La
Trobe University,
“Bundoora Arabesque”
And Australian Aboriginal Genocide
By Gideon Polya
12 August, 2007
Countercurrents.org
La
Trobe University (Bundoora, outer Melbourne, Australia is its main campus)
ranks roughly #10 out of Australia’s 40 odd universities. It can
boast past or present associations with some outstanding scholars in
the areas of bioethics, gay rights, science and human rights. It is
named after Charles Joseph La Trobe who was a governor of Victoria in
the 19 th century. However La Trobe has an ambivalent history - he was
a traveler, mountaineer and writer on the one hand but during his rule
the notorious Native Police were involved in the Aboriginal Genocide
that delivered the rich agricultural lands of Victoria to European settlers.
Indeed this ambiguity is possibly behind a statue of Governor La Trobe
at La Trobe University which is UPSIDE DOWN (i.e. head on the ground,
feet and plinthe in the air!).
This same dichotomy arises
now. I have painted a huge painting (1.3 metre x 2.9 metre) called “Bundoora
Arabesque” (for an expandable image see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15960/42/
) and am using this Art to inform people around the world about the
appalling, ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide. In this process of
Art versus Genocide I have been doubly inspired by La Trobe University
– I have been inspired by the beauty of Bundoora in which it is
set and in which I live (Bundoora means “the country kangaroos
like” in the Aboriginal language of this region – try to
spot them, in the painting!) and by the example of an outstanding La
Trobe University academic, Professor Robert Manne, who has led the scholarly
fight against right-wing DENIAL of the Australian Aboriginal Genocide.
Professor Robert Manne of
La Trobe University is widely regarded as one of Australia’s leading
public intellectuals and in recent years he has been particularly forthright
and articulate in his defence of Australia’s downtrodden Aboriginal
community. One of the world’s and Australia’s leading experts
on genocide, Professor Colin Tatz (University of New South Wales, formerly
of Macquarie University), has described what happened to Australia’s
Indigenous Australians as the Aboriginal Genocide – the Indigenous
population fell from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century
after European invasion (mainly through introduced disease, deprivation
and horrendous violence); a policy of forcible Aboriginal child removal
(0.1 million “Stolen Children”) continued up to about 1970;
Indigenous Australians were not even “counted” or able to
vote as Australians until after a referendum in 1967 that permitted
the Federal Government to legislate about them; and horrendous Aboriginal
Genocide through deprivation and discrimination CONTINUES (9,000 Aborigines
die avoidably every year out of a population of 500,000 due to deliberate,
sustained Federal and State Government neglect) (see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15140/42/
).
Professor Robert Manne has
been a leading figure in the so-called Australian “History Wars”
in which many Australian scholars have pitted themselves against writers
and politicians who claim that there was NO Aboriginal Genocide. Indeed
the extreme right-wing, Bush-ite Australian Government refuses to say
“sorry” for the past atrocities. A very notable publication
is a major academic anthology edited by Professor Robert Manne entitled
“Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's Fabrication of Aboriginal
History”, Melbourne, Black Inc, 2003. (for more a detailed list
of relevant scholarly works see the following Yale University site:
http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/
). However we live in an Orwellian Age in which “money buys truth”
and in which “all the news that’s fit to print” means
“fit to print by the corporate Mainstream media” –
denial of the Aboriginal Holocaust is alive and well in White Australia.
This has been dramatized
by very recent events in Australia. In response to shocking anecdotal
reports in 2006 of Aboriginal child sexual abuse in Australia’s
Northern Territory (NT), the NT Government set up an expert Inquiry.
The subsequent Northern Territory (NT) Report “Little Children
are Sacred” concluded that from a QUALITATIVE perspective Aboriginal
child sexual abuse IS occurring and this and other serious Aboriginal
circumstances must be URGENTLY addressed but sensibly and with community
CONSULTATION.
However the Report (p57)
states that “it is not possible to accurately estimate the extent
of child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory” while DOCUMENTING
that 34% of females and 16% of males in Australia as a whole experience
child sexual abuse (Dunne, M.P., Purdie, D.M., Cook, M.D., Boyle, F.M.
& Najman, J.M.(2003), Is child sexual abuse declining? Evidence
from a population-based survey of men and women in Australia, Child
Abuse & Neglect, vol. 27 (2), pp141-152)
(see: http://www.nt.gov.au/dcm/inquirysaac
/pdf/bipacsa_final_report.pdf ).
Yet the Bush-ite Australian
Federal, “Coalition” Government and Mainstream media have
been commenting extensively and in very strong terms about this without
actually knowing about the ACTUAL extent of NT aboriginal child abuse
(for all we know it is far LESS than in Australia as a whole).The Government
is simply INCORRECT in implying that it knows of the horrific extent
of the NT child abuse problem when it does NOT actually know the NUMBERS
- just as it was INCORRECT about children overboard (it won the 2001
election by falsely claiming that Muslim refugees had thrown their children
into the sea); Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) (a falsehood
used to “justify” the illegal, war criminal Australian invasion
if Iraq); ignoring and denying Australian Wheat Board (AWB) bribes to
Saddam Hussein; and denying huge civilian casualties in Occupied Iraq
and Occupied Afghanistan (post-invasion excess deaths now total over
3.4 million).
Thus there were actually
NO children thrown overboard; there were NO WMDs; everybody knew of
the need for Iraqi wheat sale bribes from the mid-1990s onwards (the
$250 million in Australian bribes diverted from the UN Oil for Food
Program are estimated to have killed up to 21,000 Iraqi infants); post-invasion
excess deaths in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories total 1.0
million and 2.4 million, respectively, and post-invasion under-5 year
old infant deaths total 0.5 million and 1.9 million, respectively (largely
avoidable and due to war criminal Occupier mass child-abuse in gross
violation of the Geneva Convention; see: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/13099/26/
).
