The Tracker

[Magda Hassan]

Thanks Maggie, I've noted the two films to watch. It's a terrible thing that the Aborigines have suffered -- and the usual thing too, when native cultures come up against the white man who invade. It's happened in so many places besides Oz too. There's a film in that, too, I suppose.

Yes it is a tragic tale and all over the globe and the injustice continues every day especially with the mining companies but not just them. Largely unacknowledged by most in the settler governments. So much misunderstanding and ignorance in much of the settler populations as well. The removal of their children was a terrible crime. This also happened to some poor white women too. Different colonised culture reacted in different ways. Many differences between Australia and New Zealand for example. Maybe the differences in size contributed. Maoris got a much better deal from the whites. Politically stronger. But they fought hard for it. Aborigines fought hard too but more spread out and different tribes didn't always work together. Poisoned and weakened with disease. Different circumstances.
Speaking of white men a friend of mine was very involved in indigenous women's rights. She is Maori but lived here for years and lived and worked in Aboriginal communities. She and some other women went to a UN conference on indigenous rights and they couldn't work out what the white women were doing there. Took them a couple of days and some odd conversations to find out they were Suomi indigenous reindeer herders from Northern Europe and Scandinavia before the German tribes moved north into their lands. But the vast majority of colonised people are shades of black and brown and racism is used to keep the privileged status quo. In our white culture here we know it is not our land. Many secrets and silences in our stories too. To hide our arrival and ill gained success from ourselves. Live a lie for the most part. We are visitors here. Alienated. Lost between worlds. No where to go back to either. Some of us accepted but not all. Indigenous have to live between worlds too. But different worlds. Because we took most of theirs away. And force ours on them unwanted and causing damage. But the umbilical cord is still there to their land. Unbroken. True. We catch glimpses of each other as we dash for sanctuary in our respectively strange lands and landscapes.

You will notice in the films the theme of the land and landscape and the inner world and its landscape. The connection and collisions of cultures and worlds and the impact on each other. Often unrecognised and unintended. Some times fatal. Sometimes life giving and awakening, enlightening.