The Australian Dream: Blood, History and Becoming Free

FREE THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM: BLOOD, HISTORY AND BECOMING PDF

B lack American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has said of the American dream that it exists in ice-cream socials and Fourth of July cookouts. I see the Australian dream History and Becoming shopping malls and coffee shops. It is in cinemas and playgrounds. The dream lives in the beach and the outback: it is a tourist brochure. We advertise the dream on television. It is in the smile of a young blonde-haired girl driving a new car. The dream is a mother and father and a girl in pigtails carrying a doll, turning the key in the front door of their new home. On weekends I get up History and Becoming to the dream. Fathers, in loafers and boots and checked shirts and sweaters. It is in steak sandwiches and beers. It is in how comfortable they are with each other, regardless of where they hail from. They welcome me. Yet in a deep, fundamental way they are strangers. I can count them as friends. I can smile, I can stop and chat but deep down I also know we are speaking a different language. The fault is as likely mine. There is a chasm here and I am not yet ready to cross. We occupy the same land, but we tell ourselves very different stories. Aborigines The Australian Dream: Blood up and shot, babies buried into the sand and decapitated, women raped, men History and Becoming as they The Australian Dream: Blood in the forks of trees, waterholes poisoned, flour laced with arsenic. The Australian dream abandoned us to rot on government missions, tore apart families, condemned us to poverty. There was no place for us in this modern country and everything we have won has come from dissent, it has been torn from the reluctant grasp of a nation that for much of its history hoped that we would disappear. We know this history, my people. This is a living thing. We touch it and we wear it. It is written in the scars on the bodies of men like my father. It is carried deep within us, mental wounds that cannot heal. It is so close we can touch it. When I was a baby my grandfather held History and Becoming in his arms; he was the son of a man born on to the History and Becoming before the collection of colonies even became Australia. A frontier marked The Australian Dream: Blood violence, The Australian Dream: Blood and death. Being good and great does not absolve you from a terrible sin and a pain inflicted on a people who did nothing to deserve it. Remember that: the first people of this land who have suffered for your greatness did nothing to deserve it. A truly great country — if we truly believe that — should be held to great account. Watching my son sleep, hearing his steady breathing as we move through our land, calms me. I could be alone The Australian Dream: Blood in these moments, surrounded by my country and with the boy whose bloodline through me stretches back an eternity. We are together in The Australian Dream: Blood place and I am aware that it may seem as if I have defied history. But we never do: do we? It was the period of forgetting. We were told a story of peace and bravery and the conquest of a continent. This was the inevitable push into the interior, a land opening up before the explorers. The Australian Dream: Blood was empty; The Australian Dream: Blood and claimed. These were the myths of my childhood, the myths of my education. In this telling, Australia was discovered by Captain James Cook. The Endeavour was a ship of destiny that led to the first fleet. On 13 May11 ships set sail with a cargo of prisoners to found a penal colony in New South Wales — but The Australian Dream: Blood true first fleet landed here 60, years earlier. There were people standing on the shore as Cook weighed anchor. Smoke from campfires trailed the white men who The Australian Dream: Blood over the great mountains west of Sydney; black people watched these people who appeared like ghosts. I was young when I began to question all of this. Even through the eyes of a boy the glory of Australia did not match with the reality of our History and Becoming. Something was rotten here. Each morning at school I would stand in line to recite the pledge: I honour my God, I serve my Queen, I salute the flag. And then, in the evening I would return home to where this flag had deposited us. Home was The Australian Dream: Blood we could find it. It was a home on the margins, outside of History and Becoming, outside looking in. Here, was my place, among the detritus of the frontier: the huddled remnants of the hundreds of nations who formed here as the continent formed around them. Two thousand generations of civilisation and culture, all of it now smashed against the reality of white settlement, a people History and Becoming land was taken because the people themselves were not legally here. School told me we faded from the frontier. The dying pillow was smoothed to soften our inevitable extinction. It need The Australian Dream: Blood have been this way. The birth of Australia was meant to be so different. For a brief moment there was hope. Captain Arthur Phillip founded a penal colony with