The racism and neglect of
the Conservative (Coalition) Australian Federal Government has created
appalling Aboriginal living conditions. My recent book “Body Count,
Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne,
2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/
; copies in major libraries around the world) estimates that the “annual
death rate” (2003 figures) is 2.2% (for Aboriginal Australians)
and 2.4% (for Aboriginal Australians in the Northern Territory) –
as compared to 0.4% (what it should be for a comparable high birth rate
society), 2.5% (for pre-drought sheep in paddocks of Australian sheep
farms), 0.7% (for White Australians), 1.7% (non-Arab Africa), 2.6% (Occupied
Iraq under-5 year old infants), 6.5% (Occupied Afghanistan under-5 year
old infants) and 10% (Australian prisoners of war of the Japanese in
World War 2).
This is happening in one
of the richest countries of the world because of deliberate and sustained
neglect – Australian Aboriginal health services are funded at
about 50% of what they should be according to the Commonwealth Grants
Commission (2001) report “Report on Indigenous funding”
(quoted by a recent and very detailed report on Indigenous Australian
Health by N. Thomson et al: “Overview of Indigenous Health, 2004”:
http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/html/html_bulletin/
bull_44/reviews/thomson/reviews_thomson_1.htm ).
The World Health Organization
(WHO) estimates “total per capita medical expenditure at average
exchange rate ($US)” (2004) as $14 (US-UK-Australia-Occupied Afghanistan)
and $58 (US-UK-Australia-Occupied Iraq) versus $3,123 (Occupier Australia)
(see: http://www.who.int/nha/country/Annex%202.pdf ). With an Indigenous
population of about 0.5 million that is funded at roughly the national
average (despite huge morbidity and remote location problems) the EXTRA
funding required is about US$1.5 billion annually – as compared
to the US$0.4 billion now offered, and this largely for Army and bureaucratic
personnel and infrastructure.
Let us be clear about what
this legislation does and how it grossly violates the 1975 Racial Discrimination
Act, International ant-racism conventions and indeed the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights 1948 (specifically Articles 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 19,
22 and 30; see: http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html
). Racist White Australia is proposing to grossly abuse the human rights
of NT Aboriginals in a racially-specific way.
THUS: NT Aboriginals will
be circumscribed about what they can read, see, drink, use, consume
and purchase in ways that do NOT apply to White Australians; their welfare
payments will be withheld by the Government; they will not be able to
litigate to protect themselves – the Racial Discrimination Act
is suspended in a racially-specific way; a Permit system, vital for
keeping drug- and alcohol-pushers from remote Aboriginal communities
will be abolished; NONE of the 97 recommendations of the expert NT Report
will be addressed and indeed the key #1 Recommendation of URGENT ACTION
WITH CONSULTATION is fundamentally violated; their Land (Sacred to Indigenous
Australians) and their Communities will be seized and controlled for
years by the Federal Government which currently presides over 9,000
avoidable Aboriginal deaths annually and which still refuses to say
“sorry” for the past horrendous Aboriginal Genocide and
Ethnocide. Indeed the Aboriginal Genocide continues – it took
90,000 lives in the last 11 years alone of rule of Australia by the
Coalition Government (see “Aboriginal Genocide. Racist White Australian
Child Abuse & Passive Mass Murder: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15140/42/
and “Racism in Australia. La Trobe, “Bundoora Arabesque”
& Aboriginal Ethnocide”: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15960/42/
).
According to the Australian
Human Rights Commission (see: http://www.humanrights.gov.au/about_
the_commission/legislation/index.html#rda ) the Racial Discrimination
Act 1975 gives effect to Australia's obligations under the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.
Its major objectives are to (1) promote equality before the law for
all persons, regardless of their race, colour or national or ethnic
origin, and (2) make discrimination against people on the basis of their
race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin unlawful.
Sanctions and Boycotts were
applied successfully against the racist Apartheid régime in South
Africa which had an “annual avoidable death rate” of 0.4%
overall in 1993 as compared to 2.0% for Northern Territory Aborigines
in Australia TODAY. The head of the Australian Human Rights and Equal
Opportunity Commission (HREOC) says that the Federal Government's legislation
for intervention in Northern Territory Indigenous communities could
face an international back-lash (see: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/08/08/2000137.htm
).
The Nazis wiped my family
from the face of Europe. I am married to a Black Australian. The Jewish
Holocaust and the Aboriginal Genocide both instruct that there must
be ZERO TOLERANCE FOR RACISM. The racist Bill has already passed the
House of Representatives with bi-partisan support – only Senate
approval is now needed but the Senate is overwhelmingly dominated by
the 2 major parties that support the Bill (only the minority Greens
and Democrats oppose the Bill). Australians have been given just a few
days to present submissions to a One Day Senate Inquiry into the 500
page NT Intervention Bill and about 70 submissions have been made (for
details - my submission is #35 – see: http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/committee/
legcon_ctte/nt_emergency/submissions/sublist.htm ). I and others
have urged all Senators to vote against this Bill – a vote for
this Bill is a vote against a non-racist Australia and the international
reputation of this country.
The World should be watching.
Tell everyone you know about the horrendous, continuing Aboriginal Genocide
and the resurgent, bi-partisan-backed, politically correct racist (PC
racist) New Racist White Australia.
Dr Gideon Polya
published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently
a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant
Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York
& London, 2003). He has just published “Body Count. Global
avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007:
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/1375/247/
).
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