My Time in Australia: Indigenous–South Asian Solidarity

[ethan_cox2]

When I lived in Australia for the first half of this year, I became friends with some locals who were Arab, African, and South Asian first- and second-generation immigrants. Talking with them about the stories of their lives and those of their families, especially in conjunction with discussions of the socio-political dynamics of Australia, it was evident that there was a very distinct experience that Brown Australians share. One of my friends, Dithmi, a Sinhalese New Zealander, related to me over dinner once that because in Australia and New Zealand there is such a high degree of political consciousness, especially among young people—notably because of things like the Voice referendum—many darker skinned Australians have come to directly equate their voices and their liberation and their comfort in a predominantly white Australian society with that of Australian Aboriginals. When the Voice referendum was defeated, it felt for many Brown Australians like a reckoning: the comfort they enjoyed in the Australian metropoles was entirely conditional on the will of the racist white majority. And that illusion of comfort, which had seemed to suggest at one point that things may have been getting better, and that at long last the atrocious legacy of White Australia was unravelling by means of education, diversification, and reconciliation, was destroyed before their eyes as that same white Australia denied the literal and figurative Voice of the original dark-skinned inhabitants of the continent.

Reading in Australianama the story of Lallie, I was brought back to that conversation. For those instances of South Asian–Aboriginal cultural and social contact, to the extent even of marriage, there was always a condition—that no matter their quality of their actions, the scrupulousness of everything was conditioned by the white society that surrounded them. When more than one hundred years ago a South Asian man desired marriage with a 'half-caste' Aboriginal woman, he was made to visit his local white authority and state his case, which for eugenicist reasons, was denied. This was out to the fact that the white authorities wished to extinguish the Aboriginal race, and so marriage between someone who was already half-white and a South Asian was unthinkable to them. Because of this, they had to venture painstakingly across Australia a multitude of times, only for the prospect of something as innocuous as marriage. This all reminded me that there is, and has evidently always been, a solidarity by virtue of non-white racialisation between the Indigenous inhabitants of the colonised 'new world' and brown-skinned immigrants. When in current times the voices of the Indigenous are suppressed, it affects and is linked to the voices of all those who too live outside of the white racial caste.