Chris wrote:

>Are borders and ownership clearer/simpler in Oz? I wonder how one shares out
>what was once all someone else's. Do we repatriate the colonists? Can a
>colonist never belong to the land their forefather's conquered, are we all
>tainted with blood until we move back to some primal territories, primal
>borders?

Ratko Mladic said: "Borders are always drawn in blood and states marked
out with graves." And I suppose he should know.

There _was_ violent resistance to the white occupation of Australia, a
fact which was glossed often in our history, and settlement was
accompanied by many brutal and murderous actions: it's not as if violence
doesn't exist in the past. But it seems to me (and perhaps someone
better informed can clarify this) that notions of borders and ownership
are quite different in Aboriginal culture and perhaps part of the problem
in recent times has been squaring a traditional Aboriginal notion of
habitation with Western ideas of freehold.

And I think that although there are significant differences, Chris was
not entirely incorrect to point to contemporary dilemmas in other parts
of the world; there are issues which should give us pause. How, to take
the question literally, could the land be given back? What constitutes
legitimacy? I don't believe, either, in primordial landrights: a good
read of the Old Testament is a scary enough warning about what that
means: and we are hardly immune from the ideological shaping of
histories. It's obviously impractical to send us Europeans home, for
there's no home to go to: it's obviously unjust to ignore the
implications of our being here for the people who preceded us. For years
we were taught that Aboriginal people were doomed to passively die out,
unable to cope with modern civilisation, but that turns out not to be the
case at all. The only thing that seems clear to me is the disgraceful
health and mortality records of Aboriginal communities, the
disproportionate rates of arrest and deaths in custody, the high
incidences of alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence, and the awful
routine institutionalised racism which seem to embed these facts. And of
course it is not simply economic deprivation, but cultural poverty, which
is causing this: and there are many Aboriginal people, also, to whom none
of this applies. And how none of these things are seriously addressed in
government policy at all.

What I can't stand is living in a society with such bad conscience.
Quite often I think our public discourse is the worst in the "free"
world.

BTW, it ocurred to me yesterday that I didn't actually know what
Australia Day (happy Australia Day, everyone) commemorates. Is it the
landing of Governor Arthur Philip in Botany Bay? Is it the anniversary
of Federation? Is it something else? I asked a few people, and none of
them knew either.

Best

Alison