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Solidarity | Mar 17, 2006 07:39
I had a request for an email address to send messages of support to the Aboriginal people trying to draw attention to Australian injustice. If you are one of these rabid, commie, pinko types, but can't actually make it to Melbourne in person, then try emailing blackgstcrew at gmail dot com.
I'd hazard a guess that knowing their fight is reaching an international stage would be well received by the locals.
PS oops... forgot to munge the address. you can take it from here.
The Cheek of It All | Mar 15, 2006 20:02
Does anyone else feel like the Commonwealth Games are kind of like a paralympics for white people? Not to disparage our athletes any, but a games held that always tend to focus on the relative sporting merits of a bunch of countries linked through their former domination by a legion of stuffed shirts just kind of seems strange.
That said, I was proud to hear a report that the New Zealand team was the only one to request a welcome to country from the Wurundjeri people. Bloody good on you to whomever arrived at that bit of publicity. And speaking of Aboriginal people, there is a couple of interesting mixed messages coming out of the Australian media on the question of the 'treatment of the natives'. On the one hand we have the Sydney Morning Herald reporting the Queen to have said,
the need to ensure that ...prosperity touches the lives of all Australians is as powerful as ever... For many indigenous Australians there remains much to be done"
while the Australian reports her saying,
the need to ensure ... prosperity touched the lives of all Australians is as powerful as ever... At the same time, this country has welcomed people from many nations and thrived on the diversity that has produced... Even so, across this vast land there exists an undiminished recognition that communities must be built on values that transcend race, religion and culture
Goes to show, selective editing is not the sole preserve of bloggers.
And read the helpful suggestion from Prince Philip at the bottom of the Australian article. The poor old bastard hasn't got a clue.
In a way I'm kind of mildy regretting not being in Melbourne for the games. The city was a great place to be during the Rugby World Cup, with people heading out of the house to take in sport at the drop of a hat. You could pretty much go into a pub anywhere and see coverage of your favourite game, and all this in Aussie Rules heaven. The Soccer World Cup was the same, we spent a number of evenings in the local supporting our favourite teams. A mate told me one time that you charged a decent price you could half-fill the MCG to see a game of mini-golf, the Aussies love their sport that much.
Ah well, split milk and all that. It's always after I've been in a new city for about a year I get the most homesick for the last place.
On a less positive note, if you are in Melbourne for the Games be sure to get out to the Kings Domain and show a little solidarity with Victorian Aboriginal people. Jesus that lot have had a hard time of it. Stopped this writing for a bit to get over to the TV and see Campbell Live do a piece of the Stolenwealth Games, and saw them interview Robert Thorpe.
Back in 2000 I was doing fieldwork for the PhD and interviewed Robert and others about the history of the Lake Tyers Aboriginal Reserve, a place way out in the East of Victoria. Christ Robert made me laugh, the man's as mad as a cut snake. He had this way of talking about events in the 1840s like they were happening today, and stories about whitefellas unloading sheep off boats that can't really be repeated in polite company.
God he and the people at Tyers lived in a difficult place. The towns that surround the reserve are stocked with some of the most in-bred, bigoted assholes I've ever met, and it made Tyers something like a prison for the people who saw the reserve as the last tiny bit of their country not confiscated or stolen by the English. They were subject to routine verbal and physical abuse from police and public alike, unemployment was near one hundred percent, conditions mediocre at very best, and I could go on.
Meanwhile mainstream Australia wallows in a sea of apathy or complacency towards Aboriginal futures, seeing them as nothing greater than cultural tourism or 'ethnic' rubber-stamping for festivals.
It's sickening, victim-blaming behaviour that has no rightful place in a country that likes to think of itself as 'gods own'.
Ah well, at least there might be some medals handed out to the Kiwi's. If you're reading this, and are in the media scrum for the Kiwi team, how about having some of our winning athletes say, "I recognise this, the traditional land of the Wurundjeri people".
