The Hindu Business Line : Contrition two centuries too late

One reacts with mixed feelings to the news that the new Australian Government, headed by Mr Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister, is planning to apologise to the indigenous people of the island for centuries of ill-treatment at the hands of colonisers.

They belonged mostly to the seamy side of the British population and were convicted of heinous offences, whom the British Government considered too dangerous to be allowed to remain in Britain and transported to the newly discovered far-away Australia.

The new arrivals and their descendents immediately began a systematic, senseless and inhuman orgy of decimation of the indigenous people who were demeaningly named aborigines.

Their lands were seized, they were squeezed like sardines into horrible ghettos which were nothing but living hell, and their children were snatched from them either to be put to death or to be sent away to specially set up reformatories for ‘civilising’ them in the image of the white settlers.

In short, the indigenous people were subjected to such cruel treatment that tens of thousands of them, deprived of food, proper sanitation and minimum medical care, perished. It was only in 1962 that they even got the right to vote in Australia.

Far from feeling sorry for such barbarities perpetrated, Mr Rudd’s predecessor, Mr John Howard, even as late as last year, refused to apologise to the original Australians, and in a revolting display of supremacist arrogance declared flatly that “There are millions of Australians who will never entertain an apology because they don’t believe that there is anything to apologise for.”

Reports published in Australian media say that even today many indigenous people, constituting 2.5 per cent of the population, are treated as dregs of society leading a miserable subsistence-level existence. Their life expectancy is 17 years lower than the rest of the country; they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated; three times more likely to be unemployed; and twice as likely to be victims of violence or threatened violence.

Saving grace

It is good that Mr Rudd at least at this late stage has realised the enormity of the insufferable wrongs done to the natives and come forward to express contrition.

Even while doing so, his Government is fighting a rear-guard battle against setting up any kind of fund to pay compensation for the cruelties inflicted on them over centuries.

What the Australian indigenous people have gone through is typical of what happened to the natives of every landmass on which the European conquistadors set foot in previous centuries.

Most infuriating of all was their contempt for, and destruction of, all traces of the culture and traditions of the natives. India with its hallowed 10,000 year-old civilisation and such marvels of human intellect as the Vedas, Upanishads and epics, and such achievements in astronomy, medicine, engineering and fine arts to its credit looked, in the eyes of the likes of T. B. Macaulay, as a country inhabited by primitives whose whole literature “was nowhere near a single shelf of a good European library”. He asserts: “It is, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England”.

The saving grace is that the inhumanities characterising colonisation by white interlopers in various continents had been documented exhaustively by white authors themselves. For instance, the monumental history of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas is a catalogue of the bestialities beggaring description of the Spanish colonisers leading to the conclusion that they were especially violent and barbaric in their treatment of natives.

Actually all white colonisers were the same.

B. S. RAGHAVAN