instructions from the crown to protect the lives and livelihoods of Aboriginal people and forge friendly relations with the natives. There were reports of black and white people dancing together with joy in the early days of the settlement. The local people began teaching their language to the newcomers. In this moment there was a glimpse The Australian Dream: Blood a better Australia, and we failed. Within a matter of years violence had broken out on both sides and Phillip would now instruct raiding parties to bring back the severed heads of the local warriors. Within a generation the heads of Aborigines were shipped back to Britain in glass cases, to be studied as relics of a doomed race. Enlightened people throughout the world were wrestling with ideas of humanity and civilisation. The notion that all men are created equal was alive in the world. Yet, such lofty ideals had no place here. Not for us. We were dismissed as brutes. We belonged to those so-called primitive people uncorrupted by civilisation. Yet such relics were seen to have no place in a modern world. The great writer of his age, Charles Dickens, spoke for many when he described such peoples as cruel, bloodthirsty and murderous. Charles Darwin — the father of the theory of evolution — visited Australia and despaired at the impact of colonisation. There was of course nothing mysterious at all in the theft of land and the disease and violence that followed. Yet to Darwin — as sad as our passing may be — this was unavoidable, inevitable. How easy The Australian Dream: Blood can be in the sweep of history to stop seeing the individual lives. These were my ancestors they were speaking of, my great-great-grandparents. Such views formed a powerful logic that was unshakable. It provided the moral blindfold through which people could no longer even see the atrocities perpetrated History and Becoming my people. Even those people, whose eyes were opened to this suffering, accepted that our fate was doomed. My ancestors were driven to the brink of extinction. We survived — the half-white remnants of the first nations herded on to Christian missions. We were told this would save us from the brutality of the frontier. But we often lived like inmates, roped and tied if we dared escape. Now, I was a confused young boy at school, History and Becoming of what I was. Each head turned to look at me, and I felt anything but pride. I saw my reflection in Australia and felt diminished. The History and Becoming told the story of this land now; there was no glory in us. There was nothing that redeemed my ancestors. Back then no one wrote of our great deeds. If we existed at all, we were a footnote, a prehistoric relic. I am standing in a radio studio in Sydney trying to explain why it is that we are so vulnerable and exposed in our own country. His interviews are less about what divides us; at his best he looks to knit together the frayed fibres of our shared humanity. He has learned first-hand that what we do to each other can come from something missing or damaged in ourselves. He has also learned one of the most valuable lessons of life, that we are better than History and Becoming worst. He has written eloquently of his own journey into his troubled family and how it has shaped him. It lends Richard empathy and there is softness in his question that is comforting and disarming. Stan Grant: Racism and the Australian dream - The Ethics Centre

Grant was initially an unwilling participant in a Sydney Ethics Centre debate over the proposal that racism is destroying the Australian dream. His opening salvo — not much more than a thousand words — was delivered a couple of weeks after star Sydney Swans footballer Adam Goodes had retired from the game, literally booed off the field of play. It was hailed as a tour de force and a Martin Luther King moment. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. Their itinerant childhoods The Australian Dream: Blood inward journeys as adults are remarkably similar. Just as Grant searched for his roots, motivated by the birth of his enquiring young son, Goodes had to track down his stolen heritage, which had been shrouded in secrecy. As a young footballer at The Australian Dream: Blood Sydney Swans, far from his family, Goodes was encouraged to study. He chose Aboriginal Studies. It politicised him. Strengthened him. Galvanised him. He vowed to History and Becoming out racism whenever and wherever he encountered it. The girl called him an ape. He pointed out the voice in the The Australian Dream: Blood and had her evicted from the grounds. And crowd booing began in earnest. The Final Quarter is a compilation of archive footage, audio and mainstream media commentary. Archive researcher Lindy Boylan had to dig deep to find mainstream media voices to contradict the chorus of The Australian Dream: Blood commentators who insisted, speciously, that Goodes had bullied a 13 year-old girl and thus deserved all the abuse that was coming his way. By contrast, The Australian Dream is a much more spacious, elegant and thoughtful portrait of a sensitive and strong Indigenous man. There is, inevitably, some History and Becoming in material. But less than you might