Monday, March 28, 2011

Is 'Sorry' Enough?


Although, today we think that the Australians were atrocious towards the Aboriginals, the British knew they were doing the right thing. The movie Rabbit- proof Fence sends a very abundant message and view point of both racial groups reacting to each other. Stealing half-caste children from their parents was their way of saving the Aboriginals from themselves, more use of the ethnocentric language that drives the audience who watch the movie insane with anger and annoyance. What surprised me most was the fact that the camps that the children were forced to attend lasted for years upon years, beginning a few years after the colonization of Australia to 1970. The suffering seen in the eyes of the children in the movie, especially the main characters Molly, Gracie and Daisy, stirs deep emotion in the audience making the movie more documentary like. And the fact that it is based on a true story leaves the audience shaken up. At one point in the story, a new character is introduced, a maid working for white people. This further strengthens the cruelty that the Aboriginals had to suffer. The maid is put through some kind of torture through her master for providing the girls with shelter, this act questions all morals as to how a human is supposed to treat another human. The movie and other sources that we got a chance to look at provided us with a reason as to why the Aboriginals deserve an apology. The actions of the white Australians leave them with a sense of shame and a need to apologize to the Aboriginals. But is an apology enough? All those children that were stolen, all those families that were left devastated, this information shocks me to my core. The apology that the Australians provided the Aboriginals with stabilized relations between the two groups.

Wordle: http://www.creativespirits.info/downloads/politics/stolen-generations-postcard-2.png

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