Backbencher

I chose to read a book called Australian Race Relations by Andrew Markus. The book covered what Autralia went through from when it first started seeing settlers and dealing with Aborigines to current day issues. The format of the book was really easy to read and follow it was broken down into different parts and chapters in a chronological order like Sinclair's book on New Zealand. The first part deals with the human conduct between the two cultures and the settlers justification to treat them as they did. The viewed the Aborigines as savages, like animals, so since they viewed them like animals they could treat them as such so they didn't have a bad subconscience. When the settlers came to Australia, the Aborignies had weak if any military and could not resist the European onset and when the Europeans seized the land the called it 'terra nullius' meaning empty land devoid of sovereign power. Since they said it was empty they did not have to compensate for what they were taking. Because they could not understand one another there was a lot of fighting but Britian refused to let the settlers declare war, but the settlers more or less covered it up and was very quite about it. Only four Europeans were ever convicted and executed for the brutality towards the Aborignes. Then Australia had an onset of non European immigrants coming in for the gold rush. Many of the non Europeans were Chinese and still could not communicate with the settlers. After the gold rush, Australia had to start dealing with racial segregation and the workforce. Even though they tried to uphold them as humans and not animals like the Aborigines it didn't really work and the Chinese were more forced into mining and farm labour. Australia soon passed a law to limit immigration and basically exclude non European immigrants from coming in. They eventually started letting limited numbers in and began dealing with assimilation. It was a slow process to start excepting the other races, they had a couple major turning points in their attitude towards race. While reading this book it sounded a lot like the US's history with race. Australia went through everything we had to from trying to get rid of the natives to making them slaves and then latter learning to live with them. I think they are were we are today. There are still problems with race through out the country but for the most part everyone is seen as equal.