Category: language

A heresy is occurring in Australia

Guest post by Helen Caldicott

Ever since white men appeared 200 years ago on the shores of Sydney Harbour in their uniforms, with their guns and flags, the aboriginal people have been hunted, shot at and herded off cliffs and escarpments, and have had to drink from poisoned water holes.

Until very recently, aboriginal children were stolen from their parents by policemen under the direction of government and transported to “Christian” mission stations where they were taught English history, language and morality. Many were treated as slaves and sexually and physically abused. This horrifying history leads me to the current abuse and desecration of several aboriginal tribes inhabiting their land in the Northern Territory.

This land called Muckaty Station is conveniently located adjacent to the railway line, constructed recently by Dick Cheney’s former company Halliburton, which bisects Australia connecting Darwin, a port in the north, to Adelaide a port in the south.

In its wisdom, the previous conservative Howard government allocated this site along with three others for a possible radioactive dump. At the time the opposition labor party strongly criticized the nomination of Muckaty, labeling the Howard government’s National Radioactive Waste Management Bill as sordid and draconian. At the same time, the Howard government offered $12 million to just two of the tribal elders, excluding all other members. However the new labor government under the act can still impose a nuclear waste dump on the Northern Territory against the wishes of the indigenous owners and the government of the NT.

Muckaty Station sits above an ancient aquifer which is used by both the aborigines for drinking water and white station owners to water their cattle. It also experiences large intermittent rainfalls during the year.

Not only does the government intend to bury Australia’s low and high level waste at this site, but there is a distinct possibility that waste from overseas – namely the United States – will be transported by ship and on the Halliburton line to Muckaty Station, thus making Australia one of the main radioactive waste dumps in the world.

The reason for this eventuality is that Howard signed a treaty with the American government called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership GNEP which stipulates that after Australia exports its large quantities of uranium to nuclear powered countries, the high-level radioactive waste would be re-imported to prevent lateral proliferation of nuclear weapons. Despite its previous promises, Labor has not vetoed the GNEP and there is a suspicion that a secret deal was negotiated under the aegis of the GNEP to relieve America of some of its deadly radioactive waste.

Long-lived carcinogenic isotopes will inevitably leak into underground water systems, bio-concentrate in food chains and over generations induce cancer, genetic disease and congenital deformities in humans, animals and plants. A dismal prospect indeed for Australia’s future.

Helen Caldicott is an advocate of citizen action to remedy the nuclear and environmental crises. She has devoted the last 38 years to an international campaign to educate the public about the medical hazards of the nuclear age and the necessary changes in human behavior to stop environmental destruction. Dr. Caldicott holds a medical degree from the University of Adelaide Medical School and was on the staff of Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Boston, when she resigned to work full time on the prevention of nuclear war. While living in the United States, she co-founded the Physicians for Social Responsibility and the umbrella group, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. She also founded the Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament. The recipient of many awards and the subject of several films, she currently divides her time between Australia and the United States.

Image: “Northern Territory.” Creative commons licensed content from Flickr user dinaiz.

Ethnography briefing: the Andaman Islanders

The Andaman Islands are a string of islands in the Bay of Bengal that belong to India. For unknown numbers of centuries, many of the islands were inhabited by people who fished, gathered and hunted for their livelihood. During the 18th century, when European countries were expanding trade routes to east Asia, the Andaman Islands were of major strategic importance as a stopping place.

At the time of the first, small settlements of the British in the late 18th century, the total indigenous population was estimated at between 6,000 and 8,000 (Miller 1997). Today, more than 400,000 people live on the islands, and they are mostly migrants from the Indian mainland. The total number of indigenous people is about 400. British colonialism brought contagious diseases against which the indigenous people had no resistance. The colonial presence also resulted in death by direct violence (hanging of islanders who fought back, skirmishes in which the British had guns and the islanders had bows and arrows) and indirect violence (from displacement, despair and culture shock).

Only four surviving clusters of indigenous Andamanese now exist:

  • The smallest group, just a few dozen people, consists of the remnants of the so-called Great Andamanese people. Several groups of Great Andamanese people formerly lived throughout North and Middle Andaman Islands, but no indigenous people inhabit these islands now. Their surviving descendants live on a reservation on a small island near Port Blair, the capital city.
  • The so-called Jarawa, numbering perhaps 200, live in a reserved area on the southwest portion of South Andaman island, and very little is known of their language. Jarawa is a term that the Great Andamanese people use for them.
  • The Onge, around 100 in number, live in one corner of Little Andaman Island.
  • Another 100 people or so live on North Sentinel Island. Outsiders call them the “Sentinelese.” No one has established communication with them, and almost no one from the outside has gotten closer than arrow-range of their shore.

The December 2004 tsunami disrupted much of the Andaman Island landscape, particularly areas that had been cleared of mangroves and other trees. As far as anyone knows, none of the indigenous people died as a direct result of the tsunami, though many of the immigrant settlers did (Mukerjee 2005).

The future of the indigenous people is more endangered by external culture, in the form of immigration and development, than from nature. Immigrants from the mainland continue to arrive, and international organizations such as the World Bank and businesses continue to provide incentives for the settlers.

In February 2010, one of the few remaining survivors of the Great Andamanese people, a woman named Boa Sr, passed away. She was the last speaker of the Boa language.

Sources:

  • “Culturama” by Barbara Miller, <a href="Cultural Anthropology, 5th edition, Pearson 2009, pg 94
  • Barbara Miller, “Andaman Update: From Colonialism to “Development,” paper presented at the Annual South Asia Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, 1997
  • Further information on the Jarawa and their cultural survival

Images: One of the many uninhabited islands in the Andamans with intact mangroves protecting the coastline from erosion. The roots of mangrove trees provide a habitat for shrimp, a prominent food item of the indigenous peoples and also now sought after by the tourist industry for hotel fare. Source: Barbara Miller.

Archival photograph from the early twentieth century of a girl wearing the skull of her deceased sister. Source: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922.