Part II Australians• Unit 4 Histories of Australia• Unit 5 Immigration and Multiculturalism: British Past and Asian Future? Unit 6 Aboriginal Policy and Identity Unit 7

Interpretation of film about ‘Stolen Generation’— ‘Follow the Rabbit- Proof Fence’

Unit 4 Histories of Australia

• Introduction

• Three Periods of Australian Progressive History

Introduction

Until recently, Australian school children were taught a progressive history of Australia. In this history, is transformed from convict colony of Britain to independent nation to a modern industrialised society. Thus official story is one of population growth and economic expansion.

Three Periods of Australian Progressive History

• 1788-1850: Convict Colony and Pastroalism

• 1851-1901: The Gold Rushes,Closer Settlement and Cities

• 1901-2000: An Australian Nation

1788-1850: Convict Colony and Pastoralism

The ‘official’ histories of most nations are tales of heroic development. In the Australian versions, Captain Cook discovered Australia in 1770. The first settlers arrived in Botany Bay in 1788, an unpromising mix of convicts deported from England and the military officers responsible for controlling them. The colonial governors were charged by Britain to create a self-sufficient colony. They sought to turn convicts who had served their prison terms into useful farmers and artisans.

The pastoralists are the people who had been using the land to ran their large flocks of sheep.

1851-1901: The Gold Rushes,Closer Settlement and Cities

A major increase in the population occurred after gold was found in Victoria in 1851. The huge increase in the population and wealth of Victoria meant that ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ overshadowed the founding city of Sydney by the 1880s. When the gold ran out, the colonial governments passed legislation, so unemployed European prospectors could take up land for farming.

The closer rural settlement of farmers supported the growth of towns and railways in south-eastern Australia.

1901-2000: An Australian Nation

• Australia was the second country in the world to give women the vote in 1902 and the first to elect a Labor government, the short lived Waston government in 1904. In many versions of this official history, it is said that Australia did not achieve true nationhood with Federation in 1901, but when the blood of its young men was shed in Turkey at Gallipoli in 1915, during the WWI.

• Following WWI, the economy moved fitfully into secondary industry to supplement one of the most productive primary industries in the world.

• After WWII, secondary industry expanded rapidly behind protective tariff barriers.Australia became a lucky country where unemployment never rose above 5 percent .

Unit 5 Immigration and Multiculturalism: British Past and Asian Future?

• Introduction

• Waves of Immigrants to Australia

• From Assimilation to Multiculturalism

• British Past and Asian Future?

• Cultural (Ex)changes?

Introduction

• This Chapter explores the changes in Australia’s immigration policy and the influence of migrants from countries where English is not the official language on the development of Australia’s economy, culture and society.

Waves of Immigrants to Australia

• Within a single generation, the ‘bold experiment’—an experiment conceived in fear and launched in desperation, under the slogan ‘Populate or Perish!’ and devised to secure a ‘White and British Australia’—would lead to a ‘multicultural’ society. (Lack and Templeton 1995:xiii)

• This quotation captures most of the key aspects of Australia’s postwar immigration programme. 90% population were of British background and less 1% were of Asian origin.

• This postwar migration was fuelled by fear of Asian communism overtaking the sparsely populated continent of Australia, but also by a belief that a larger population leads to higher economic growth.

From Assimilation to Multiculturalism

• ‘I’ve often thought’, says composer Bruce Smeaton, ‘that the Australian identity is a bit like a platypus ---unbelievable to the rest of the world and difficult for us to find.’(Alan Attwood in Lack and Templeton 1995:218)

• This section we explore the claim that the claim that the Australian identity, like the platypus, has come to be made up of ‘bits and pieces’ of many cultures. This is expressed in the transition from an official policy of assimilation to multiculturalism in the government’s response to Australian migration.

British Past and Asian Future?

• Australia is not and never can be an ‘Asian nation’ any more than we can, or want to be, European or North American or African. We can only be Australia, and relate to our friends and neighours as Australian. (Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1993)

• Australia is seen as a museum society with a British flag, an Argentine economy and an American foreign policy [ as irrelevant to Asia as] an appendix to the human body. (Indonesian Ambassador to Australia)

• Given that this British past still in the present, can Australia have an Asian Future?

Cultural (Ex)changes?

• While Australian artists have been influenced by Asia, on the whole, Asia has been represented as traditional and peripheral, Australia as modern and central.

