Sausage Mama

I wrote this two years ago on my blog and had to reshare and read as we ‘celebrate’ Australia Day Tomorrow….

At the moment, I’m doing a summer semester for university – Indigenous Perspectives is about to wrap up this week. I was totally dragging my feet over doing it and I was fantasizing about leaving it until the very end of the 10 year period I have in which to complete the degree, by which I would no longer need to finish the degree as I would have invented some new baby product – a bpa free highchair, for example – and spend my time rolling around in my millions of dollars, accompanied by my millions of babies.

So Saturday mornings have been dedicated to pretending to study, shuffling papers and colour co-ordinating highlighters and post-it notes and updating on facebook about how ANNOYING study was and how IRRELEVANT it was and how they say you only use 10% of your degree once you are working (each of these activities add up and are considered as time spent actually studying, so then I can have a break!). Then I decided to actually DO some readings and suprisingly, I found it hard to put them down. And then I HAD to put them down because it was too upsetting. I had no freakin’ idea. And here is the rest of ‘Australia’ complaining that Indigenous people get free cars (not true), get given bucketloads of money (not true) and how they are all alcoholics (not true).

I regret status updating ‘Happy Australia Day’, because I realised afterwards how ‘unhappy’ the day really is for everything it symbolises……

I won’t even pretend to know even 1% of this topic and what the Indigenous people have endured at the hands of the Whites, I’ve only just scratched the surface… basically, if you are my age (25) or older and live in Australia, in school you were probably taught about Colonisation, not ‘invasion’.

Here are a few things that might open your eyes a little to the REAL story. I have an exam on Wednesday, so I thought I would revise whilst showing you some interesting and DEVASTATING stuff that has happened to the Indigenous people, which helps you understand why they are in the pickle that they are now in….(Now remember, as Jane said a while back, it’s happened all over the planet, not just here…)

1. Indigenous populations number some 350 million individuals in more than 70 countries in the world, and that this represents more than 5000 languages and cultures. (This is epic. How many languages can you recite off the top of your head? Like, eleven?)

2. In Australia, the Indigenous population was estimated at between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people in 1788. This had declined to about 60,000 people in the 1920s. (and by declined, they mean brutally tortured and murdered).

3.The Indigenous cultures of Australia have the oldest living cultural history in the world – they go back at least 50,000 years and some argue closer to 65,000 years, others say up to 120,000 years. One of the reasons Aboriginal cultures have survived for so long is their ability to adapt and change over time. It was this affinity with their surroundings that goes a long way to explaining how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples survived for so many millennia. (How lovely of the whites to, you know, come in and OBLITERATE the oldest culture on the FREAKING PLANET).

4. <i>’A man named Harrington procured 10-15 Aboriginal women, placed them on different islands and left them to procure Kangaroo skins for him, and if, on his return, they had not procured enough, he used to punish them by tying them up to trees for 24-36 hours, together, flogging them at intervals’. </i>BASTARD. Can you imagine trying to catch and kill and skin a kangaroo? I couldn’t do it to save my life. I can barely aim a thong (flip flop, for you new American readers) at a cockroach. Those poor women….<i></i><i>

5. …a man named Carrotts….chased a native man and woman. Having shot the man, he cut off his head, hung it around the womans neck, and rode back into the nearby settlement, proud of his success. He thought hunting Aborigines was better than smoking his pipe. One of his favourite pastimes was to lie down a gun, and wait until the Aborigines approached and pull the trigger with his toe, shooting them. </i>Can you imagine how traumatising that would be, to see your partner killed and to wear his head around your neck? This stuff is really hard to read, but I feel it’s really important to be able to put ourselves in other peoples shoes to better understand them and what their people have endured over the generations….. this next one must have been terrifying.<i></i><i>

6. …two men…were chasing a very pregnant Aboriginal woman through the bush. Unable to escape them, the woman climbed up a tree and tried to hide in the branches. But she had been observed by the sportsman. One proposed to shoot her, the other protested. The first decided to fire anyway at the unfortunate creature. A fearful scream was heard and then a new-born fell out of the tree’. </i>This broke my heart. The poor woman, hunted like a fucking fox.<i></i><i>

7. It has been claimed that some settlers shot Aborigines so they could feed them to their dogs. </i>What on EARTH was wrong with these people who did this? I get the guilts when I kill a spider – it was probably only looking for a corner of my bedroom to set up a home and make baby spiders, you know?

This next one was the WORST…just warning you know, as a woman, a partner, a mother, this is pretty much the worst thing I have EVER heard. You can close the browser window, there is still time……..<i></i>

9….manhunts of sexual mutilation, of burying Aboriginal babies up to their necks in sand and kicking their heads off, after tying the severed heads of the husbands around the RAPED spouses necks.</i>

<i>This reduced me to a sobbing wreck. </i>;1 in 3 of us women will have experienced rape, if the statistics are correct, so to imagine enduring rape, witnessing your husbands bloody murder and what happened to your baby….. It just breaks me into a million pieces….if you are going to murder someone in the end, what the FUCK is the purpose of torture? Sick twisted fucking individuals who I bet didn’t have warm, loving and affectionate people around them growing up, suffered abuse as children and were angry at the world…..

