The Aboriginal boy teaching Australia a lesson
A documentary about a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy's experience in school, In My Blood It Runs, has reignited a debate about Australia's failure to give indigenous children education and a fair begin in life. "Listen carefully," the teacher tells the class. "That one isn't a story, that is information, or non-fiction - it's fact."
She's holding up The Australia Book, an image book from 1952, and reads: "In Botany Bay, Cook landed for the very first time in a fresh country. Then he sailed up the coast, mapping as he went... On an island in Cape York he raised the English flag. And he claimed for the English country the whole of the new land." Dujuan Hoosan's hand shoots up, but he doesn't get the opportunity to speak.
Afterwards, the children have to find a set of words in the written text and mark them with a highlighter. Dujuan, a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy, struggles a little with the vocabulary, but he finds it even harder to discover the story, for the reason that history he has been taught by his elders is quite different."That [lesson] was for white people, not for Aboriginals," he reflects. "
This man came on the ship and he was the first white man on Australia. The Aboriginal people told them to go and discover another land, because this is their land. But persons didn't listen."Film-maker Maya Newell filmed the scene on her behalf documentary, IN MY OWN Blood It Runs - in which she followed Dujuan at school for a year - and may feel his frustration."You imagine what it feels as though to be essentially erased from history," she says.
