Colonialism 3

Police come out to collect our rent. The Aboriginal‘s Protection Board think it is important for the coloured people to pay rent. But the white people never thought of paying US rent for the whole country that they took from our ancestors.

Original source: Newspaper Melbourse Argus (22.02.1951). Reprinted in: Jan Chritchett (1998): Untold Stories: Memories and Lives of Victorian Kooris. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, p. 4.

Mary Clarke, (date of birth unknown - 1984) was a Koori Aboriginal activist. The quote comes from a speech recorded at a meeting with journalists. The meeting was organised to speak out against the eviction of a woman and her children of multiracial decent from their home in Framlingham Settlement, Victoria, Australia.

Australia was one of Great Britain’s settler colonies. In 1770, James Cook claimed eastern Australia for the British Crown. He also put forward the idea of a prison colony to relieve overcrowded British prisons. In 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed in Sydney with 1,500 prisoners. It is estimated that between 1788 and 1900 up to 90% of Australia's indigenous people were killed by introduced diseases, land dispossession and violent conflict. There were mass shootings, people were thrown in groups off cliffs or offered land poisoned with arsenic or other substances (Behrendt 2012: 274). George Reid, a politician from the Free Trade Party, said in an election speech in 1903 that ‘we should have a white Australia’ (he became Prime Minister in 1904). Forging a white Australia was a key political goal not only for him, however, but for European settlers in general over the centuries. The protests of the Aboriginal population also go back a long way. In 1938 a silent march was held to commemorate 150 years of land grabbing and colonization (creativespirits.info).

*Foley, Gary (1999): ATSIC: Flaws in the Machine. The Koori History Website. *John Harris (2003): Hiding the Bodies: the myth of the humane colonisation of Australia. In: Aboriginal History Journal. Canberra: Australian Centre for Indigenous History, S. 79-104. *Larissa Behrendt (2013): Indigenous Australia for Dummies. Canberra: International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies, S. 53f. (Rezension) *creativespirits.info: Aboriginal timeline: Protest.

1951