” Sol was giant of a man who made a giant contribution to self-determination for our people right throughout the land , one who would now take his honoured place amongst his very honoured ancestors.
News of his sudden death last week had sent shockwaves through Aboriginal Australia”.
Pat Turner, Chief Executive of NACCHO : National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation speaking at the State Funeral about her long term friendship and respect for Sol Bellear. Pictures above Michelle Lovegrove
See full NACCHO Tribute to Sol Bellear AM Press Release
NACCHO was also represented by Current Chair John Singer and Past Chairs Pat Anderson , Matthew Cooke and Justin Mohamed.
” We will always be grateful for the many expressions of kindness, love and support we have received following the loss of our father and brother, Sol Bellear, who passed away peacefully at home on Wednesday night, 29 November.
We have been overwhelmed by the numbers of people who have reached out to us in this very difficult time. Sol touched many lives in the movement for Aboriginal rights, the game of rugby league and the community of Redfern that he loved. Now the people whose lives he touched are comforting us with their memories of him.”
Statement from the family of Solomon David “Sol” Bellear AM
Sol stood for many things including self-determination, proper treaties with our people, Aboriginal control of our people’s health and legal services, Land Rights and a better understanding of our history.
Although, Sol achieved many great victories, much of this work remained unfinished at the end of his life. We ask all those who loved Sol to please continue his work so that the vision he had for his country and people might one day be fulfilled.
One of Sol’s last wishes was for the Sydney City Council to erect a plaque at Redfern Park to help people remember and reflect on the Redfern Speech delivered on that site by former Prime Minister, Paul Keating.
We will always treasure the time we had with him. He was the most loving and committed Father, Brother, Poppy and Uncle any family could hope for.=
We would like to particularly thank the NSW Premier and the staff from her Department, the NSW Aboriginal Land Council, Joshua Roxburgh and our brother, Shane Phillips for their generous assistance in organising Sol’s funeral.
Sol Bellear remembered as giant at state funeral
Aboriginal land rights and health activist Sol Bellear has been remembered as a giant of indigenous advancement at a state funeral on Saturday at Redfern Oval in Sydney, the spiritual home of his beloved South Sydney Rabbitohs.
It was a mark of the man, mourners heard, that after being dropped as a player from the Rabbitohs squad after raising a black-power salute on scoring a try at the ground, he was within a year serving on the rugby league team’s board.
“He carried a great personal weight on his shoulders because he was a strong man,” fellow activist Paul Coe, one of the leaders with whom Bellear founded the Aboriginal tent embassy at the then parliament house in 1972, said.
“He would stand his ground no matter what or no matter who was opposing him.”
Bellear was joined in one final march to the football ground from the nearby Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, an institution which mourners including NSW Governor David Hurley and wife Linda heard was one of his great legacies.
Sols Last March with 3,000 family and friends
The march ended at the park where, exactly 25 years ago tomorrow, Bellear led Paul Keating to the stage to deliver the then prime minister’s famous oration admitting white Australia’s culpability in the poor state of indigenous affairs.(see Picture in Part 1 above )
“He stood proud and he stood tall but he was not egotistical,” Mr Coe said.
“I’ve seen him give money out of his own pocket to people on the streets. This is the kind of man that he was — a kind of man you could admire but not completely understand.
“In those days as young students, trying to work out who and what we were, it was very hard to make ends meet. But he would always give of himself, both time and energy.”
A Bundjalung man from Mullumbimby in northern NSW, Solomon David Bellear, who was 66, leaves partner Naomi and children Tamara and Joseph. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1999 for services to the Aboriginal community, in particular in the field of health. His brother Bob, who died a decade ago, was the first Aboriginal judge.
In a letter from grand-daughter Rose read out at the service, Bellear was bid a “merry Christmas in the dreamtime” and the hope he had travelled there safely with his totem, the carpet snake.
Bellear’s achievements were legion. He was the founding chair of the Aboriginal Legal Service, a founding member of the Aboriginal Housing Company, an Aboriginal delegate to the UN General Assembly, player and director at the Rabbitohs, a foundation player with the Redfern All Blacks in the NSW Aboriginal Rugby League Knockout, a manager with the indigenous dreamtime and All Stars rugby league teams, and deputy chair of the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Sol Bellear, whose funeral was held on Saturday. Picture: Dan Himbrechts
Ken Wyatt, federal Minister for Indigenous Health and Aged Care, said on Friday Bellear had “played a key role in establishing medical, housing, land rights and legal services for Aboriginal people and remains a towering figure on the journey towards justice for our people”.
He was remembered as being crucial to the consensus position developed at the Indigenous constitutional convention held in Central Australia in May this year, when disparate ambitions for reform were distilled into the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
Singer Emma Donovan opened the funeral with the touchstone Land Rights Song, whose memorable lines “they keep on saying everything’s fine, still they can’t see us cry all the time” seemed particularly apt.
Bellear’s casket was borne from the park by a cortege including members of his beloved Redfern All Blacks, whose members linked arms to sing their team song for him one last time. His casket was draped with a Rabbitohs scarf, the hearse with an Aboriginal flag.
As it set off one final, slow, lap of the oval, fists were raised in a black-power salute
” And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians. It begins, I think, with that act of recognition
Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.”
Sunday December the 10th is Human Rights Day, and 25 years since former Prime Minister Paul Keating delivered a landmark speech at the Sydney suburb of Redfern, acknowledging the wrongs done to Australia’s Indigenous people.
Download the original speech here or read in full below
“As Keating started, he was a bit nervous, you know, and you could see the anguish on the faces of non-Aboriginal people … and then the looks on the faces of Aboriginal people as he started to talk about the murders and the oppression. And you could see Aboriginal people in the park saying to each other, yeah – that’s right, that’s it – he’s nailed it’.
Keating called it – the history – for what it was. And it all goes back to history in this country. All of it,”
The person who introduced the PM that day Health, justice and land rights Legend Sol Bellear AM will lead his last march at a State Funeral to be held in Redfern on Saturday followed by a funeral service and wake in Mullumbimby Thursday 14 December
Sol’s family, friends and supporters are invited to gather at Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service on Redfern Street from 10am for a last march to the State Funeral service at Redfern Oval starting at 11am.
