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Square Story
video_tag:
Year:
2006
Description:
‘Square Story' was created in response to the devastating affect the invasion of Western culture and politics has had on the Indigenous people in Australia. The compulsive way in which dominant societies demand compliance and assimilation with their systems has been destructive to so many Indigenous cultures and their land globally.
Ignorance continues to be the most destructive element in this situation and there remains to be an extraordinary inability to look and understand beyond ones own cultural perspective. There seems to be an even larger capability to pay respect in these circumstances.
Prime Minister Paul Keating described the white's treatment of Indigenous people in Australia in the following way;
"It was we who did the dispossessing.
We took away the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases. The alcohol.
We committed the murders.
We took the children from their mothers.
We practiced discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice.
And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
With some noble exception, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds.
We failed to ask: how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us...
Imagine if ours was the oldest culture in the world and we were told that it was worthless...
Imagine if we had suffered the injustice and then were blamed for it...
Gradually we are learning how to see Australia through Aboriginal eyes, beginning to recognise the wisdom in their epic story."
‘Square Story' relies upon symbolism, similar to that used in Pop and Op Art periods. The ‘squares' represent the way Western society boxes everyone off from each other and the colourful freeform shapes represent the organic nature of humans in a scientific reality, as if they were under a microscope.
Charles Perkins spoke volumes about the attitudes we could all adopt to improve the situation in Australia for Indigenous people and their culture as well as all other Australians when he said:
"My expectation of a good Australia is when white people would be proud to speak an Aboriginal language, when they realise that Aboriginal culture and all that goes with it, philosophy, art, language, morality and kinship, is all part of our heritage. And that's the most unbelievable thing of all, that it's all there waiting for us all. White people can inherit 40 000 or 60 000 years of culture, and all they have to do is reach our and ask for it."
‘Square Story' is a digitally animated film. It runs for around 3 minutes and has been designed to be viewed as a looped/rotated film. It should be noted that I am a non-Indigenous Australian.
Artist:
Jennifer Caldwell
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Re: Square story
Hey Jennifer...great thoughts...nice work!
"The genocidal practices perpetrated against Australian Aborigines
were the outcome of policies adopted and implemented by all Australian
governments from British settlement in 1788 until the present.
A people who had virtually no contact with the outside world,
were suddenly confronted with a hostile and alien force. Aborigines
were forced out of their traditional homes, hunted like wild animals,
poisoned or shot, and confined to the harshest and most desolate
climes. The effect of British settlement upon these people led
to near extinction within 120 years.
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
Studies has published a report detailing this history. Entitled
Genocide in Australia, it was written by Professor Colin
Tatz, director of the Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies
at Sydney's Macquarie University.
The report's timing is significant. Its release coincided with
the first of the “stolen generations” legal actions
brought against the Commonwealth and State governments by Aborigines
who were forcibly removed from their families. Lorna Cubillo and
Peter Gunner are seeking compensation from the Commonwealth government
for injuries received after they were taken from their families
in the 1940s and 1950s. Tatz will provide testimony on behalf
of the plaintiffs, and thousands of such actions could be undertaken
in the future.
The legal guideline for Tatz's study is Article II (a) to (e)
of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide of 1948:
In the present convention, genocide means any of the following
acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of
the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or
in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within
the group;
(e) Forcibly removing children of the group to another group.
Tatz's report asserts that the policies adopted by colonial
administrations and both state and federal governments, as well
as actions by settlers, from British colonisation up until the
1970s constituted genocide against the Aborigines.
He writes: “Genocide is the systematic attempt to destroy,
by various means, a defined group's essential foundations.
In this tighter legal sense, Australia is guilty of at least three,
possibly four acts of genocide:
“(1) Killing by private settlers and rogue police officers,
while the state authorities for the most part stood silently by.
“(2) The implementation in the twentieth century of official
state policy, entailing the forcible removal of Aboriginal children
from one group to another, with the express intention that ‘
they cease being aboriginal'.
“(3) Twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological
disappearance of those deemed ‘half- caste' Aborigines.
“(4) A prima facie case that Australia's actions
to protect Aborigines in fact caused them severe bodily or mental
harm. (Future scholars may care to analyse the extent of Australia's
actions in creating the conditions of life that were calculated
to destroy a specific group, and in sterilising Aboriginal women
without consent.)”
The report provides compelling material to justify these assertions.
Even though no official figures exist, estimates of the Aboriginal
population in 1788 range between 250,000 and 750,000. By 1911
the number was 31,000. Aborigines have only been included in the
National Census since 1971. In 1996 the National Census recorded
that 352,970 or 1.97 of the population were of Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander descent."