Australia Wars

We lived in Australia for two years. It wasn’t until I got there did I realise the Aboriginal people weren’t very well treated. Apart from when I travelled in the Northern Territory, the only Aboriginal people I saw were sitting on benches drinking. They were always friendly.

But this. Paul and I just watched a documentary on the Australian Wars. I had no idea, no idea about this.

• The Australian Wars ran from 1788 to 1930

• There were hundreds of thousands of Indigenous peoples that were instantly deemed as ‘subjects’ of the British Crown

• 102,760 Australians died, the vast majority of whom were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

But Australia doesn’t talk about this. It doesn’t even recognise this as a “war”. European people arrived on the island and decided to take it over. Aboriginal people could not own land, land that they had occupied for thousands of years.Why don’t they - no we - recognise it? I’d say it’s because they’re embarrassed about what they did.

This picture shows the massacres that took place of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people between 1788 and 1930.

I feel sick.