by the white man began like the massacre of the native american nations in the conquest of what is now the united states the indigenous people of australia whose population is estimated to number over seven hundred thousand british colonisers bring subjugation pestilence and genocide and massive numbers that historians ratio could be as high as one indigenous to european history may well indeed be written by the victors but the pages and bindings of that book are made through the resilient spirit of those who lost in history that seek to win the future which is why today hawk watchers we will not only examine the beautiful but tragic history of the indigenous nations of australia but we will also look to the road ahead as they continue their fight for equality and their right to decide not only their own future history. as well so let us learn from the past in order to create a better future as watching the hawks finds the beauty in the struggle of australia's first nation. to.

get the. real truth is what. you. would. expect. for those without you know knowledge you know from the outside looking in and who haven't studied history what do you think is the most misunderstood aspect of the relationship between the aboriginal people here in the australian government and society almost everything it's it's a straight is dirty is secret. unlike the united states which has in many respects come to terms not always successfully but come to terms

with let's say the sovereignty of its native peoples. now there are many in the us would say whoa wait a minute that hasn't really happened but i have to say compared with a straight it has this a straight it was the scene of the greatest theft of land in history. and it happened all at once the late eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century the massacres and the bloodshed in australia especially through the state of queensland. were virtually unknown whereas in the united states they were there was a kind of hollywood for them if we call cowboys and indians but in the end by reverse to the indians started weaving and certainly around wounded knee the great

grievance of native americans begun to want to be understood it's not understood in this country even to the low the forester is one of us really just most experienced aboriginal broadcasters and activists she hosts black chat on koori radio as strong as only first nations radio station though they explained where it all began when they form the constitution not one this nation people were exploded from the constitution so we were part of the foreigner and for want to end and it wasn't or not in sixty seven that they ran a referendum so that referendum was to take the responsibility away from the states and give it to the federal government for the betterment of aboriginal people now since then there's been it would be moving slowly forward but at the same time and i think it's very challenging we had the howard government the liberal government come in and ninety six and he changed everything he cut millions of dollars off the

aboriginal in a budget he created laws that present a spec fifty years. and when when you're looking at all the organizations we have legal we have medical we have all these organizations but slowly and slowly the findings have been they create and i want to like everyone here to assimilate and people even the ethnic community autonomic speaking community everyone's asking what is that main to assimilate into into what. you know we have a culture that goes back thousands of thousands of years this country is like america is built up of migrants from or nationalists that have come here and and built this country to be what it is today much like the united states and strangely is struggling with police violence against people of color well it's more so the aboriginal culture and the police force. culture here we have had. so many of our people are dying custody or die at the hands of police and where the police is when you look at it i have been at fault and no one's been charged i'll

give you an example we had down mr ward from western australia and he was picked up on a drink driving touch with a body from a community into perth into the mine city and it was a private a private prison. and what had happened there was no way conditioning in the truck that they would bring him in by the time i got to piss it was fifty degrees in the bent of the truck and hume melted into the back of the van so you can imagine what that would have been like we had another woman in western australia back in two thousand and sixteen she had to go into prison for unpaid fines aboriginal people when i used to go in there for minor offenses and she kept on saying she was in pain she'd been involved in domestic violence before she actually went in there and they took to the hospital they said there's nothing wrong with her they took a back to the hospital again there's nothing wrong with that then they dragged her added the cell along the hallway took a bet she died she had pneumonia she had all these other conditions that were wrong

with her but no one checked around we had in panama and in two thousand and four we had a young man which is an island community made up of aboriginal people it used to be a kind of like a painter colony full of bad blood so what had happened he was that one day he was a little bit you know intoxicated the police picked him up and never had a charge in his life took him to the play station within an hour he was dead. the police officer wasn't charged and what had happened he had a busted splaying and broken ribs and that and the police officer said that he fell on top of him. so when they got the doctor's report back to the coroner's report back there was a shooting protest they bought this what's gone on into the yard and kicked in doors not dive of people and everything like this and. they burned down the playstation as well the local community burned down the play station one guy was charged with creating the riot so he got four years trial. and other men got moved

