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I'm still viral and easily distracted from work. Yesterday the distraction was mainly sleep - I was just a bit less well than I thought. Today, however, I was impelled to confront some issues I need to deal with. This was prompted by government policies I disapprove of (very, very, very much do I disapprove of them) and also by the book I'm reading for a BiblioBuffet essay, which clarified those policies for me. There are so many things I can't talk about in a single essay without turning that essay into a book, but I'm wondering that, if I pare issues back to their human component and set them in one of my other worlds for writing, if I can't address some of the issues fictionally. My first step is always to look for a deeper understanding and, in this case, to sort out my own ambivalent background (am I sinned against or sinning? it turns out I'm probably both).
My issue of the day is the perceived shape of British Empire. It's also Australian bigotry. Let me talk about the latter, first.
Something rather evil happened in Parliament this week - our government decided that refugees weren't refugees at all and were not in need of help. At least, not in need of help by us, on our soil. This is despite the fact that we really don't get many refugees compared with many countries and that most of the people who get here are in need of help somewhat direly.
We're nice people, Australians, but we have this blind spot. There's a growing public unhappiness with the government attitude, but this unhappiness doesn't change things. Why? Why do we have this blind spot? Why can't we change things easily? How can we hurt when people hurt and still not reach out and help them?
This is why. (ignore the highlights, please - I was looking to see what the ANA historically thought of refugees in the hopes that I was wrong).
Our history of not wanting people because they're in need rather than because they're from the right background goes back far further than this, but this snippet of text shows how very entrenched it is. These people who were 'taking ship berths' and so forth were survivors of attempted genocide. They had no home and no safety. Some of them were in refugee camps for years after they survived the Shoah. And Australia put its nose up and was rude. The then-government even put quotas on the % of Jewish passengers on ships docking in Australian ports**. This is a bit more of the general background, for those who are curious: http://www.ijs.org.au/Jewish-Immigration-after-the-Second-World-War/default.aspx
Australia has a history of preferring people of a particular ancestry and origin. This history was partly produced, in its turn, by our place in the Empire and our perception of what the British Empire was. We were one of the "White" regions. Those quotation marks are terribly important and more than somewhat ironic, since South Africa was another - the remaining are usually given as NZ and Canada. We thought we sent more of our people to war for Britain (I'd like to see the actual numbers - I know Australian and NZ sent more per capita of our rather small populations, but I suspect that India actually sent more) and we felt a strong bond to the place many of us still called Home, even in the 1960s and 1970s. We had a complex sense of duty and responsibility and the sense of cultural background and race and all the issues of colonisation mixed in with the duty and responsibility and made something that could be awesome, but that could also be awesomely bigoted.
Race and culture and their intersection with bigotry are thus quite complex and not well understood here. When an issue becomes too complex, Australia has been known to define it out of existence or pretend it will go away (both having applied to Indigenous Australians at various times) - it's easier than dealing with our past, I suspect.
This means that we make judgements about who we prefer to live with based very much on a bunch of stereotypes and prejudices we inherited and developed alongside our strange colonialism. It wasn't Jews only who benefited from hysteria when they* tried to migrate, but the post-Holocaust hysteria is particularly notable because if a country can't be warm and welcoming to fellow-Europeans after they've suffered such terror, then it's not going to be warm and welcoming to anyone who doesn't quite fit expectations.
The stereotypes were not based on skin colour, although that was certainly an element: the world was ranked in tiers. My suspicion as to how we once-British folks often order our Earth is that England (and preferably Southern England) was the centre of humanity (very Whiggish!) and then the rest of the UK and then the select few countries I listed. The rest of the Empire was more important than non-Empire places, with the USA being a key exception. India was lauded as the jewel in the crown, but its people were not among the favoured few. They were, however, probably the top echelon of the next rank. Jews (as we've seen) didn't fit anywhere. This underlying order-of-humankind lasted for well over a century and still influences the way Australians see the world.
