Eora

Recognise this? Thought so. It's Australia, land of the good life - where the people are cheery, the beer is cold, the sun always shines and there is always a barbecue on the go.

Recognise the colours on the map? Thought not. I didn't either until very recently. This is a map of Aboriginal Australia, detailing where the indigenous peoples of this country have lived for thousands of years.

Like me, you will probably be aware that there has traditionally been a degree of tension between the European settlers of the last two centuries and this country's ancient inhabitants. What you may not have known - like me until very recently - is that this is more than just a case of white settlers riding into town and there being a bit of 'bovva'. Over the last 219 years, this country has seen some of the most outrageous racial brutality I have ever heard of in a so called 'modern' state. So bad, in fact, that the thing that shocks you the most is that you had not heard about it before.

I had been meaning to write a post about the treatment of Aborigines for a while. After my trip to the Australian Museum in Sydney today, where there is an excellent display of both Aboriginal culture and the shocking treatment these people have been subjected to, it now feels appropriate to tell you about it.

Let's start from the beginning. The Aborigines have occupied land in Australia for at least 65,000 years - some recent archaeological discoveries suggest it may be more than 100,000. There is every reason to suggest they are the oldest human race on the planet - and not an unremarkable one at that. If you take the time to examine Aboriginal culture, art and spirituality over these many years, you cannot help but be impressed. They have also managed to survive and prosper in the most punishing country on earth. Even today, Australia remains overwhelmingly uninhabited, the vast majority of its citizens crowded along cities along the south east coast where the climate is at its most tepid. Aborigines have learnt to survive and adapt in all parts of this vast land - defying mother nature at its harshest and most extreme.

Everything changed in January 1788, when Captain Cook and his band of British sailors rocked on in. Nothing the severity of Australia's punishing climate threw at them for centuries could prepare these people for the perverted barbarity they would be made to suffer.

The first shameful act was the declaration of terra nullius by the British - meaning the land they found was not occupied by anybody. To be fair, the good captain and his crew would not have been aware of just how long Aboriginals had been in Australia. But they were very much aware of these people's presence - they just chose to ignore it. Because Aborigines did not display the same social and administrative practices you would find in Britain, it was deemed they had no right to the land they were occupying. In other words, because there wasn't a parish council, a church, a cricket pitch, a post office or Mrs Miggins serving afternoon tea, these black savages had no rights to their home. Captain Cook duly claimed the land for the British Empire.

Having stolen their country in effect, the British then set about killing them. If it wasn't direct murder, it was indirectly through the arrival of European diseases like Smallpox, against which the Aborigines had no defence. It is estimated that there were almost a million Aborigines in Australia in the late 1700's - a century later that was down to 50,000.

If you think that's just an accidental medical consequence, on the whole you'd be correct, but most historians agree that around 20,000 were killed in battle by whites during the first century of British occupation. Now some of this may be have been in legitimate self-defence, but there are countless examples of genocide on a sickening scale. Allow me to just pick one, this from Myall Creek in 1838. I shall now ask a historian to enter the room and tell the story.

"A party of twelve men, consisting of eleven convict settlers and one free man, John Fleming, arrived at a hut on Myall Creek station on 10 June. They told the station hand there, George Anderson, that they intended to round up any Aboriginal people they could find. They claimed to be acting in retaliation for the theft of cattle, although they did not attempt to identify any individuals who were responsible for the theft. The men gathered up twenty-eight people, mostly women and children, out of a group of forty or fifty Aboriginal people who were camping in the area. They were taken behind a hill, away from the hut. The shepherd later heard shots. The twenty-eight had all been killed, and some of the young women had been raped."

There is only one thing remarkable about this incident - the people responsible were actually brought to justice. The first criminal charges after 50 years of British rule for the killing of Aborigines. I could have picked as an example the massacre of 200 at Waterloo Creek three months before, where the perpetrators were even regarded as heroes, but there's only so much I can type into a post without getting Repetitive Strain Injury.

In fairness, this did all happen a long time ago. So let's have some more recent examples. Let's talk about the Lost Generations instead. From 1915 right up until 1969, the Australian authorities forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their parents - particularly those of mixed race background - and took them to either white foster parents or internment camps. Up to 100,000 children were taken from their parents, in what was basically an attempt to kill off the Aborigines culturally and physically. The kids were brought up as if they were white, even though they were not. Some would have their mouths scrubbed with soap if they communicated in any language other than English.

I will probably never be a parent, but you don't have to be one to know there can be nothing more terrible or heartbreaking than to have your children taken from you. And, as I said, this was still going on until 1969. Most families did not start to be re-united until the 1980s.

If a government is prepared to indulge in such outrageous racial social engineering, it probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise that Aborigines didn't get the vote until the late 1960s either. They weren't even included in the official population figures - in other words, they were not even considered to be human beings. This only changed after a referendum in 1969. That's right - a referendum on whether people who had been living in a country for thousands of years should be granted such basic freedoms.

In fairness to most Australians, a lot of good work has been done since then to heal these wounds. Talk to most people (at least in Sydney) and they feel a very deep sense of shame about how the Aborigines were treated. The trouble is, although they don't go round stealing their babies any more, life for an indigenous Australian is still incredibly harsh. The average life expectancy for an Aboriginal person is 20 years - twenty years - lower than that of a European Australian. Any attempts at 're-conciliation' are surely exposed as very shallow when statistics like that - from today - exist.

It is the continued injustices that Aborigines face that is particularly galling. The life expectancy issue is a serious, but admittedly complex social issue. Some things are more simple. Like saying sorry. This country's odious prime minister, John Howard, refuses to. He says he will not wear 'the black armband of history'. This is a man who sees the world in a very narrow and conservative way. In other words, because he wasn't a member of Cook's crew in 1788, or holding the gun Myall Creek, or stealing babies, he has nothing to apologise for. In 1998 a National Sorry Day was instituted, to give people the chance to apologise for the past and heal wounds. John Howard boycotted every event associated with it.

As I said earlier, one of the most surprising facts about the history of Aborigines in Australia over the last 200 years is how little the wider world knows about it. We all know loads about Mandela, apartheid and the civil rights movement in America. Ask yourself the last time you read anything about the plight of Aborigines. And, finally, consider this. All of the murders, rapes, repression, the abduction of children - all of it - took place in a country with a British head of state. And we started it. Perhaps we're a bit too close to teach children about it in our schools, eh?