Invasion Day

She's been traveling Australia for the last few months looking at the impact on Aboriginal people of the past, present, and the future for BuzzFeed. She's created an excellent video series about this, and she's also written an article about why changing the date is so important. We'll post the links to both the video series and the article on our website. Stay with me after you've heard from Amy for the challenge, But for now, he's my co host, Amy maguire reflecting on what Invasion Day.

in seventeen eighty eight. For US, it's the beginning of the invasion, not just into Gategol lands around what is now called Sydney, but the beginning of the waves of invasions that began into Aboriginal nations all across this country at different times and under different circumstances. But one thing is similar is that they left Aboriginal communities decimated, and Aboriginal people had power and control ripped away from them

in the pursuit of white interests. Last year I went over to Rottnest Island, which lies nineteen kilometers off the coast of Fremantle near Perth and Rottenesst Island is now one of Western Australia's most profitable tourism resorts. Thousands of visitors go to Rottenest every year, including people from Western Australia. But for Bodagna people it has a very different history. It used to be and still is a place of extreme cultural significance, a place where they're dead would go

to pass over. But when the invasion happened in Wa, which began at the Swan River colony around where now where perf now sits. It was a prison camp where up to four thousand Aboriginal men, many of them more men, many of them resistance fighters in their own lands, not just in normal country, but all across Western Australia, were

sent in chains. They were marched through Fremantle, put in the roundhouse that still sits there, and put in chains, made to row over choppy seas to Rotnest Island, where many of them died. The conditions that they lived in were horrendous. They would sit seven people in a very small, cramped, dark cell, and they had to build that island's infrastructure, infrastructure that is still there, with no food or with very little food. Diseases were rampant, conditions were harsh. Many

of them died. Now in the nineteen seventies, workers who were digging up part of that area discovered a mass grave and the WA government attempted to cover it up. They would have succeeded if not for a whistleblower who actually came out and made news. And after that Aboriginal people campaigned for that grave site to be respected, but

it took four decades. For a very long time, tourists were still camping on that grave site, there's an estimated three hundred and seventy Aboriginal monk who lied buried under soil not six feet in some cases three to four feet. People who went to Rotanness Island had no knowledge that they were actually camping on top of the graves of Aboriginal people. It was literally called tent land where people would drink, sleep, party on the graves of law men,

on the graves of resistance fighters. Now it's only been very recently that that area has been cordoned off. It's only been very recently that the quad where many Aboriginal people died, in fact, where five were hung in the center of is going to be closed. But right now it's still a tourist resort. That concentration camp on Rottnest Island, where three hundred and seventy maybe even more Aboriginal men died, is currently a hotel where you pay three hundred dollars

a night to stay in. Can you imagine anywhere in the world where a concentration camp, a place of such extreme grief and trauma, could be converted into a tourist hotel and the people who stay inside those walls and pay hundreds of dollars are not told, but they're staying in rooms where many men, many people died. Can you imagine any place in the world. I visited that quad

and you could just feel the energy there. You could feel the pain and you could feel the grief, and I just wondered, how can anyone stay in these walls. I walked a short walk down and saw the mass grave, which is the largest death in custody site in Australia, and I saw that there's barely any memorial to those people. In fact, it's taken four decades to get a small sign erected. Australia will celebrate on the graves of Aboriginal

people today. That's what's happened over in Rottenests, what's happening right now, And it's a perfect metaphor for what Australia does every year in January twenty six, which continues this horrendous display of amnesia, which continues to comfort Australians in the knowledge that they can somehow barricade themselves from the past, even though Aboriginal people deal with the past in their

present days every single day. And we see that in the case of what we're talking about with Kurdin, we see that outrages are still happening Australians refusing to own up to their own complicity and Aboriginal disadvantage and dispossession is exactly the issues that we continue to face when we talk about Kevin Henry, in the massive miscarriage of

justice that has happened. When Kevin Henry entered those walls for Campton's Prison Capricornia Correctional Center, he was effectively rendered voiceless, and for two long Aboriginal people have also been rendered voiceless. Now we're using our voices, we're standing up on the streets as we've done, and we're finally getting some sort

