This is a post about racism in Australia, and before I launch into that, I want to make two things pretty clear:
1) I am Australian, and
2) I am not black.
Perhaps these admissions will detract from our attempts at anonymous blogging, but probably not that much because Australia is overwhelmingly, preposterously white.
And, again, before I get to my main point–which is a rather small point but one I’ve been thinking about and feel strongly that I have to make–I think it’s worth considering why Australia is overwhelmingly and preposterously white, so I’m going to consider that for a while, during which I’ll take periodic breaks to make snide remarks about whatever I damned well please. Here we go:
When I was a kid, I had a beautiful, hard-backed, illustrated history of Australia book. I don’t remember enough about it to know whether it was a fair or accurate telling of Australian history, I also don’t know enough about Australian history to make that sort of judgement if I did remember more of it, and I know just enough about copyright law to be concerned that the intended use to which I’d put the book–jazzing up this post with glossy images–probably wouldn’t satisfy fair use, so I wouldn’t do that anyway. All of which is beside the point because the book is on a bookshelf somewhere in Mum’s house, and I’m in the United States. So you’re going to get Wikipedia links and you’re going to like them.
Australian Aboriginals are probably the oldest extant culture in the world. Before European arrival, there were somewhere between 300,000 to one million aboriginal people living in Australia. By 1933, there were around 74,000, due to the standard horsemen of colonisation: disease and famine, often caused by relocation, and genocide.
During the last century, that population increased to the point where there are around 500,000 Aboriginal people in Australia now, or around 3% of the population. It’s not been a bed of roses, however, as up until the 1970s, the federal and state governments were forcibly removing aboriginal Australian children from their families and putting them in church missions and foster homes to be raised away from their culture and their people.
To my mind, that sort of thing deserves an apology, but even that was controversial. Plenty of politicians resisted the idea on the basis that it would somehow put the government on the hook for damages or similar to the Stolen Generation who were victims of this policy. (It doesn’t sound like a very good reason not to apologise, if you consider the fact that the government was actually responsible for causing the damage in the first place) Former PM John Howard notably refused to apologise, which led to Midnight Oil famously performing at the closing ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games in outfits printed with the word “SORRY.” I still get chills watching it.
Former PM Kevin Rudd made good on a campaign promise when he issued an official apology in 2008, but Australia’s far from having a comfortable relationship with its shameful past, or its sticky tendrils which hang around today. In 1994, Aboriginal Australian sprinter Cathy Freeman caused a controversy when she carried the Aboriginal flag and the Australian flag on her victory lap after winning the 400 metre sprint at the Commonwealth Games. There was less controversy when she did the same after winning gold in the 400 metre sprint at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, which maybe was a sign of growing cultural maturity in Australia around the country’s relationship with its indigenous people.
Nevertheless, former Australian football player Adam Goodes might be an example of how far we’ve yet to come. Goodes came under a ton of flack for pointing out a young football fan who yelled a racist remark at him during a game, despite speaking later about how concerned he was for the young girl that insulted him, and encouraging people not to blame her. He was consistently booed at games for years after. He was criticised after giving a moving, but mild, acceptance speech when he won the Australian of the Year Award in 2014, in which he acknowledged Australia’s racist past and urged all Australians to move beyond racism as a community. And he was criticised again when he did a celebratory dance–a “war dance,” according to his critics–during a football game last year. One prominent critic, in addition to writing various asinine opeds that are behind the Herald Sun’s paywall, went on TV to say:
Look, I want to reiterate again that I’m not black, but I think I can safely assume that black people don’t like being told how to be black. It’s especially jarring when white people are telling black people, in Australia or in the US, how to respond to the very real racism that remains after centuries of racial violence committed by white people against black people. Frankly, it’d be a whole lot easier for white people if everyone else was as good at forgetting that heinous past, and ignoring the troubling present, as they are.
There are a ton of white Australians who seem comfortable with the presence of Aboriginal Australians, but not with hearing what Aboriginal Australians have to say. They get mad when Cathy Freeman celebrates being an Aboriginal Australian, as well as an Australian. They get mad when Adam Goodes points out that being an Aboriginal Australian involves experiencing the modern legacy of racism, which is also racist.
Andrew Bolt also said this:
‘You know, the man is always a victim,’ Jones told Channel Seven’s Sunrise on Wednesday morning.
Bolt is unintentionally accurate, here. Every time Goodes speaks, Australia is a racist nation, not because Adam Goodes says it is, but because it’s got a long and well-established history of being racist. Bolt might not like what Goodes is saying, but that’s not Goodes’ fault. It’s the fault of Andrew Bolt and everyone who agrees with him who refuse to acknowledge the virulent and deep-seated racism in Australian culture.