It influences us, but it's not as important. We're changing far too slowly, but we are changing. Now we need to persuade our government to catch up.
*I say "they" because my family came out earlier and thus missed the hysteria although not the "ick, you're Jewish".
**More details of government policy are here: http://www.api-network.com/main/pdf/scholars/jas77_rutland.pdf
My issue of the day is the perceived shape of British Empire. It's also Australian bigotry. Let me talk about the latter, first.
Something rather evil happened in Parliament this week - our government decided that refugees weren't refugees at all and were not in need of help. At least, not in need of help by us, on our soil. This is despite the fact that we really don't get many refugees compared with many countries and that most of the people who get here are in need of help somewhat direly.
We're nice people, Australians, but we have this blind spot. There's a growing public unhappiness with the government attitude, but this unhappiness doesn't change things. Why? Why do we have this blind spot? Why can't we change things easily? How can we hurt when people hurt and still not reach out and help them?
This is why. (ignore the highlights, please - I was looking to see what the ANA historically thought of refugees in the hopes that I was wrong).
Our history of not wanting people because they're in need rather than because they're from the right background goes back far further than this, but this snippet of text shows how very entrenched it is. These people who were 'taking ship berths' and so forth were survivors of attempted genocide. They had no home and no safety. Some of them were in refugee camps for years after they survived the Shoah. And Australia put its nose up and was rude. The then-government even put quotas on the % of Jewish passengers on ships docking in Australian ports**. This is a bit more of the general background, for those who are curious: http://www.ijs.org.au/Jewish-Immigration-after-the-Second-World-War/default.aspx
Australia has a history of preferring people of a particular ancestry and origin. This history was partly produced, in its turn, by our place in the Empire and our perception of what the British Empire was. We were one of the "White" regions. Those quotation marks are terribly important and more than somewhat ironic, since South Africa was another - the remaining are usually given as NZ and Canada. We thought we sent more of our people to war for Britain (I'd like to see the actual numbers - I know Australian and NZ sent more per capita of our rather small populations, but I suspect that India actually sent more) and we felt a strong bond to the place many of us still called Home, even in the 1960s and 1970s. We had a complex sense of duty and responsibility and the sense of cultural background and race and all the issues of colonisation mixed in with the duty and responsibility and made something that could be awesome, but that could also be awesomely bigoted.
Race and culture and their intersection with bigotry are thus quite complex and not well understood here. When an issue becomes too complex, Australia has been known to define it out of existence or pretend it will go away (both having applied to Indigenous Australians at various times) - it's easier than dealing with our past, I suspect.
This means that we make judgements about who we prefer to live with based very much on a bunch of stereotypes and prejudices we inherited and developed alongside our strange colonialism. It wasn't Jews only who benefited from hysteria when they* tried to migrate, but the post-Holocaust hysteria is particularly notable because if a country can't be warm and welcoming to fellow-Europeans after they've suffered such terror, then it's not going to be warm and welcoming to anyone who doesn't quite fit expectations.
The stereotypes were not based on skin colour, although that was certainly an element: the world was ranked in tiers. My suspicion as to how we once-British folks often order our Earth is that England (and preferably Southern England) was the centre of humanity (very Whiggish!) and then the rest of the UK and then the select few countries I listed. The rest of the Empire was more important than non-Empire places, with the USA being a key exception. India was lauded as the jewel in the crown, but its people were not among the favoured few. They were, however, probably the top echelon of the next rank. Jews (as we've seen) didn't fit anywhere. This underlying order-of-humankind lasted for well over a century and still influences the way Australians see the world.
It influences us, but it's not as important. We're changing far too slowly, but we are changing. Now we need to persuade our government to catch up.
*I say "they" because my family came out earlier and thus missed the hysteria although not the "ick, you're Jewish".
**More details of government policy are here: http://www.api-network.com/main/pdf/scholars/jas77_rutland.pdf