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Australia born out of gulag. Nothing has changed (Read 128 times)
Unforgiven
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Australia born out of gulag. Nothing has changed
Mar 22nd, 2017 at 3:00pm
 
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/17/australia-was-born-out-of-...

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Australia was born out of a gulag. Not much has changed

When researching the Parramatta Female Factory I found parallels with our dehumanization of vulnerable and maligned groups today

‘Like the women of the female factory, those on Nauru endure the double insult of demonisation in a society they will never be allowed to join.’

It’s a well-worn solution to an intractable human problem involving a large group of inconvenient people – ship them off somewhere, put a wall (whether of ocean, stone or steel) around them, and try to forget about the whole thing.

You could argue that our country was founded as a result of this approach.

You could also argue that we learned our lesson too well, because it’s an approach we are still using when it comes to vulnerable people who have undertaken hazardous ocean journeys – and the outcomes are no more humane than they were in the 18th and 19th centuries.

At a time when I was researching historic institutional abuse in colonial Australia, its modern counterpart was in operation at another remote island dumping ground.

Whenever you mash a group of powerless souls together and isolate them, you accomplish two things – they are easy to abuse and they are easy to demonise.

That was certainly the case for the inmates of the Parramatta Female Factory, who as both women and convicts were the most powerless subset of a powerless group.

The factory, the largest of its kind in colonial Australia, was supposed to be self-supporting through the work of the women confined there. It was a marriage bureau for those seeking wives, and an employment agency for those seeking assigned convicts. Just as importantly, it was supposed to get the women out of the picture, away from the men who outnumbered them.

Once they were tucked away, the administrators in Sydney and Parramatta quickly forgot them, at least in terms of seeing to their needs. A significant proportion of them wore threadbare clothes and had no shoes, but an order for new clothes took two years to fill. When the clothes finally did arrive, they were for children, and three items were needed to make one set of clothes for a grown women.

Clothing, though, was the least of the problems for the factory women. There were the men who guarded them to deal with and, while sexual abuse rarely made it into the official record at the time, it almost certainly occurred.

It was also all too tempting for those charged with guarding them to siphon off some of their rations to be sold outside the factory walls.

One convict, Mary Ann Hamilton, was caught mashing and eating the bones in her ration, as well as eating weeds. Her punishment was solitary confinement. She was tethered to the ground with stakes and ropes and when she became wild she was put in a straitjacket.

Unsurprisingly, she ultimately died of starvation. The inquest that followed returned a verdict of death by hunger and hard treatment. The administrative response was to increase the rations – not of the women, though. Of the superintendent and of the factory management, so that they would not be tempted to steal the women’s food.

While the women were being exploited inside the factory walls, they were being slandered outside them. In 1827 a journalist for the Sydney Gazette summed up the general attitude, writing: “The awful fact is too well known, that the softer sex, to the disgrace of human nature, are a thousand times more obdurate in their minds, and determined in their vicious career, than the men.”

With our modern sensibilities, we can look at the treatment of the women in the female factory and shake our heads. We can deplore their abuse, and feel relief that our society has evolved to a point where such horrors can no longer occur.

The only problem is that they can, and they do.

Asylum seekers fleeing persecution, at the end of their own long sea voyages, may not have to undergo colonial-era starvation. But the evidence that they are enduring a modern brand of horror is overwhelming.

Last August Guardian Australia published more than 2,000 incident reports containing graphic allegations of the awful abuse of children on Nauru. Less than a week later the office of the UN high commissioner for human rights issued a statement saying: “We are extremely concerned about the serious allegations of violence, sexual assault, degrading treatment and self-harm contained in more than 1,000 incident reports from offshore processing centres on Nauru, many of which reportedly involved children.”

Like the women of the female factory, those on Nauru endure the double insult of demonisation in a society they will never be allowed to join. Last year the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, said: “The reality is Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in the 1970s and we’re seeing that today.”

In a response to a proposal by the Greens to increase Australia’s humanitarian intake, Dutton said: “For many people, they won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs … and for many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare, and the rest of it. So there would be a huge cost.”

This depiction of asylum seekers – or any other maligned group – as a faceless, grasping mass ...
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“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours” Bob Dylan
 
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Unforgiven
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Re: Australia born out of gulag. Nothing has changed
Reply #1 - Mar 22nd, 2017 at 3:24pm
 
This just exemplifies that closet poms, like many Ozpolitic denizens, are brutal to immigrants.
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“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours” Bob Dylan
 
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