WHEN: Saturday 9 December 2017
WHERE:
March from 10am outside Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern Street
Prime minister’s Paul Keating’s speech at Redfern Park, Sydney, on December 10, 1992
I am very pleased to be here to day at the launch of Australia’s celebration of the 1993 International Year of the World’s Indigenous People.
It will be a year of great significance for Australia
It comes at a time when we have committed ourselves to succeeding in the test which so far we have always failed.
Because, in truth, we cannot confidently say that we have succeeded as we would like to have succeeded if we have not managed to extend opportunity and care, dignity and hope to the indigenous people of Australia – the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people.
This is a fundamental test of our social goals and our national will: our ability to say to ourselves and the rest of the world that Australia is a first rate social democracy, that we are what we should be – truly the land of the fair go and the better chance.
There is no more basic test of how seriously we mean these things.
It is a test of our self-knowledge.
Of how well we know the land we live in. How well we know our history.
How well we recognise the fact that, complex as our contemporary identity is, it cannot be separated from Aboriginal Australia.
How well we know what Aboriginal Australians know about Australia.
Redfern is a good place to contemplate these things.
Just a mile or two from the place where the first European settlers landed, in too many ways it tells us that their failure to bring much more than devastation and demoralisation to Aboriginal Australia continues to be our failure.
More I think than most Australians recognise, the plight of Aboriginal Australians affects us all.
In Redfern it might be tempting to think that the reality Aboriginal Australians face is somehow contained here, and that the rest of us are insulated from it.
But of course, while all the dilemmas may exist here, they are far from contained.
We know the same dilemmas and more are faced all over Australia.
That is perhaps the point of this Year of the World’s Indigenous People: to bring the dispossessed out of the shadows, to recognise that they are part of us, and that we cannot give indigenous Australians up without giving up many of our own most deeply held values, much of our own identity – and our own humanity.
Nowhere in the world, I would venture, is the message more stark than it is in Australia.
We simply cannot sweep injustice aside. Even if our own conscience allowed us to, I am sure, that in due course, the world and the people of our region would not.
There should be no mistake about this – our success in resolving these issues will have a significant bearing on our standing in the world.
However intractable the problems seem, we cannot resign ourselves to failure – any more than we can hide behind the contemporary version of Social Darwinism which says that to reach back for the poor and dispossessed is to risk being dragged down.
That seems to me not only morally indefensible, but bad history.
We non-Aboriginal Australians should perhaps remind ourselves that Australia once reached out for us.
Didn’t Australia provide opportunity and care for the dispossessed Irish? The poor of Britain? The refugees from war and famine and persecution in the countries of Europe and Asia?
Isn’t it reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkably harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the first Australians – the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
And, as I say, the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with that act of recognition
Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing.
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We failed to ask – how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.
If we needed a reminder of this, we received it this year.
The Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody showed with devastating clarity that the past lives on in inequality, racism and injustice.
In the prejudice and ignorance of non-Aboriginal Australians, and in the demoralisation and desperation, the fractured identity, of so many Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.
For all this, I do not believe that the Report should fill us with guilt.
Down the years, there has been no shortage of guilt, but it has not produced the responses we need.
Guilt is not a very constructive emotion.
I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit.
All of us.
Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done – the practical things.
There is something of this in the creation of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation.
The Council’s mission is to forge a new partnership built on justice and equity and an appreciation of the heritage of Australia’s indigenous people.
In the abstract those terms are meaningless.
We have to give meaning to “justice” and “equity” – and, as I have said several times this year, we will only give them meaning when we commit ourselves to achieving concrete results.
If we improve the living conditions in one town, they will improve in another. And another.
If we raise the standard of health by twenty per cent one year, it will be raised more the next.
If we open one door others will follow.
When we see improvement, when we see more dignity, more confidence, more happiness – we will know we are going to win.
We need these practical building blocks of change.
The Mabo Judgement should be seen as one of these.
By doing away with the bizarre conceit that this continent had no owners prior to the settlement of Europeans, Mabo establishes a fundamental truth and lays the basis for justice.
It will be much easier to work from that basis than has ever been the case in the past.
For that reason alone we should ignore the isolated outbreaks of hysteria and hostility of the past few months.
Mabo is an historic decision – we can make it an historic turning point, the basis of a new relationship between indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians.
The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include indigenous Australians.
There is everything to gain.
Even the unhappy past speaks for this.
Where Aboriginal Australians have been included in the life of Australia they have made remarkable contributions.
Economic contributions, particularly in the pastoral and agricultural industry.
They are there in the frontier and exploration history of Australia.
They are there in the wars.
In sport to an extraordinary degree.
In literature and art and music.
In all these things they have shaped our knowledge of this continent and of ourselves. They have shaped our identity.
They are there in the Australian legend.
We should never forget – they have helped build this nation.
And if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership.
As I said, it might help us if we non-Aboriginal Australians imagined ourselves dispossessed of land we had lived on for fifty thousand years – and then imagined ourselves told that it had never been ours.
Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless.
Imagine if we had resisted this settlement, suffered and died in the defence of our land, and then were told in history books that we had given up without a fight.
Imagine if non-Aboriginal Australians had served their country in peace and war and were then ignored in history books.
Imagine if our feats on sporting fields had inspired admiration and patriotism and yet did nothing to diminish prejudice.
Imagine if our spiritual life was denied and ridiculed.
Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it.
It seems to me that if we can imagine the injustice we can imagine its opposite.
And we can have justice.
I say that for two reasons:
I say it because I believe that the great things about Australian social democracy reflect a fundamental belief in justice.
And I say it because in so many other areas we have proved our capacity over the years to go on extending the realms of participation, opportunity and care.
Just as Australians living in the relatively narrow and insular Australia of the 1960s imagined a culturally diverse, worldly and open Australia, and in a generation turned the idea into reality, so we can turn the goals of reconciliation into reality.
There are very good signs that the process has begun.
The creation of the Reconciliation Council is evidence itself.
The establishment of the ATSIC – the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission – is also evidence.
The Council is the product of imagination and good will.
ATSIC emerges from the vision of indigenous self-determination and self-management.
The vision has already become the reality of almost 800 elected Aboriginal Regional Councillors and Commissioners determining priorities and developing their own programs.
All over Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are taking charge of their own lives.
And assistance with the problems which chronically beset them is at last being made available in ways developed by the communities themselves.
If these things offer hope, so does the fact that this generation of Australians is better informed about Aboriginal culture and achievement, and about the injustice that has been done, than any generation before.