around quinn's and another other prisons that they wouldn't connect with each other then when lex wotton the guy that they said was they went later when he came met they put a gag order on him not to be able to speak for a period of time just raise that lie all last year hayes put a case up against the place he won the case for two hundred twenty thousand dollars and then they did a class action case for the whole lot of the four hundred forty seven people are not that's not the whole population but four hundred forty seven people they were awarded thirty million dollars but that has to be recognized by the federal government they have to prove that so you've got why destroying people guy why you're giving black people thirty million dollars. the pain and suffering that i had you know young people what kicked to the floor when mothers were knocked over when you run a and m. in a mission i was told call them hey you call them receives over there. why would you bring in the swat squad in a military with a rifle that we see every there into a community quince that has always had that problem with the police and it's not

one place officers actually been charged by killing them you know if there's a knife in a reparation a person young aboriginal women are incarcerated at something like six to seven times of apartheid south africa and it's lost its in july twenty teen western australia police commissioner christine nixon give a speech at police headquarters in perth where he stated quote on behalf of the western australian police force i would like to say sorry to aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples for our participation in past wrongful actions that have caused immeasurable pain and suffering. i grew up in a small country town and upon a famine queensland never thought that i would never amount to anything but i never thought i'd ever meant to anything i just wonder corrupt or merican play basketball that was my dream or formula one driver you know who would ever think that going from secretarial work and then moving into the to the media but when i was obvious

fourteen i went into a local use i can say and i'm going through magazines and all of a sudden i see ebony or essence it was essence so i saw a black woman on the cover and because you don't say that in it because australia is very white country so i picked up the magazine and as i'm going through the pages it was like it didn't matter what it was a advertisement or a story it was all on black people and i was like. i'm clueless. this isn't my thing you know i was brought up in a home with music so we did a lot of going to harry belafonte and women for that fall and all these old sol from back in the day and that's what queens that was like a lot of people were brought up in the church we all went to church sang in the choirs so we were influenced by african-american culture and then we had marcus garvey with the when the when the bites kind main reason i kind of spread the message about first nation people people of color around the world so that just really blew me out that there was a possibility that i could be something in the world because when you live in a country where it's all white you don't get saved you told the state bank and then

over sudden i thought that when i left school that racism would finish but that's when i realized racism didn't it was going for a job you know no secretarial work or office work and it was like we don't take cover bills and i went what what has come up what about my credentials what about what i've got here on my resume i didn't matter it really didn't matter so you know when we look at today it is things like and not in seven days i bought in scholarships for aboriginal people so that when you went into second we spill you got a dollar fifty away pocket money and they paid for your education and that still exists today right through the university that aboriginal people get that education also today in nineteen sixty seven when they board and they rush for discrimination act but they also bought in and that that we could identify the jobs as aboriginal torres tried on that other than that you know you can't discriminate because people couldn't get jobs you know you'd go for the job at a big as an aboriginal person that i get it so they do have you can advertise

identified aboriginal positions now which is really really great i mean when we look at it and i call aboriginal people savages when you look at it we've only had education for fifty years. fifty years now in that time in fifty years we've got i've one hundred doctors we have lawyers we have psychologist we have academics we have some amazing people so what we have achieved in fifty years has taken the wider population hundreds of years to actually achieve but i don't say that also within their communities like i say people speak three four five six languages before they speak english but that's not embraced that's not embrace everything has to be done in english so it's like when we were going to school we had to learn french and german you know it's like what for. it's crazy but now they are taking a break from languages and skill and distance while say we have five languages being taught in schools if there's nicer language being taught so where there are

high populations of aboriginal people or aberrational students everybody gets to learn doesn't matter if you're black white whatever you all get to land at this nation language faced and it's making the kids fail you know this generation i believe that the kids to die will are more aware and have better understanding of what the past was like.

or you will be in the blood that is your loss of years does do you know that was what gave the people most of all not all what i mean. i mean. really a lot to get me from him he can see us in the fields by you. if you're in the home or they leave you. i'm with you more games. people but people still. we will talk to.

people feed the economy because they buy scratch tickets scratch off lottery tickets you know when i was living in the ghetto in new york you know the red apple grocery store uptown had the highest prices in town right in the liquor stores are open and you buy you know more expensive in the ghetto and build an economy it's always built on the backs of the poor america was built on the slave market america was built on prison labor. day the good times of america the ne'er do wells it's all very well that's over we got to go back to basics. when our mind when the content of our mind. changed there are. a ratio of the level of the physiology that he's at the level of the brain the brain as a formal plasticity can rewire itself and not just the brain but the rest of the body responsible.

