Should We Be Concerned that the Australian Army Is Putting Aborigines In Camps?

A short note on a government that appears more competent than my own

Did you know that in Australia, the government is using the army to collect aboriginal people from their rural communities and put them in “quarantine camps”?

No, really. One such camp, located near Howard Springs in the Northern Territory, is called the Centre of National Resilience, and it’s a repurposed mining camp with room for 850 possibly-contagious internees. It’s used to house international arrivals and, in recent weeks, members of the Jawoyn, Wardaman, Mialli and other aboriginal peoples who live in remote parts of the Katherine region and have had outbreaks of COVID in their communities. To flatten the curve the government is quarantining aborigines at Howard Springs, and the Australian Defence Force is helping with the logistics.

Supposedly the government is acting in these people’s interest and with their full consent. But still, it remains factually true that, in Australia in 2021, the army is putting ethnic minorities into camps. Not a great headline, is it? Twitter is awash with theories about these quarantine facilities, some of them quite hysterical, including liberal use of the term “concentration camp” and suggestions of coercion, violence or worse, all part of some sinister agenda to… I don’t know, brainwash the kangaroos using 5G boomerangs? I won’t pretend to have followed these rumours closely.

An Australian man called Matthew Blackwell has written an eloquent defence of Howard Springs in Quillette. It’s worth reading in full, but the gist is that these aboriginal communities are highly vulnerable to COVID, are generally appreciative of the government’s efforts to protect them, and that to compare these air-conditioned, catered facilities to the horrors of a Nazi death camp is both moronic and insulting. Also, a recent viral video of eight aboriginal men pleading for help should be ignored, because the men in question are well-known antivax crackpots who have no connection to the communities they claim to represent.

And more importantly, Poms like me should shat the fack ap, mate, because we don’t know anything about Straya. On that point he’s correct: I’ve never been to Australia, and I know as much about Australian politics as I do about Australian aboriginal language families, which is to say: basically nothing, apart from a few bits of pub quiz trivia. Pama–Nyungan, and Scott Morrison. Or was it Malcolm Turnbull? I can’t keep track, the bastard keeps changing his name.

Whatever. I’ll take your word for it, Matthew. All I want to say is: damn, you Aussies have a lot more faith in your government than I have in my own. Because I might not be the most politically literate man in the northern hemisphere, but if I heard that Boris Johnson was sending the Army into the remotest parts of the Hebrides to round up the last few remaining Gaelic speakers and transport them by truck to detention camps on Dartmoor, that would really set my alarms bells ringing. I can’t imagine living in a country where the government is so highly regarded that it can literally put ethnic minorities into camps and no-one suspects foul play, but somehow Australia has managed it. Congratulations on your utopia.

Anyway, I wish nothing but the best to the good people of Australia, indigenous or immigrant, and I hope you have fun keeping scorpions out of your undies or whatever the hell it is you have to worry about down under. Up here in the motherland we’ve got enough problems of our own to deal with.

Image credit: Ondrej Machrat on Unsplash