Moving on from, sigh, our General Election, the failure of Australia's Voice referendum on giving Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islanders an official right to weigh in with opinion and advice on matters that affect them - no more than that, mind, no obligation involved to follow their recommendation - was dismaying, to say the least. You'd think that, after over 230 years of bossing them about and/or ignoring them, Australians generally might have come around to considering that it was time to concede a bit of token equality. After all, they had pre-dated the European settlers by just the 60,000 years, or thereabouts.
Some facts: Australia is a continent, as well as a country - huge and environmentally challenging. So the First Peoples developed as culturally diverse nations, with 300-plus distinct languages; and all of their energy went into simply surviving in that often harsh landscape - a triumph in itself. Captain Cook didn't recognise them as a native people in 1788 and declared Australia 'terra nullius' ie 'empty land' when he claimed it for Britain. The Aboriginal people were treated abysmally by the settlers and their successors - look up the Stolen Generations - and weren't even included in the population count till 1967. And it wasn't until 1984 that they were given the same voting rights and responsibilities as all other Australians. Though they comprise less than 4% of the general population, they make up 30% of prisoners. Alcoholism and unemployment are big problems, they suffer from diseases most of us think of as historical, and die 8 years earlier than non-Aboriginals.
NB I know that NZ's treatment of Māori has been/is far from ideal but, in comparison, well...
So, knowing all that, and with the Voice referendum coming up, it felt perfectly timed to go to the Auckland Art Gallery's exhibition of First Peoples Art a couple of weeks ago. And I was so glad I did.
[Sincere apologies to the artists, whose names I shamefully didn't record.]
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