for the first nations people of australia has been forever originals here in australia to maintain very culture and there are long history you know through the oppression through the genocide of the very first well i think more so now because of technology because you know everything's just on the net you want to know something just put it in your i phone or you put it in iraq paula and you you get it slowly it's paying aberrational study it is a selective at school so you can learn it if you want to learn it so we've got more of a younger generation having a better appreciation of first nations people and. a lot of these kids are fighting with their parents in the early ninety's they started off reconciliation. to give people a better so it was ten years the government put a lot of money into reconciliation so people would get an understanding of it and

of racism that came out i had friends going to my parents or rice is my best friend of twenty years is right as there was so many fights that they were the wider community because people didn't realise how racist their friends were but it didn't work i spent a lot of money on it but still to die we still have really ignorant people out there thinking the wrong thing about aboriginal people but for the younger generation like we have is what we call a strike a day or what a strike called a strike a day when they celebrate you know all the strains but that wasn't the day it was the first of january when cooking i was here so they couldn't do it on the first of january because i mean he is even everyone would be too drunk to celebrate so what will you do if we have recorded him by day and we commemorate our survival as the oldest continuous living rise on the planet it's exactly the same thing you've got the water protective you've got the land protected now just in the northern territory which is a state but the the federal government can override the state they have they just

had elections raise it in they said they weren't going to allow any monitors or the labor party that were going to allow any mining or fracking on the land they won and what happened they chief minister up there just said recently that they will allow fracking to go on their own territory so there's been at riker's there was a huge big march in darwin last saturday but back in not in not in i said not two thousand and seven there was an n.t. intervention that was put on aboriginal people john howard was the prime minister at the time and mel braff was the minister for aboriginal affairs and i read this report called the little children a psych report that was created by a former judge in the northern territory and a profile woman in health and it had their little bit about sexual abuse child sexual abuse to it so what happened is that the howard government called in the military in the place. and i said that communities were full of pedophiles and we had to bust always pedophile rings but really what it was all about was about mining so they tried to take over seventy aboriginal communities within the northern territory and what happened there if you put

a mining map on top of those communities there's resources everywhere because you know i spoke to stray away hundred forty percent of uranium to the world you know coal iron ore we've got so many many holes here but at the same time you know we're a country that should be the food bowl of the world with agriculture so agriculture is paying rejected for that for mining now we've just got underway the affair we just got an indian company they've been fighting for the last couple of years and danny that they want to build the largest coal mine in the world so to be the size of the u.k. in the galilee basin in queensland no bank or financial institution will back them the government said that they would give them money but we've had so many more people come on now and protest against it that the mine they galilee basin is like the water there's water there so the water runs not just from queens and it runs through new south wales victorian it comes out on top of strayer so we've got to love a darling basin which is the water's being dried up because of irrigation and because

of mining that we have here as well and fracking that we have a new south wales and so people are constantly protesting all the time i remember thinking at the time would you get away with this in another country and the media played a very important part of it is it promoted the idea of aboriginal people really being sort of beyond the pale all they were drunks the the subtext was they were to blame for the road situations but weren't the products of a vicious colonialism. or can the merger him but another prime mental storm it will never come true with newton's population will be able to pull what on earth we are slowly with the biggest issues facing aboriginal and torres strait islander people work in modern dance training sixteen thousand children and out of home care

sixteen thousand children and at home care the incarceration rates about people we make up just under three percent of the population but we make up the majority of the prison system you know in the no one church about ninety percent but overall it's about twenty six percent of the population. suicide of young people as young as i is about age we have the highest rates of suicide in the world had a population as opposed to any other country in the world most of our people have been in prison because of fines or they're waiting on a man they're not even sentence not even sent or we have people who have mental health conditions like fetal alcohol syndrome spectrum you know they're stuck in their. rehabilitation and nothing for them we've just had a big case i'm not so long ago that was exposed last year the northern territory where they showed a picture of a boy with a hold over his head split forward his arms tied to the chase and this is happening

to people in detention they're locked in isolation they are flogged they are tear gassed it's like when it came out it was like abu ghraib. exactly the same thing now that boy has add now and he's won some compensation but they still after him they try to get him at every may and unfortunately he's he's a very quiet passionate person and he's trying to do the right thing but he doesn't realize that the place i'm gonna get him because he's won a case and that's just in the northern territory we the government just approved doing that they welcome issue and the northern territory but our people said we wonder what across the board the same thing is happening and quite insane it's happening in every state in this country where our kids are being tortured as as children said that's better that would be it into being the mining it would be they children being taken away and it would be the high incarceration rates of app of our people you can't really call a third world it's almost it's beyond in many ways it's beyond conditions in africa

