The First Australians:
Assessment task
Dear Editor,
Around you, everyone you were once close to, everyone you had dealings with, are dropping dead. One day you’re playing with your cousin’s new born baby and the next you see the same, delicate baby, dying in its mother’s arms, as she weeps. These are the effects on aboriginal men and women, because of European men only just stepped on the Australian land in 1788, and that was just the start of the ongoing tribulation toward the Australian natives. This letter is in response to the letter written by B. Ignorant who stated that he is “sick of all this talk about Australia’s indigenous” and says it’s “all a lot talk about nothing”. Mistreatment of aboriginals may be in our past, but we mustn’t forget the disgusting, appalling things the white population did to the original owners, and are still doing. So, in order for you to be slightly less daft, im going to give you a history lesson…
First of all do you even know our history of Australia, or are you really ignorant enough to make a judgement before you know the whole story. B. Ignorant said “Anybody would think they have been constantly mistreated over the last 200 years.” Well, you right in one aspect, they have been mistreated in the last 200 years, and they have been deprived of their culture, traditional living, spiritual practices and their connection with the land. Young loved ones have been ripped away from their only families and have been placed in missions, in which the way they spoke dressed and lived was badly looked upon. Innocent people were chained up, and treated as if they were slaves simply because they looked remotely similar to each other.
So I’ll start from the beginning, it’s the 1780’s, factories has taken its toll over England and many hard working farmers had lost their occupations due to this. A small number of these farmers could get jobs, but most were left onto the streets with nothing left for them or their families. So many people had to resort to stealing in order they do not die onto the cold, wet streets of England like so many others had. Crime had elevated, and prisons began to overflow. So Captain James Cook was sent on a voyage to find another hospitable land that can fit all the prisoners on it and can produce resources to feed the industrial revolution. Upon finding this land, the first fleet shortly arrived in the mysterious land now known as Australia which, from their point of view, is full of opportunity and resources.
Coming onto the land, the European brought over merchandise that would produce disastrous effect on the Australian landscape and the aboriginal population. First of all the white settlement brought over the ferrel rabbit which multiplied in huge numbers because there was not enough natural predators and ate the