Image from NASCA
By Situation Theatre 19/7/2019
Who am I?
I think I was born in 1788 when white people arrived here despite at least 60,000 years of Aboriginal history.
I violently dispossessed close to a million Indigenous people spread across hundreds of nations based on the racist doctrine of terra nullius.
I spent the first 150 years of my white incarnation committing genocide on the Aboriginal population through disease, policy, and as many as 500 massacres. I reduced the number of Indigenous people on the continent from about 750,000 in 1788 to about 60,000 in 1920.
In the 1800s, I forced the remaining Aboriginal people into reserves, missions, stations and abusive homes and called it protection.
From the 1890s to the 1970s I spent a lot of time stealing tens of thousands of Aboriginal children from their families.
Under the 1901 White Australia Policy I enforced nationwide segregation of white and black communities, including at cinemas, swimming pools, town halls, pubs and hotels, footy ovals, hospitals and school buses.
In the 1930s, I adopted “assimilation” as national policy, whereby “the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption”.
After sending 6,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to fight in two World Wars, I denied them land grants, pensions and gratuities, admittance to RSL clubs upon their return and sometimes stole their children while they were away.
In 1967, I decided to count Aboriginal people as human beings.
I spent the 1980s and 1990s having a panic attack that Aboriginal people might want their land back.
I’ve spent the last two decades ignoring the 339 recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
In 2004, I abolished the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
In 2007, I aired a series of false reports about paedophile rings in the Northern Territory. I used it as a justification to suspend the Racial Discrimination Act and impose a series of racist policies throughout the Territory. Then my more “progressive” arm got into power and extended these policies for ten years.
In 2008, I apologised for the Stolen Generations but since then have created another one.
For the last decade I’ve claimed to be Closing the Gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians but this is a smokescreen and I continue to cut funding for Aboriginal services and punish these communities with poor life expectancy, child mortality, employment, mental health, incarceration, and education outcomes.
I like to humiliate Indigenous Australians by wearing blackface on a semi-regular basis.
I regularly profit from racism by broadcasting high-rating interviews with white supremacists.
I spent three years booing an Aboriginal sport star for being too proudly Aboriginal, hounding him out of the game.
I’ve spent the last decade teasing the First Australians with the prospect of recognising their existence in the Constitution but have no intention of actually doing that.
When a diverse delegation of Aboriginal peoples spent months carefully crafting the Uluru Statement from the Heart, clearly expressing their desire for “Voice, Treaty, Truth”, I ignored it.
I label any campaigns for equality and basic human rights for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as “divisive”.
I find the notion that I might be a little bit racist absurd and offensive.
I’m sick and tired of being denied my right to free speech.
Who am I?