NIT - ISSUE 103, April 20, 2006: A peaceful,
well-managed Indigenous justice protest in Melbourne
gives rise to a media circus. A bewildered GRAHAM RING*
surveys the debris.
Last Thursday,
demonstrators at Melbourne’s ‘Camp Sovereignty’ complied
with a Melbourne City Council direction and pulled down
the tents which had been standing in Kings Domain since
the start of the Commonwealth Games.
The protest
village was located not far from the spot where a plaque
commemorates the internment of the skeletal remains of
Aboriginal people from many of Victoria’s Aboriginal
nations.
They are the ancestors of today’s
Indigenous Victorians.
In some quarters, there
may be dispute about whether this little pocket of
Melbourne parkland belongs to the Boonerwrung people,
whose country stretches away to the south towards
Wilsons Promontory - or to the Wurundjeri mob who own
the land to the east of the city.
What is not in
doubt is that before the whitefellas arrived with their
intolerance and gunpowder the whole of the country was
Aboriginal land.
There was no treaty. There was
no ceding of land or sovereignty.
Hence the ire
of the ‘Black GST’ group. The ‘GST’ bit reflects the
group’s aims of ending genocide, acknowledging
sovereignty and securing a treaty.
The media
focus on the Commonwealth Games provided an opportunity
to raise awareness around the world of the injustices
meted out to Indigenous Australians over the last
200-odd years.
The Black GST crew dubbed the
event the ‘Stolenwealth Games’, reflecting the fact that
Aboriginal people were dispossessed of their land
without compensation, and brutally mistreated by the
invaders.
Some brilliantly staged media events
did indeed generate much publicity for the cause.
‘Stolenwealth Games’ protest signs received widespread
media coverage. A ceremonial fire was lit, and visitors
to the camp were invited to participate in a smoking
ceremony.
The mainstream media did its usual
woeful job of covering the dispute, with the shabbiest
performer being the mass-circulation Melbourne
Herald-Sun.
The ‘currant bun’ - in its
inimitable fashion - was able to sweep aside all the
complexities and nuances and simply deal in terms of
Good Guys and Bad Guys.
No prizes for guessing
how the paper categorised the GST mob.
The low
point was reached by the paper’s columnist, Andrew Bolt,
in his 12 April piece ‘Ferals run amok’.
Victorians know that on matters requiring
cultural sensitivity, a blue from the Bolt is no bolt
from the blue. In fact it’s par for the course.
The man’s stock-in-trade is to produce the sort
of inflammatory stuff that induces apoplexy in
well-intentioned, woolly-jumper lefties.
But
Bolt’s commentary on Camp Sovereignty was reckless even
by his standards.
The opening line was a real
zinger: 'If they really wanted the sniff of a genuine
black camp they could have pitched a tent in the river
bed at Alice Springs.'
Remarkably, he was able
to go downhill even from there.
The man appears
to have an unhealthy fascination with skin tone, as he
found it necessary to record that ‘not even one-third of
the campers looked even tanned’.
It would seem
that Mr Bolt holds the view that fair-skinned folk -
some of whom he derides as ‘ferals’ and ‘failures’ -
shouldn’t be in the business of campaigning for social
justice.
After that stomach-churning main
course, Bolt’s dessert was a serve of uninformed
speculation about the percentage of ‘British blood’
flowing through the veins of one of the Camp Sovereignty
spokespeople.
This is nasty, ignorant stuff.
File it away with the utterances of the deluded
types who believe that the government gives all the
blackfellas a new bicycle every
Christmas.
Indigenous folk tell me they’ve been
putting up with this sort of tripe all their lives, and
that it’s not worth getting all bent out of shape about
this kind of deliberate provocation.
Deal with
the genuine people, they say, the ones with an open mind
and a willingness to listen. Leave the hard-core types
to stew in their own juices.
Good advice too, I
reckon.
A curious aspect of Indigenous protest
politics is that middle-class whitefellas in positions
of power always expect the blackfellas to play
scrupulously by the rules.
That is, ‘the rules’
that were put in place after Indigenous Australians had
been stripped of their country and their possessions.
It takes a lot of gall to steal everything a
person owns and then squeal when they light a fire
without a permit.
At Kings Domain the tents and
caravans have gone - but the flame of Indigenous justice
still burns
brightly.
graham.ring@bigpond.com
*
Graham Ring is based in Melbourne and is a part-time,
award-winning writer and a fortnightly NIT
columnist.