We are beginning to more generally appreciate the depth and the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.
From their music and art and dance we are beginning to recognise how much richer our national life and identity will be for the participation of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders.
We are beginning to learn what the indigenous people have known for many thousands of years – how to live with our physical environment.
Ever so gradually we are learning how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom contained in their epic story.
I think we are beginning to see how much we owe the indigenous Australians and how much we have lost by living so apart.
I said we non-indigenous Australians should try to imagine the Aboriginal view.
It can’t be too hard. Someone imagined this event today, and it is now a marvellous reality and a great reason for hope.
There is one thing today we cannot imagine.
We cannot imagine that the descendants of people whose genius and resilience maintained a culture here through fifty thousand years or more, through cataclysmic changes to the climate and environment, and who then survived two centuries of disposession and abuse, will be denied their place in the modern Australian nation.
We cannot imagine that.
We cannot imagine that we will fail.
And with the spirit that is here today I am confident that we won’t.
I am confident that we will succeed in this decade.
” Sol Bellear leaves an important legacy that must be carried on by the board of NACCHO and all our members if Indigenous Australians are to ever enjoy health services and standards that other Australians take for granted.
Throughout his career he advocated a philosophy of community control, self-reliance and independence, attributes that would be vital for the survival of ACCHO’s over the decades
We would like to record our sincere gratitude and admiration for Sol’s service to our nation and communities, and tender our profound sympathy to his family and community in their bereavement.”
NACCHO Chair John Singer speaking on behalf of all the 143 Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services throughout Australia said he was saddened to hear of the untimely passing of one of the nation’s leading spokespeople on Aboriginal health issues, Mr Sol Bellear AM. ( see our full Press Release below ) Or Download
Health, justice and land rights Legend Sol Bellear AM will lead his last march at a State Funeral to be held in Redfern on Saturday.
Sol’s family, friends and supporters are invited to gather at Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service on Redfern Street from 10am for a last march to the State Funeral service at Redfern Oval starting at 11am.
WHEN: Saturday 9 December 2017
WHERE:
March from 10am outside Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern Street
Service from 11am at Redfern Oval
For any enquiries please email media@alc.org.au or call 02 9689 4444
“ So they took our children away. They forced us from our ancestral lands. They held our wages and savings in trust, and then found better ways to spend the money. We were forced into slavery, denied equal wages and prevented from ever building generational wealth.
That great lie still underpins thinking in Indigenous affairs policy today. So it’s time to do something different, and time to acknowledge that the case for self-determination for Aboriginal people in Australia isn’t just compelling – it’s overwhelming. “
Sol Bellear AM 1951 -2017 : When NACCHO TV recorded over 100 interviews throughout Australia in 2015 Sol was our first interview : VIEW HERE
NACCHO Press Release :
NACCHO tribute to Sol Bellear AM Aboriginal activist
NACCHO Chair John Singer speaking on behalf of all the 143 Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services throughout Australia said he was saddened to hear of the untimely passing of one of the nation’s leading spokespeople on Aboriginal health issues, Mr Sol Bellear AM
Sol was a respected elder, friend, lifetime Aboriginal activist, a co-founder and Chair of Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern and a recently appointed NACCHO board member.
Sol Bellear a Bundjalung man from Mullumbimby was also the first chair of the Aboriginal Legal Service when it was founded in the early 1970s.
In 1990 Sol became a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), where he served as deputy chair before stepping down in 1994.
Throughout his career he advocated a philosophy of community control, self-reliance and independence, attributes that would be vital for the survival of ACCHO’s over the decades.
Mr. Singer said Sol Bellear was an inspiration to everyone involved with or interested in Aboriginal issues and specifically Indigenous health. He was admired and respected leader who served his community for nearly 50 years.
” Sol was a tireless worker for his people,” Mr Singer said.
“He travelled all over Australia and the world championing the cause of Indigenous Australians as we have had historically some of worst health outcomes in the western world.
“He was a fearless advocate not afraid to take on politicians and bureaucracies.
“And he certainly was a man of great compassion and commitment to improving the health of his Redfern Community and all Indigenous Australians.”
“Sol Bellear leaves an important legacy that must be carried on by the board of NACCHO and all our members if indigenous Australians are to ever enjoy health services and standards that other Australians take for granted,” Mr Singer concluded.
” I’ve been part of campaigns urging Aboriginal men to lead healthy lifestyles and get regular medical checks, but I didn’t follow my own advice.
If there’s one legacy I leave, I want it to be that Aboriginal men more regularly present for check-ups.”
“We need to take responsibility. We owe this to our families and our communities. We don’t need to keep dying too early from preventable heart disease.”
As the long-term Chair of the Aboriginal Medical Service and a Board member since 1975, Sol didn’t practice what he preached when it came to his own health.
All images in this story: Courtesy of the Bellear family
Land Rights legend Sol Bellear considers himself one of the lucky ones.
A decision Sol made some nine months ago to lead a healthier lifestyle not only saved his life but made him more determined to lead the campaign for men’s health.
A few months before he was to die from a massive heart attack, Sol decided to change his life.
While driving back together from a New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC) meeting in West Wyalong, Sol’s colleague, Acting CEO, Cal Davis told him about a diet he had started to control his diabetes.
“Sol was pretty interested in the diet and said he wanted to try it out,” Cal says.
“So I got him some books and he started to get his calories down and eat more low-carbohydrate, Mediterranean-style meals.”
The diet immediately brought results. Within eight weeks, Sol had lost seven kilos. But then his weight plateaued. When he started to do some light exercise he found he was short of breath after only a few steps.
Sol’s doctor referred him to cardiologist, Dr Raj Puranik who for seven years has conducted monthly clinics at the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service.
“We took an ultrasound and I was concerned that an area of Sol‘s heart muscle wasn’t working,“ Dr Puranik said.
“After we did an angiogram (or x-ray of the heart), we found that two of his coronary arteries were 100 percent blocked and the other was 90 percent blocked. So he was surviving on just ten percent blood flow.”
Sol could have suffered a life-threatening heart attack at any time.
How Sol Bellear prevented a massive life-threatening heart attack
A member of the surgical team that operated on Sol later told him that he was just three to four weeks away from a massive heart attack that would most likely have killed him.
Sol was rushed to the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where surgeons performed an emergency coronary bypass operation.
