Hidden history – Alice Springs and the Destruction of an Ancient Culture

I have just watched SBS’s First Australian’s Episode 4 – There is no other law – you can watch it here. This series is about Australia’s Indigenous peoples and each episode focuses on a different area, a different Aboriginal nation. Tonight was particularly significant for me because it was about the history of the area in which I live and have done so for most of my life.

The pictures, places and people were familiar, the story not so. Much of what I learnt tonight was not taught to me at school and that fact is not a surprise, I suppose.

I had heard a little of the psychopathic policeman Wiltshire, but hearing the dramatisation of his words, his journal writing, his poetry delighting in the slaughter of unarmed men, women and children made me physically sick. His glee at the “almighty” providing an abundance of Aboriginal women for white men’s use had me angry. That a man, who should rank as one of Australia’s worst, government sanctioned, serial killers was able to live out the end of his days in peace, deeply saddens me.

Unknown to me also was the story of Frank Gillen ( I live in the shadow of a mountain named after him). A man, famous world wide for his work in understanding the Arrente people of Central Australia but largely ignored in Australia.

Alice Springs has social problems, alcohol, violence and abuse. When people have been slaughtered, women raped and children poached by the church and removed by the government can we really expect anything else.

The amazing thing is that the Arrente have held on to their culture at all.

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