Mission & Justice

Annabel Stafford; 2/6/08

There is a new face of Islamophobia in Sydney. Gone are the images of angry young men draped in Australian flags and brandishing beer bottles as they rampage through Cronulla terrorising anyone who looks Middle Eastern. In their place is middle-aged, earnest-looking Kate McCulloch, wearing a large Akubra hat plastered with Australian flag stickers. She tells the TV cameras that she is not racist, but Muslims take our welfare, do not live by our rules and are not welcome in Camden.
They are different faces, but their message is the same. They do not want Muslims on their beaches, in their streets, in their suburbs.

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Graeme Cordiner; 2/6/08

Myall Creek is hardly a metropolis. In fact no one actually lives there. It is marked only by a large corrugated tin hall, commemorating the fallen in battle in the World Wars, a loo, and a couple of clay tennis courts, now sadly overgrown. This June long weekend, as I have done every year for several years, I will travel from Sydney to Myall Creek near Inverell. It is not such a big deal. It means a couple of nights away, leaving Friday, returning Sunday, but it is a commitment on my part, and hundreds of others. Why do I do it? Myall Creek is the site of an infamous massacre of Aboriginal people in 1838. Nothing unusual in that perhaps, as there were many massacres, some far larger than the 27 or so women, children and men killed that day. Not far from Myall Creek, at Waterloo Creek, there had been a far larger massacre, by soldiers.
See:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/lets-bury-our-hearts-at-myall-creek/2008/06/01/1212258640207.html

Paul Daley; 1/6/08

In the past few days Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has missed a golden leadership opportunity. …  Sometimes a leader needs to call a wrong for what it is, and damn the immediate consequences. … Local resident Kate McCulloch, wearing a towering hat covered in Australian flags, declared that the outcome was a victory for “decency”. “The ones (Muslims) that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don’t want to accept our way of life,” said McCulloch, eerily reminiscent of another woman who burst into national consciousness 12 years ago, Pauline Hanson.

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Damien Murphy; 31/5/08

The hair is assisted blonde rather than red, but the rawness of Kate McCulloch’s words curiously echoes Pauline Hanson’s redneck worries about dispossession and the need to curb Muslim immigration, especially in the white-bread community of Camden. Mrs McCulloch, a Catholic mother of four, became the poster girl for Camden’s Muslim-shy residents this week when local councillors voted unanimously “on planning grounds alone” to reject a Quranic Society proposal for a $19 million Islamic school on Sydney’s rural outskirts. Having railed against Muslims who “take our welfare”, Mrs McCulloch, 45, now says she is considering following Mrs Hanson into politics. She met the Queenslander when she pulled into Camden last November to help oppose the Islamic school as part her failed crack at a Senate seat.

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Denis Gregory; 18/5/08

Police are investigating claims a group of young Aborigines were threatened by a man armed with a tomahawk and wearing full-length Ku Klux Klan garb. Members of the group say that about 1am last Saturday, as they were walking home in the Riverina town of Griffith, the man jumped out of a black utility truck and waved the tomahawk at them while yelling racial obscenities. They say another man emerged from the truck wearing a black balaclava and the female driver of the ute also began fighting, with one of the female Aborigines. The group claims that when police arrived, the men pulled off their garb and put it in the back of the truck.

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Jewel Topsfield; 17/5/08

When former immigration minister Kevin Andrews sparked a race row over his claims that African refugees were engaged in crime and failing to integrate into Australia he was acting contrary to advice from his own department. In a confidential briefing to the minister, obtained by The Age, the Immigration Department stressed that studies suggested it was not ethnicity that determined criminal behaviour but a combination of socio-economic problems and other disadvantage. The briefing was prepared for Mr Andrews in response to an article in the Cranbourne Leader suggesting that transit police believed Sudanese men were responsible for 99% of assaults and armed robberies on two Victorian rail lines.

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Phil Brown; 7/5/08,

The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police; Jonathan Richards; University of Queensland Press
The sad emptiness that pervades parts of rural Queensland is a curious residue of colonisation. I felt this keenly when, in the late 1970s, I lived in a small to,wn in central Queensland. The town had an Aboriginal name but there was little other evidence that indigenous people had lived thereabouts. The local historical society ignored the indigenous past and promoted stories about the hard-working, God-fearing folk who settled the district. Of course, for these pioneers to flourish local Aborigines had to be subjugated and “dispersed”, as it was described in colonial times. That euphemism crops up regularly in this disturbing book about a shadowy aspect of our nation’s history. “Dispersed” meant disposed of, run off or killed, sometimes by settlers, often by the much-feared Queensland Native Police, a force of largely. indigenous policemen that terrorised their countrymen and women and helped destroy their way of life.

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Ross Amorelli; 6/5/08

I am wondering what makes one “Australian”. I was born here, raised here and absolutely love the country I live in. Is this enough to make me “Australian”? Apparently not. This identity crisis has come about due to a most unfortunate incident on Anzac Day. I was enjoying a game of two-up and a few quiet beers at a local pub, when the incident - involving a misplaced chair leg and a spilt beer - landed me toe-to-toe with a large, sandy-haired and self-professed “Aussie”. After a few heated words, I was told to “Piss off out of my country back to the dirty woghole you come from”. I decided to speak to the management about having the accident-prone lout ejected. With this done, I sat back down to ponder his statement.

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10/4/08

A prominent Sydney-based human rights lawyer will represent a group of Aboriginal women who were allegedly asked to leave a backpacker hostel in Alice Springs because of the colour of their skin. Sixteen Aboriginal women and children from the community of Yuendumu had travelled to Alice Springs in March to attend classes organised by The Royal Life Saving Society Australia. After checking in at the Haven Hostel at the weekend they were then asked to leave, with management telling them that other guests felt frightened. Lawyer George Newhouse, who will take their case to Northern Territory Anti-Discrimination commissioner Tony Fitzgerald, today said there was “no excuse” for the hostel’s alleged conduct.

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Bruce Loudon; 7/4/08

In a judgment that goes to the heart of India’s preoccupation with skin colour, the Supreme Court has sent a husband to jail for taunting his wife so much over her “dark complexion” she committed suicide. Syed Fathima got so distressed that, two months after her marriage to Farook Batcha, she drenched herself in kerosene and set herself alight, the court wastold. In a dying declaration as doctors fought to save her, she said that because of her dark complexion her husband did not like her and there were frequent fights over the issue. The court, in its historic ruling, held that ridiculing a wife by calling her “black” amounted to severe mental torture, and said such derogatory remarks in a marriage were worse than physical torture.

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