the australian immigration museum

The Australian immigration museum is supposed to be a tribute to how Oz was bolstered by immigration throughout its great history. Instead I found it to be a bitter memorial to how the first white settlers to this country oppressed those who were already here, and any non-whites who came after (sounds familiar, eh?)



if you can't read the text in the image, it's:

RUBBING IT IN
we take his country, ring his possum trees,
and steal the carvings from his father's tomb,
and give him in a grim exchange for these
a blanket, and the whiskey of his doom;
then turn him out an outlaw and a wreck,
and later yet our hands thrust home the blow
by hanging around his brown and withered neck
a plate inscribed "king bill of so-and-so"

when you think of that, along with the dictation test used by customs to exclude non-whites who came to this country, it's quite an eye-opening experience.

One thing I learned from Lies My Teacher Told Me was that as Americans, we operate from the basic assumption that we have a good and moral country; we are largely expected to ignore the imperialism, greed, racist oppression, and corruption that makes up most of our history.
It's sad that it's the same in the rest of the world.