January 26 was Australia Day, when the colonial power raised its flag and pompously paraded as if Australia was an empty land found by the imperialists of the West. The parade showed no hint of the bloodshed, plundering, genocide ethnic cleansing and slavery that is the foundation of Australia.
This article from Socialism Or Your Money Back helps to put that in perspective.
The imperial wars and massacres (guns vs spears) such as those at Hawksbury, Nepean Richmond Hill, Risdon Cove, Appin, Bathurst, Port Phillip, Swan River (Battle of Pinjarra), Gravesend, Vinegar Hill, Myall Creek, Kinroy, Rufus R, Long lagoon, Dawson River, Kalkadoon, Cape Grim, the Black war, McKinley River, and West Kimberely were resisted by Aboriginal warriors like Pemulwuy, Winradyne, Multuggerah, Yagan, and Jandamarra. These wars, along with starvation and Western diseases decimated the dispossessed Aboriginal population to about 70,000 by 1920.Read the full article HERE:
Australia's First Peoples were marginalised onto reservations and missions, restricted entry into white towns, exploited as unpaid slave labour, their indigenous languages and sacred rituals forbidden, and mixed blood children (The Stolen Generations) were forcibly kidnapped from their parents for resocialisation - ie to be made "white". Until the 1967 referendum in Australia, Aborigines were government property: "The right to choose a marriage partner, to be legally responsible for one's own children, to move about the state and to socialise with non-Aboriginal Australians, were just some of the rights which Aboriginal people did not have."