If you are an athlete, how about a photo op of you giving that medal to Thorpe, he's fought his whole life for something like a space on a podium. His people have been pushed down and beaten for generations, spat on, ostracized for speaking out against white injustice, rounded up and incarcerated for the crime of being black.
Think about that while you're preparing for the race of your life. Think about your entire life being nothing more than a race you'll never win, because you're marked 'trash' from the day you're born.
Or just go hang out with the people down at the Kings Domain, share a joke or two, talk about who they are and what they do. You know, folksy like.
Metics Eleven | Mar 12, 2006 17:42
Despite last writing on this topic an eon ago, I thought I'd better live up to the promise of continuing to get out blogs on metics. So here we go.
The last time I wrote I briefly discussed the concept of social capital. It's a great little idea because it allows us to better understand how and why some people get to be in charge while others are pushed to the outer. It's also useful because it means you can distinguish between groups within a national society on a more abstract level that just race.
Let's look at Māori society for example. Since at least the 90s we've had an ongoing tussle between 'urban' and 'traditional' iwi. From here on the sidelines it's a great development for Māori because not only does it demonstrate that Māori society is vibrant, modern and evolving, but shows urban Māori making strong demands about their governmental belonging [governmental belonging is the idea that you have the right to a say in governance. Just because you're a citizen there's nothing to say you're going to get to contribute].
In the case of urban Māori while they may well fully belong to Māori society, traditional iwi resist their claims to belonging and their right to represent Māori as a whole. The interesting thing is that this type of behaviour is exceedingly common in political systems. When Pauline Hanson was purporting to speak for 'one Australian nation' there were numerous claims that she did not have such a right. Detractors were commonly trying to point out that Hanson was little more than an interloper on the national stage.
You could just write this type of behaviour off as a competition for 'authority', but the term just doesn't really encompass the political behaviour we see in these examples. You can get authority lots of ways, with a big gun for example, but it's most influential when you have it granted to you by your constituents. The Americans do not have governmental belonging in Iraq, for example.
As I stated in Metics Ten, social capital is a good way to understand how a group of individuals aggregate enough governmental belonging to maintain power. In New Zealand we have an idea called 'the majority' that determines what is and is not acceptable in a governmental sense, and the specific content of this group shifts every election time.
But what determines the content of that group? It's not simple electoral politics. You can have any number of votes based on party platforms, but what really determines the shape and nature of the governing body is the personality of the individuals in governance roles. Now first of all the governance roles in New Zealand are broader than just the Member of Parliament, much broader. And secondly they all have variable power, from the secretary of the local Rotarians club up to the PM. What they all have in common though is an amount of social capital they've accumulated over the course of their lifetimes.
Social capital is pivotal to the exercise of political power, and not just any social capital, but just the right kind. John Howard or George W. Bush may well have high levels of social capital in their own nation-states, but in New Zealand these do not amount to much. Not to disparage their social capital mind you, but in New Zealand it is quite simply inappropriate.
What's important to gaining political power is the accumulation of a social capital your constituency can identify with. And it's that idea that brings us full circle to the nature of nationality. Nationality is defined by individuals mutually accepting each others identity, and social capital works much the same way. Both ideas work in self-referential cycles, with one generation of individuals validating the next, and vice-versa, in perpetuity.
So how does this relate to the metics theme?
Sometimes you have entire groups of people who belong to a place but have their social capital, and their social identity, invalidated by the majority. Aboriginal people in Australia are a good example. There is very little about Aboriginality that mainstream Australian actually wants to keep.
And it's also what makes New Zealand a great place to study these concepts, because over the last 30 years Māori have gained increasing levels of governmental belonging, and have had their identity recognised by the majority as valid. You can't really underestimate the worth of that particular piece of rubber-stamping.
The situation has become one in which two types of social capital have been working in tandem, with both contributing to the overall 'vibe' of New Zealand nationality. But a problem seems to be developing, the issue of competition between these two components. And it's something we'll discuss another day.
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