• More recently, Asian-Australian writers have themselves forced more subtle and varied viewpoints to emerge in Australia. Australian artists including many from Asian backgrounds, have begun to explore some of the styles, techniques and symbolism of Asian art, and to collaborate with artists in the Asian-Pacific region.

Question for Discussion

• How does the official policy change in the government’s response to Australia migration?

Unit 6 Aboriginal Policy and Identity

• Introduction

• Citizenship

• Indigenous Australian Political Campaign in the 1990s

• Indigenous Identity

• Limitations of Reconciliation

Introduction

• This chapter explores the difficult struggle of Indigenous Australians to regain their losses of land and culture.

• Now living in a dominant white society, most Indigenous Australians have been obliged to accept aspects of that society. Some are forging new ‘two-ways’ identities which marry the best of European and black cultures.

Citizenship

• In the late nineteenth century, governments adopted what was called a policy of ‘protection’ of the Aborigines, based on the theory of Social Darwinism, popularised in Australia during the 1870s.

• Between about 1910 and 1950s, in different parts of Australia, the protectionist policy was replaced with the policy of assimilation.

• During the 1960s, Aboriginal people were granted the right to vote, whether or not they had become assimilated.

Indigenous Australian Political Campaign in the 1990s

• From the early 1970s, the idea that white Australia would ‘solve’ the Aboriginal ‘problem’ increasingly gave way to the idea that Aboriginal people should be allowed to ‘solve’their own problems. From the mid-1980s, self-determination was increasingly called for, which included the right to live on their land and to learn their language and culture. The following are two famous political campaign issues in the 1990s:

• Land Rights: Mabo and the Native Title Act

• The ‘Stolen Children’ or ‘Lost Generations’’

Indigenous Identity

• This section explores the construction of ‘two-ways’identity, how Indigenous Australians are adapting their culture to the forms and resources found in non-Indigenous society, while retaining what they value their traditional cultures.

• Given the dominance of white culture and people, Indigenous Australians have been required to do more adapting than have white Australians, most notably with the policy of assimilation. Reconciliation between white people and Indigenous people suggests both sides change and adapt to understand the needs of the other better.

• Reconciliation is based on respect for cultural difference, sharing information and cooperative action. Perhaps the most successful sharing and cultural exchange has been in the area of cultural production—for example, music, writing and painting.

The Limits of Reconciliation

• The era of ‘reconciliation’was legislated into being with the passage of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act in 1991. This might be the latest policy move in a long line of polices which include ‘protection’, ‘assimilation’, ‘self-management’ and ‘self-determination’. A cynic might suggest that the problem is to reconcile the prestige and frame of contemporary Aboriginal Art with the reality for most Indigenous Australians.

• It is quite acceptable to many non-Indigenous Australians for Aboriginal people to express their culture but less comforting when they demand their political rights or a greater share of Australia’s economic resources.

Unit 7 Interpretation of Film about ‘Stolen Generation’— ‘Follow the Rabbit- Proof Fence’

• This is the true account of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s mother Molly, made legendary by the film ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’.

• In 1931, Molly led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometer walk across remote Western Australia. Aged 8, 11 and 14, they escaped the confinement of a government institution for Aboriginal children removed from their families. Barefoot, without provisions or maps, tracked by Native Police and search planes, the girls follow the rabbit-proof fence, knowing it would lead them home.

• Their journey—longer than many of the celebrated walks of our explorer heroes—reveals a past more cruel than we could ever image.

• This is a marvelous adventure story and thriller, celebrating courage and the resilience of the human heart. (--- Phillip Noyce, Director of ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’)

Questions for Discussion

• What do you understand by the concept of ‘reconciliation’? Do you think that reconciliation is an improvement on earlier government policy response to Indigenous Australians?

• Please explain the two indigenous political campaigns: ‘Mabo Case’ and the ‘Stolen Children’.

Social Darwinism

Social Darwinism refers to various ideologies based on a concept that competition among all individuals, groups, nations, or ideas drives social evolution in human societies.The term draws upon the common use of the term Darwinism, which is a social adaptation of the theory of natural selection as first advanced by Charles Darwin. Natural selection explains speciation in populations as the outcome of competition between individual organisms for limited resources or "survival of the fittest". The term fist appeared in Europe in 1879 and was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter, and has generally been used by critics rather than advocates of what the term is supposed to represent.