The revolution has always been in the hands of the young

Last month I got the opportunity to sit in Gary Foley’s lectures at Victoria University.

I feel very fortunate enough to attend and to get the chance to listen and learn about Aboriginal resistance here in so-called australia.

One of the guest lecturers, Tony Birch, (who is one of my inspirations) did a lecture about Aboriginal women, young people and resistance in Victoria and New South Wales. Birch provided profound insights into the missions and mission systems and how they effectively operated as prisons for Aboriginal people throughout much of last century or two. I gained and a deeper understanding how they operated. Tony spoke about the ethnic cleansing of Aboriginal people and the targeted assimilation and genocide of women and young people.

They separated Aboriginal people by a caste system which is no longer an accepted way of categorising Aboriginal people, but I am using these terms for the sake of this article.

The castes were half caste, quadroon caste, octaroon, as you can see the younger people have fairer skin and was organised according to skin colour as shown in image below. We were separated from the the ‘full blooded Aborigine’ to ensure we didn’t practice culture and speak language. Full blood Aborigines were destined to die out. The half-caste population, however, was growing. So if they weren’t going to die out the only other hope was that their Aboriginality would die out.

A portrait of three generations of an Aboriginal family, with a boy, his mother and grandmother PHOTO: Australia’s coloured minority: its place in the community (State Library of Western Australia)

Most of the ‘full blooded aborigines’ were older and they broke up Aboriginal people into ages as well as castes, anyone under 35 had to stay in incarcerated on the mission and the young people were forced to read, write, trained to work and religion had been forced onto them. Tony’s lecture was a light bulb moment for me.

I realised that young people have been trying to connect with elders for a long time but the coloniser has positioned itself as barrier and have demonised young Aboriginal people for not being Aboriginal enough while enforcing barriers to keep them away from older Aboriginal people.

But what the coloniser didn’t know , as Kathy Fisher, a former resident of Cherbourg mission in Qld, says in Thomas Blake’s ‘A Dumping Ground’, (p 197), “The government thought they would disband the different tribes by splitting them up around all the different reserves, but they didn’t realise that they were creating one big tribe”.

This really sparked an interest in me because of my work with the Koorie Youth Council. Last year at the Koorie Youth Summit they had Uncle Kevin Coombes attend a yarning circle because us young people are always yearning to connect with our elders. I wondered why more young people don’t connect with elders on a regular basis and it was in Tony’s lecture I realised why.

“History is not the past.
It is the present.
We carry our history with us.
We *are* our history.
If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.” James Baldwin

In my community  young people have lead movements in this country for around 100 years. It was young people from Redfern and Fitzroy protesting Sydney and Narrm/Melbourne in and fast forward to today and young Aboriginal people are again at the forefront of most campaigns, for example Seed mob’s “Land Rights not mining rights”, Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance “Abolish Australia Day” and Stolenwealth Games and Queer young blackfullas like Edie Sheppard and Tarsha Jago heading up “Blackfullas for marriage equality”. Young Aboriginal people have been creating change in our community but I continue to see the media or other institutions demonise them. Young Aboriginal people are incarcerated at record rates, yet continue to resist colonisation and fight for our mob.

Australia seems to espouse the idea that young people are change makers and creates opportunities for them, but these typically exclude Aboriginal young people from that category. I grew up in country Victoria in a town called Portland. The town was extremely racist and although I look ‘racially ambiguous’, like most black kids in small towns – everyone knows you are black. The police, the schools, the shops and hospitals knew who I was and my family. The police were the worst; we would walk home from the carnival which visited in summer and the police would stop us multiple times and threaten to call DHS on my mum, but never on my white friend’s mum.

As a young black girl in Portland most of my friend’s parents labelled me as a troublemaker and it forced me, and I’m sure many other young Aboriginal people ,to devalue themselves.

We know this country’s violence against young Aboriginal people isn’t new considering more children are in out of home care then when the stolen generations happened.

In the last decade we have seen young people die and little to no accountable for their deaths, and with every death and assault on the young black body us young people feel the pain in our bones.

A few examples of this is fourteen year old  Elijah Doughty killed by a white man in a truck spending 19 months in prison and the countless other Aboriginal children who continue to get run down by white men in WA which seems to be part of the culture, in particular Kalgoorlie. Twelve year old Tiahleigh Palmer killed by her white foster family, 22 year old Ms Julieka Dhu killed by WA police, no justice for the children in Don Dale like Dylan Voller and 17 year old Thomas “TJ” Hickey, who died after he catapulted off his bike and became impaled on a fence after police chased him down.

One of the latest under attack by the media is sister Leilani Clarke, a climate justice warrior.

Leilani, like most young people, went out on the town and when the police and ambulance found her she was in an unconscious state and woke up to them over her. Leilani reacted in a traumatic way given her knowledge and interactions with police not only in her family and history of violence on black women by the state.

In Tony’s lecture he spoke about the attempted destruction of Aboriginal women and that the colony will continue to try and destroy Aboriginal women because of our resilience and strength.

Because of this black women’s resilience and strength in her activism and challenging capitalism and the destruction of our lands by mining.

The Daily Mail and news.com ran a story demonising Leilani, regarding her understandable reaction to them and they titled the articles “Glamorous teen assaults paramedic she calls ‘a white dog’ and ‘F**k you white dogs’: Aboriginal teen, 19  as if a black girl who is beautiful has to be passive to the coloniser who have a history of killing Aboriginal people who get picked up for ‘public drunkenness’.

I’m an avid social media user like most people my age and again I continue to get frustrated seeing young Aboriginal people continually demonised and criminalised.

To add to the list of attacks on young Aboriginal people in Victoria I saw an article from The Age regarding the Victoria Aboriginal youth legal service Bali Ngulu which is at risk of losing funding.

The article titled  ‘I’m a lost cause, aren’t I?’ Aboriginal legal service faces closure”. This title made me feel 14 again stuck in a small country town wondering if I have a chance at a better life because myself and the people are around me didn’t have much hope and neither did I.

The Aboriginal community started this legal service in reaction to the young people in Parkville youth detention centre being moved into adult Barwon Prison after the riots shows the strength and resilience of my mob and our young people working in Bailt Ngulu.

Like the Koorie Youth Council, Balit Ngulu is the only one of its kind in the country that exclusively represents Aboriginal youth.

Living in Victoria and having previously been on the Aboriginal Treaty working group, I’m frustrated that Victorian Government are in Treaty process and have young people involved, but the same government has moved children into an adult prison. Considering we are over-represented in the prisons in this country and Victoria is currently building a youth super prison for children that aren’t even born yet it makes me question their intentions.

Credit: Charendev Singh – NAIDOC March 2017

After listening and learning from Gary and Tony it has shown me the importance of how guidance and education from older black people can build so much strength.

Young people need to get a look into the history of violence from the state, Gary’s activism as a young person speaks to the treatment of young blackfullas today.

This country’s attack on Aboriginal young people is not new, and has a long history. I don’t see it stopping any time soon, but I do know that young Aboriginal people have and will continue to rise like a phoenix from ashes. We are victims of colonialism but we are not victims.

Some haven’t made it and many have continued to fight. There will always be another generation of young people to pick up the baton, but too, young people need to be protected because the brutality is visited upon the young.

No matter what young Aboriginal people do we will be labelled as the troublemaker in the eyes of the coloniser in our protests, writing, in school, as parents and community members.

Thank you to the young black people who continue to fight and put their bodies on the line.

Young black people will always be a threat to this country and we need older black people to guide and help protect us because in the words one of my favourite writers James Baldwin,

“People who are denied the participation in this society will wreck it by their presence.”