Surgeons split his chest open and grafts were used to bypass the blockages in his arteries.
After four hours the operation was a success and Sol woke to see his concerned family huddled around his bed.
“You wake up in the Intensive Care Unit and all your family are there. And you look at their faces and see all their grief. You think, so this is what I’ve put them through,” he said.
As the long-term Chair of the Aboriginal Medical Service and a Board member since 1975, Sol didn’t practice what he preached when it came to his own health.
“I’ve been part of campaigns urging Aboriginal men to lead healthy lifestyles and get regular medical checks, but I didn’t follow my own advice.”
Sol was a keen sportsman who played rugby league for the South Sydney Rabbitohs and Redfern All Blacks, but after he retired from football he didn’t maintain regular exercise or watch his diet.
“I was working long hours, drinking too much and eating too many rubbish foods.”
Although he spent a large part of his life at the Aboriginal Medical Service, Sol, like many men, didn’t prioritise a visit to the doctor.
“It’s an ego thing. We think we’re bullet proof … it will never happen to me. But it did happen.”
Since his brush with death, Sol has been struck by how many of his friends and colleagues have had heart bi-passes.
“They say to me: ‘Brother, you’re now a member of the zipper club.’ But this isn’t a club where we want any new members.”
However, Sol knows that he is one of the lucky ones. After the operation he was at home recovering and feeling bored so he got out some old photos from his playing days.
There was one that was of the Redfern All Blacks team from 1978.
There are 20 young men in the photo including the ball boys.
Now all but six of them are dead, many from heart disease.
“The greatest tragedy is that many of the deaths of these young men were preventable,” Sol says.
“The only thing separating me from them is luck.”
Dr Puranik says that Australia will never close the mortality gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people without action on heart disease.
“Heart disease is the number one driving factor behind the gap. It’s the number one killer but 90 percent of cardiac disease is preventable,” he says.
His years at the Redfern AMS have convinced Dr Puranik that getting the model of health care delivery right is crucial to overcoming the problem.
“We need to take our clinics to Aboriginal people in their community-controlled medical services and show through images rather than just tell them how their heart muscle is working.”
The secret, he says, is patience and building trust.
“When we first started out at Redfern in June 2009 we had a no show rate of around 90 percent. Now we have seen more than 6,000 patients and the number of people who don’t turn up for appointments is down to 10 percent.”
Sol says that Aboriginal men can’t just leave it to the doctors to solve the problem.
“We now have some of the best doctors in the world at our Medical Services, but only we can change the way that we live by having regular check-ups and a healthier lifestyle,” he says.
Sol says that when you hit 40, you need to start getting regular check-ups – even if you play regular sport and feel fit and healthy.
“By the time you move through your 50s and 60s you should have a clear idea of your blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol levels.
You don’t want to leave it as long as I did – where you’re playing Russian roulette with your heart.”
Sol urges Aboriginal men to adopt a healthier lifestyle by not smoking, cutting down on alcohol and keeping weight down through healthy foods and regular exercise.
Dr Puranik says that there are some clear warning signs that indicate you should seek urgent medical attention.
These include pain to the left side of the central chest, neck or arm pain – particularly related to exercise, dizzy spells or blackouts, chest pain that wakes you up from sleep as well as breathlessness or palpitations.
Incredibly, given how close he came to death, just one month after surgery Sol’s normal heart function had been fully restored.
A veteran of the Aboriginal Land Rights movement and a pioneer of Aboriginal media, sports legal and health services, Sol says that nothing now matters as much to him as overcoming heart disease amongst Aboriginal men.
“If there’s one legacy I leave, I want it to be that Aboriginal men more regularly present for check-ups.”
“We need to take responsibility. We owe this to our families and our communities. We don’t need to keep dying too early from preventable heart disease.”
Imagine watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed over 225 years against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.
Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.”
Adam Goodes is the Australian of the Year and plays AFL for the Sydney Swans.: “It takes courage to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular those truths may be.” Photo: Rohan Thomson
“Put simply, reconciliation hasn’t worked in Australia because as a nation, we continue to refuse to face up to our real past. Just as you cannot have reconciliation without justice, you can’t have justice without truth”
Sol Bellear reviewing the movie Utopia (see below ) Sol is the chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern and a long-time Aboriginal activist.
Hostility to John Pilger’s film a denial of nation’s brutal past-Adam Goodes
For the last few weeks, I’ve seen a film bring together Aboriginal people all over Australia. The buzz around Utopia – a documentary by John Pilger – has been unprecedented. Some 4000 people attended the open-air premiere in Redfern last month – both indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – and yet little appeared in the media about an event that the people of Redfern say was a ”first”. This silence has since been broken by a couple of commentators whose aggression seemed a cover for their hostility to the truth about Aboriginal people.
When I watched Utopia for the first time, I was moved to tears. Three times. This film has reminded me that the great advantages I enjoy today – as a footballer and Australian of the Year – are a direct result of the struggles and sacrifices of the Aboriginal people who came before me.
Utopia honours these people, so I think the very least I can do is honour Utopia and the people who appeared in it and made it.
It takes courage to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular those truths may be. But it also takes courage to face up to our past.
That process starts with understanding our very dark past, a brutal history of dispossession, theft and slaughter. For that reason, I urge the many fair-minded Australians who seek genuine prosperity and equality for my people to find the courage to open their hearts and their minds and watch Utopia.
Imagine watching a film that tells the truth about the terrible injustices committed over 225 years against your people, a film that reveals how Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit.
Now imagine how it feels when the people who benefited most from those rapes, those killings and that theft – the people in whose name the oppression was done – turn away in disgust when someone seeks to expose it.
Frankly, as a proud Adnyamathanha man, I find the silence about Utopia in mainstream Australia disturbing and hurtful. As an Australian, I find it embarrassing. I also see an irony, for Utopia is about telling the story of this silence.
Some say the film doesn’t tell the ”good stories” out of Aboriginal Australia. That’s the part I find most offensive.
Utopia is bursting at the seams with stories of Aboriginal people who have achieved incredible things in the face of extreme adversity. Stories of people like Arthur Murray, an Aboriginal man from Wee Waa, and his wife, Leila, who fought for several decades for the truth over the death in police custody of their son Eddie.
Their quiet, dignified determination helped spark the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, a landmark inquiry that still plagues governments today.
