Spaces and exchanges : Australia and native people

Spaces and exchanges

I will talk about the notion “Spaces and exchanges” and more particularly of Australia and its native people. A space is an expanse, a surface inhabited or uninhabited

An exchange it’s the act of giving something in substitution for something else. This word can take different forms, like economic (work exchange), cultural (exchange of ideas, information, education) and it can be the movements of people (immigration). But in Australia in the 18 century, we can’t talk about exchange cultural because they want delete the Aboriginals, the native people of Australia. It was a truly harsh period in Australia’s history.

We may wonder whether Aboriginal people will one day recover from the contact with westerners.

In a first part, we’ll see Australia history and then we’ll see that the Australian government wanted to eradicate aboriginals in different ways. And finally we’ll see the apologize of the government.

First of all, in a document we’ve seen in class and a reading comprehension called “the first Australian penal colony established”, we’ll see Australia history. Australia was discovered in seventeen eighty eight by James Cooks, a British navigator. Since it was no more possible for the British to send criminals or convicts in America (American became independent in seventeen seventy six), they decided to turn Australia into a gigantic penitentiary lost in lands where conditions were inhuman. The Aboriginal people had been living in Australia for over sixty thousand years. This people belonged to the oldest continuous culture on earth outside of Africa. In the document “Songlines”, we’ll see they were animists, they believed every things had a soul.

After a century of colonization, the British want to colonize the country more extensively. Then, they decided to re-educate the Aboriginals according to the principles of white culture, Christian culture. This is just the beginning of the eradication and acculturation of Aboriginals.

In a second part, we’ll see the will to eradicate Aboriginals.

In Rabbit Proof Fence, a movie, three Aboriginal little girls are kidnapped from their families. They are brought one thousand five hundred miles away from their village. The goal was to lock them in re-educating centers where they were not allowed to speak their Aboriginal language. They were obliged to believe in Christ and to obey the principles of western civilization. It’s the “Stolen Generation”. The aim is the acculturation. When grow up, this girls had to marry a white person to disperse the Aboriginal gene by dissolving them into white blood. Today, Aboriginals are basically unemployed, we watched a video where we see their living conditions. They are often alcoholic or take drugs and they die prematurely. On account of British colonizers and the Australian government, Aboriginals have lost their culture.

In the document “The Songlines”, we’ll see they live in shacks, they are away from the population, they haven’t work and no link with the world. They don’t live, they survive.

Finally, the government apologized for the wrongs of the past.

We looked at the video “Kevin Rudd’s Sorry Speach”,on thirteen February two thousand and

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