Mandela Is Gone, but Apartheid Is Alive and Well in Australia

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Mandela Is Gone, but Apartheid Is Alive and Well in Australia

Thursday, 19 December 2013 09:08
By John Pilger, Truthout | Op-Ed

Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar disapproval seldom has found its mark for Australia's treatment of its Aboriginal population.

In the late 1960s, I was given an usual assignment by the London Daily Mirror's editor in chief, Hugh Cudlipp. I was to return to my homeland, Australia, and "discover what lies behind the sunny face." The Mirror had been an indefatigable campaigner against apartheid in South Africa, where I had reported from behind the "sunny face." As an Australian, I had been welcomed into this bastion of white supremacy. "We admire you Aussies," people would say. "You know how to deal with your blacks."

I was offended, of course, but I also knew that only the Indian Ocean separated the racial attitudes of the two colonial nations. What I was not aware of was how the similarity caused such suffering among the original people of my own country. Growing up, my school books had made clear, to quote one historian: "We are civilised, and they are not." I remember how a few talented Aboriginal Rugby League players were allowed their glory as long as they never mentioned their people. Eddie Gilbert, the great Aboriginal cricketer, the man who bowled Don Bradman for a duck, was to be prevented from playing again. That was not untypical.

In 1969, I flew to Alice Springs in the red heart of Australia and met Charlie Perkins. At a time when Aboriginal people were not even counted in the census - unlike the sheep - Charlie was only the second Aborigine to get a university degree. He had made good use of this distinction by leading "freedom rides" into racially segregated towns in the outback of New South Wales. He got the idea from the freedom riders who went into the Deep South of the United States.

We hired an old Ford, picked up Charlie's mother, Hetti, an elder of the Aranda people, and headed for what Charlie described as "hell." This was Jay Creek, a "native reserve," where hundreds of Aboriginal people were corralled in conditions I had seen in Africa and India. One outside tap trickled brown; there was no sanitation; the food, or "rations," was starch and sugar. The children had stick-thin legs and the distended bellies of malnutrition. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20726-mandela-is-gone-but-apartheid-is-alive-and-well-in-australia