lunedì, novembre 12, 2012

Well that's odd

Some odd things happened yesterday. The thing in itself wasn't odd - it was just the sort of standard conversation I as a massively pregnant woman (BTW today is my due date according to the twelve week ultrasound) have quite often with strangers about when the baby's due, advice about delivery - lots of walking, try to keep off your back (which sounds more like contraception advice to me) etc. The odd thing was that I realized after the conversation that it was the first time I had had a conversation with a recognizably aboriginal person, even though I've now been living in Australia for more than two years.  The other odd thing, which took awhile to register, is that at the end of the conversation, she thanked me, even though she was the one offering advice and good wishes.

Australia is really making my skin crawl. I'm no Étienne Brûlé but I've got first nations friends, family, and I'm pretty sure I've never gone anywhere close to two years in Canada without chatting with a first nations person in various contexts, and they've certainly never fucking thanked me for it. This is . . . weird. I've become casually acquainted, living here, with more Maori people for heaven's sake, and it's not like this podunk shithole is some sort of high-powered Kiwi job magnet. And there are a lot of aboriginal people about, though few that are actually from around here - there were hundreds who were relocated from Sydney during the Olympics twelve years back. (Yep. They still do that.)

Well. I don't know what the take-home from feeling weird like this is. Except that Australia's not the place for me. It's stolen country being squandered by its parasitic thieves, who somehow don't get treated as parasites by the people they stole it from. Probably because they killed too many of them. I've heard from a few different people now the same anecdote about conversations with drunk white South Africans (of which Australia is pretty full): at some point, when the conversation turns to apartheid and what shitty people white South Africans are, out will come the blurt: "you can't judge us, you just killed all your blacks." On reflection one of my South African business contacts in Belgium said something similar about Australia when I told him I was moving here, though not while drunk and not so harshly.

2 commenti:

Melbine ha detto...

What? They relocated aboriginal people during the Olympics? WTF?

Mistress La Spliffe ha detto...

Yep. By government estimates about a third of the families living in the aboriginal district in Sydney were relocated before the Olympic games.