G’day friends & comrades,
Welcome back to another episode of the Radio Reversal Podcast.
Late last week, I shared an episode called “Refusing to pinkwash a genocide” which looked at some inspiring examples of local, autonomous organising against the normalisation of Zionist settler colonialism and genocide in Gaza. Today, I’m coming back to the core of this series on crisis, disaster & collective futures to ask: how can we think about the crisis when the crisis is permanent?
As of today, it's 610 days since the Israeli Occupation Forces began their most recent genocidal siege on Gaza. It’s more than 76 years since the Zionist occupation of Palestine began with the events of the Nakba: massacres, displacements and the ethnic cleansing of huge swathes of Palestinian land. It’s 237 years since the first British penal colonies - prisons - were established on the homelands of the Gadigal, Dharug and Dharawal peoples of the Eora Nation. And it’s just over a week since Kumanjayi White, a young Walpiri man who lived with complex disabilities, was killed after being restrained by off-duty cops in Mparrtwe, Alice Springs. And then, just a few days ago, we heard reports of a second Aboriginal death in police custody in the Northern Territory in as many weeks. Kumanjayi White’s death in police custody is the 597th Aboriginal death in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its findings in the 1990s - many of which, as Senator Lidia Thorpe has consistently pointed out in Parliament, are yet to be implemented.
So as we look back at the unending crisis conditions of colonialism, what does it mean for how we look ahead? What does it ask of us - to think about these current atrocities in the context of a much longer, ongoing crisis?
To dig into this, we’ll begin by sharing an interview between Han and our dear friend and intellectual guiding light, Dr. Jamal Nabulsi, who provides a bit more historical and political context for the events of the Nakba and their continuation into the present. We then turn to two speeches from the recent Nakba commemoration here in Magan-djin, including Remah Naji and Binil K. Mohideen.
We then turn towards this continent, to think about the significance of commemorating the 76th anniversary of the Zionist occupation of Palestine from the vantage point of 237 years of ongoing colonial occupation of this continent. To help us see the linkages between colonialism in Palestine and on this continent, we turn (as we so often do!) to Darumbal and South Sea Islander writer and academic, Dr. Amy McQuire. We’re so excited to be sharing a sneak peak of Amy’s opening remarks from the plenary panel discussion of the Activism for Palestine conference, hosted by Justice for Palestine Magan-djin over the weekend. We were lucky enough to head along to record a couple of the conversations that happened as part of the conference to share with anyone who couldn’t attend in person, to help inform our collective struggle going forwards. We’ll be packaging those up and releasing them here in the coming weeks, as part of a community resource pack coming out of the conference.
For now, we just wanted to share this short excerpt from Amy as a way to understand the deep linkages that connect the current genocidal violence in Palestine with the ongoing war against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on this continent. For more content drawing these links, check out these brilliant Blackfulla-Palestinian solidarity resources compiled by Anna Cerreto and the Institute for Collaborative Race Research.
I want to quote a section from Amy’s speech at length here, because it really helps to clarify the connections between colonial violence on this continent and in Palestine:
(In an article I was reading recently) the author mentioned that the Mt Morgan mine was once the largest gold mine in the world. Mt Morgan, as many of you would know, is on the land of the Gangalu, and is just outside Rockhampton, near my own Darumbal homelands.
So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole in reading about this – and it led me to another fact. By 1907, the mine had produced $60 million worth of gold. And so one of the original owners of that mine, and the largest shareholder, a man by the name of William D’Arcy, was made enormously rich on the stolen resources of Gangulu people. He then used some of that money to invest in the oil fields in Persia, where his company – which was at the time called the Anglo-Persian Oil Company - struck oil in 1908.
Now why am I telling you this history?
Because that Anglo-Persian Oil Company later become a company by the name of British Petroleum, which we know today as BP.
And so when I found this out, the first instinct I had was to google the words BP and Israel.
BP owns and operates the Baku-Tbilsi-Cehan pipline, which Azerbaijan uses to supply Israel with crude oil. And this oil is used to fuel Israel’s military operations. This oil is sent through this pipeline to produce JET FUEL for the f-35 planes that are dropping bombs on the men, women and children in Gaza. The pipeline supplies 28% of Israel’s crude oil imports.
Not only that, BP operates in West Papua. This is from the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice: “In Bintuni Bay of West Papua, BP’s Tangguh LNG project has been under public scrutiny for alleged connections with excessive surveillance and violence enacted by security forces. Indigenous Papuans have been relocated, and selective compensation has led to tensions and divisions among Papuan residents…” And this is just some of the horrific things BP has been accused of doing in occupied West Papua.
So the genocide of Gangulu, and of First Nations tribes in Queensland (because the gold mine brought in waves of settlers to neighbouring lands, like my Darumbal homelands) is intrinsically connected to the current day atrocities not just in Gaza, but in West Papua.
