by SARAH IRVING
Hidden from the eyes of the world, Australia’s First Peoples are fighting for freedom. PHOTO/Sinem Saban/Our Generation.
“It wasn’t our dream to come and eat at the white man’s table, to work for the white man as a slave,” says Reverend Dr Djiniyini Gondarra, a Yolngu elder. Dr Gondarra is one of the indigenous voices heard in Our Generation, an important new film documenting the impact of the ‘Northern Territory Emergency Response.’ Since 2007 this government initiative has decimated the human rights of the Yolngu and other indigenous Australian peoples, collectively known to most of the world as Aboriginal peoples.
As Djiniyini Gondarra implies, the Yolngu and other Aboriginal peoples have been given little choice whether or not to interact with white Australia. Using interviews, historical footage, and news reports, Our Generation shows how the gains of the Aboriginal civil rights movement of the 1970s were brutally overturned by the Northern Territory Emergency Response, often known as the “Northern Territory Intervention.”
Under the Intervention, 73 indigenous communities in the Northern Territory were taken over by the Australian army, police, and government officials. Collective control over Aboriginal lands – only handed back to indigenous peoples in 1976 – was revoked, community assets frozen, and indigenous-run social programmes closed down. For individuals ‘income quarantining,’ or compulsory government income management, was imposed.
The Intervention was initially justified with a report, Little Children Are Sacred, which alleges that child abuse was rife in Aboriginal communities. Mal Brough, minister for Family, Community Services & Indigenous Affairs at the start of the Intervention, claimed that “each and every day, children are being abused. We need strong powers so that we are not weighed down by unnecessary red tape and talk-fests.” He claimed that ‘every one’ of the communities targeted had ‘paedophiles’ lurking within it. Prime Minister John Howard launched the Intervention with evocations of “The nightmare of violence, abuse and neglect engulfing remote indigenous settlements… [is] Australia’s own hurricane Katrina – an emergency that demands urgent action, not more consultation.”
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