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Confronting Racism's Boundary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2016
Extract
The Brisbane of my childhood was monocultural and ethnocentric, a very white affair. Like most Queenslanders of my generation, I had virtually nothing to do with Aborigines and was given little reason to understand their culture or to see the history of the European conquest of this country from their point of view. I certainly had no knowledge of the relationship between Aborigines and police, poisoned as it was by decades of policing which intimidated, imprisoned and eliminated Aboriginal ‘troublemakers’. Nor did I know of the confiscation of children of mixed descent from their Aboriginal mothers. Similarly, I was ignorant of how Queensland's paternalistic protectionist policies had compulsorily detained tens of thousands of Aborigines on ‘missions’ scattered throughout Queensland, an injustice compounded by the practice of quarantining their miserable wages into a ‘welfare fund’ which was used in ways that suited the government bureaucrats of the day.
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References
Notes
1 Fitzgerald, Ross, From the Dreaming to 1915: A History of Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1982, 317ff.Google Scholar
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