Silje Knutsvik Kalleberg 1STA St. Olav 24. April 2013
The dark side of Australia
All around the world there are a lot of different people and cultures. By traveling to different places, we learn more about these cultures as well as we often become a more compassionate person. We see things through other perspectives and this makes it easier to understand the backgrounds for why people live and act in different ways. Sometime just reading a story or listening to a song is also enough to get knowledge of different cultures and it's historical background. The text to the song "Took the Children Away" by Archie Roach is an example of this.
In Australia there was a friendly group of black people living in harmony with the nature before Captain Cook and his white soldiers came in 1770. The native population of Australia was called the Aborigines. This meeting of two new cultures made big conflicts.
Ruby Hunter and Archie Roach at the 2009 Tamworth ...
Tasmanian Aborigines at Oyster Cove
Location of the ArcticThe white men looked at the Aborigines as worthless, because of the way they lived and the colour of their skin. As a consequence of Aborigines being so friendly and the white men using modern weapons to defend themselves, the land was fast taken over by the whites. This led to supressing and discrimination of Aborigines. In the beginning of 20th century the white started with a process that were supposed to assimilate the Aboriginal children of mixed race into the mainstream Australian society. They were forcibly removed from their family and put together with white families. Here they were supposed to be Christianised and live the life as a white one.
In the song "Took the Children Away", Archie Roach sings about this life the Aborigines lived during the 20th century. White men came to the places where they lived and took the...