In this blog I am going to use the following terms, Aborigine, Aboriginal, Black Fella and maybe Koori. If this offends then I apologise but I can’t see in any publication where any of these terms are offensive. And furthermore if my intention is not to be offensive then how can I be? Of course, I do mean to be controversial; that is the raison d’etre of the blogger. So here goes.

A group of well-intentioned Australian citizens including politicians are trying to have the Australian Aborigine enshrined in the Constitution of Australia. At the risk of offending a whole range of people, this smacks of Whitey knowing what’s good for the black fella once again.

White Australians have, in the main, for about 225 years, tried to do the right thing by the Aborigine. That’s not to disregard the extreme harshness to which Australian Aborigines were subjected by many European settlers and which we, as white Australians, should not only recognize but about which we should be respectful. Nevertheless it is true that the policies of previous Australian Governments were genuine attempts to solve crises within Aboriginal communities, crises that even today are ignored in the rush by our generation to apologise for the apparent wrongs of our forefathers.

Of course that is a simplistic view of a very complex issue and it does not and never could cover all circumstances. It would not wash as an excuse for the treatment of so-called “orphans” brought to Australia from Britain from the 1950s and onwards so why would it be acceptable in the case of the Australian Aborigine. No apology, no matter how genuine, would, nor will in the future, assuage the pain caused by the poor application of the ill-conceived government policies of the past.

Still, there were crises within the Aboriginal communities back in the days of the stolen generation and were governments to have stood by mute and indifferent then we would be having an entirely different but similarly heart wrenching argument today.

As a society we are moving forward but at a snails pace and rarely to the real benefit of Aborigines despite all the back patting that often accompanies teary apologies issued by our political leaders. And calls by idiotic ex-rock stars come politicians for Australia to be given back to the Aborigine only add to the woes of indigenous Australians by widening the dialogic gulf between them and us. Despite my Irish-English parentage I consider myself an indigenous Australian, as I am Australian born and bred however for this point I refer to Aboriginal Australians.

The notion that this land belongs to the Aborigine fails on a single count. Where is the country in the world today that is occupied by its apparent original people? Certainly not England and certainly not the USA. No European country to my knowledge is totally occupied by its original people. Africa, South America. The world is full of displaced or immigrant people. One could just as easily argue that Australia belongs to the Kangaroo or the Emu. The fact is Europeans, in the form of white Australians have lived here for 225 years. OK, in world national terms that is the blink of an eye but it nonetheless means a hell of a lot to the 20 million or so white Australians who were born here and who know no other country but this one. And as bad as the English may have been in other countries the world as colonialists, I wonder how Aborigines would have survived had the French or the Dutch decided to settle here instead of the Brits. Think Vietnam or South Africa. It’s debatable whether there would even be any Aborigines left, let alone enough to conduct an argument over whose country this is.

It is true, white Australians have been painfully slow to recognize the rights of the Aborigine. It is hard to understand why it took so long for Aborigines to have the right to vote. Most people recognize 1967 as the year Aborigines were allowed to vote although the truth is Aboriginal men were allowed to vote much earlier; in the 1850s in some states. Unfortunately most weren’t aware of that and no doubt few, if any, white Australians encouraged them to learn or to exercise their constitutional rights. Nevertheless modern Australia now recognizes Aborigines as having equal rights in the Constitution. Of course what exists in law does not necessarily translate to equal opportunity.

It has always been and it remains a real problem for the Aborigine to gain the trust and respect of the vast majority of employers. Jobs that are available for most are more often than not, simply not available to anyone who is of distinct Aboriginal appearance. So what are the answers?

A recent cartoon by Bill Leak in which a black fella doesn’t recognise the child in police custody as one of his own, raised the ire of many who saw it as classic racism. It is the responsibility of the cartoonist to be controversial and at that Bill Leak is a master. I did not think Leak’s cartoon was particularly offensive but I did think that he had perhaps missed an opportunity to tell a better story. In the main Aboriginal fathers recognise their own children, the thrust of the Leak cartoon, but their pathetic efforts to take responsibility for how their children behave is where the message belongs. This was Leak’s intention and it is a good message.

Education remains an issue amongst aborigines, more so in rural areas than the cities. And the further out one goes in outback Australia the more obvious the absence of education becomes. While encouragement to attend school is of some assistance anyone who believes all aboriginal youngsters are receiving a full and complete education is living in dreamland. The reality is that secondary education is a hit and miss affair and certainly education at a tertiary level is rare. There is also resistance to education from aboriginal elders, and who could blame them for not trusting white fellas to educate their children correctly or in the manner in which they would prefer. We, as white people, have not done much to earn the trust of aborigines at any level.

And aboriginal health is an even more disastrous situation. My wife is an operating theatre nursing sister and a few years ago worked in Alice Springs for six months. I will probably be hammered for these statistics but my wife reported Type 2 Diabetes amongst aboriginal children as young as nine and affecting as many as 45% of the indigenous child population brought about mainly by obesity. If this level of diabetes were reported amongst white kids there would be national outrage. I have witnessed a typical breakfast in one community I visited where a young boy around ten ate a large packet of potato crisps washed down with a 1.5 litre bottle of Coke. I seriously doubt that this was a rare or isolated incident. This is the casual diet we dare not challenge amongst indigenous Australians, yet were it to be typical amongst white Australians we would demand government intervention.

All the recognition in the world will not change the aforementioned tragedies one iota but if it encourages the wider aboriginal community to take more responsibility for the education and health of their children, it will be worth it. It must also however encourage white Australians to recognise our failures in these areas for neglecting to do so will only lead to more whitey knows best policies being delivered on a culture that has suffered enough.

We all need to understand what is happening out there because I cannot believe white Australians could be satisfied with what is patently obvious to many.

J Raymond Long