Monday, January 26, 2015

Invasion Day

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention states: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

26 January is commemorated as Invasion Day by Indigenous Australians (or should it be described as the day that the attempted genocide began) but celebrated as Australia Day by Australian settlers.

Before the British Invasion of Australia on 26 January 1788, Indigenous Australians had been living in Australia for about 60,000 years. There were about 750 different tribes, 300 language groups and 750 dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered.

After the British Invasion, the Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million in 1788 to about 0.1 million in the first century through introduced disease, dispossession, deprivation and genocidal violence. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the 1920s but no Treaty has ever been signed. Indigenous Australians were only counted after a referendum in 1967 and were finally given some protection by the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. In the 20th century up to 10% of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their mothers, the so-called Stolen Generations. Forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers is continuing today at a record rate. Indigenous Australians are far worse off than Australian settlers in relation to housing, health, wealth, social conditions, imprisonment, deaths in custody, forcible removal of children, avoidable death and life expectancy.

In 2000 about 9,000 Aborigines out of an Aboriginal population of 500,000 died avoidably  every year (the avoidable death rate as a percentage of population of 1.8% pa was the highest in the  world and 1.8 times that for non-Arab Africa)  but by 2011  this had declined to about 2,000 annual avoidable deaths out of a population about 670,000 (an avoidable death rate of 0.4%, the same as for impoverished South Asia but occurring in one of the  world's richest countries).


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