Sarah Lloyd

Sarah Lloyd

I spent a year in Adelaide studying an MA last year and was shocked by the racism I saw in South Australia,racism and prejudice towards Aboriginal Australians that has gone on so long it seems to have become a habitual comfort zone in the mental furniture of the 'fair-go' white australian psyche.'Fair-go' proponents present themselves as egalitarian and neighbourly,unsentimentally plain-speaking, down to earth and completely decent.This is of course a bare-faced lie,as the whole of Australia is stolen from the Aboriginal Australians,and as their children were stolen often to erase white mens sexual guilt about their abuse of Aboriginal women,and to build a 'white nation',the fair-go myth erases the history of White theft and brutality with the cosy myth that Australia offers a fair-go to all Australians,whilst brushing quickly over the embedded racism in its legal constitution and current social policies towards Aboriginal Australians.I heard and noticed during my one year stay, Aboriginal Australians being villified for alcoholism,sexual abuse,laziness,trashing social housing, being a burden on the state etc many many times.I heard little honest reflection from White Australians about their historical violence and theft,their sexual abuse of Aboriginal women in the past, their dislocation and arbitrary destruction of an entire culture,both materially and spiritually, the oldest in the world. I heard almost no empathic discussion of the obvious social,cultural and psychological consequences of growing up with no warmth,perhaps little sense of belonging or empathy with one's caretakers,having few cultural role models to build an embedded social self esteem, I was struck by how maddening and shaming it must be to hear your whole culture and people put down and scapegoated by those who founded their entire sense of nationhood on abuse and violence, and then have the audacity to scapegoat their victims for being a social burden. It is denial on a breath-taking scale.The fact that the Australian council's code of conduct report HAS to specify that artists are not allowed to be treated in harsh, oppressive and thuggish ways,nor paid with alcohol etc ,tells it's own story in the 21st century.The appealing to an ethics founded on good conscience seems particuarly ironic, as one wonders how most in Australia can claim any sort of good conscience in relation to the treatment of Aboriginal people's.The relegation of matters of conscience to 'black armband politics' in recent history, the use of the army to resolve social problems in the Northern territories, the huge ignorance of most White Australians to even the historical testing of nuclear weapons from the 1950's onwards in land inhabited by Aboriginal people, the forcible administration of infertlity drugs to young aboriginal women without consent, is proof to me that White Australians en masse are still deeply ignorant in matters of conscience that might help them identify what unreasonable coercion is.The sponsorship for instance by mining company BHP Billiton of a few art exhibitions and museums does not to my mind compensate for their exploitation and rape of ancestral territory,their wholesale destruction and degradation of Aboriginal lands and culture. But as the government are currently allowing the testing of laser weapons in Shoalwater Bay, 'in the national interest',right next to the fragile barrier reef and no one much seems to mind,just as they sanctioned the Maralinga nuclear tests without too much resistance and with even a strong degree of national pride, perhaps its not too surprising that the appalling treatment of Aboriginal artists still remains inadequately examined. What is good conscience in Australia founded upon, not history obviously, history is as they say, written by the conquerors.