166 Unit 10 | Iceberg and outback Read the title and quickly skim through each paragraph of the article below. What is it about? Read the article about the indigenous people of Australia. Some sentences are missing. Choose the correct sentence from the list (A–L) for each gap (1–9). There are two extra sentences that you should not use. Write your answers in the boxes provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. READING 23 a b Worlds apart By Germaine Greer Ever since white men set foot in Australia more than 200 years ago, they have persecuted, harassed, tormented and tyrannised the people they found there. The more cold-blooded decided that the most humane way of dealing with a galaxy of peoples who would never be able to adapt to the ‘whitefella’ regime was to eliminate them as quickly as possible. (0) . Others believed that they owed it to their God to rescue the benighted savage, strip him of his pagan culture, clothe his nakedness, and teach him the value of work. (1) ; learning from them was beyond impossible. As far as the pink people were concerned, black Australians were primitive peoples, survivors from the Stone Age in a land that time forgot. (2) . By the time the newcomers registered the fact that the Aboriginal peoples belonged to something like 700 language groups, many of those groups consisted of only a handful of people. Officialdom has never made any attempt to cope with the multiplicity and complexity of Aboriginal culture. For groups who have jealously guarded their distinctness and carefully managed their intercommunal negotiations for 40,000 years, forcing them to live together in closed communities brings intense psychological stress and the resulting negative effects. (3) . For years, the extinction of the Australian Aborigine has been eagerly looked forward to and repeatedly described as about to happen soon. In fact, there are probably more Aboriginal people alive in Australia today than there were when Captain Cook planted the British flag at Botany Bay in 1770. (4) . Aboriginal people are tough, and it is the fate of the toughest to suffer longest and hardest. The Aboriginal peoples reacted to contact in different ways. (5) . Most assumed that the newcomers would adapt to their way of life and offered to help them find food and show them how to survive. Even when the Europeans brought diseases, there was no real attempt to drive the foreigners away. By the time the Aboriginal peoples realised that the newcomers had laid claim to the whole country and everything in it, it was too late. (6) ; they were outraged when they saw men whipped. In Aboriginal communities, a man who offended against tribal law was to be speared, but he was not to be beaten like a dog. The crushing blow that destroyed Aboriginal self-esteem was the gradual realisation that the strangers they had accepted as human like themselves did not reciprocate their respect. (7) . Hunter-gatherer morality does not permit the collection of possessions and even today does not recognise the value of money. Emily Kngwarreye, an indigenous Australian artist, once asked one of her patrons for a car for her nephew in payment for one of her paintings. The car was supplied, Kngwarreye gave it to her nephew, but a few weeks later the nephew had sold the new car for A$300. “Why did he sell the car, a new car, for just A$300?” her patron asked. “Because he only needed A$300,” said Kngwarreye. (8) . Traditional Aboriginal people will take government money as part payment for what the whitefellas took away from them, namely, everything, but they simply don’t see that that gives the whitefellas the right to tell them what to do. (9) – eternal, implacable, self-destructive defiance. When government officials take over the policing of the Aboriginal communities, they can expect more of the same. They will never defeat the Aboriginal peoples, but will surely increase the bitterness of their suffering. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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