Australia / Colonialism / Genocide and Memory

British Settlement of Sydney an "Invasion"
By Jonathan Pearlman
The Telegraph, June 28, 2011
"The British settlement of Sydney in 1788 has been officially declared an 'invasion', following strong pressure from the Aboriginal contingent of the city council. The City of Sydney voted 7-2 to remove the words 'European arrival' from documents and rejected a compromise plan to describe the First Fleet's arrival as 'colonisation.' An Aboriginal advisory group had proposed the use of the word 'invasion' and threatened to quit over the compromise term offered by the Lord Mayor, Clover Moore. 'We were invaded,' said Paul Morris, an Aboriginal leader who pushed for the change. 'It is the truth and shouldn't be watered down. We wouldn't expect Jewish people to accept a watered-down version of the Holocaust, and if you ask American Indians, they wouldn't want the truth of their history watered down, so why should we?' After a bitter feud on the council over the terminology, Miss Moore accepted the Aboriginal panel's insistence on the term despite claims by some councillors it was 'divisive.' The preamble to the council's new 2030 master plan will now include the sentence: 'Despite the destructive impact of this invasion Aboriginal culture endured and is now globally recognised as one of the world's oldest cultures.' The document says the arrival of white settlers to Sydney Harbour had a 'devastating impact' on the local Eora tribe of Aborigines and resulted in the 'occupation and appropriation of traditional lands.' Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales state, estimated there were at least 1,500 Aborigines in Sydney at the time of white settlement, half of whom perished in a 1789 smallpox epidemic. Others were killed under a programme offering bounties for dead Aborigines, or perished from disease. Australia's original inhabitants, the country's most impoverished minority, are believed to have numbered around one million at the time of white settlement, but are now just 470,000 in a nation of 22 million.
The debate over the proper term for the settlement has been largely dormant since the bicentennial celebrations in 1988, when Aboriginal groups branded Australia Day as 'Invasion Day.' In recent years, Australian governments have increasingly moved to recognise the impact of the settlement on the Aboriginal population. Many government and official functions begin with a public acknowledgement of traditional owners of the land. And in 2008, the Rudd Government's first act was to issue an apology to the 'stolen generations' -- the Aboriginal children who were removed from their families by government agencies and church missions. [...]"
[n.b. Note that The Telegraph, for its part, uses the term "settlement"!]