| british responsibility news |
UN investigates Australia rights |
| Australia's dirty little colonial wars 19 April 2009 - The Independent UK - The Australian War Memorial, an imposing building on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, honours the dead of two world wars as well as other conflicts, including Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam. But the bloody and prolonged battles that accompanied white settlement of Australia, and claimed at least 20,000 Aboriginal lives, rate barely a mention. |
Uncovering history in black and whitewash |
| Aboriginal bowler honoured at last 30 September 2008 - The Independent UK - Eddie Gilbert was the fastest bowler of his era - so fast that he knocked the bat out of Don Bradman's hands before dismissing him for a duck. But while Bradman is a household name around the world, few people have heard of Gilbert, even in his native Australia. |
UK: government rejects collective rights for tribal peoples |
| Aboriginals' significant role in WWI revealed 13 April 2004 - The names of more than 400 Aboriginal soldiers who served in World War I have been uncovered -- and many were from Tasmania's Bass Strait islands. Canberra-based historian David Huggonson, who has spent 20 years researching the Aboriginal contribution to Australia's military campaigns, announced his findings yesterday. |
| UK Crown owes 20,000 1836 English Pounds plus interest to South Australia's traditional owners 10 April 2004 - Patrick T. Byrt - There have been Aboriginal court actions in Qld for payments to the descendants of trackers going back to the arrest of Ned Kelly, the actions over the "Nigger Brown" football stand, and for stolen wages, and in WA for the constitutional promise to pay 1% of WA Revenue to Aboriginal people there. South Australia faces a treaty claim. The circumstances surrounding the establishment of South Australia have not been yet litigated. |
| Slave descendents sue British insurance company 30 March 2004 - In a case set to test the bounds of the legal definition of "pain and suffering", the American descendents of Africans forced into slavery have launched a legal action against the British insurance company, Lloyds of London. And here in Australia, indigenous groups are watching the case with interest. |
| BBC blast for 'white' Australia 21 March 2004 - A BBC documentary into the Redfern riots promises to give Australia a "very uncomfortable" hour's viewing. British reporter David Akinsanya, who made his name with TV programs about his own tough life in British institutions, said of the film: "As a black man I feel I am treated better in Britain as a stranger than Aborigines are treated in their own land." |
| The fatal error 28 February 2004 - Could white Australia have averted many problems by signing early treaties with the Aborigines? Treaties would not have resolved all issues between the first Australians and the European settlers, any more than the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 settled all differences between Maoris and European settlers in New Zealand. However, Waitangi guaranteed Maori tribal chiefs land and other rights in return for British sovereignty over the country and any Australian treaty would most likely have provided a similarly useful foundation document. The chances are that the relationship between black and white would have been put on a happier basis than it was. |
| Aborigines appeal to Blair for return of remains 1 August 2003 - Australian Aborigines today took their plea for the return of ancestral remains held by British museums to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. A delegation from the Foundation for Aboriginal and Islander Research Action (FAIRA) was due to deliver a letter to 10 Downing St later today, thanking Blair for his past support and asking him for more help. |
| Return of Aboriginal remains 30 July 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - A museum yesterday said sorry and handed back four skulls collected from Australia's Aborigine people by colonial explorers more than a century ago. The skulls, which have been stored at Manchester museum, were handed over in a ceremony which included an antidote to any curses Manchester may have earned as a result of its sacrilege. |
| Aborigines call for Britons' support in battle for remains 30 July 2003- Aboriginal leaders today stepped up their battle with London's Museum of Natural History, calling on Britons to back their fight for the return of Aboriginal remains. The museum is refusing to hand over its collection of remains to Australia for burial or safekeeping, saying it is not allowed to do so under British law. |
| Alarm raised over return of human remains 16 May 2003 - The Independent (UK) - Leading scientists said yesterday that their research would become practically impossible if the Government sanctioned the return of human bones and other museum exhibits to their countries of origin. |
| Dead Aborigines returned home 9 May 2003 - As the remains of 300 Ngarrindjeri people were returned to their lands yesterday, a century after they were first taken, Aboriginal community leaders believed there were “thousands” more ancestors still to be handed back from museums around the world. |
| Plundered Aboriginal remains go home to Australia 10 April 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - The bodies of 75 Aboriginal men and women were returned to Australia yesterday after spending decades in the collection of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. |
| Britain backs plans to weaken heritage sites 13 March 2003 - The Guardian (UK) - Plans supported by the British government would undermine protection for world heritage sites such as Stonehenge and the Giant's Causeway, according to the organisation that advises on their protection. |
| Rendering the past less unpalatable 13 January 2003 - Keith Windschuttle's The Fabrication of Aboriginal History has caused a greater sensation than any work on the Australian past since Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore in 1986. It is not because he is the first to write on genocide. When Alison Palmer and Henry Reynolds published carefully argued books on the subject recently, they barely caused a ripple. |
