Australia's prime minister glosses over the real story of white settlement
gathered in a circle to defend the statue of Captain James Cook in Sydney’s Hyde Park. Australians inspired by American protests, and calling attention to the plight of their country’s indigenous peoples, might have toppled the statue. The moment was replete with historical irony. The “discoverer” of Australia met his end on a Hawaiian beach, at the hands of a crowd of angry natives. The police seemed determined not to let it happen to him a second time.
That is some gloss to the real story of white settlement. Australia’s indigenous peoples have endured land seizures, massacres, servitude and, well into the second half of the 20th century, children forcibly removed by government agencies and church missions in the name of racial assimilation—the so-called stolen generations. An uproar over his comments compelled Mr Morrison to backtrack and clarify that he had meant no legal slavery.
But Australia has made strides to improve the Aboriginal condition, starting with a referendum in 1967 granting full citizens’ rights to indigenous Australians. In 1992 a High Court case over land title overturned the long-held legal fiction that Australia had been an uninhabitedfor the taking. And in 2008 the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, formally apologised to the “oldest continuing cultures in human history” over the stolen generations and other past mistreatment.
In the past, bottom-up efforts by indigenous folk to improve their lot tended to work only if the political climate encouraged it. The “Uluru statement from the heart” in 2017, which called for constitutional change to give indigenous Australians a special voice in laws and policies that concerned them, was rejected by the ruling coalition, on the ground that the proposed body would constitute a third legislative chamber.
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