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...a
sense of emptiness that comes over us every evening.. .the desperate moment
when we discover that this empire...is an endless formless ruin, that
corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed... that the triumph
over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing...
You know, I was never taught about the bomb testing at school, no-one was back then. Kinda suspect it’s still not talked about. The white spin on history in Australia continues to be primarily founded upon lies, denial and amnesia. This is notwithstanding historians such as Henry Reynolds who challenge the canon of peaceful settlement with their painstaking recuperation of primary sources, the colonial newspapers, letters by Aboriginal people to the new bureaucracies requesting land to farm, prison records tracing the expansion of the “frontier” by the waves of incarceration of young men. And so on and so on till you can read no more, it’s just too devastating in one sitting. But a new sense of history is emerging from the long night, a history based on the experiences and knowledge of the Aboriginal people of Australia. And this history is being shared with non-Indigenous Australians who want to listen, to learn, and to work together to begin the process of healing the land and the people to create a better future for the ones to come. (O yeah, and shove your charges of “political correctness” or "bleeding heart" leveled at anyone who participates in the dismantling of the endemic injustice in this country.)
It’s
much too late to make art; a little too early to concretely make situations
of some
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