However, it was just recently uploaded online, a week before the Australia Day on Tuesday.
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There is no doubt racism is part of Australia’s history – the White Australia Policy is evidence enough of that – and there is no doubt there are racist elements within our culture, as there seem to be in nearly every human culture.
A speech on racism delivered by Australian journalist Stan Grant has gone viral after it was uploaded to YouTube in recent days. “[Indigenous Australians] are fewer than 3% of the Australian population and yet… a quarter of those Australians are locked up in our prisons”.
But while to many of us Australia Day is little more than an excuse to have a pool party, to many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples, the First Fleet’s arrival at Botany Bay in 1788 is not an occasion to be celebrated.
The Australian dream… We sing of it and we recite it in verse; “Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free”.
Indigenous people never consented to the British coming to Australia and taking over the land, he said. And if you’re a juvenile it is worse, it is 50%. “On those rugged mountain ranges, my people, women and children were herded over those ranges to their deaths”, Grant said. Reminds me that my people were killed on those plains, we were shot on those plains, disease ravaged us on those plains.
“While we have this cohort of people in Australia who haven’t moved as far as we’d like them to, there’s a whole cohort of people who has. Captain Arthur Phillip, a man of enlightenment… was sending out raiding parties with the instruction “bring back the severed heads of the black trouble-makers”.
Stan goes on to detail extraordinary injustices to his people, including the jailing of Grant’s family members for talking to each other in their own language.
Anti-Australia Day protesters march holding a banner reading “No room for racism”.
“By 1901 when we became a nation, we were nowhere, we were not in the constitution”.
Stan Grant spoke with Neil Mitchell on Monday.
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Grant admitted that he has done well, but not because of the Australian dream, but in spite of it. His father, who toiled in the mills because he was denied an education, lost three fingers just to feed his children. “Stan Grant’s speech has brought this much needed conversation into the mainstream”.
