Chapter
1: Australia and South Africa: the differences, similarities
and why the first lags
behind the other
As an Australian who has lived in London for a year and a half, I've met
many South Africans, having had two SA house mates as well as the regular,
and always interesting, lunchtime company of three others. During that
time, I've come to understand the difference between 'just now' and 'now
now' (I once timed one of my SA workmates to find that 'just now' comes
to approximately 23 minutes), their obsession with dried meat, their staggering
drinking ability, a level of patriotism that's nearly on a par with America's
(I realised this earlier this year as I stood in torrential rain in Trafalgar
Square with many of you for your national day celebrations) and their
unnervingly casual accounts of residing in their home country surrounded
by electric fences or having to take car-hijacking courses to obtain driving
licenses.
Yet, while there are differences between our cultures, Australians and
South Africans do have a great deal in common. The main one is that we're
both from the southern hemisphere, so we're accustomed to clear blue skies,
warm weather, long beaches, a winter that lasts three months, not six
(those of us living in London will know what I mean). We also love to
gamble, are addicted to shopping centres (I'm opting not to contest your
country's multiple claims to having the largest) and, last but certainly
not least, we can't get enough of going out for a drink.
Australia and South Africa are also among the most multicultural countries
in the world. I am told that SA has about a dozen main languages, and
that speaks for itself (and, yes, that pun was intentional). Australia,
which is also a young country like yours, has also welcomed immigrants
from around the world. (Oh, that's unless we don't like them, in which
case we throw them and their children into barbed-wire enclosures in the
middle of deserts for years on end; I highly recommend the recent book
A Tyrant's Novel, by Thomas Keneally, which focuses on this subject in
a powerful way. I can't imagine the SA government being as draconian as
that.) I went to school surrounded by kids from countries as diverse as
Greece, Italy and Vietnam. In fact, Melbourne (located in Australia's
south) has the largest population of Greeks outside Athens, numbering
about a million. Australia has a slogan that has become very popular in
recent years, which is sung in television ads promoting multiculturalism,
which goes:;We are, you are, we are Australians. The ads celebrate the
fact that we are such a multicultural land, something of which most are
very proud. My parents, for example, came from Ireland, having lived in
Nigeria for about seven years (please don't ask me to describe their time
there; it's a very long story), so I'm a first-generation Australian.
But, sadly, the similarities between our countries are not all positive.
Our countries' pasts bear some strong parallels, the most obvious being
their ill treatment of indigenous populations. I would guess that many
South Africans reading this column are not aware that Australia also has
an appalling human rights record but, whereas your country is a world
leader in addressing that situation, in Australia a surprisingly high
percentage of prison inmates are Aboriginals, in spite of the fact that
Aboriginals constitute only 3 per cent of the Australia's 20-million-strong
population. According to the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal
Deaths in Custody, of those aged 10-17 years in 1993, Aboriginals were
24.2 times more likely to be in custody than non-Aboriginals. And indications
are that the situation has not improved since then.
One doesn't have to look far into Australia's history to see other examples
of how badly it has treated its indigenous population. If any of you have
seen the excellent film, Rabbit Proof Fence, starring Kenneth Branagh,
released a few years ago, you'll know that we used to tear Aboriginal
children from the arms of their mothers to live with white folk with the
devious aim of breeding out the indigenous race (four generations of interbreeding
would achieve this, members of the Australian government at the time said
as calmly as would a breeder of dogs or horses). Such acts, which continued
to be widespread until the late 1960s, are tantamount to genocide.
In addition, the average indigenous Australian - who were all only given
the vote in the early 1970s - dies at the age of 55, 20 years younger
than their largely Anglo-Saxon counterparts. The Australian government
has a lot to answer for in terms of Aboriginal health, having promised
for years to improve the situation, particularly in outlying settlements
where conditions are little better than those of third-world countries.
Again, many similarities can be drawn with South Africa as its government
works to improve places such as Soweto, but from my understanding it seems
your government is making considerably more headway than mine.
In spite of all of this, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, refuses
to apologise for more than two centuries of wrongs committed against Aboriginals
after England invaded their country 216 years ago, shortly after which
it was declared terra nullius (land without owners), a term not abolished
until the Supreme Court's Mabo ruling of 1992. We can only hope that Mr
Howard, who has been in power for nearly 10 years, loses the Federal Election
later this year and the Opposition offers a long overdue "sorry"
to indigenous Australians. Some, including the Australian PM, argue that
there is no need for us to apologise because it was our predecessors who
were at fault, but surely by not saying speaking up and saying sorry,
we are condoning those actions. There can be no reconciliation between
the two peoples of Australia until this happens, and incidences such as
the days of riots in the streets of Redfern, Sydney earlier this year
are likely to be repeated.
So, from
an Australian's point of view, you South Africans have a lot of which
to be proud. You have left behind an oppressive past that saw such a strong
divide between black and white. And you share a great deal in common with
us that is profoundly positive as well as a great many differences that
make your culture so unique. I can only hope that Australia's government,
one day in the not-too-distant future, is as progressive as yours.
By Joe Murtagh
Seaking the best!
website
Situated in
the heart of Cape Town, District Six is a site of national and international
importance. Its destruction in the 1960s and 1970s remains one of the
most notorious episodes in the history of Apartheid, but was only the
culmination of a much longer history which links the site intrinsically
to the colonial city of Cape Town, to the slave economy and to the development
of an urban black culture in South Africa in the twentieth century.
Whole
page on District Six Museum to come soon.
by Joe Murtagh