Even before that, Murray led a historic strike of cotton workers and forced employers to provide better wages and conditions for Aboriginal workers. How is this achievement negative?
The film also features Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, a strong Aboriginal woman who proudly speaks of truth and a long overdue treaty.
The work of Robert and Selina Eggington is also profiled in Utopia. After the suicide of their son, Robert and Selina created a healing centre in Perth called Dumbartung. Its aim is to stop the deaths and provide an outlet for the never-ending grief of so many Aboriginal families.
I reject any suggestion that by telling those stories, that by honouring these lives, Pilger has ”focused on the negative”. Their achievements may not fit the mainstream idea of ”success” but they inspire me and other Aboriginal people because they’re shared stories. They are our courageous, unrecognised resistance.
Nana Fejo, another strong Aboriginal woman, appears in Utopia. She tells of her forced removal as a child. It’s a heart-wrenching story and yet she speaks with a graciousness and generosity of spirit that should inspire all Australians.
Like Fejo, my mother was a member of the stolen generations. My family has been touched by suicide, like the Eggingtons. My family and my people talk of truth and treaty, just like Kunoth-Monks does. My family has been denied our culture, language and kinship systems, like all the Aboriginal people who feature in Utopia. This extraordinary film tells the unpleasant truth. It should be required viewing for every Australian.
Utopia brought back were not pleasant, and large sections of the film simply made me angry
Sol is the chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern and a long-time Aboriginal activist
It’s the new mantra in Aboriginal affairs: get your kids to school.
Prime Ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd were fond of saying it. So too is Prime Minister Tony Abbott.
While I don’t accept that education alone, or rather a lack of access to it, explains the desperate poverty in
But if it’s good enough for blackfellas, then it should also be good enough for whitefellas.
Mainstream Australia has long lacked a real education about Aboriginal people, about our shared history, and this nation’s brutal past.
Fortunately, there’s a simple way in – an opportunity to get a “punter’s guide” to the truth about the treatment of Aboriginal Australians.
John Pilger’s latest film, Utopia – a 110-minute feature length documentary more than two years in the making – should be required viewing for all Australians, in particular lawmakers.
I watched the film recently and it brought back many memories for me. Admittedly, a few of them were pleasant. The spirit of my people has always helped to sustain and inspire me, and watching old warriors such as Vince Forrester, Bob Randall and Rosie Kunoth-Monks, for me at least, took the edge off some of the hard truths in Utopia.
But many of the memories Utopia brought back were not pleasant, and large sections of the film simply made me angry.
During the 1970s, I travelled the nation with Fred Hollows. We travelled across Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, treating Aboriginal men, women and children for trachoma and other eye diseases, problems which still plague remote Aboriginal communities today.
The Australia I saw in Utopia this week is the same Australia I saw with Hollows.
Very little has changed on the ground.
Attitudes in non-Aboriginal Australia, it seems, have not evolved much either.
In one part of the film, Pilger is taken on a tour of Rottnest Island by a local Aboriginal elder, Noel Nannup. But it’s not the tour tourists get – despite “Rotto’s” history as a brutal concentration camp, today it is a resort and luxury spa, with virtually all traces of its past erased.
The stories around deaths in custody; around an Aboriginal elder being cooked, literally, in the back of a prison van; around government and media deceit that led to the Northern Territory intervention; all made for infuriating viewing.
But for me, Pilger’s interview with the former indigenous health minister, Warren Snowdon, and the responses of white people on Australia Day who were asked why they thought Aboriginal people didn’t celebrate January 26, were the real nuggets in the film.
For Snowdon’s part, he was grilled about why, after 23 years in office, his constituents were still among the sickest and poorest on earth. Snowdon’s seething, bombastic response was to label the question “puerile”.
And then there were the vox pops from mainstream Australians on January 26, 2013. People were asked why they thought Aboriginal people didn’t celebrate the date. Most seemed to have no idea that was even the case, and others were just openly hostile.
To me, it’s these attitudes of indifference, and sometimes outrage when challenged, that are the real elephants in the room for this country.
The denial of our history, and our collective refusal to accept the truths of our past are the biggest hurdles to Aboriginal advancement.
I hope that people who see Utopia will have their consciences pricked. Those who do might feel embarrassed or ashamed. But I hope that’s not the only reaction. I hope, above all else, Utopia starts a long overdue national conversation.
We can’t just sweep aside the truths in Utopia because they’re uncomfortable. And we can’t let conservative commentators make it all about the film-maker rather than the film, which is what often happens with Pilger’s work.
I’m bracing myself for the inevitable focus on Pilger’s “style” and his “bias”. So before it comes, let me give you one assurance: You’d be hard-pressed to find many Aboriginal people with whom Utopia won’t resonate strongly.
The reason why is simple: what John Pilger and his co-director Alan Lowery have produced is a substantial work of truth, one which provides answers to many of the questions Australians have been too afraid to ask.
Why is this happening? Why were there no reparations to the stolen generations? Why do Aboriginal people still live in such grinding poverty? If, as Snowdon concedes in the film, the NT intervention was “wrong-headed” and “stupid”, why did he continue and extend it under the Rudd and Gillard governments?
The most pressing question from my perspective is why has reconciliation in this country failed?
Pilger touches on this in his closing remarks. He makes the point that until Aboriginal people are delivered justice, there can never be reconciliation.
I agree strongly. But I would add that the path to justice begins with the truth.
That’s a reality that nations such as Canada and South Africa recognised many years ago, when they established their respective Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.
Put simply, reconciliation hasn’t worked in Australia because as a nation, we continue to refuse to face up to our real past. Just as you cannot have reconciliation without justice, you can’t have justice without truth.
Through Utopia, Pilger sheds some light on those truths. It’s likely to be very uncomfortable viewing for many Australians, and it will inevitably cause pain.
But you’ll find the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal people are prepared to watch Utopia, and feel the hurt all over again.
The real question is how many non-Aboriginal Australians have the courage to watch this film, educate themselves a little, and feel the hurt for the first time?
* Sol Bellear is the chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern and a long-time Aboriginal activist.
The importance of our NACCHO member Aboriginal community controlled health services (ACCHS) is not fully recognised by governments.
The economic benefits of ACCHS has not been recognised at all.
