DISTURB ME, LORD

This was written last Tuesday, 21 February 2006


That's precisely what happened to me today. I was disturbed. Extremely disturbed. I am on Day 2 of an 8-week training course given by the Department of Community Services. This is mandatory training for all new caseworkers so everyone goes through this, and I hope every single participant felt as disturbed as I did.

Our topic for today was Working with Aboriginal Children and their Families. I was looking forward to today because I have been wanting to understand the issues involved in working with them. Why did we have positions called "Aboriginal Caseworkers" and why does every single form we fill out in this country have the question, "Are you of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent?" I knew that there was a time in this nation's history where the Aboriginal children were taken from their families and placed with white families. I didn't realize the extent of this, and the implications it had on the generations to come.

For those of you not familiar with the history, this is a summary of what I learned today. When the British came here, they actually classified the Aboriginal people along with the flora and fauna of Australia! Sometime in the 1920s, Aboriginal children were removed from their families because it was deemed that the parents did not know how to care for their children. The children were put into institutions, some were put into foster care, and most if not all of them, were denied access to their families of origin. A lot of the children were maltreated and even sexually abused while in care. Many people took part in various forms of deception. It would be announced that the circus was coming to town. The aborigines would come with their children in tow and when they left, they left without their children. Members of the church would themselves come and take the children away from their parents. Some years later, Aboriginal kids in their teens would be sent to work in affluent white Aussie's homes to work as farm hands and maids. Their wages would be sent to the Australian government, who justified this by saying that the money would be held in trust for them until they reached the age of 21. Today, these people are in their 70s to 90s, or dead. Not one of them has received this pay, which is reported as totalling 69 million Aus dollars. The government also encouraged Aboriginal women to get pregnant by white men because they produced fair-skinned children. These children, and any Aboriginal kid who was white enough to pass for a white person, would then be taken from their family and adopted into a white family. The adoptive family would not even be told of the child's background, and never did they tell the child that he or she was of Aboriginal background. This was for the purposes of “assimilation”. Thus, they were denied their families, their communities, their cultures.

In our discussion, it came out that the purpose of the government was to eradicate the race. It is interesting to note that this was happening in Australia at the time that World War II was happening, when Australia fought against what the Germans were doing to the Jews. They had their own version of "dawn raids". The police and DOCS people would come in the middle of the night and take the children from their families. The families would not be told where they were taking the children. Some families never were able to find their children again. Many children searched for their parents years later only to find that their parents had died.

And here's the punch line. The main people carrying out this order, were workers of the Department of Community Services! That is why the Aborigines so violently oppose working with anybody from the Department. At the end of the day, my friend and I were discussing, "So what are we doing working for this organization? What are we doing working for this government?"

I think the mere fact that I am hearing all of this from an Aboriginal woman in training given by DOCS, shows that the Department at least, is sincere about righting the wrongs of the past. I think it was sometime last year that the Department issued a public apology to the Aboriginal people for all the trauma and hurt they have caused to their people. So I guess the values of my office are still in line with my own values.

But I was so enraged about how brazen these people were, to so boldly take these children away from their parents. I started to examine why I was so affected by this story. First of all, I saw the parallelisms between the oppression of the Aboriginal people and many of the sufferings that Filipinos have gone through from the many people who have colonized us. In both cases, some people with a fair complexion who believed themselves to be superior over people who were not, came to our country, decided it was theirs, tried to erase our cultures and create “little” versions of themselves. I have always been inflamed by the injustices done by the friars during the Spanish Occupation, and people know how in Grade 6, after reading the Noli and Fili, I cried and cried at the powerlessness of some of the characters and was extremely angered by the injustices done to them as well. So I guess it’s no surprise that I reacted this way to the story.

But when I searched deeper, I realized that it also affected me on a personal level. Since coming to Australia, I shared with those close to me that I didn’t feel welcome, that I felt that I always had to prove myself. In short, I felt that there was some discrimination against me, but I couldn’t quite attach a label to it. Then I did reach the point wherein I came to the conclusion that it was discrimination, only to be told by, of course, a white person, that no way could there be discrimination in the Catholic schools! He knew these people personally and they were a good bunch of people. It was me who had the wrong perception. It was my depression that was clouding my perception of how things were. In other words, my feelings and observations were invalidated, and I was told that there was something wrong with me.

I think that is the scary part. People really believe that they aren’t racist, but the cold truth is, they are. And a big part of the problem lies there, that they refuse to acknowledge that the problem exists. I learned from my friend that anti-discrimination legislation only came out in the last 10 or 15 years. Then I started to understand Australian society. Since the law is still very new, it really would be expected that this has not sunk down to the feeling level of the people. Legislation may be in place, but it will take some time for the general public to actually accept this as part of their way of life.

What’s scary is that this country has actively recruited immigrants from different nations, and is playing host to refugees from various troubled countries, many of them African. I am afraid that again, they did not think things through, and may be setting themselves up for a big explosion to occur. If a country has not accepted that racism exists in their society, and thus has not dealt with it head on, then this way of thinking is bound to be present, though not in an obvious way. Then you bring into the picture people of different colors, who are viewed as eating up the nation’s resources, job-grabbers, etc. etc, then events much larger than the Cronulla riots are bound to happen. Many of the cultures that have come to move to Australia are extremely nationalistic and would not take any insults sitting down.

Do I want to bring up my kids in an environment like this? What will it be like when they are teenagers? Will I always be in fear that they might get bashed, ridiculed, or oppressed just because they are not white? I hope not.

I feel that I have been hoodwinked. I tend to think the best of people, and I guess this has extended to my notions about this country. I entered this country with a really positive attitude, eager to learn more about their culture, to become part of it, and to share my culture with them as well. I was looking forward to living in a country where multiculturalism was valued and protected. But now I am learning that Australia’s history shows that this is not the case.

One of the things that really got to me was that these outrageous events happened in the last 60 years. Up to 20 years ago, a lot of these things were still happening! And this, in a world power. This, in a society that is supposed to be enlightened and more educated than most.

In my discussion with Mom, she reminded me that in this sense, Australia is a very young country, who has not yet threshed out these issues and actually has not yet established its own identity. It is neither here nor there. It has no culture of its own to speak of. (And to think the aborigines have a very deep and rich culture which the whites attempted to take away from them). Anti-discrimination laws were put into place within my lifetime. The country has a lot of soul searching to do before it reaches an enlightened phase. So in a way, this is a good time to be here. It is a chance to try and do something in terms of awareness and making people challenge their own beliefs and change their ways of thinking. There is a movement for these changes to take place and it would be wonderful to have some part in that.