tell him he shouldn't do that, but I thought that maybe the pictures would come out cursed, and then he would figure it out. In the movie Jindabyne, the man who kills the Aboriginal young woman is never caught, but he's seen sitting in his truck in the last shot being bitten by some kind of lake fly, with the implication that he will die from the bite. Until the 1970s the Victorian government would effectively kidnap Aboriginal children to control their "care, custody, and education" - "civilizing" them, teaching them to pray, making them forget Aboriginal culture.
On weekends there's an open mic in front of the Melbourne Library, which is right across the street from where I live. There's always this woman who speaks. She carries around the Australian flag and talks about how people in other (Muslim) nations spit on the Australian flag, desecrate it, and are disrespectful of Australian soldiers. I have never heard her ending point. It's strange and uncomfortable to listen to her here - you can see, beyond her small audience of five or six old people, people who belong to the sizable immigrant community, many of them Southeast Asians, turning and staring at her on their way into the library. There's also a politician here named Pauline Hanson who wants to keep Africans (because they bring diseases, like AIDS) and Muslims (because the government bends over backwards for them) out of Australia. In the past, Asian immigration has been her issue:
"I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. Between 1984 and 1995, 40 per cent of all migrants coming into this country were of Asian origin. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate. Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say in who comes into my country."
From "The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia", by Norman G. Owen:
"In order to continue to believe in their own mission, it was important to the colonizers to be able to defend their prestige in their own eyes. For this reason Western colonialists often tried to convince themselves that their passion for Asian women was different, inherently less noble, than their love of white women."
"Western women were warned never to lose their tempers with their native servants, because rage in public would destroy their dignity; they were also told to keep their children away from the servants' quarters to prevent them from assimilating improper native ideas about sexuality."
From "On the Wisdom of Our Country to Rely on France", by Hoang Cao Khai (1910):
"Look at England and Germany; the people they send to their colonies are the very poor ones, and poor people, once settled in the colonies, never nurture the hope of one day returning back to their country. As for France, her people are prosperous; they are used to their bourgeois way of life. In fact, ever since Napoleon the First, French laws guarantee equal shares in inheritance, so that sons and daughters receive equal parts; they all can afford to live in comfort, even in affluence. Precisely because of the comfort and affluence of their way of life, even [French] farmers and businessmen, let alone civil servants, will return to their country after a stay of about three to four years [in the colony]. This shows us that the French, in acquiring the colonies, simply wanted a place to vacation and not at all an area for permanent settlement."
"If our people follow that path, sooner or later, say within fifty or one hundred years, we will become the same as the French - that is, an intelligent race. It is relatively easy for an intelligent race to govern over a stupid one, but it will be difficult even for an intelligent race to dominate another intelligent race. At that time France will give us back our autonomy, and she will only protect us in foreign affairs."
From "Tearful Conversation over the Mulberry Fields and the Sea", by Nguyen Thuong Hien (1912/3):
"Once, in a certain province, there was a policeman who, after checking the tax card of a peddler, tore it into small shreds and put the pieces into his mouth. Before he could swallow them, the peddler seized him by the throat. As the policeman refused to spit out the shreds of paper, the peddler, naturally, was not ready to let go of the policeman's neck. After a while, the latter died of suffocation. The affair went to court, where the peddler just told the whole truth. The judge ordered an autopsy of the policeman's corpse. Upon finding in his throat all the pieces of the tax card, the judge acquitted the peddler."
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