We provide employment, income and a range of broader community benefits that mainstream health services and mainstream labour markets do not. ACCHS need more financial support from government, to provide not only quality health and wellbeing services to communities, but jobs, income and broader community economic benefits.
A good way of demonstrating how economically valuable ACCHS are is to showcase our success at a national summit.
Provocative Melbourne columnist Andrew Bolt has done it again, starting his recent Herald-Sun column with the claim “I am an indigenous Australian” and warning that Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s plan to recognise Aboriginal Australians in the Constitution is “the path to apartheid”.
SEE full transcript below
We have resisted over two years to give Mr Bolt any “oxygen” but we felt that our members and stakeholders needed to read this latest diatribe
Mr Bolt, who was born in Adelaide to Dutch immigrant parents, goes on to declare “Australia is now under severe threat” due to the Prime Minister and in a series of increasingly alarmist pronouncements, often in quotation marks, says it’s socially dangerous, is racism and racial division and the move will permanently divide the nation.
Michael Mansell is an Aboriginal lawyer from Tasmania and a founding member and secretary of the Aboriginal Provisional Government
Right wing commentator Andrew Bolt is at it again, this time arguing the sky will fall in if there is any constitutional recognition of the fact of Aboriginal people being here before whites arrived.
Everyone knows Indigenous people were here, so what’s the great fuss? Bolt’s view is an attempt to revive the Terra nullius doctrine which, for 200 years, fictionalised that the British came to an empty land and settled peacefully.
That myth was discredited by the high court of Australia with its Mabo ruling 22 years ago, but people like Bolt are still yet to catch on.
Bolt also plays mischief-maker, claiming to be an Indigenous Australian. Like Pauline Hanson did in her maiden speech to the parliament in 1996, Bolt makes his claim based on a technical view that everyone born in Australia is legally, but not socially, an Indigenous Australian. His mischief is to ignore common sense and community normality which distinguishes between Indigenous Australians on the one hand, and white Australians like Bolt on the other. Bolt wants to lead his followers through the chaos he ferments.
As part of the scare-mongering tone of his article, Bolt gets it wrong about the aim of the Aboriginal provisional government (APG), claiming it is a separatist movement. The APG wants an Aboriginal assembly of elected Aboriginal people with legislative power, returned land and a budget – in the same way different states do. And this aim is within the federation of Australia. How is that separatism?
Bolt also claims the courts lean “too far” towards Aboriginal people. This is a case of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story. Aboriginals make up 26% of the prisoner population, yet only constitute 2.5% of the Australian population. In 20 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, Aboriginal imprisonment rates have climbed from one in seven to one in four. Too far? Come on.
There is a big difference between theoretical equality – a belief that 20m Australians all live the same and have the same opportunities – and real equality. Rich and poor cannot be treated alike for stealing bread. Sentencing courts across Australia acknowledge that people are not all the same. A woman suffering domestic violence who strikes out because she’s had enough should not get the same penalty as an alcohol fuelled king-hit merchant. Nor should the background of people suffering daily discrimination, leading to family dysfunction, be ignored as Bolt would have it. Yet Bolt implies that the courts should consider everyone’s background except that of Aboriginal people, and claims that is equality.
Bolt claims “Australia is now under threat” from just talking about constitutional reforms – but then again, he is very prone to exaggeration. What is really at stake is whether constitutional recognition will benefit Aboriginal people or merely warm the hearts of middle-class Australians – that’s the nub of the debate.
This national discussion can be robust if the views of all – including the alleged beneficiaries of constitutional recognition – are to be heard. I support Bolt’s right to participate in the debate, but he should avoid inflaming prejudice against Aboriginal people which leads to personalising and dismissal of Indigenous opinion.
I AM an indigenous Australian, like millions of other people here, black or white. Take note, Tony Abbott. Think again, you new dividers, before we are on the path to apartheid with your change to our Constitution.
I was born here, I live here and I call no other country home. I am therefore indigenous to this land and have as much right as anyone to it.
What’s more, when I go before the courts I want to be judged as an individual. I do not want different rights according to my class, faith, ancestry, country of birth … or “race”.
I’m sure most Australians feel the same. We are Australians together, equal under the law and equal in our right as citizens to be here. That’s how we’ve been for generations. It’s why we’ve welcomed lawful immigrants and damned racists.
But this Australia is now under severe threat. Most incredibly, that threat is now led by Prime Minister Abbott, a Liberal. Abbott says he wants a “national crusade” to change the Constitution to recognise Aborigines as the “first Australians”.
“If we had known in 1901 what we know now, if our hearts had been as big then as now, we would have acknowledged indigenous people in the Constitution back then,’’ he said this week.
This is nonsense. The writers of our Constitution no more lacked heart than do people today.
The difference is they were inspired by the creed that all citizens — those, at least, we admitted — are as one before the law.
True, they did not always live up to that ideal (although, contrary to popular myth, they granted Aborigines the vote in all states where they had the franchise).
But even if we don’t always follow our moral compass, the answer never is to break it. Changing the Constitution to divide Australians between the “first” and the rest — on the basis of the “race” of our ancestors — is not just immoral and an insult to our individuality.
Worse, it is socially dangerous. This will not “reconcile” us but permanently divide. It would do no good to a single Aboriginal in bush camps, but would concede a critical point: that Australians in our most fundamental legal document are now to be divided by “race”.
Abbott insists he will not endorse any change that will have that practical effect in the courts. He means to treat the Constitution in this matter as if it were just a history book, not the foundation of our law.
But once he concedes the principle he concedes everything.
He will not get the “reconciliation” he imagines, some shiny day when we all hug each other in happy tears.
He will instead license demands from people, particularly race industry professionals, who will in some cases be satisfied with nothing less than apartheid.
Consider the history of this disastrous “reconciliation” movement. First, we were told we simply needed to say sorry to be reconciled.
As Aboriginal activist Professor Mick Dodson claimed: “The apology has the potential to transform Australia and, once and for all, to put black and white relationships in this country on a proper footing.”
Prime minister Kevin Rudd duly said sorry in 2008, but then another step was needed, after all — a law to recognise Aborigines as the First Australians.
As Ballarat elder “Uncle” Murray Harrison put it: “As far as I’m concerned this is what it’s all about, just being recognised would put the icing on the cake, mate.”
So last year Parliament passed an “act of recognition”, but that wasn’t enough, either. Now the Constitution itself must change, and already we’re told even that won’t do.
