Analysis Of Australian Literature Essay, Research Paper
Racial discrimination has always been and chances are always will be a concern through out the world. All around the world there will be different races cohabitating in the same area. We see it every day in living in America. I chose a piece coming from Australia that deals with some of the same issues that we deal with.
In Clothes Make A Man Herbert writes how the hierarchy of the different castes or races will always keep someone down. The highest in the hierarchy owns all the land while then lowest are merely servants. The people in the middle are sharecroppers . Oscar doesn’t want anything to do with the half caste boy be cause he fears that the mixture of races will make his appearance look bad. The boy was not a lil “niggah” but Oscar still did not let his daughter play with Nawnim because he was a different race. Nawnim was the native word for a dog that is not wanted but the tribe doesn’t want to kill. This fits in with the actual boy because he is just thrown on to Oscar. Oscar really has no choice on if the boy stays or goes, he was just dropped off, but Oscar never asked for him. He also cant kill him because its his brothers son. Since the boy was his nephew he felt responsible to care for him but he did not want to admit that he was related in any way to him. He finally decided that he should just send him down the rail road and that he did. One day he brought him the station put him on a train and got rid of his nuisance. The half caste was no longer a part of him. He tries to get rid of the fact that he would be related to something, not pure not white just as what Dawe speaks of in Bora Ring.
In Bora Ring Dawe speaks of the old aboriginal times. The way they lived the way the acted. The aboriginal tendencies within the tribe and the daily rituals that the had. Now all of that is lost, the old ways have been mowed over by bull dozers and where the old culture was now there is the “white” culture. The way that it was forgotten was to get rid of it totally. It was the old culture and the aboriginal culture was taken out to make way for the new because the new is seen as better. This is shown in And Go So I by Grace.
In And Go So I a brother is moving to a foreign place. Where there is new culture new sights to see, new people. He is leaving his culture, his roots. He is coming from where his race is and moving to the city where he will have to start at the bottom of the ladder. He is leaving his home where he has established his ways. His family tries reminding him that the outside world is different. They may not accept his ways. His beliefs. They don’t really want him to go because the outside world is so different he may become one of them he may like it better there. He may think that their culture or race is superior to the one he is coming from. The family tries running a guilt trip asking him how he can up and leave them. They fear the outside world that is why they are against it.
I think that in all of these stories, Clothes Make A Man, Bora Ring, And So I Go, its not all about different races colliding. It is more that one race is afraid of something that isn’t its own. These stories say that mostly the white race is trying to get rid of the black race. The first story the half caste was making the withes look bad and when he thought he could not make the boy respectable he just got rid of him. Second story, the whites came in and got rid of the old ways, they didn’t like them so they just made new ones. As for the last story the outsider was trying to be accepted into the higher race, he was moving inward to try and make a new start.
This will always be the case. There is always someone that feels they are better then the next guy for whatever reasons they may have that is the word that they go by. In this case the whites don’t like the blacks or aboriginals so they get rid of them. If it isn’t something that suits them it is easier to just put it out of sight then to try and understand it. There will never be a peaceful coexistence of races because of this.
The writings imply that things have been this way since anyone could remember and I personally do not see them changing. The different caste systems pretty much make it so someone is always higher up on the food chain then you. There will always be someone with more power. The higher castes usually do not take to kindly to the lower castes. Mixing any two levels is not looked upon as a very good idea and usually is made publicly aware. Most of the time the different castes are split up by birth rights and there is little area for vertical movement meaning that its very difficult to ride from a lower class.
In all of these stories the white population is viewed as the highest caste or the most respected race I guess you could say. They are always viewed at the top and in these stories the lowest class is the blacks. I find this to be true as of today. Some people feel that the best way to deal with something that they do not understand is to discriminate against it or flat out try and destroy it.
Racial discrimination has always been and chances are always will be a concern through out the world. All around the world there will be different races cohabitating in the same area. We see it every day