NT Intervention or Invasion

NT Intervention or Invasion: Modern Day Genocide in Disguise. 

This painting to so many Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory of Australia depicts the reliving of their ancestors nightmare of the "original" invasion by the British in 1788 and the brutality that followed. 

The red depicts the bloodshed and the black is the scattered communities, again governed by the “white”, depicting their harsh white rule and policing. 

The black dots scattered throughout the painting represents the frightened men, women and children, again in disarray and dysfunctional-with no where else to go. 

In spite of Mr Rudd saying “Sorry” to Australia’s Aboriginal population, nothing has really changed in the minds of most Australians and the NT Intervention juggernaut roles on. 

Legislation in its present form, discriminates against the our Aboriginal people. The NT is administered by the Australian Federal Government, (unlike the 6 Australian States which have their own sovereignty under our constitution, based on the British Westminster System). 

Furthermore, to rub “salt” into our Aboriginal peoples wounds, the former Australian Prime Minister John Howard in his unlamented intervention had the Discrimination Law changed, so he could proceed with this blatant “land grab”. Simply, this was a continued effort to drive the final nail into the coffin of extinguishing our Aboriginal Culture and forcing Aboriginal people into White Australia.

I should also mention that many Indigenous people who are still living their traditional lifestyle and cannot speak English, but rather than encourage this tradition, along side teaching English, the Howard followers –and now it seems the incumbent Rudd government too – will “carry on” in the same manner, as early indications from the Rudd camp, have NOT yet disavowed it. 

Under NO circumstances, can we allow our people’s language and culture, to be diminished, but to ensure that this is part of our Aboriginal people’s school curriculum and should be made policy under the Rudd’s Education Revolution election promise. 

This action has caused considerable and bitter resentment by the tax-paying Australian, who has been so misinformed on the issues dealing with our Aboriginal Heritage. 

The Northern Territory (NT) Intervention, for our peoples, will NOT solve the issues, in fact many more problems are created, but few White people can see them and even less accept them or indeed understand them. John Howard remains the "last man" in this country that would or could understand this issue. 

NO doubt it was a personal choice of his-conceived in order to tackle what Howard and many sectors of the capitalist class in Australia feel is the underlying problem – that Aborigines still exist as indigenous people.

Aboriginal communities are being ignored, coerced and steamrolled because the object of the exercise is to abolish Aboriginality, to make Aboriginal people just like White Australians – only poorer and with darker skins; this process is the policy, a program of continued assimilation. 

In this way, the Government can prevent the transmission of Aboriginal culture and teach residents of remote communities and town camps a “superior” way to live. 

Forcible assimilation, however, is genocide. Genocide does not require extermination (like poisoning and the government offering bounties for the heads of our Aboriginal people, including women and children in the early days of British Colonization), – it merely requires a State policy to achieve the elimination of an ethnic group: and this is what the NT “intervention” is all about. If it succeeds, it would be the consummation of the original sin of capitalist Australia – the invasion and conquest of a land that was not theirs and the dispossession of the original inhabitants. The continuing existence of Aboriginal people is a standing rebuke to that conquest and a threat to the legitimacy of capital and it’s State. The time for hypocrisy on human rights be rebuked by ALL Australians. 

Medium: Acrylic Paint on Stretched Canvas.

Painted: 2007.