Abbott’s chief adviser on Aboriginal issues, Warren Mundine, this week said we must then negotiate treaties with each of Australia’s hundreds of tribal “nations” to “acknowledge Australia’s right to exist”.
Pardon? Argue with hundreds of Aboriginal “leaders” over whether our nation actually is entitled to exist? Have the incendiary debate Israel has with its Muslim enemies?
What next? Well, Aboriginal leader Sol Bellear, chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern, spelled it out on the ABC: a future in which “no Australian court has the right to sit in judgment of my people.”
Indeed, we already have an “Aboriginal Provisional Government”, led by Michael Mansell, with such a separatist agenda. So when exactly will we be “reconciled”? When our country is torn apart on ethnic lines, with more recently arrived groups demanding their own customary laws, too?
Stop now. Say no to racism. Say no to racial division. Say no to changing our Constitution
Andrew Bolt and Cane Toads, Both As Indigenous As Each Other!
A few days ago, Andrew Bolt shared a rather strange idea:
“I AM an indigenous Australian, like millions of other people here, black or white. Take note, Tony Abbott. Think again, you new dividers, before we are on the path to apartheid with your change to our Constitution.
I was born here, I live here and I call no other country home. I am therefore indigenous to this land and have as much right as anyone to it.”
Of course, that caused a bit of a controversy. And, I am aware that Bolt thrives on controversy and does so deliberately – because let’s face it when it comes to his place in the media, it’s really all he has. Yes, I’m sure that some of you will say that if you just ignore him, then he’ll go away. While I can see some merit in that argument, I also think that lies and misinformation need to be challenged. Otherwise, we end up with things like Jon Faine telling a talkback caller that the Liberals took the sale of Australia Post to the election as one of their policies. Does anyone remember that? The sale of Medibank Private was tucked away in their fine print, but I can find nothing nor can I remember anything about it.
And so to the word “indigenous”. People are arguing. Some are saying that “technically” he’s right. However, I can find no definition to support even a technical argument to enable someone to argue that he or she is indigenous, simply by virtue of being born in a place.
The Oxford Dictionary defines it:
originating or occurring naturally in a particular place; native:
the indigenous peoples of Siberia
coriander is indigenous to southern Europe
If someone can find a definition that includes zoo animals which are born here, then I’ll be willing to concede that Bolt is as indigenous as a cane toad. (Or almost, cane toads have been here for several generations now).
But Bolt is not content with manglng the word indigenous in order to inflame and insult. He goes on to quote Tony Abbott, before twisting history:
“If we had known in 1901 what we know now, if our hearts had been as big then as now, we would have acknowledged indigenous people in the Constitution back then,’’ he said this week.
This is nonsense. The writers of our Constitution no more lacked heart than do people today. The difference is they were inspired by the creed that all citizens — those, at least, we admitted — are as one before the law.
True, they did not always live up to that ideal (although, contrary to popular myth, they granted Aborigines the vote in all states where they had the franchise).
But even if we don’t always follow our moral compass, the answer never is to break it. Changing the Constitution to divide Australians between the “first” and the rest — on the basis of the “race” of our ancestors — is not just immoral and an insult to our individuality.
There is much in this that’s highly questionable, but his assertion that “although, contrary to popular myth, they granted Aborigines the vote in all states where they had the franchise)” can’t be allowed to go unchallenged.
Section 41 of the Constitution ensured that people who already had the right to vote weren’t disenfranchised by the new Federal Parliament.
’No adult person who has or acquires a right to vote at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of a State, shall, while the right continues, be prevented by any law of the Commonwealth from voting at elections for either House of Parliament of the Commonwealth.’
Its main impetus was to protect the rights of women in South Australia who had already gained the vote. As a by-product it gave rights to a number of others, including “non-white” migrants who had arrived before the “White Australia” policy and Indigenous Australians if they already had voting rights.
While two states specifically excluded Aborigines from voting – Queensland and Western Australia, others did little to make them aware of their rights or to encourage them to enrol.
The initial interpretation of Section 41, by the first Solicitor General was that franchise rights only included those who were on the role at the time of Federation, meaning that no new Aboriginal voters could be enrolled. While this was challenged successfully in 1924 by an Indian man who’d been rejected as a Commonwealth voter in spite of being enrolled at State Level, the history of the voting rights of Aboriginal people is not as simple as Andrew Bolt implies with his throwaway line about “popular myth”. It wasn’t until the 1967 Referendum that the voting rights were ensured; to suggest otherwise, is to be mischievous.
But Bolt has always been one for contradictions. He suggests that he just wants us to be all one, but points out that both the judge and the prosecutor at his trial were Jewish. Not that he has a problem with that – it’s just that he thought that such people would understand the dangers of an oppressive government trying to shut down free speech. However, a media organisation should never use its free speech to “aid the enemy” by publishing allegations about who’s being spied on – even if it’s us – or which suggest that our navy has treated people roughly when turning their boats around. In the case of the ABC, the whole organisation should be shut down or sold off for daring to publish that which the public has no right to know. A celebrity’s hacked phone records, however, are no reason to launch an inquiry which may inhibit the media from doing its job.
However, the thing I find worrying is not the fact that Bolt has made a fool of himself with his inaccurate and inflammatory use of language. It’s that – for just a millisecond – he’s made Tony Abbott look good. Oh, I know that some of you will question Abbott’s motives about the constitutional addition, but that’s not the point. When Bolt starts criticising Abbott as being too trendy and left wing, it almost makes Abbott sound like he’s mainstream. (No, of course, not to you died in the wool Left wing socialist, latte-sippers who lap up sites like this ). While we’re making effigies of Bolt to throw on the bonfire, we can be distracted from the fact that he’s not the one in government. In the end, Bolt is an irrelevant errand boy who’ll write what he’s told.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of spending an entire blog only to say that Bolt doesn’t matter. However, I make the simple defence that one can’t allow misinformation to spread, no matter who’s spreading it.
“Much has been accomplished when one man says ‘No’!” Bertold Brecht
The health services were also inspired by the US civil rights movement. The health of Aborigines today is among the worst on Earth, but there’s broad consensus it would be far worse were it not run by Aboriginal people.
But if Aboriginal control of Aboriginal lives can work in health and in NSW land rights, why hasn’t it been allowed to work in all other aspects of our lives?
