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First Australians – Episode 3, Freedom For Our Lifetime (2008)

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clip ‘Soothing pillow for a dying race’

Original classification rating: PG. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Narrator Rachel Perkins outlines the formation of an Aboriginal Protection Board and the establishment of reserves around Victoria. Margaret Gardiner of the Wurundjeri clan, Carolyn Briggs, a Boonwurrung Elder and Professor Janet McCalman attribute the ultimate survival of the Victorian Aboriginal people to the creation of reserves and an enduring will to survive.

The Christian influence on these reserves is explored through the example of Ramahyuck and its overseer, Brother Fredrich Hagenaeur, who bans all religious ceremony and language. We hear an archival record of his description of corroboree. Historian Professor Marcia Langton of the Yiman-Bidjara Nation and Jim Berg of Gunditjmara Nation discuss the life on reserves and the link between loss of spirituality and loss of self-being.

Curator’s notes

by Sophia Sambono

The establishment of the Protection Board is an example of the paternalistic systems of control over the Aboriginal population created by European settlers in the colonisation of Australia. Even though slavery had been abolished by 1860, there were still enduring ideas about racial superiority that underpinned the treatment of Indigenous people.

The reserves allowed the white settlers to segregate the outcasts until their ‘inevitable’ extinction, described by Boonwurrung Elder Carolyn Briggs in this clip as the ‘soothing pillow for a dying race’. The irony is that the reserves actually saved them from extinction – but at the cost of their culture.

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