islander

Stealing a generation of Aboriginal children from their families might have been legal but it was also immoral. Some of the white Australians involved in the theft might have believed that they were acting in the best interests of the children — the “good intentions” defense — but the policy itself was not concerned with the interests of the children. It was concerned with “breeding out” a race, that is, eliminating it. Source: publicintegrity.org/accountability/longtime-australian-po...

Taken at Seattle-Tacoma airport.

In 1891, the Presbyterian Church established a mission station on the western side of Cape York Peninsula. They named the station Mapoon. Over the next 72 years, hundreds of children of mixed descent and Aboriginal families came to the mission by force or by choice. One of the reasons Aboriginal people chose to come to Mapoon was the decreasing availability of bush food and the conflict with pastoralists when they tried to hunt, gather and fish on their country. The first missionaries at Mapoon used food as an assimilation strategy. Through the distribution of rations, the establishment of gardens maintained by Aboriginal people, and the introduction of set meal times, they radically altered the traditional Aboriginal diet and way of life. Food was the fuel that made the Mapoon mission run. It provided work for the Aboriginal ‘inmates’ and the missionaries sold surplus crops, cattle and seafoods to raise funds for the mission. One of the other ways the Presbyterian Church supported the Mapoon mission was through the sale of its ever-popular Women’s Missionary Union cookery book. A poem on the title page encouraged cooks ‘as they work its dainties up, [to] remember far Mapoon’. Christianising and ‘civilising’ Aboriginal people involved curtailing their mobility, revolutionising their diet and teaching them European ways to produce, prepare, distribute and consume food. Source; www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue9/Wishart.pdf