That racism isn’t limited to indigenous people, however. Australia also has a troubled history and shameful present when it comes to immigration. From just after its federation in 1901 until the middle of the 1970s, Australia had in place a collection of racist immigration laws known as the “White Australia Policy” that were exactly as racist as they sound. In 2001, in response to asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat from south east Asia, Australia implemented the “Pacific Solution,” which attempts to stop asylum seekers in boats from reaching Australian territory, and hence having a claim to asylum in Australia. Boats full of asylum seekers are instead intercepted by the Australian Defence Forces and routed to detention camps in various Pacific islands for processing. Australian politicians from both major parties continue to work to prevent asylum seekers from ever reaching Australia or obtaining asylum there. In the last 15 years, almost 2000 asylum seekers have died in ocean crossings, in detention, after being returned to their country of origin, or while being sought by Australian immigration officials. (Great visual representation here.)
What happens if they get to Australia, though? It has a reputation as an incredibly friendly, laid-back place that exports tanned, drunk, singlet-wearing young people to youth-hostels all over Europe. It hosts one of the world’s largest gay and lesbian mardi gras. According to the UN’s Education Index, Australia is the most highly educated country in the world. It seems like foreigners would be welcomed into the progressive mix and, to a large extent, they are. But they also aren’t.
As a kid in the 1990s, I recall seeing drunk yobbos in the city shouting racial slurs and spitting at brown people in downtown Adelaide. In 2005, crowds of racist louts rioted against the Middle-Eastern community in Cronulla, a suburb of Sydney. In 2014, Australians started a Twitter campaign around the hashtag #illridewithyou, in an attempt to preempt racially motivated attacks on Muslims.
Until I was about 6 or 7, my dad was a ballet teacher. Until I was about 11, my mum taught English as a second language to adult migrants in Adelaide. As a result, when I was a kid I thought Adelaide was just chock-a-block with gay people and immigrants. Every party we went to had twelve different languages being spoken and foods you couldn’t pronounce. We had an overwhelming number of gay family members or friends, and those that weren’t weren’t troubled by those that were. It wasn’t until I left Australia, actually, and talked to some of my friends who hadn’t, that I realised that my experience was exceptional, and started to reflect a bit more on prejudice in Australia. Unfortunately, from a great distance, you miss a lot of things, so you can imagine my surprise when I recently came across this Buzzfeed article.
It turns out that blackface is apparently widely accepted in Australia. Not so accepted that people don’t speak out against it, or that there’s no controversy when prominent people engage in a little casual racist make-up, but accepted enough that in 2009 Hey Hey It’s Saturday, one of Australia’s most popular television shows, permitted a musical act doing a send-up of the Jackson Five to appear on the show in blackface. Host Daryl Somers seemed to think it was hilarious, the crowd clapped along, at least one of the judges of the act seemed to think it had some entertainment value, and whoever is in charge of vetting the acts before they walked out on stage looked at six white guys in blackface and thought “Yep, these are the guys we want to put in front of a national audience.”
The incident only generated controversy because Harry Connick Jr. was a guest judge on the show, and was mildly offended by the incident. “If they turned up looking like that in the United States . . . it’d be like hey hey there’s no more show,” he said. Later in the show, Somers apologised to Connick, saying “I know that’s an insult to your countrymen, to have a blackface routine.” To which Connick gave perhaps the most milquetoast defence of racial sensitivity a person could give under the circumstance.
“I don’t want to take it to a down level,” he said, but he felt the need to speak “as an American” and note that he was offended by the act.
It’s absurd that the only thing Somers saw wrong with the act was that it offended Harry Connick Jr. That suggests that the act would be perfectly acceptable if some visiting white guy from the States wasn’t around to get his knickers in a twist over cultural insensitivity.
And it’s just as absurd for Connick to go along with the act and say that he felt the need to speak “as an American,” or apologetically claim that he’s not trying to “bring the show to a down level.”
The act wasn’t offensive because Harry Connick Jr. saw it. It was offensive because it was blatantly and obviously racist. Somers, the audience, the other judges, the producers of the show, and the network all were complicit in perpetuating racial stereotypes. Connick didn’t need to say something “as an American,” he needed to speak out as a person with an ounce of intelligence witnessing a racist act. He should have had no concern with bringing the show to a down level, and far more of a concern with alerting everyone involved that they were complicit in racism, and making clear that he wanted no part of it. Speaking “as an American” allowed Australians to believe that the issue was one of cultural sensitivity towards US Americans, rather than racial sensitivity towards everyone.
My sister, who’s still in Australia, told me about a similar scene that played out when Oprah visited Australia in 2010. Her production company met with a doll shop owner in Melbourne in advance of Oprah’s visit and, as a result of the visit, the shop owner removed some “Mamee” golliwog dolls from its display. In case you haven’t heard of them before and are wondering whether golliwog dolls are some sort of racist doll depicting black people in a crude caricature: yes. Yes they are.