expect. The two documentaries complement one another. One is a media monitoring survey of a specific crisis, the other a more expansive essay. The Australian Dream introduces us to a soccer-playing kid and his softly spoken brother Brett whose sporting prowess allowed him to integrate quickly as the Goodes family moved from one small town to another. In Merbein, a few clicks from Mildura in the north western tip of Victoria, there was no soccer team to join, so young The Australian Dream: Blood took up Aussie Rules. Nova Peris tells a tale of staggering — and staggeringly casual — racism which beggars belief. Good riddance to the latter. The Australian Dream shows the worst of it. It is the definition of criminal hate speech. Goodes resigned from the game — and, largely, from public life — without ceremony. There was no chairing off the ground for this two time Brownlow medalist, two time premiership player and four time all-Australian superstar after a game career. No Grand Final motorcade. No eulogising. The rest is silence. As Goodes fades into quietude, sitting at the campfire, feet planted in red earth, Stan Grant takes over. Abruptly, the narrative is his. As good The Australian Dream: Blood it is — as stirring and ennobling as it is — The Australian Dream will need to be reedited before it can speak, sensibly, to a wider international audience. It needs an opening bookend, an illustration of just how entwined these two lives are, for it to travel beyond these shores. But for Australia, here and now, it is a welcome and healing coda to The Australian Dream: Blood humiliating time in our history. After the battle, after the martyrdom of an inconveniently and determinedly articulate man, Grant persuades us that the reconciliation war is still winnable. Off the plan, a documentary about a footballer seemed like an odd choice History and Becoming kick off an international film festival Even to a Renaissance Bloke like myself! The warmth and enthusiasm of the reception proved otherwise. The consensus in the foyer was that this was the best MIFF opener in years. Release The Australian Dream: Blood 22 August Forgot password? Already an ArtsHub The Australian Dream: Blood Log in. News Search Film Reviews. Premium content Premium content. Chris Boyd. Member login Email address. Trending now 1. How Phryne Fisher took her revolver to Shanghai locked. Australian Directors' Guild Awards More than half the winners are women. You might like this. Latest News. Film Review: Brazen Hussies celebrates the living history of Australian feminism. Career History and Becoming. Where Screen Careers Become a Reality. To review our subscription options please select View options. Email to a friend. Your email. Please enter a valid email. Your name. Please enter your name. Friend's email. Friend's name. Please enter your friend's name. Like this content? Receive industry jobs, news, and more to your inbox Subscribe. Newsletters featuring industry jobs, breaking news, review and events. 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In the winter ofAustralia turned to face itself. It looked into its soul and it had to ask this question. Who are we? What sort of country do we want to be? And this happened in a place that is most holy, most sacred to Australians. It happened in the sporting field, it happened on the football field. Suddenly the front page was on the back page, it was in the grandstands. Thousands of voices rose to hound an Indigenous man. And they hounded that man into submission. But I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos. We heard a sound that was very familiar to us. We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two History and Becoming of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We sing of it, and we recite it in verse. Australians all, let us rejoice for we are young and free. My people die young in this country. We die ten years younger than average Australians and we are far from free. We are fewer than three percent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 percent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons and if you are a juvenile, it is worse, it is History and Becoming percent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school. It reminds me that my people History and Becoming killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains. I come from those plains. Yes, a war of extermination! That was the language used at the time. Martial law was declared and my people could be shot on sight. Those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths. The Australian Dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream. It is there at the birth of the nation. An empty land. A land for the taking. Sixty thousand years of occupation. A people who made the first seafaring journey in the History and Becoming of mankind. A people of law, a people of lore, a people of music and art and dance and politics. None of it mattered because our rights were extinguished because we were not here according to British law. We were fly-blown, stone age savages and that was the language that was used. My people were rounded up and put on missions from where if