| Displaying the British Empire for Posterity 4 January 2003 - New York Times - As Britain's baby boomers came of age in the mid-1960's, the sun was setting on the British Empire. Instead of young Britons heading off to run the colonies as soldiers and administrators, Jamaicans, Indians, Pakistanis and other former colonial subjects began migrating in droves to Britain. It was now the turn of the ex-colonies to change the mother country. In a sense, the British Empire had come home to roost. |
| Landscapes in blood 14 December 2002 - The Aborigines of the Kimberley have turned to pictures to sway the debate about white massacres of their people. 'He ran and ran. The white men were chasing him on horseback and he hid in the water. A white man shot at him from up on the horse. The old man thought quickly and cut himself so that his blood came out in the water. The white man looked at it and said: 'All right. I hit him."' |
| Our history, not rewritten but put right 25 November 2002 - At a ceremony in the Kimberley district of Western Australia, Sir William Deane, then governor-general, apologised to the Kija people for an infamous massacre by whites at Mistake Creek in the 1930s. While the brutal dislocation of Australia's indigenous population has rightly become an acknowledged chapter of national shame, the accusation of genocide is something altogether different. Deane, for one, might one day reflect on his role in defaming the Australian people on the basis of shabby evidence. Mistake Creek indeed. |
| The skeletons of colonialism may get a decent burial at last 10 November 2002 - The Independent - Body parts trundled back from all corners of the globe and displayed like mere ornaments are among the exhibits most popular with visitors to British collections. James Morrison reports on moves to give other cultures' ancestors a more dignified end |
| Statement by ATSIC Commissioner for Tasmania Rodney Dillon 12 September 2002 - The offer by the British Museums Association for me to address their annual conference and exhibition in Manchester is a positive indication that attitudes and behaviours towards Indigenous issues are changing. |
| BBC Radio 3 'Undercurrents' debate about cultural restitution — the repatriation of cultural property (RealPlayer streaming file) features contribution from ENIAR's Lyndon Ormond-Parker. The web page for this story is here. |
| Blacks to sue the Crown 2 September 2002 - The nation's richest Aboriginal land council is preparing to launch unprecedented legal action in the British High Court, claiming that 18th-century white settlers ignored royal instructions when they dispossessed Aborigines of their land. |
| Australian Aborigines: Their future welfare: On This Day in The Times, August 8, 1922 8 August 2002 - The Times (UK) - The most important step taken in recent years to save these wild tribes is the establishment of a sanctuary in the far-away country on the border of South Australia, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory. |
| ENIAR co-hosted a 'Dialogue on Indigenous Peoples in the Commonwealth', June 7 |
| Museum returns sacred samples: Remains of last Tasmanian Aborigine to be put to rest 31 May 2002 - Guardian (UK) - She was the tragic sole survivor of the "Black War", the last full-blooded Aborigine in Tasmania after British settlers systematically rounded up the island's indigenous population. When she died, to the despair of her mixed race relatives, Truganini's body was exhumed and plundered by scientists and souvenir hunters. |
| Genocide, Ethnocide, Or Hyperbole? Australia's "Stolen Generation" and Canada's "Hidden Holocaust" 25 April 2002 - Cultural Survival - A decade awash in genocide and deadly conflict has passed since Jason Clay lamented that "it is impossible for concerned activists and scholars to agree on which cases constitute genocides, much less how interested people would go about documenting them." The learning curve when it comes to genocide, however, is conspicuously uneven. The challenge lies not in cultivating and maintaining an awareness of the phenomenon -- a task the mass media has demonstrated itself more than capable of handling -- but in recognizing its universal implications. |
| My undercover attempt to court the Duke 29 April 2002 - The Guardian (UK) - There was an embarrassing leak last week; word got out that the Queen had asked me down to Windsor for a tête-à-tête. The person responsible has been disciplined. |
| G'bye to G'day 25 March 2002 - The Guardian (UK) - A Blighty-bound Patrick Barkham reflects on the good - and the not so good - aspects of life in Australia. When I tell Australians I am returning to Britain, most react as if I am going to the funeral of a mass murderer. |
| 'Undercurrents' debate about cultural restitution February 2002 - The repatriation of cultural property features contribution from ENIAR's Lyndon Ormond-Parker. The web page for this story is here. |
| Elders seek royal apology 5 January 2002 - Indigenous leaders want the Queen to apologise during her Australian tour because Aborigines were used as human ornaments during a royal tour of Queensland at the turn of the last century. |
| Nightmare in dreamtime: the genocide of australian aborigines 25 December 2001 - disinformation - The people who could sing dreams into reality are falling away. Where insects once buzzed praise through human avatars enraptured in music, gravestones and concentration camps chain a world. Stories that shaped the world into the mythic Dreamtime and back out again are as forgotten as the Ancestors and the joyful camaraderie brought by food, laughter, and playing children. |
| Britain blocks protection for indigenous people 7 September 2001- Britain is blocking an attempt by the world's 300 million indigenous peoples including Maoris, Aboriginals and Native Americans to have their rights protected under international law, The Independent has learnt. |
