Germaine Greer argues in On Rage (MUP) that the flagrantly transgressive behavior of the Aboriginal male is a form of last-ditch resistance to alien authority. The person who is powerless, speechless and helpless has no outlet but to smash things and people (2008:22). She argues that dispossessed, unemployed males who have been pushed around all their lives by white people turn upon themselves and their children. The pattern is repeated with dispossessed hunter-gatherer peoples everywhere (2008:30). Violent, explosive anger - but we must remember when reading, it's not only the aboriginal male who exhibits this behavior. Rage, according to clinical psychologists results from feelings of being ignored or by emotional abandonment experienced by many of us. Since Greer began her book speaking about the rage she experienced in the face of a tormentor, which sent her heart racing, her breathing faster, the muscles of her throat to ache and her mouth to turn dry (2008:5), I feel I can mention I am the progeny of alcoholic parents, my father's rage in particular born out of frustrations associated with returning home from war, unskilled and often unemployed, poor, uneducated, unwanted, unloved, emasculated. My mother's rage stemmed from living in poverty with five small children and dealing with my father's anger. My own rage (everyone has their own pharmacon, words are my bottle!) of police, authorities and institutions.
Alcohol abuse is often blamed for aboriginal male rage and although Greer agrees that the suffocated feeling that is set free by alcohol is rage (2008:36) she maintains to enforce abstinence from alcohol is not to face the real cause of self-destructive behavior (2008:34) since the black man's rage is directed not against the oppressor but against himself (2008:37). She blames poverty and disadvantage. There are children all over Australia who should have inherited from their white progenitors and White Australia owes black Australia an immense fortune in unpaid child support (2008:46,47). When the white man walked away from the black family, no attempt was made to track him down for child support, even though his black relatives all knew who he was.
These children of mixed heritage, struggling for subsistence with their mother were forcibly removed (or in some cases, offered up by their white fathers to authorities) by White Australia because their fairer skin deemed them more easily assimilated into White Australia. In Greer's words...the state stepped in...and fathered up the children he had discarded. (2008:68). No wonder the black man had rage. He had been humiliated, lost his women and in many cases because of the white man, he lost reproductive opportunity (2008:63).
Dysfunction and breakdown of hunter-gatherer societies creates rage and this rage, according to Greer results in self harm. Aboriginal communities now exhibit one of the highest suicide rates in the world (2008:80) and the anger that aboriginal men direct inwards causes them depression, high blood pressure, heart problems and an early death. She argues that it might be better to have an 'angry' rather than a 'sorry day' (2008:98).
C. Taz proposes in his article 'Aboriginal Suicide is Different: A Portrait of Life and Self-destruction', Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2001 that while there have been many advances in the Aboriginal cause since the 1960s, the internal values of Aboriginal society are ambiguous, leaving many Aboriginal youth with a profound sense of frustration, alienation and acute distress and this is a primary contributor to aboriginal suicide. He maintains youth suicide most closely approximates an 'existential suicide' of meaningless and purposelessness, that is, aggressive, reactive and aimed towards the forces of authority and institutionalism.
Greer concludes her book with the following: It was not the blackfella who killed the Murray-Darling river system, who ripped the guts out of the Pilbara, who poisoned Woomera, who introduced cinnamon fungus, who silted up the rivers of the east coast, who logged, felled and burned the rainforest, who is now destroying Port Phillip Bay and squandering the water of the arteisan basin. Australians are now becoming aware of the dire plight of their island continent, and the utter bleakness of its future. If they are to master the discipline that enabled hunter-gather peoples to live off that same land for 60,000 years, they need to learn a new set of properties and a new way of life (2008:99). There is much information included in Greer's book about the rape of aboriginal women by white men, the bashing inflicted by black men on black women and other forms of injustice dealt out to black women. But as Greer said (although she said it in another way): Black men do rage, black women do Grief!
Alcohol abuse is often blamed for aboriginal male rage and although Greer agrees that the suffocated feeling that is set free by alcohol is rage (2008:36) she maintains to enforce abstinence from alcohol is not to face the real cause of self-destructive behavior (2008:34) since the black man's rage is directed not against the oppressor but against himself (2008:37). She blames poverty and disadvantage. There are children all over Australia who should have inherited from their white progenitors and White Australia owes black Australia an immense fortune in unpaid child support (2008:46,47). When the white man walked away from the black family, no attempt was made to track him down for child support, even though his black relatives all knew who he was.
These children of mixed heritage, struggling for subsistence with their mother were forcibly removed (or in some cases, offered up by their white fathers to authorities) by White Australia because their fairer skin deemed them more easily assimilated into White Australia. In Greer's words...the state stepped in...and fathered up the children he had discarded. (2008:68). No wonder the black man had rage. He had been humiliated, lost his women and in many cases because of the white man, he lost reproductive opportunity (2008:63).
Dysfunction and breakdown of hunter-gatherer societies creates rage and this rage, according to Greer results in self harm. Aboriginal communities now exhibit one of the highest suicide rates in the world (2008:80) and the anger that aboriginal men direct inwards causes them depression, high blood pressure, heart problems and an early death. She argues that it might be better to have an 'angry' rather than a 'sorry day' (2008:98).
C. Taz proposes in his article 'Aboriginal Suicide is Different: A Portrait of Life and Self-destruction', Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 2001 that while there have been many advances in the Aboriginal cause since the 1960s, the internal values of Aboriginal society are ambiguous, leaving many Aboriginal youth with a profound sense of frustration, alienation and acute distress and this is a primary contributor to aboriginal suicide. He maintains youth suicide most closely approximates an 'existential suicide' of meaningless and purposelessness, that is, aggressive, reactive and aimed towards the forces of authority and institutionalism.
Greer concludes her book with the following: It was not the blackfella who killed the Murray-Darling river system, who ripped the guts out of the Pilbara, who poisoned Woomera, who introduced cinnamon fungus, who silted up the rivers of the east coast, who logged, felled and burned the rainforest, who is now destroying Port Phillip Bay and squandering the water of the arteisan basin. Australians are now becoming aware of the dire plight of their island continent, and the utter bleakness of its future. If they are to master the discipline that enabled hunter-gather peoples to live off that same land for 60,000 years, they need to learn a new set of properties and a new way of life (2008:99). There is much information included in Greer's book about the rape of aboriginal women by white men, the bashing inflicted by black men on black women and other forms of injustice dealt out to black women. But as Greer said (although she said it in another way): Black men do rage, black women do Grief!
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