Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has revealed an “offensive” view of Australian history more closely aligned with old culture warriors like former prime minister John Howard than most other First Nations people.
Howard, wheeled out in July for the no campaign, rehashed an old history war theme when he said colonisation by the British was “the luckiest thing that happened to this country”.
At the National Press Club on Thursday, when asked if she thought any Indigenous people were suffering ongoing negative impacts of colonisation, the Nationals senator said: “No.”
Price continued: “I’ll be honest with you, I do not think so. A positive impact, absolutely. I mean, now we have running water, readily available food.”
She went on: “If we keep telling Aboriginal people that they are victims, we are effectively removing their agency and giving them the expectation that someone else is responsible for their lives. That is the worst possible thing you can do to any human being, to tell them that they are a victim without agency. And that is what I refuse to do.
“No, there is no ongoing negative impacts of colonisation.”
Tell that to the survivors of the “hellhole” that was Kinchela Aboriginal Boys’ Training Home, one of the most notoriously violent institutions of the Stolen Generations era.
One week ago we broke the horrific news that there may be as many as nine possible clandestine burials on the grounds of Kinchela.
An estimated 400 to 600 Aboriginal boys between the ages of five and 15 were taken away from their families and incarcerated there, from 1924 to 1970, under the laws and policies of the Stolen Generations.
There are just 56 survivors left of the hundreds of little boys who went through that awful place. They are among the most resilient yet traumatised Aboriginal people in the nation. Please read their stories. They really want you to understand what happened to them in the name of colonisation.
As little boys, they were given numbers instead of names, beaten with whips, abused physically and sexually, tied to trees overnight for “crimes” like wetting the bed. Uncle Richard Campbell, number 28, is among the youngest left, at 66 years old.
“They call it intergenerational trauma now and it was going on … before the bloody boys’ home was built. Colonisation, that was the first part of it,” Uncle Richard said. “When you try and abolish a whole nation, what do you call it? Genocide? They softened it here, they called it assimilation.”
Price, who identifies as a Warlpiri-Celtic woman, joked about her own family history: “I guess that would mean those of us whose ancestors were dispossessed of their own country and brought as convicts in chains are suffering from intergenerational trauma. So I should be doubly suffering from intergenerational trauma.”
I doubt the Uncles of Kinchela would have seen the joke in Price’s comments.
The Uncles are respected Aboriginal elders in NSW. They are the last, beloved survivors of a brutal regime that did not end until 1970. The ongoing impacts of those horrors are still being felt in their families, and hundreds of other Aboriginal families today. And, until further investigation is done on the site, the Uncles are forced to consider the possibility that little Aboriginal boys may be buried there, playmates who maybe did not make it out alive.
Just to reiterate, Kinchela closed in 1970. Not ancient history.
Price was born in Alice Springs in 1981. That same year in her home town there was an attempted mass killing of Aboriginal people.
An Aboriginal man and an Aboriginal woman died and 14 others were admitted to hospital, six of them seriously ill, after unwittingly sharing a poisoned bottle of sherry that had been deliberately left on the grounds of the John Flynn memorial church in the main street.
Nabbutta Abbott Nabarula, 50, and David Charlie Jagamara, 28, died on 29 March after drinking the wine, which had been poisoned with strychnine. A team of eight police detectives investigated the incident and offered a $20,000 reward, but no one was ever charged.
Dr Robyn Smith, a historian, who has spent the past several years researching colonial violence in the Northern Territory, said in 2022: “The NT was still the frontier. Even though they might not have been successful, in a sense, the intention was to kill people.”
None of this is ancient history. It is burned into the minds and hearts of Aboriginal people who are living today. To argue that colonisation had a “positive” impact, to joke about intergenerational trauma, is to deny and belittle the lived experience of hundreds of Aboriginal people – some the most marginalised Australians, the very people the senator claims to want to defend.