| The Aboriginal Tent Embassy has established an office in the Hague. 29 August 2001 - The Aboriginal Tent Embassy from Canberra Australia has established an office in the Hague. The Nederlands, to start their case in the world court over the historical facts that surround the stealing of sovereign Aboriginal lands in Australia, genocide and crimes against humanity in Australia, that were carried out by the British Crown and government , when the British founded Australia and established a penal colony, in Sydney, in 1788. |
| Aboriginal Tent Embassy; The Hague Consulate Decleration 2001 August 2001 - The Aboriginal Tent Embassy would like to inform you that a delegation led by Isabel Coe , with 'the sacred fire for peace and justice", will be going to the Hague, the Netherlands, to establish a consulate on neutral diplomatic ground. The purpose is to lobby the Crown and the Queen of England on the issue that the Aboriginal people who belong to the land known as Australia, never ceded their sovereign rights to the land known as Australia. |
| Question of intent 28 July 2001 - Did Australians intend to exterminate the Aborigines? Historian Henry Reynolds looks for evidence of genocide in his latest book, An Indelible Stain? |
| Did Australians intend to exterminate the Aborigines? Historian Henry Reynolds looks for the evidence. |
| 49 MPs sign 'Sorry motion' in House of Commons 25 May 2001- As Sorry Day looms again, still without an official apology from the Australian Government, the news from Britain is that49 MPs have now signed Early Day Motion 927 tabled by Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn apologising to Aboriginal people. |
| Repatriation Developments in the UK May 2001 - Requests for the return of ancestral remains have been heard from indigenous communities across the globe.. In the UK, some museums and holding institutions have repatriated remains to Australia, some have narrow criteria for allowing the return of remains, some have policies which oppose repatriation, and others have no written policies at all. |
| Few set out on road to ethics 14 April 2001 - The Despite activists' clamor, key pension funds have yet to move towards socially responsible investment. Tony Levene reports. |
| We ignore UN rights report at our peril December 31, 2000 - Australia must recognise the increasing links between international trade and human rights, writes Angela Ward (Associate Professor in International Law at Essex University, and junior counsel to Cherie Booth, QC). |
| Canberra denies unease over Blair 15 July 2000 - The Federal Government has denied embarrassment over the involvement of Cherie Booth, the barrister wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in an international legal challenge by Aborigines to the government's mandatory sentencing laws. |
| Sea of Hands 6 July 2000 - Their inclusion in Australia week has provided the British people with an opportunity to acknowledge the legacy of past policies on indigenous Australians and offer our support and commitment to reconciliation. |
| 'Sorry' motion in House of Commons July 5, 2000 - On the day that Australian Prime Minster John Howard visited the House of Commons to hear warm words from Tony Blair and William Hague, a Labour MP tabled a motion apologising to Aboriginal people for past British policies. |
| Aborigines 'deserve a royal apology' 27 March 2000 - After a week of large crowds and little controversy, the royal tour of Australia was finally dragged into the political arena yesterday when a party leader called on the Queen to apologise to the Aboriginal people for their suffering at the hands of the Crown. |
| Royal Aborigine apology urged 26 March 2000 - A leading Australian politician is calling on the Queen to apologise to aborigines for their past treatment by British colonists. |
| Queen braves tour furor over Aborigines' loyalty pledge 3 March 2000 - The Queen will face a severe diplomatic predicament when she visits Australia later this month, created not by disgruntled republicans but by the Aborigines, who regard her as their champion. |
| Aborigines to see Queen at Palace 10 October 1999 - A group of Australian Aboriginal leaders will have a historic meeting with the Queen at Buckingham Palace this week to air their hopes for constitutional reform and to discuss "unfinished business" with Britain. |
| British campaign starts for Aboriginal land rights treaty 23 March 1999 - The British government and public will be urged to advocate the settlement of a treaty between the Australian government and Aborigines under a new campaign which started today. |
| It's Time for a Treaty 22 March 1999 - We call for the UK Government and citizens to strongly advocate a Treaty between the Australian Government and the Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. |
| British Government challenged to repay its moral debt to Indigenous Australians 22 March 1999 - The British Government will be challenged to repay its moral debt to Indigenous Australians when a new Aboriginal Rights group is launched at Parliament House, London. |
| Aboriginal call for British responsibility 22 March 1999 - In Parliament House today MP's, Trade Unions, NGO's and influential speakers will stand in solidarity with Aboriginal people as they call on the British to finally act with responsibility towards them. |
| MPs support 'Sorry Book' 13 April 1998 - British MPs are starting to rally behind the Sorry Book campaign and "one of the great disgraces of the world". |
| British MP's were invited to sign the "Sorry Book" April 1998 - "Sorry Book" event, Room W6, The House of Commons, Westminster, London . 4.30 – 6pm, 7th of April, 1998. "The truth is sometimes difficult to accept, but we must all accept responsibility," Anne Clewyd MP. |
| An open letter to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth 11 Queen of Australia November 1997 - We write to appeal to you as Australia's constitutional Head of State. We do so as a matter of some urgency and not without hope. |
| 'Ordinary' Britons call on Blair to stand up for Aboriginal rights November 1997 - International human rights groups deliver some 500 letters, faxes and e-mails to Prime Minister Tony Blair from 'ordinary' Britons protesting against an Australian Government plan which will deny basic human rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. |
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