Full post here: Where Romantic Pastoralism Meets Indigenous Realities.
Roger Sandall explores the difference between some of the realities of Aboriginal life and the romantic pastoral image that the larger Australian culture projects onto the Aboriginal:
“The kindest service to Australia’s northern Aborigines which journalists of any seriousness writing for weekend papers can do is to avoid encouraging still more false hopes, especially among the well-intentioned southern middle-classes who read their stuff; and the notion that anyone can find a place in today’s Australia—on or off a cattle station—without literacy, numeracy, and a full mastery of English is simply untrue.”
The hypocrisy on display is familiar to us all. This is sentimental and secondhand support of the native population. It doesn’t recognize the depth of its own cultural ideas and traditions (language, laws and ideas which have often been used against the aboriginal) yet it’s not necessarily interested in the moral sacrifice needed to include these people into the culture either.
Within these bubbles, aborigines languish with no past and little future, and a twisted incentive to live up to these romantic images. In response, Sandall seems suggests the best way foward is to teach them the language, laws and ideas.
I’d like to offer a politically pragmatic point: people are always going to be dreaming silly and naive dreams like this (both majorities and minorities), and if you’re a politician, you have a duty to represent these people. If they have money, they get more influence with you.
While it’s not exactly the moral high road, this seems to be the current American solution:
by NichK
The Mohegan Sun Casino