of coverage. And so if you believe in changing the date, or if you believe like I do, in abolishing the day, you should also believe in the wider issues as well, helping Aboriginal people like Kevin Henry in ways that we've told you, you can help supporting our fight because if you have finally woken up to the fact that Australians shouldn't be celebrating on a day of such deep pain to Aboriginal people, if you believe that we should start

addressing the unfinished business at the heart of this nation. You should also be supporting fights like those for curtain, fights like for so many other Aboriginal people who've been denied their rights. You should be supporting the fight to slow the rates of incarceration of Aboriginal people all across

the country. The issues are linked because what happened on twenty sixth January seventeen eighty eight continues everything that we talk about in this podcast, Everything that's happened to Kevin Henry is a continuation of those boats that first sailed into Sydney Cove. It's all connected. We don't have the luxury of ign ignoring this. So today I just want to push all our Aboriginal Islander listeners a safe day.

I hope that you take care of yourselves in the face of so much horrendous disrespects that we see every year in January twenty six and I also hope to our listeners listening in Capricornia Correctional Center and all across the country, and especially Kevin Henry, I hope that today you have a good day and remember that we're all thinking of you on the outside, and that we're going to continue this flight just as Aboriginal people all across the country protest on the streets.

what that means. Many in the non Indigenous community have a simple argument when it comes to Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island to people calling for this date to be chainedged Australia Day shifted to another time, a more appropriate day and time, perhaps even when a treaty has been established, when truth, justice and reconciliation have really been achieved, because, as Amy pointed out, invasion didn't just begin on one day and end the next. It was a continual process.

Australia as it's known today is a continent of nearly eight million square kilometers. Sydney is roughly twelve thousand square kilometers. To help you understand just how bad this invasion was, I'm going to talk only about twenty square kilometers that surround where I sit right now, and I want you

to do this. After you've listened to this, I want you to research the twenty square kilometers that surround you and what happened and is happening to the Aboriginal introstraight island of people, whose land that belongs to and continues to happen to them to this day. Within the twenty square kilometers from where I sit right now recording for you,

these events took place. A man named Boyd, one of the earlier settlers, as he was described, came to the Beaga Valley on the far south coast of New South Wales. Make no mistake, mister Boyd was a slave trader. How do we know this? It was by his own admission. In the eighteen hundreds, Boyd himself was being investigated for conducting a slave trade. He was trafficking in Aboriginal and

Torrestrate Islander people as well as South Sea Islanders. He did so with assistance of not just the British, but with people from many nations around the world who were also involved in the slave trade. He was a well established landowner and merchant around the world. In the Legislative Council in New South Wales, Boyd, in defending himself, referenced the African slave trade and made the discussion about introducing such practice to the colony that would become Australia. He

used these slaves to enrich himself. They were brought to a small place that to this day is still named Boyd Town after this man, this self confessed slave trader. The clerk sitting at the local bench of the magistrate's court there took notes, and this is what he said. None of the natives could speak English, and all were naked. They all crowded around us, looking at us with the utmost surprise and feeling at the texture of our clothes.

They seemed wild and restless. Here it's clear that a no humanity was shown whatsoever, b that the state, through a magistrate's court, was involved in assigning ownership to mister Boyd of the Aboriginal people that they called natives. It should also be noted that they were surprised at what was happening to them. They were feeling the texture of the clothes of these Europeans. They made no attempt at

this point to resist. They were not acting in any way violently, and yet over the coming years they would be used as slaves, many of whom would be slaughtered and killed. Others were never paid the supposed wage that was guaranteed to them by the court, and many managed to escape despite their goodwill despite the fact that it was with surprise that they acted that they were being

treated this way. It took a number of years before they acted in any way violently, and when they did, what they did was simply to resist their own imprisonment, to free themselves of the shackles of the slave trade that operated in Australia, that was conducted not just by the British, but by a global group of people who

had conducted the slave trade for centuries. When you think about slavery, you should not just think about the African slave trade, the slave trade that took place across the Arab world, and slave trades that have operated up and to this day. The slave trade was alive and well in Australia. There was blackbirding from the South Sea Islands,

including what is now Vanuatu. A horrific history of people being stolen away from places like Tanner Island and brought to Queensland to work as slaves, never to see their homes again, and it extends right around Australia. And that slave trade took place within twenty square kilometers of where I sit now. Another word, we hear a lot about on Australia Day invasion day is massacre. If you look even at the maps that many of the universities off

