Have you ever stopped to consider why the Australians have a British accent? Not many people have, but it is a valid question, especially with Australia being thousands upon thousands of miles away from England. As you’d imagine, it wasn’t always this way. Over 40,000 years ago, there was a race of indigenous people called the Aborigines, literally meaning “from the beginning”. It is said that they migrated from Asia and had been untouched by any other civilization ever since… at least up until the British came. Through an imperialistic way of being, the British almost wiped out an entire population in hopes of colonization. The genocide of the Aboriginal people, though having been covered up for years, is, frankly, an important piece of our World History, and should be acknowledged as such.
In the year 1788, the British first made contact with the Aborigines. According to infoplease.com, the presence of the British not only sparked a loss of Aboriginal political autonomy, but also caused a great number of deaths from foreign diseases (2012). While they originally attempted to kill the Aboriginal population by hunting tribes down, that isn’t what they’re remembered for; it was the more strategic approach of eliminating the natives that still enrages people today.
Breeding. The British wanted to breed the Aboriginal gene out of children so, eventually, there’d be none left. Soldiers would forcibly remove light-skinned kids, or “half-castes”, from their families and either take them to institutions, where they’d be exposed to “Anglo values”, or given to foster parents. The children kidnapped were named the Stolen Generations. They were taught to abandon and deny their heritage. The British were nearly successful at not just breeding out the Aboriginal gene, but their culture too. |
The public is only now becoming interested in these outrageous and bigoted events that have taken place in Australia’s history. With new documentaries and publications helping to spread the word, soon this might become general knowledge. Movies like “Rabbit-Proof Fence”, released in 2002, have tremendously raised public awareness and action. The plot itself was about three Aboriginal girls desperately trying to escape the confines of a British re-educational camp, but its backdrop describes the history of the Stolen Generations in an easy-to-understand fashion. In recognition of the history of such atrocities, in 2008, newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd finally gave an official public apology on behalf of the Australian government to the Aboriginal population.
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But does any of this ring a bell? The British- heck, the Europeans- have a long history of committing genocide in order to either populate regions themselves or simply because of distaste. But, society has made it so that, unless they’re on as big of a scale (they have been) as The Holocaust’s, almost nobody really remembers any genocides having taken place. Have you ever wondered what happened to the Native Americans? To the Aztecs? To the Inca? America was rich in resources and Europe just needed to be in control of all of it. Tribes who did escape being brutally slaughtered were sure to be taken by the newly introduced smallpox disease. As a result, like listverse.com says, “the populations of Native Americans is widely scattered, and many tribes and ancient customs have been lost forever.” The worst part is, almost nobody remembers.
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Concluding, I must restate the importance of our world’s genocides becoming general knowledge. While maybe seeming insignificant now, their history deserves to be acknowledged just as much as Egypt’s or Rome’s. Whether discussing the Aborigines, the Native Americans, or any other unfortunate ethnicity, it’s important to spread the knowledge; they deserve to be remembered.