From Sol Bellear is the chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern
I also have a dream. A lot of people my age remember where they were when man landed on the moon. As a lifelong Aboriginal activist, I prefer to remember where I was when Martin Luther King delivered his iconic ”I have a dream” speech.
That was our moon landing, a feat, until then, considered impossible – the rallying of people of colour around the globe to stand up against inequality and injustice.
This week was the 50th anniversary of King’s speech. When he delivered it, I was a young man in school at Mullumbimby on the NSW far north coast. Our teachers discussed the speech the next day in class but, in a place like Mullumbimby, it was hard to grasp the importance of the occasion.
It wasn’t until I came to Sydney in the late ’60s to attend a memorial service marking King’s assassination that the enormity of what King had said, and what it represented, finally dawned on me. King, Malcolm X and other great black leaders had challenged and dismantled much of the apartheid state in the US, and the March on Washington was part of a growing push to see civil rights legislation enacted there.
Much of the focus was on jobs and the right of African Americans to get access to the real economy.
Of course, discrimination remains very much alive and well in the US today, but the gains of African Americans can’t be denied. But sadly, as we mark the 50th anniversary, the truth of that era and the Aboriginal struggle also dawns on me.
Yes, King’s speech inspired my people. And yes, King’s speech shone an international light on the appalling treatment of Aboriginal Australians. But while King was arguing for basic civil rights, in Australia we were still fighting for basic human rights, a fight that continues today.
”I have a dream” was delivered in 1963, when Aborigines were still classed as ”flora and fauna”. It would take another half a decade before our nation voted to count Aborigines in the census, and afford us citizen status.
But the great promise that the referendum held forth – justice and equality before the law – has never fully materialised.
I’m not suggesting there haven’t been some gains in Australia. The activism of the 1970s and ’80s, strengthened by the determination of men such as King and women such as Rosa Parks, brought us modest land rights.
In NSW, there exists a land rights system that costs the taxpayer nothing, and which is leading economic development in many metropolitan and regional Aboriginal communities. The NSW system is not perfect – indeed it has returned to Aboriginal people less than one-tenth of 1 per cent of the total NSW land mass – but, according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples James Anaya, it is the best land rights legislation on Earth.
The 1970s also saw the creation of Aboriginal Medical Services, community-controlled groups that resulted in Aboriginal people solving Aboriginal problems.
The health services were also inspired by the US civil rights movement. The health of Aborigines today is among the worst on Earth, but there’s broad consensus it would be far worse were it not run by Aboriginal people.
But if Aboriginal control of Aboriginal lives can work in health and in NSW land rights, why hasn’t it been allowed to work in all other aspects of our lives?
Why, 50 years after King’s speech, does the most basic human right – self-determination – still elude my people? Why, today, do we seem further away from this dream than ever before?
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott recently promised to appoint a national indigenous council if he is elected to office. Hand-picking our leaders to get the advice you want to hear didn’t work in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s. It won’t work now. It’s as far from self-determination as you can get.
And why is the other most basic of human rights – justice – still denied Aboriginal people?
Mr Abbott is promising compensation for Australian victims of global terrorism, including legislation to compensate for victims of the 2002 Bali bombing.
”When people suffer because of the fact they are Australian, a decent nation should offer some acknowledgment, some recognition,” Mr Abbott said.
I agree, and I applaud the promise. But I also look forward to Mr Abbott extending that same fine principle to my people, who suffered because they were Aboriginal Australians.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched himself onto the international human rights stage with the national apology to victims of the stolen generations. Mr Abbott, if elected, can actually make it meaningful by delivering reparations – a basic human right – denied those people.
If, 50 years after King’s speech, either of the two main parties really want to engage with Australia’s first people on a basis of equality and respect, they’ll find us ready, willing and able. Aboriginal people have always had the solutions to Aboriginal problems.
Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when his people would be judged not on the colour of their skin, but on the content of their character.
Fifty years on, I dream of a day when Australians will face up honestly to the failures of their past, regardless of the kindness of their intent. I dream of a day when non-Aboriginal Australians demand not a dream about a future for my people, but a simple plan to restore our basic human rights.
Most of all, I dream of the day when Aboriginal Australians will be judged not on the colour of our skin, but on the strength of our self-determination.
Sol Bellear is the chairman of the Aboriginal Medical Service
EXCLUSIVE COLUMN: SOL Bellear, the long-serving chairperson of the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern, takes a swipe at Brisbane star Sam Thaiday.
PICTURE Above AIATSIS
LATE this week, the Brisbane Broncos unveiled their special Indigenous jersey, a strip designed to honour the contribution of past and current players, and in particular to highlight efforts to ‘Close the Gap’ in Indigenous health.
It’s a great initiative, and not before time.
But for me at least, the event was soured by the comments of Broncos’ star, Sam Thaiday.(picture above left)
At the jersey launch, Sam told media: “We’re out there to win at all costs and sometimes things get said in the heat of the moment that I think aren’t said as a hurtful thing.
“It is a tough thing to hear but you can’t really react to those things these days. I think the best way to deal with it is to try and push it aside as much as possible.”
Sorry Sam. That’s no solution at all.
There is never any excuse for racism, no matter how it is said, no matter how it meant. It is unacceptable in any form.
There are countless reasons why, but the most compelling is precisely one of the reasons why the Broncos launched the jersey in the first place – to highlight the gap in Indigenous health.
Racism makes me sick. It makes Sam sick. It makes everyone who is the target of it sick. It is one of the key reasons why the health gap in Australia is so wide.
For example, countless studies have shown significantly higher rates of smoking among the poor (it’s 50 percent among us blackfellas). And whatever your views about modern Indigenous politics, I challenge anyone to make a case that the poverty suffered by Indigenous Australians today is not a direct result of the racism of our past.
The racism of our present may be less overt, but it still hurts
Racism causes stress – stress is one of the most powerful contributors to illness and poor health.
Racism causes people to self-medicate with things like drugs and alcohol.
The simple reality is that racism affects everyone in this country, and no problem ever went away by “pushing it aside”, as Sam suggests.
As a role model, Sam and other Indigenous players of the NRL have a responsibility to stand up to it whenever they see it.
). While we’re making effigies of Bolt to throw on the bonfire, we can be distracted from the fact that he’s not the one in government. In the end, Bolt is an irrelevant errand boy who’ll write what he’s told.
