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    Flora and fauna banished from history

    A new TV series on the colonial settlement of Australia titled Banished manages to totally exclude any Aborigines, as performers or even as crew members. How on earth can the story of colonisation of Australia exclude the indigenous population?

    Creator Jimmy McGovern, who has a pretty decent track record, defended this by saying that working the indigenous people into the plot would have disturbed the narrative flow, and that filming Aborigines would have been too expensive.

    Perhaps sensing that both were untenable position, he wheeled out this mind-boggling explanation: "It's a series written by a British man for the British Broadcasting Corporation for British people."

    He suggested that the onus on telling the Aborigines' story rests with Australian producers.

    McGovern's spectacular weak and not exactly unracist defence is not helped by the knowledge that until less than 50 years ago Aborigines were classified in Australia as "flora and fauna", and have been subjected to mind-boggling racism even since they were grudgingly classified as humans. I can't see much appetite by Australian producers to make a big-budget series from the Aboriginal perspective of colonisation.

    This article discusses the issue well.

    #2
    Flora and fauna banished from history

    G-Man wrote: the knowledge that until less than 50 years ago Aborigines were classified in Australia as "flora and fauna"
    Wow. I have learned something today that I won't quickly forget. It boggles the mind.

    Comment


      #3
      Flora and fauna banished from history

      I can understand why the supporters of apartheid in South Africa regard white Australia as a leading exponent of smug hypocrisy.

      Comment


        #4
        Flora and fauna banished from history

        I like McGovern's work when he's writing about stuff he knows - family relationships in the north of England, although even there he has a tendency to over-egg the pudding and have working class people making melodramatic speeches in the pub or at the dinner table, while everyone else listens patiently.

        I caught about 20 minutes of this series and it made me cringe, with Russell Tovey making an almost tearful speech, but unable to manage any actual tears. So it looks like a load of bollocks and the Aborigine people are fortunate not to have been roped in.

        Comment


          #5
          Flora and fauna banished from history

          Genuine question - did the colonists of Australia really have that much significant contact with the aboriginals? You don't get the sense that there was any "thanksgiving" moment like in America where we were reliant on the locals, nor any kind of "raj" arrangement as in India or Rhodes' Africa where it was very much a feudal colonization involving agreements over property and trade with local kings and princes. The story of Australia's colonization, as I've seen it portrayed, does seem very much that we just turned up, attempted to build a "New" South Wales (quite why we'd want another of them is anyone's guess) and the aborigines weren't that fussed by us, until we got much more numerous?

          Comment


            #6
            Flora and fauna banished from history

            I've never heard of the program discussed here, but a couple of years ago Jimmy McGovern worked with aboriginal scriptwriters to produce an excellent drama series about aborigines in urban Sydney, called Redfern Now.

            Comment


              #7
              Flora and fauna banished from history

              Yes, there was tons of contact. I don't have time to track down a lot for you, but this wikipedia article gives you a sense of some of the tensions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemulwuy

              Comment


                #8
                Flora and fauna banished from history

                trimster wrote: I've never heard of the program discussed here, but a couple of years ago Jimmy McGovern worked with aboriginal scriptwriters to produce an excellent drama series about aborigines in urban Sydney, called Redfern Now.
                That's why I find his reasoning so bizarre. If it was Mel Gibson, you'd not be very shocked. But McGovern has a reputation for earnestness and decency. And that reputation now appears to be compromised.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Flora and fauna banished from history

                  Contact between aborigines and white settlers was disastrous right from the start- although for the first thirty years or so white settlers only occupied a very small corner of Australia. The aboriginal population of Australia was small- it was said to be as little as 4-500,000 in 1788. The more the whites spread out across the continent, the more disastrous the contact became.
                  No two cultures could have been less suited to understanding each other.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Flora and fauna banished from history

                    Sadly I think the answer to most of Rogin's post is no. There was never really much effort at sharing the country, just getting rid of the locals when they were in the way.

                    This new series is a worry and I will be avoiding it. Redfern Now was shown here quite recently and generally well received, although it was criticised by some for "over-realism". So to hear of McGovern's involvement isn't a great surprise.

                    Slight aside: This great novel tells two parallel stories of the European occupation of Tasmania: an evocative tale of a foolhardy English expedition; and a story through one aboriginal's eyes of the gradual extermination of the Tasmanian indigenous population. Recommended.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Flora and fauna banished from history

                      G-Man wrote: I can understand why the supporters of apartheid in South Africa regard white Australia as a leading exponent of smug hypocrisy.
                      ...as a well as a nice black-free Utopia to move to.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Flora and fauna banished from history

                        G-Man wrote:

                        the knowledge that until less than 50 years ago Aborigines were classified in Australia as "flora and fauna"

                        Wow. I have learned something today that I won't quickly forget. It boggles the mind.
                        Well, myths and inventions often do.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Flora and fauna banished from history

                          Evariste Euler Gauss wrote:
                          G-Man wrote:

                          the knowledge that until less than 50 years ago Aborigines were classified in Australia as "flora and fauna"

                          Wow. I have learned something today that I won't quickly forget. It boggles the mind.
                          Well, myths and inventions often do.
                          The "something I've learned" includes, for instance, what pretty much seems like the fact that Western Australia had a Department of Aborigines and Fisheries (last paragraph of the "Update" section).

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Flora and fauna banished from history

                            Oddly, Snopes has no entry on the Flora and Fauna thing, and the Wikipedia oage on it is a jumbled mess of rivalling editors.

                            But even if there was no formal classification of the kind, the idea that this was plausible tells us a lot about Australia's treatment of Aborigines, which included acts that bordered on genocide.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              Flora and fauna banished from history

                              And yet the Colonial governments established a post called Protector of Aborigines in the 1830's... so it wasn't as if everyone was united in their contempt for aborigines.

                              Comment


                                #16
                                Flora and fauna banished from history

                                Pretty good discussion of this, including in the comments

                                Comment


                                  #17
                                  Flora and fauna banished from history

                                  Why is UA's ignore poster function enabled? Mine isn't! It's not fair.

                                  Comment


                                    #18
                                    Flora and fauna banished from history

                                    Ah, sorry about that. Your link didn't show up as such on my phone (bad phone).

                                    Comment


                                      #19
                                      Flora and fauna banished from history

                                      ursus arctos wrote: Ah, sorry about that. Your link didn't show up as such on my phone (bad phone).
                                      No worries.

                                      Comment

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