for up, they show massacres right around the country. They do not document them all. There was a massacre that took place less than ten square kilometers from where I sit right now, that isn't documented in the history books, but is documented in diaries. Those diaries are those of the men who carried out that massacre. This is from

an officer who observed what was going on. He wrote in his diary, Lieutenant H. W. Breton, that the invaders invented all sorts of ridiculous tales concerning Aboriginal people in order that they may be furnished with an excuse for taking away their lives. When it came to this particular massacre, first the men were shot. Every single man of this tribe was shot and killed. This left the women and children. So were the women and children allowed to escape or

allowed to go free. No, after they had witnessed their men being slaughtered shot in cold blood for no reason by settlers. The women and children were chased through the forest, and they ran, and they fled. They fled for their lives. One hundred and seventy three women and children took through the bush and managed to evade men on horseback and their dogs for days until they reached a cliff top. There they were driven over the edge, some were shot,

some simply fell to their death. Women and children one hundred and seventy three killed for absolutely no reason, and no one was ever held accountable. That massacre is not documented in the history books of Australia, but thankfully the oral history, the diaries of both non indigenous and later indigenous people who were told the stories by their relatives, all match up. So much so we know the exact number, we know the exact location Jinger of Rock, and we

know what happened. Men who had come to kill seals in the Port of Eden to take Wales had decided they would declare war on the most peaceful people on the planet and kill every last one of them, including babies. They were not the only children to die. Many in the area died in forced burials, that is, children buried alive from a range of diseases deliberately introduced from random attacks by settlers and new locals, and often in silence, often at night, killed in ways that are almost too

horrible to imagine. Even in the context of what you've already heard. These black massacres, as they were known at the time, were often justified by misreporting. As one paper said at the time, there was aboriginal cannibalism. Of course it was totally made up. There were other stories of black on black violence being far more frequent than white on black violence. Again, the diaries of another lieutenant describe how these pioneer recollections were but fables. They were not true.

But one crime documented by the courts of New South Wales again took place right near where I sit. A white woman had been involved in a relationship with an Aboriginal man working on the local farm. To him, she fell pregnant. When it was discovered by her father, also a local Catholic man of high standing, that she was pregnant, she was given two choices by her own father, be

killed or killed the baby. The night the baby was born, she took the child with assistance from her sisters, and buried it, still alive, wrapped in cloth, in the backyard of the family home. That baby would later be recovered an Aboriginal child murdered purely because they were an Aboriginal child. This was more than one hundred years after the initial invasion of Australia. To believe that it is only one date that is problematic is the problem to begin with.

But these crimes would continue. Less than sixty years ago, journalists from Canberra traveled to the Beaga Valley and were horrified to note that not only were no Aboriginal people in the town, they were pointed to a settlement at Stony Creek where the Aboriginal people lived there. The journalists in the nineteen sixties described the conditions as disgusting, as squalid and primitive, and were shocked to believe that the place this site where the people were forced to live,

was the local rubbish tip. As Arnie Glenda Dixon describes, we were treated like animals at that time. They didn't want the Blacks too close to town. Auntie Glenda was part of the first family allowed and I say that in inverted commas to move into the township of Beager. As she said, we had a stove, we had a shower, which was a big deal to us. We had a toilet that we flushed all the time. But as she recalls,

the locals called it Coon Avenue. This was two hundred years after the invasion of Australia first commenced, and only then was the first family of Aboriginal people allowed by the new locals to live in that town with access to the facilities of the twentieth century instead of the rubbish tip they'd been sent so long ago, two hundred years later, and the invasion was still going. Because this was just the first family that was allowed to move into town. So how was this family treated when they

moved into town? The first editorial in the local paper called it a betrayal and a shock. The editor claim there was not a large enough space to accept the new people and that the people of the town had grave concern. He said Aboriginal people would be moving into begas prime domestic area, ghettos would be formed, and property

values would be affected. In the sixty seven referendum, the town had voted overwhelmingly no. Unlike ninety odd percent of the population in the same area where Aboriginal people had been massacred, where an Aboriginal child had been buried alive, where Aboriginal people had been held shackled, sold and killed as slaves, a single Aboriginal family brought such fear to a community that scenes not unlike those we've come to know from the South of America where the ku Klux

