“There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one’s native land.”, Euripides, Medea, 431 a.C.
On the occasion of the opening of Australian ‘Ndrangheta, the webpage of a UCL research group of which our friend Stephen BENNETTS is a member, we propose a series of interesting videos and texts from the other corner of the world.
- BabaKiueria (‘Barbecue Area’, 1986): Great video! Aboriginals are the colonizers and white men the colonized; the ‘Ministry of White Affairs’ is the actor Bob Maza, among the promoters of the Black Theatre of Redfern – an experience of aboriginal theater within the civil rights movements of the 70s.
- Redfern’s The Block: In 1973 the first cooperative housing block for aborigines was built in Redfern (Sydney); over 20.000 people were housed there by the Aborigenal Housing Company (AHC), but in 2009 the same AHC launched a demolition project with the typical excuse of renewal. Currently there is much opposition to the destruction of this “epicenter of aboriginal culture“, in one of the cities from which they were expelled more than two centuries ago. See the web Redfern Oral History.
- Wendy Susan SHAW (2001) “Ways of Whiteness: Negotiating Settlement Agendas in (post)colonial Sydney“, PhD thesis on The Block.
- On July 4th, 1975, the journalist and activist Juanita Nielsen, from Sydney, disappeared in mysterious circumstances, while she was struggling against a urban project involving demolitions and evictions of residents from the neighborhood of Kings Cross. Her body was never found.
- Recent threats of evictions of Aboriginals from their lands in Western Australia: Kennedy Hill, Oombulgurri. See also Koori History Website, for info about the 240 years of struggle of Aborigenal Australia, and Stephen BENNETTS 2014 article about the current attack on aborigenal cultural heritage in Western Australia.
- And… the best of aboriginal cinema: Bush Mechanics!