or in india remote communities in this country which holds the real they're the real heartland of aboriginal life those are minority of aboriginal people who live there but they keep the faith as it were they have the relationship with with the land and are really extraordinary people and i suppose that recognition of them first of all i suppose the terrible suffering they've been through since the arrival of settlers in this country but also the uniqueness they are the oldest human presence on the earth most free a story ends agree but that's true so very and the land of the uniqueness of australia the rest is derivative it's like you would

recognise that sydney with its tall buildings kind of the york slightly in minutes sure and beautiful harbor and all. very high standard of living for those who can afford it but the uniqueness of the stranger that's not unique but important you little says the aboriginal people who. are politicians i mean this is the one country. that has first nation people and indigenous population but has not negotiated a sovereign treaty with. every other country in some form or another museum and united states canada. even the bush people in south africa but not in a straight the battle is still going on. to recognize the fact the bay never see the ownership so what message would you like to some to the

world about the first nation people of australia the aboriginal people here a little bit out i'm a grandmother now i still can't understand what color has got to do with. it well it just freaks me out that you know if you look at personally i take people at face value i will speak to that the gomi in the straight the alcoholic of the straight i'll speak to the ice addict on the street i speak to everyone my mother used to say to make you know in itself in trouble but i love how you're going to know people if you don't talk to them you know and some may it's like when are people going to wake up i want to make a case share a song guy wanted chemin a day you know when ward's joy love caring sharing but what we're saying all around the world first national people being poor persecuted and at the same time there's nation people know that they have rights but at the same time i have rights they don't have rights because of their governments are putting them down all the time and that's that's what really worries mate when i grew up.

the aboriginal people were the liberal view was that they were dying off that there was nature's pillow and we really sued the path to extinction well that was nonsense and it to sky's a replace was passed i mean i went to a high school here in sydney and there was a major historical textbook had not a single mention of aboriginal people in it and once you put their deemed to be a straight in story then you begin to understand it's there are for sods in the straight that city is one of the great facades john do you see a change in how australian society and australian government deals with the aboriginal people here in the first place and people you know is there hope. there

are some extraordinary aboriginal people i mean i have to say from my way of thinking some of the most amazing of straightens i've met are indigenous. they have a dimension of struggle. that is unknown among many in the majority population astray is a great country we don't have guns and that like other countries we start far away but i just wish that i always called australia than i was out instead of bringing to all we have got every nationality in the world and we've lived in place and harmony but it's getting to that point now where people are talking about you don't belong here and it's nine day and not a stranger to sign a caucasian paper saying that this is our country. and it's not it's everybody's country everybody built this country and i'm just wishing that before we destroy itself that we really have a look at that self and we're like that we're all human thanks we come in different

shapes and sizes different colors we speak at languages but we're all here for one purpose and survive but in our families up and they've you know good quality of life as best we can and that is our show for you today remember everyone in this world we are not told the real love the mob so i tell you all i love you i roll them turn in times have a wall and keep on watching those hawks and have a great day and night everyone. in. my seven years doing drugs my nephews was still in drugs my sister just with doing drugs it was

like an epidemic of drug abuse america's public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse he started going after the users in the prison populations who are we started treating sick people people who are addicted to these drugs like criminals while i was on the hill i increasingly became convinced that the war on drugs was a mistake there are countless numbers of people who are in prison for. a long sentence in this for minor minor offenders in the drug trade it's a lot watching your children grow up and miss you in waves and say by daddy as you're walking out of the business it's just it doesn't get easier. so what we've got to do is i do. to fight the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race on the spear in dramatic development only mostly exists i

don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical. usage. in. a. country called russia no one's ever no one has ever had a country never even heard about most.

washington expresses concern. new hypersonic weapon saying there are no effective counter measures the. final test was successfully carried out on wednesday. cutaways protests spreading across after the death of a journalist who set himself on fire protesting the difficulties of being a reporter the country's economic problems. french judges drop a two decade long probe into the deadly attack on the former president's plane it was a case that's long been the one.