Klan operated, were present in the very area where I sit now. This took place in the lifetimes of people who are still alive. Would you ask someone who was forced to grow up at the tip and only allowed to move into their town once it had been exposed by the Canberra Times, the squalid conditions they were forced to live in. Would you ask that person to get

over it? Would you ask the families of all those who were massacred, the women and children shot and thrown off a cliff, driven off a cliff by dogs chewing at their body until they jumped, to get over it? Would you ask the families of those who were bought and sold, shackled and killed to get over it. We're not talking about one single day. We're talking about more than two hundred years. But as many people would say the slavery is over, many might even argue the killings

are over. But what about the four hundred deaths in custody in the last twenty five years. Four hundred deaths of Aboriginal people in just twenty five years who were in the care of the state and of those four hundred deaths, not a single police officer or single corrections officer has ever been found guilty of murder. How did all these people die?

The stats when it relates to Aboriginal and torrestrate Islander people who are in prison are alarming and known to all two percent of the population and in many jurisdictions more than fifty percent of the prison population. For what reasons are Aboriginal people in prison? The same stats that show us these appalling numbers that must surely be built on racism, also tell us some alarming facts when it

comes to the crime of homicide. Aboriginal entirostrate Islander people are underrepresented and per capita commit homicide, that is, murder at a much lower rate than non Indigenous people. What about sexual assault and the crimes we always hear about that were used to justify the Northern Territory intervention another invasion by an armed force into Aboriginal community. Here again, Aboriginal Entrostraate Islander people are underrepresented compared to the broader

Nonindigenous community. This is from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Commonwealth of Australia, twenty fifteen. That doesn't say that there is no problem with either homicide or sexual assault in the Aboriginal and tore Straight Islander community. Any single one

of these events is one horrific event too many. But the picture painted by the media and believed by the population that these crimes are committed far and away by Aboriginal people in numbers that means their imprisonment can be justified, are not backed up by the facts. But what about offenses against justice? That is things like not paying fines? Here we find Aboriginal and tore Straight Islander people are far greater represented than non Indigenous people. What about the

crime of unlawful entry? Can you really break into your own country or break into your own land? Once again, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are far over rep presented. When it came time to invade Australia, young Aboriginal men were the first targets. They were seen as the biggest threat. They were killed first, as evident by the massacre that took place near to where I sit. The women and

children were also killed. Nobody was spared, and to this day, young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men are targeted in the same way. From seventeen eighty eight up until the world's attention was drawn in the late twentieth century, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people were simply killed, killed by the gun in their thousands right across this country. In twenty eighteen, those same Aboriginal people are imprisoned, where in the last twenty five years four hundred of them have

been killed. As we've shown in this series, Kevin Henry is innocent of the crime he is alleged to have committed. In his early twenties, he was imprisoned for the crime of murder, a crime he did not commit. One more Aboriginal man, seen by the state as a threat, was taken out of action and was removed from the lands

that are his own for life. The purpose of this podcast is to free Kevin Henry, but it is also to free your mind of the idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people deserve thereover representation in the prison system. It is to explain to you these four hundred deaths of Aboriginal in Torres Strait Island people in prison in

the last twenty five years. It's to understand that the enslavement, the massacre, the murdering of Aboriginal children took place over a much broader period than one day, the twenty sixth of January. It continued for two hundred years and continues to this day. You can't get over something that is still happening. You can't get over the murder of your loved ones. You can't get over the injustices that are

inflicted upon you. You cannot get over a life sentence placed on you for a crime you did not commit. So take the challenge. Look into the twenty square kilometers that surround you. There might be eight million square kilometers that make up the continent of Australia. But wherever you walk, wherever you put your feet in the sand the dirt, wherever you drive your car or call your home. There has been crimes committed against Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island

to people. This is why changing the date matters. But what really matters is ending the two hundred plus years of a horror island for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island to people until a treaty is signed, until there is truth, justice and reconciliation, then we can start to think about Australia Day for All. That was episode forty seven of Curtain, the podcast