All of this stuff was before the ‘Stolen Generation’, where children were forcibly removed from their families (this is considered an act of genocide). This was done to merge the Indigenous, in hopes they as a distinct group would disappear and eventually die out.
<i>’…with the view to encourage the conversion of the children to Christianity and distancing them from their Indigenous lifestlyes, children were housed in dorms and contact with their family was strictly limited’ </i>How TERRIFYING this must have been for the children….can you imagine this happening to your child?

In Queensland, where I live, the children of Aboriginal or ‘half caste’ parents we automatically declared ‘Neglected Children’. This meant that the children were ‘neglected’ from the instant of birth, and subject to being separated from their parents because of this imaginary neglect.

One Aboriginal woman who had been fostered out as a baby said <i>’we were told that our mother was an alcoholic and that she was a prostitute and she didn’t care about us. They used to warn us that when we got older we’d have to watch it because we’d turn into sluts and alcoholics, so we had to be very careful. If you were white you didn’t have that dirtiness in you…it was in our breed, in us to be like that.’ </i>I feel so much for these people, being brought up to be ashamed of themselves, their conception…..reminded of the lies every time they looked in the mirror…I can’t even imagine what this would be like to live with.

One of our Prime Ministers said ‘We need to recognise who did the dispossessing. ‘We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters, the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers….. we failed to make the most basic human response…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’. (Paul Keating).

And it sucks to read a quote like this and realise how the Whites had NO RIGHT to do anything they did (not that there was ever any question that they DID have the right)…. ‘If the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander occupation of Australia was the equivalent of one hour (40,000 years) then the shared history of Colonisation (209) years has lasted the equivalent of NINETEEN SECONDS.’

The following poem I felt I could relate to with regards to parenting naturally as opposed to sleep/feed/cry it out training and detaching from your ‘manipulative’ baby, was written by an Aboriginal woman named Ooodegeroo of the Noonuccal. It’s called ‘The Unhappy Race’.

<i>White fellow, you alone are the unhappy race</i><i>You alone have left nature and made civilized laws</i><i>You have enslaved yourselves as you enslaved the horse and other wild things</i><i>Why, white man?</i><i>Your police lock up your tribe in houses with bars,</i><i>We see poor women scrubbing floors of richer women</i><i>Why, white man why?</i><i>You laugh at ‘poor blackfellow’, you say we must be like you</i><i>You say we must leave the old freedom and leisure</i><i>We must be civilized and work for you</i><i>Why, white fellow?</i><i>Leave us alone, we don’t want your collars and ties,</i><i>We don’t need your routines and compulsions</i><i>We want the old freedom and joy that all things have but you</i><i>Poor white man, of the unhappy race.</i><i></i>

Sigh….. In becoming a mother, I’ve realised how stupid most of the stuff we worry about is, how we put monetary gain over our childrens needs, how we spend our lives working our assess off for retirement but when we get there, we’re usually too tired to do anything but sit down and feel like something was missing. &nbsp;Wishing we’d enjoyed parenting more, living vicariously through our children as they have their own, wishing we had our time over to choose different partners, raise our kids differently, not spend our time consistently ignoring our children for the sake of a clean house…..working in jobs we hated, didn’t believe in, for the sake of the cash, whilst we could have been using our creator-given gifts to help people for the greater good.

Funny how my posts always come back to bitching about society. But after reading what the Indigenous People have endured, and what people are CURRENTLY going through in Haiti, Sudan, Afghanistan (friggen EVERYWHERE)….doesn’t it make Western life seem so trivial and pointless? I know I questioned bringing children into this world….but we decided the world needed some more GOOD people, to counter-act the BAD that we hear so much of whenever we open a paper or switch on the telly.

Doesn’t it seem redundant to be trying to make our life as cushy, luxurious and convenient as possible whilst African women are suffering from obstetric fistula, shunned by society because their births rendered them incontinent and they’re having to live with the shame of their constant smell of urine, with the good chance their baby died in birth, when their conception was probably due to rape in the first place.

I don’t know what I’m hoping to achieve with this blog, I guess I just felt the need to share this stuff that had affected me. A part of me wants to shy away from the world in our little apartment and be happy in our little sausage world. But another part of me feels it’s socially irresponsible to not at least be aware of the plight of other people. We don’t choose (or do we) which country or race we are born into, but hell, I’m relieved I haven’t had to suffer as so many cultures have had to….I have a choice to pretend it’s not happening, or use my position as an Active Participant in my life to somehow help….and once I’m finished raising babies (half of which I hope we adopt) and the last one leaves the Sausage Nest, I’m outty – off to help somehow, someway.

If anyone would like to share their story, please email it to sausagemama@gmail.com. Would love to open our minds….

Un-happily Australian by Citizenship, SM.

I may not have much metime these days to get very creative with photography, but dammit I’ll take shortcuts and make pictures even prettier with my new iphone and the application ‘Vintage Camera’ (because I simply can’t be bothered figuring out how Instagram works). YES, I’m fully aware that I’m about 12 months behind everyone in using it, but my old iphone died a little when I accidently posted it overseas and I was unable to add any applications or new things to it. I also didn’t know how! I am learning and stuff.

<3 SM.