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Aboriginal Australia and Western Civilization
An old photograph tells a haunting story of loss
Random notes from a deep green conservative
About eighteen months ago, in a tiny church-run museum near the main Tiwi Islands township of Wurrumiyanga I saw a photograph that has haunted me ever since.
It was a grainy black and white shot of a row of sturdy outrigger sailing canoes lined up on the beach. From memory, a few men stood near the canoes holding some fish, but I can’t be sure. What I mainly remember are the canoes.
The photograph haunts me because it starkly contrasts a life of dignity and freedom the Tiwis once enjoyed compared to the hopeless boredom, chronic overcrowding in substandard housing and alcohol-fueled violence that western civilization has wrought on their lives.
It is, with only a few exceptions, a story repeated in remote communities all over Australia’s top end.
The Tiwi Islands in the beautiful Arafura Sea are Australia’s second largest island group after Tasmania. Just 80 kilometers from Darwin by boat, about 2500 Indigenous Tiwi live there along with 300 white teachers, police, business owners and service providers.
The islands were the site of the first British settlement in northern Australia in 1824…
