Disclosure: i am, for the most part, strongly opposed to the politics of the ruling conservative coalition government in Australia.
That said, Prime Minister Tony Abbott is a fucking doofus, even by Liberal/National Party standards. How Australians voted for this asshole (or, returning to my Aussie roots, arsehole) is completely beyond me. My mother has voted for the coalition in the past, but she hates Abbott with a passion, and it seems that there are plenty of Aussies who voted for him who are already regretting it. His approval ratings have hovered around 40% for much of the past year, dipping frequently into the 30s.
Anyway, it’s not his general politics that i’m concerned with here. It’s his constant idiocy about the place of Australia’s original inhabitants in the nation’s history. He keeps suggesting that there was no-one here when the British arrived to start a penal colony in the late eighteenth century.
Back in July, he referred to Australia as “unsettled” when the British arrived, before correcting himself and saying “scarcely settled.”
Then, just today, at a breakfast with British PM David Cameron, he said:
While this new place undoubtedly seemed strange and frightening to those who stepped ashore in 1788, at least they were aware enough of their surroundings to realize that it was NOT “nothing but bush.” I studied Australian history as part of my history major at university, and one course included reading diaries and letters produced by members of the First Fleet. Some of these writers were talking about the native inhabitants before they even landed in Sydney Harbor, and they wrote quite a lot about the Aboriginal people they encountered.
Abbott’s comments are not simply off-the-cuff remarks that can be excused for a lack of precision; they were speeches (admittedly short, in the latter case), and had presumably been prepared by Abbott or his aides. I don’t expect that the Australian Prime Minister cover himself in sackcloth and ashes every time he talks about British colonization, but some recognition of the first Australians by the nation’s elected leader does not seem too much to ask. Or, at the very least, try to avoid suggesting that they were never here. This is especially the case given the protracted debates over historical memory in Australia, and the fact that the doctrine of terra nullius (empty land) was used for so long to justify the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples.
Unfortunately, Abbott’s simply continuing a long line of conservatives in Australia who insist that we just need to get over the past mistreatment of indigenous people, and stop wallowing in the so-called “black armband” theory of history.