The former Premier of Victoria was outraged, however, at what he saw as a politically correct attack on a bit of harmless fun:
Hold the phone! Jeff’s upset! He’s got a basket full of racist dolls. He’s even given one of them what looks a lot like a charming racist nickname! The last thing you’d want is this poor fella getting upset because his idyllic childhood memories are being disturbed by confrontation with the actual racist reality in which he lives. The store didn’t have to remove the doll because of political correctness, the store removed the toy because, whether you like her show or not, Oprah is an incredibly successful entertainer and businesswoman who has been a pioneer for black women in entertainment and isn’t about to put up with blatant racism.
Unfortunately, although Oprah’s powerful enough to overcome this sort of entrenched cultural racism in this single incident, the culture of racism persists when she’s gone. That allows Australian to pretend that the problem isn’t our own, it’s Oprah’s: the Herald Sun repeated the same boring trope that the problem here is the arrival of someone from the States, not with Australia itself:
Golliwogs are deeply offensive to Americans because of their perceived links to slavery and racism.
Golliwogs aren’t deeply offensive to Americans because of their perceived links to slavery and racism, they are deeply offensive, full stop.
Look, the US has no end of problems, and suffers the continuing symptoms of its own long, horrible history of racism. I could write another disjointed screed about racism in the US, but people here are probably doing that better than I could, and I feel more of an obligation to talk about racism in the country in which I grew up. Especially when distance has given me a perspective that a lot of Australians apparently lack. But almost no one in the US pretends that blackface is just a bit of harmless fun.
There is something about Australia that permits many Australians to pretend the country doesn’t have a problem with racism. It’s as if Adam Goodes or Cathy Freeman are a symbol to some people of how far the country has come, so long as they keep their mouths shout. As soon as they speak out about the country’s awful past, or comment on the existence of racism today, they’ve pulled aside the curtain on the delicate act that allows these people to pretend the country doesn’t still have problems with racism. When Harry Connick Jr. offers some mild-rebuke of blackface, or when Oprah’s producers ask a shop-owner to take down racist merchandise, these people act as if outsiders are failing to understand the Australian way of life. The way of light-hearted larrikinism. It’s just a bit of fun, mate. Take it easy.
The actual issue is that people defending blackface in Australia, defending racist dolls, or having a go at Adam Goodes or Cathy Freeman for proudly representing their heritage and speaking out about modern-day racism don’t understand that the Australian way of life is racist. It’s a way of life based on hundreds of years of murdering, kidnapping, raping, and stealing from Aboriginal Australians. The kidnapping stopped only 40 years ago. A way of life based on excluding foreigners based on their skin colour. That stopped only 40 years ago, too. It’s a way of life that whips gangs of drunken yobs into a fever of racial hatred against anyone with brown skin just ten years ago.
I love Australia. It’s a great country that I don’t get to go home to enough. And because I don’t get to go home that often, I don’t witness the racism that permeates a lot of the country. Maybe some people reckon I don’t have a right to speak out against it. But when he was accepting his award for Australian of the Year, Adam Goodes said “I believe racism is a community issue which we all need to address and that’s why racism stops with me.”
Racism stops with me, too. I’m a bit late on a lot of the actual issues I’ve discussed, but as an Australian, I couldn’t sit silent once I learned about them. Racism stops with every Australian speaking out against it. Don’t buy racist toys. Don’t watch racist shows. Don’t laugh at racist jokes or let your mates get away with a bit of cheeky blackface for a joke. Facing up to Australia’s awful past and the problems it still faces today isn’t an insult to the country, it’s the only way of making it better.
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Post scripts:
- I’ve attempted to use the words and phrases that I think are appropriate to describe the various peoples I’m talking about in this post, but don’t take me as an authority, by any means. Feel free to let me know if there’s a reason I should change any of the terms I’ve used.
- Adam Goodes is part Adnyamathanha. The Adnyamathanha people are from the Flinders Ranges, in South Australia. They run an eco-tourism retreat up near Nepabunna called Iga Warta. It holds a special place in my heart because I visited the area a couple of times as a kid on church trips. I even spent a bit of time clearing rocks and digging holes at Iga Warta when it was still getting started. The whole area is indescribably beautiful. Red cliffs scramble up from rocky plains. Huge gums line dry-creek beds that zig-zag across rocky rolling plains covered in salt-bush. At night, you’ll look up into the biggest sky you’ve ever seen and, if there’s even just a bit of soul knocking around inside you, you’ll drop to your knees at the sight of a universe that large wrapping you up and reaching out to eternity. The Coulthard family are wonderful stewards of the land and happy to share its history, and the history and culture of the Adnyamathanha people, with visitors. This isn’t a travel blog, but I’m recommending you visit.