This wide, brown, racist land

Are Indigenous Australians so economically useless and menacingly unattractive that they need to be relocated away from their birth place or removed from public view?

Just when you think the tide of public opinion in support of Indigenous Australians is turning, after Prime Minister Rudd’s heartfelt national apology on February 13, along comes two unsavoury incidents that staggeringly snap us out of our complacency.

An incident in my home town of Cunnamulla, involving a mayoral candidate’s offer to pay 25 Aboriginal families $50,000 each to leave town, and a backpacker hostel owner in Alice Springs, evicting Aboriginal guests because he feared they scared his Japanese visitors, are sobering reminders that we still live in a country steeped in racism.

Many Indigenous leaders around the nation may even view these offensive acts as trivial compared to the more serious examples of racism their community members can cite regularly - but which fail to gain the media attention that these two issues have in recent weeks.

These communities, in Queensland and the Northern Territory, may be separated by a thousand kilometres of parched landscapes but the bigoted perpetrators’ contemptible acts against their local Indigenous population is a mirror image in intent.

Sadly these two incidents are not a coincidence - this is Australia 2008 - and can be viewed at will on any given day in any community with a significant Indigenous population.

The only positive to come out of both disgraceful events is the exposure of the offenders’ high level of racial intolerance, to their detriment, by national media outlets. The national publicity may well be a result of the media adopting a more objective stance on these occurrences since the stolen generation apology in federal parliament.

Let’s hope the media will continue to be as inclusive in their dealings on topics with a peculiar racial slant.

When I was first approached by family and friends from Cunnamulla, via an email, with the offensive flyers attached my initial thought was not to do anything that would give the mayoral candidate any publicity that might enhance his campaign.

After all it is the publicity that these types of people crave the most and which motivates them to put pen to paper and vent their spleen. We Indigenous Australians are all too familiar with the disdain with which we are held by certain racist elements within our communities, even so very few of these people publicly take their message of racial hatred to the next level through the publication of their troubling thoughts.

A week passed and I still hadn’t bothered to do anything about the flyer when I had a visit to my office from concerned relatives who wanted to brief me further on what they were hearing from their mob back home and the damage this flyer was doing to their morale.

When I was told that this fellow had deliberately placed the racist flyers in letter boxes of local Indigenous families I then felt the need to become more proactive. I am well aware of the anxiety such mail can cause Indigenous families from personal experience with my long running dispute concerning the E.S. “Nigger” Brown Stand controversy - from people purporting to represent the Ku Klux Klan in the Toowoomba district.

It was at this stage that I felt that to do nothing - as was my intention - was in fact an exercise in condoning what had taken place.

I posted a media release the afternoon my concerned relatives visited. The story was initially picked up the following day by my local ABC Radio station and it snow balled from there.

Most newspapers did a story on the controversy or ran the Australian Associated Press (AAP) coverage of it during the next couple of days before A Current Affair (ACA) decided they wanted a piece of the action.

Although initially apprehensive about the angle the commercially-geared ACA was going to take on the story, I did agree, after some assurances were made, to assist them in their presentation.

I was somewhat relieved that the finished product shown nationally on Channel 9 not only subjected the flyer’s author to ridicule from Indigenous people but also provided a platform for Cunnamulla’s non-Indigenous population to vilify him for attracting such bad publicity to their small community.

This is Mayoral aspirant Kevin Wise’s suggestion:

I will petition the federal government to offer 25 “indigenous” families $50,000 each to relocate any-where away from the Paroo shire and for their places to be allocated to 25 non English speaking Vietnamese peasant families with upwards of 100 sub teen children on a five year contract to remain in the Cunnamulla area.

I guarantee that within that five years these families will have advanced this shire's wealth and future prosperity out of all proportion to that achieved to date with the integration on totally racial grounds of this “dead in the water”, last one leaving “turn out the lights” community.

It was also dismissed by a representative of the Vietnamese community in Brisbane for being divisive and offensive.

In Alice Springs the Haven Backpacker Hostel joint owner, Greg Zammit issued a statement of apology for the alleged racism of the 16 Aboriginal people evicted from his hostel because other tourists were scared of them.

The resort manager told Bethany Langdon from the Yuendumu Young Leaders program the group would have to leave.

“The manager came out and told me that we weren’t suitable to stay there,” she told ABC1’s Lateline program.

“They said, because you’re Aboriginal, other tourists were making complaints that they were scared of us.

“I felt like I wanted to cry, because it made me feel like I wasn’t an Australian.”

Message Stick Online reported Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin saying racism of any sort in Australia is unacceptable.

Ms Macklin says she is concerned about the allegations. “We don’t support any form of racism, it is just abominable in Australia today to imagine that this sort of racism is taking place,” she said.

It really does make you wonder how someone could be so alarmist about the physical appearance of 16 young Indigenous ladies who were in town to undergo Life Savers training. These fine fit young ladies traveled 300km to Alice Springs to gain extra life saving skills to better equip themselves should members of their community seek their assistance in times of trouble in the pool, river or in any other health related facet of their lives.

Several years ago I read an article that disturbed me immensely when the author quoted hotel guests in an eastern European city saying the group of visiting Central Australian Indigenous female artists and entertainers were “the ugliest people they have ever seen”.

I couldn’t believe the journalist in the first instance would give weight to such disparaging remarks from one human being of another. Second, what merit does a subjective view give to the question of the aesthetic beauty of one person over another?

I’m not naïve in ignoring the fact that bullying occurs at all levels of outward physical appearance; weight, height, hair colour, physical impairment and so on, but try as I may the notion of factoring in specific racial-ethnic characteristics as a generalisation to me is way over the top.

The Cunnamulla mayor aspirant said in one of his many interviews that the Aboriginal population had contributed little to the wealth of the township and thought the Vietnamese families could magically create prosperity by engaging in market garden type enterprises.

The patronising notion that Vietnamese people only make good market gardeners is an omission of the varied professional skills they currently contribute to communities in which they live.

Perhaps Kevin Wise’s thoughts, when writing his pamphlet, were still in the 1950s.

Kevin Wise and the Alice Spring’s backpacker hotel proprietor, Greg Zammit, are the ones who ought to rethink their roles in their respective communities as I’m sure many Australians are of the opinion that they are the ones who should be moved on and kept out of public view.