Mabo Day, a day of celebration and a day of recommitment. A day to remember that Australia was founded on a legal fiction, that conceived a false narrative, that gave birth to a lie; a lie Australians told to each other for generation on generation - that this land was empty, that there were no people here, that their European claims to this land were just, that discovery and agriculture were a higher law than any law of mere savages. The night after Eddie Mabos grave was furnished with a headstone (after the period of mourning) it was defaced and red swastikas painted on it. Who are the savages who cannot look on anothers face, even sculpted in death, and whose desires lead them to strike the already downtrodden? Which are the governments that in our own lifetime could enter the remote homelands on a fiction of pedophile rings and enact racist policies of disempowerment and break the spirit of communities who sit on lands filled with the resources our own age says must be exploited for profit? Poor fellow my country, indeed. Lucky the country who honestly faces its past, and walks together into the future. Thank you Eddie Koiki Mabo. Because of you, any day we might take that step.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 01:59:37 +0000
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