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Nightmare in dreamtime: the genocide of australian aborigines

By Sara Aronson

25 December 2001 - 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.

Over the past decade, Australia has struggled to come to terms with the steady erosion of Aboriginal land rights (the "Native Title" debate), past government policies of splitting up Aboriginal families for cultural indoctrination (the "Stolen Generation"), punitive "Mandatory Sentencing" laws that violate international human rights commitments, and continued deaths in police custody.

Now even the arid land that once so selectively bore its secrets has been turned to fodder for the plastine commodities of the world that sprung atop it. Those who made not only their home but the sincerity of their existence in the cycle of hunting, gathering, and gazing out to other worlds must now consciously struggle to access that which their own culture has created.

The cultural shreds of a society that didn't take the universe for granted are being rapidly disseminated to protect the patchwork quilt of rescued traditions. It seems that whenever Father Time rhythmically clicks his tongue at the mortality's foolishness, another wise-person is lost forever to disease or strong leaders are greeted with one too many hits by heavy handles of police batons.

Although the bulk of Australians who thank colonization of the past centuries for their nationality weld no such prison cells, degradation of character and conditioning against hope have scarred indigenous Aboriginal culture as much as the mining and ranching have brutalized the land.

In fact, the two are one: Native Title legislation robs them of the sacred sites of free expanse that jolted through their blood like any heavenly ambrosia. Secret places of intiation and thanks-giving have been destroyed and raped by industry (Jabiluka) or the violating eyes of gawking tourists (Uluru). The wonder for life preserved through millennia has been dashed against the hard skulls of people who fail to recognize and respect their fellow man.

A thousand years ago, one could see people who took no more from the land than was needed and kept close to their environment in a lively lover's flirtation. Any rock could be an altar created by the forces that began the world; any animal or plant could be totems that could guide, protect, or provide the companionship of a kindred spirit. Reverent hands would craft tools and instruments from the Earth. Didgeridoo drones would mirror back to the flora and fauna why they had been taken as sustenance by such peculiar apes. Love was a part of life and not corruption: everything was not only natural but divine, and if one looked closely through the veils of duration, then a wily bear or kangaroo might blink back and smile from the mists beyond time.

However, the fetters of a society that was presumptuous enough to claim a continent as its sole destiny were to clamp around the ankles of those who danced in Dreamtime. The low melody of didgeridoos was drowned out by the screams of those who sought to defend their livelihoods against greater weapons of destruction. Aboriginal connection with the land became twisted when the visitors classified them as landscape and began the sequence that was to bond different futures together.

The fire has quit raging, and sparks of hatred seem diminished. Poultices have been applied to burns; bandages have been loosely wrapped around the most gaping of wounds. Perhaps even the severed union with that which has been lost is cauterized by the intensity of the events that served to wipe all bowls and baskets, all jewelry, hides, and newly forlorn toys, off the playing table.

Will the singsong of the Dreamtime still be heard from human souls?

This article appeared in Disinformation

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