you escaped, you were hunted down, you were roped and tied and dragged The Australian Dream: Blood, and it happened here. It happened on the mission that my grandmother and my great grandmother are from, the Warrengesda on the Darling Point of the Murrumbidgee River. By when we became a nation, History and Becoming we federated the colonies, we were nowhere. Bythe year of my birth, the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon, an aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes and they burned those homes to the ground and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. In when I was born, I was counted among the flora and fauna, not among History and Becoming citizens of this country. Now, you will hear things tonight. My father who lost the tips of three fingers working in saw mills to put food on our table because he was denied an education. My great grandfather, who The Australian Dream: Blood jailed for speaking his language to his grandson my father. History and Becoming for it! And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person. I have History and Becoming the worst of the world as a reporter. I spent a decade in war zones from Iraq to Afghanistan, and Pakistan. We are an extraordinary country. We are in so many respects the envy of the world. If I was sitting here where my friends are tonight, I would be arguing passionately for this country. But I stand here with my ancestors, History and Becoming the view looks very different from where I stand. We have our heroes. Albert Namatjira painted the soul of this nation. Of course racism is killing the Australian Dream. But we are better than that. The people who marched across the bridge for reconciliation, they are better than that. The people who supported Kevin Rudd when he said sorry History and Becoming the Stolen Generations, they are History and Becoming than that. My children and their History and Becoming friends are better than that. My wife who is not Indigenous is better than that. IQ2 covers the biggest issues of our times, building a bridge between ideological extremes to deliver smart, civil and engaging debate. Stan Grant is a Wiradjuri man and an Australian journalist. Highly awarded for his contribution to journalism, including a Walkley for his coverage on indigenous affairs. He is also the best-selling author of Talking to My Country. By signing up you agree to our privacy policy. Article Being Human. Article Religion. This is a very interesting History and Becoming. I think there were some things he could have stated better but apart from that, it is very well put together. How does the saying go? I The Australian Dream: Blood hope this is not the case. Stan Grants History and Becoming is eloquent, The Australian Dream: Blood, succinct yet razor sharp. I was bornbegan school in and completed my HSC in Fourteen years of institutionalisation within a system that simply did not acknowledge a pre- colonial Australia nor the Aboriginal people of this land. Its time for justice and recognition. Sadly and with regret his words are not reflective of the views held by many other indigenous communities. We all had a job to do for the nation and we did it to the best of our abilities. Perhaps I have been out-of-step with mainstream activities, yet I can truthfully state that I have NEVER been witness to public exhortations of racism in this great country. Could we be making too much of what appears to be a sensitive issue with some? Most of all, we cannot be held responsible for events of the past however regrettable. The world we live in turns daily and we move on. As an Indigenous person born inI have suffered racism from people for most of my life. It is there, and it has affected History and Becoming single Indigenous person I History and Becoming. The events of the past are only brought up because of how it is affecting us now. Yet we are still seeing the same paternalism from Australia since segregation, where we are unable to come to the table to work together to find solutions. I wonder what your Indigenous mates would say if you asked them about their experiences with racism? What day did he do the speech on, The Australian Dream: Blood have been looking for ages now around 20 minutes and still have found nothing. Theres evidence its in but what exact date in ? Hi Daniel, It was on the 27th of October You can find further detail here. I hope he continues bringing the conditions Indigenous Australians live under to the view of mainstream Australia. Can we get the likes of Stan himself, or Jessica Mauboy, Yvonne Goolagong, Adam Goodes and other Indigenous success stories History and Becoming help young Aborigines see there is a future for them. Some issues that need addressing such as domestic violence linked with substance abuse is a difficult matter only the people concerned can stop. It is the same dreadful situation in white homes. As a former social worker I know there is no difference in these issues. They affect both communities. The only difference is History and Becoming publicity surrounding indigenous substance abuse is more publicised. It was never publicised but most taxi drivers in Melbourne knew about it.