And it is not just these extractive and exploitative industries, this outright GREED and WEALTH and FORCES OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRACTION are connected to each other, but also that they have BENEFITED ENORMOUSLY from these connections. If we wonder why some people can look at these images of horror and terror enacted upon the bodies of Palestinian people and are comfortable with it, it is because they look with their eyes blinded by their own wealth, their own greed.
Their version of humanity is tied to the pursuit of profit; their version of humanity is a process of gardening; a cultivating of space in which Palestinians, West Papuans and Indigenous peoples are made to disappear, or as we know happened in this country, are made to become less than human, are seen as FLORA and FAUNA.
But in thinking about these connections of imperialism, and greed, I also thought about what these connections tell us about both why and how we fight for Palestine, and West Papua.
We fight because not only are these colonial violences connected, and not just in the past, but very much in the present, but also because are connections are Indigenous peoples are much more powerful than any connections that they have. If their networks of violence and greed are connected, then the opportunity to rupture those connections in one part of the world, means a HUGE BLOW for imperialism everywhere.
Which is why solidarity – the building and grounding of connections – is so threatening to them.
As Amy explains, the connections between Indigenous peoples globally form a rich ecosystem, with roots intertwining across the globe. Colonial, capitalist, patriarchal states try to prune this unruly mass; weeding out dissent and resistance wherever they find it. Our work as activists is not to try to cultivate or control or regulate this vast ecosystem, but rather to learn to understand ourselves as part of it; to allow our struggles to grow and flourish together.
We have been reminded of these deep connections this week in a particularly devastating way. On the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, many of us heard the tragic news that a young Walpiri man from the community of Yuendumu had been killed in an interaction with off-duty police officers in a supermarket in Mparntwe, Alice Springs. Kumanjayi White was a vulnerable young man who is mourned by his family and community. He died after being restrained by off-duty police officers in an interaction that is eerily similar to the murder of George Floyd. The police officers who restrained him have yet to be stood down by the NT Police, and no announcements have been made regarding an inquiry into his death.
All across the continent, communities are mobilising to demand that the institutions and individuals who are responsible for his death face accountability. Kumanjayi White’s family, include his Grandfather, the venerable Elder and activist Uncle Ned Hardgraves, have renewed their calls to disarm police across the Northern Territory. Almost four years ago, the Yuendumu community began the karrinjarla muwajarri campaign to demand a police ceasefire across the Northern Territory in response to the fatal shooting of Kumanjayi Walker by Constable Zachary Rolfe in 2019. They wrote:
We do not want any more reports or inquiries that are not acted on. We already hold the answers and strategies we need. We do not want any more consultations with governments who do not listen to us.
We demand our self determination, our rightful decision making authority, and our resources to be restored to us. This is a list of our demands. What we are calling for is karrinjarla muwajarri, a police ceasefire. Indefinitely.
To get across the ongoing campaign to disarm, defund and dismantle the police across the continent, in the last part of this episode, I catch up with Wanjiriburra and Birri Gubba activist and film-maker Sam Watson to talk about some of the demands made by Kumanjayi White’s family, and how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities around the country are mobilising in response to his death.
Gatherings like this are happening all over the country, so if you’re not based in Magan-djin, check out this post for links to events happening all across the country. The community of Yuendumu and the family of Kumanjayi White are also looking for financial support so that family can travel from Yuendumu to Mparntwe to demand answers and mourn their loss. Please give generously to this fund so that the family and community can mourn the loss of Kumanjayi White with dignity.
We’re ending this week’s episode with a devastating and vital speech at this Saturday’s rally from Gungarri woman and academic Dr. Raylene Nixon. Raylene shares some of her own family’s experiences navigating the coronial inquest into the death in police custody of her beloved son, Stevie-Lee Nixon McKellar. We’ll be returning to the rest of the speeches from this protest in a future series, but we wanted to finish with Raylene’s words this week because they offer a vital and timely reminder to push as hard as we can for the family of Kumanjayi White right now, and to take this opportunity to put as much pressure as possible on all of the institutions and individuals who are responsible for his death.
All in all, there’s some very big and heavy content today, so please take care of yourselves in the midst of listening through it all. For me, what I’m holding onto amid the horror and grief of this moment is the shimmering reminder that just as the threads of violence and repression criss-cross the globe, shared by colonial powers and capitalist forces internationally, so too do lines of resistance and dissent. Families from so-called Australia to Gaza, from Tamil Eelam to Kashmir, from West Papua to Sudan find common ground in the knowledge that the state acts with violent impunity; that all we have is one another. Mothers of those disappeared by repressive state forces come together to organise and strategise for truth and justice; finding common cause in prison waiting rooms and at community protests and in the futility and violence of official inquiries. There are whole constellations of people across the globe who will not forget those who have been disappeared, maligned, incarcerated, or disbelieved. As always, our work is to find each other and build a network strong enough to dismantle the regimes of repression bit by bit, place by place, until these empires, like all before them, eventually fall.
Yours in solidarity,
Anna
(Radio Reversal Collective)
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