England has its European heritage, its history as a waring nation, its shame as a monarchy claiming nations, destroying languages, dominating and patronising entire indigenous cultures on its own shared island (Scotland, Wales), on its doorstep (Ireland), into India, South Africa, America, Canada and Australia.

England’s own indigenous people’s became the poor, the unwanted and discarded of its new invaders and colonisers; the Romans, the Saxons, the Angles, the Vikings, the Normans; people’s of Scandinavia and Europe. Those like the decendants of my grandmother; the Sherwells from an ancient Iron Age called Sherwell, were probably once Gaelic speaking as Gaelic languages were spoken from Scotland, through Wales, all the way down to Cornwall. My Sherwell’s were sent out with the clearings of the English poorhouses and debtor’s prisons, people destined for similar poverty no longer on the pursestrings of conquerers of their own homeland. In Australia they formed the rural poor and provided cheap labour to free settlers, better off than themselves.
Some ‘Brits’ sought and adventured to new lives in America, Canada, India, South Africa. For those less fortunate to have such choices and free lives, Australia became the dumping ground as a new Britain cleared out its jails.

My great great grandfather, James Bonnell, was among them; a convict whose death sentence was commuted to 14 years labour working for free people in what is now NSW. Convicts were transported, often in squallor and chains to the states of Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria. They were to be useful slave labourers in ‘settling Australia’, for the ‘respectable’ free settlers who would come and purchase lands from ruling white people who had seized them from the indigenous populations. These free settlers took over South Australia, Queensland, Western Australian, Northern Territory (ok, yes, and also ACT) and in states like Victoria, NSW and Tasmania those who could hide their backgrounds often did, seeking to blend in, to forget, to find some shreds of equality in this ‘new’ country.

But Australia was not a new country, it was an ancient one and it was already settled; by its own indigenous people – Aboriginal Australians.

Indigenous Australians were poisoned, shot and driven out of their own tribal areas, their tribal leaders chained and degraded.

Throughout Australia these people with a 40,000 year heritage in this land, with 100s of languages and tribes, developed knowlege systems of natural sciences, spirituality and arts, were robbed of their hunting grounds, introduced to diseases they had no immunity to and alcohol they had no history with.

Forced to choose between starvation and inclusion in a new foreign society, many took on the language, dress, religion and ways of the invaders of their country, forming relationships with these foreigners, seeking equality on white people’s terms and more often denied it.

Then came the stolen generation. An entire generation of indigenous children stolen from their families, their culture, often on the basis they were half caste, ran about the natural hot climate unclothed or not sent to white people’s schools to be socialised into ‘modern society’.

It wasn’t until the 1980s that schools finally included black history into mainstream education for all Australians. So we were all robbed of our true history. The history told was one of pride and conquest, a tidy, middle class history of settlers and Victoriana, as though the native people of this country had thrown a few token spears and basically accepted to become ‘civilised’. It was a history of gold rushes and miners, an influx of opportunists from money-based societies, seeking money gained through the wholesale scarring of Aboriginal land and promoted, endorsed by a patriachal and racist Government.

I was in my 20s the first time I heard about Indigenous history of this country. For a generation of Indigenous people severed from the oral history of their natural families, this was the first time they too heard their own history.
By the 1980s Australia had moved past its ‘White Australia Policy’ of the 1970s and given Indigenous people the vote (yes, not until the 1970s).

It was now a multicultural nation of people of all races but still I’ve never seen a prime minister of anything other than white Eurpean heritage and still we are told Australia is a multicultural country founded on ‘Christian’ values, values that detain refugee children in detention centres and allow the Ku Klux Klan to threaten aboriginal children in NSW, values that turn away from addressing poverty and high infant mortality in indigenous populations in this affluent country and leave one of our own citizens detained in solitary confinement without light in an illegal place of torture as a political pawn in Guantanamo Bay.

Since the 1980s many Australians raced to follow America like a collection of star struck puppy-eyed wannabes. With corporate everything, we could be forgiven for having little idea of what Australian identity is. A multicultural collective of petty waring factions? A soulless mass lost in the heirarchical status quo? A questioning mass wondering who they are beyond the global glossy magazines, reality show franchises, fashion and consumerism?

Rising above this is a simple film that offers us hope of an identity we might all find both soul and pride in, a space in which we reconcile the past and our present, a hope that we might be more than a poor man’s America still struggling to overcome institutionalised racism.

This film is a whisper that just may be heard by those still listening. It’s name is KANYINI.

http://www.kanyini.com/index.html

… Donna Williams

author, artist, screenwriter

http://www.donnawilliams.net