Sea of hands Paul-Antoine

ANTaR (Australians for native Title and Reconciliation ) has been campaigning for Indigenous rights since 2004 .

The Sea of Hands is ANTaR's primary public education initiative and Australia's largest public art installation. The Sea of Hands has been installed in every major city and many regional locations throughout Australia, and continues to gather signatures everywhere it appears.



















These are Aboriginals playing native instruments.













The Sea of Hands has become a symbol of the
People's Movement for reconciliation.

Now, I'm going to talk about the aboriginals in Australia.
Traditional aboriginal culture -throwing the boomerang, ritual dancing, starting fire with sticks - is what lots of tourists expect to see in Australia. Thanks to movies and books people have romantic ideas about ancient aboriginal civilisation... Reality is quite different. Not many Indigenous live in major cities in Australia, and it is hard to meet native Australians on the streets of Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide, cities were tourists go.
The only touches of Aboriginal culture are artifacts such as boomerangs, paintings, and musical instruments such as didjeridoo and rainstick which one can buy in souvenir shops.

Aboriginal music on
the streets of Adelaide

Spear throwing

Lighting the fire with sticks



The reason why there is not much of aboriginal culture left lies in the events back in 1700's which continued until the mid 20th century. Shortly after colonization, aboriginals were ruthlessly (pitilessly) attacked by white settlers in the southeast territories of Australia. Many of the Aboriginals died from diseases brought to Australia, due to the fact that they had never been exposed to these sicknesses before.
Nowadays the elements of reconciliation with the indigenous population of Australia are a very important part of the Australian political life. Hot discussions were started about the lack of official public apologies from the Australian government to the so called 'Stolen Generation' of Aboriginals.

That's why, ANTaR tries to protect the Indigenous culture because they are in danger of extinction.



Here is Ayers Rock, which is sacred ground for the Aboriginals who call it Uluru.













Here are some pictures of aboriginal art which is wonderful.













Each line, each spot represents something.
The painter wants to convey a message in
his paintings because, it is not just art, it is a symbol.



I found this quest really interesting because
we were able to learn much more about a culture we knew nothing about.
ANTaR is a really good organization and it should continue because every culture has the right and the need to be helped if there are fewer and fewer people living this culture.









Now I am going to talk about the beginning of the film (rabbit proof fence) that we saw before the holiday. We can see in this film how the aboriginal children were torn away from their family and with which violence they were taken outside their birth place. The government does not feel sorry to these children and consider them as slaves. It does not feel sorry to the families of the stolen children either, which cannot continue to live normally without their children. Why do the government steal all these children? I think it is to eliminate the Aboriginal race. They did not want a third race, they just wanted either white or Aboriginals.
The violent scene where a man stole aboriginal children is really hard because it shows us how white people were in the nineteenth century and how they considered Aboriginals as animals just because they lived into the wild with no technology.

This question "Forgive, forget ?" makes us think about how aboriginals people could forgive what White people did to them in the past and how they could forget the horror they went through.