Just a Point of View

I'm watching, as I type and through the medium of BBC iPlayer, a programme on the exploration of Australia and the subsequent exploitation of the interior by cattle and sheep farmers. An elderly aboriginal gentleman has just been retailing stories of the cultural, environmental and human destruction wrought by disease ridden foreigners with wholly alien customs and practices. Far from sympathising I found it difficult to understand why he was not celebrating the 'benefits' to his people and land of the uncontrolled mass immigration of aliens, for such is how the indigenous population of England is expected to feel about what it has been subjected to over the past three or four hundred years.

As with the USA and its 'native' peoples, Australians seem to feel that they can never consider themselves to be indigenous to the land they live in and come from, yet the very same mentality that has fostered that attitude vehemently asserts the reverse here. Foreigners, no matter how antipathetic to our way of life they may be, must never be thought of as having fewer claims in our homeland than we. It's odd that small populations of peoples so technologically backward that they live in the stone-age can advance claims to ownership of entire continents that they can do nothing with but wander over, while Europeans from innovative and dynamic cultures must content themselves with sharing their increasingly overcrowded spaces with anyone who wishes to sup with them.