Race/Related: Australia Through American Eyes

Young Indigenous people defying stereotypes View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Thursday, June 29, 2017 [Join Race/Related »]( [A still image from the documentary “Through American Eyes.”] A still image from the documentary “Through American Eyes.” Gregory Nelson/Australian Broadcasting Corporation BYRON BAY, Australia — I wandered into a gift shop in this picturesque Gold Coast town, and it was hard to miss the rugby balls and jerseys, beach towels and flags. I browsed a rack with hundreds of postcards touting the same Aussie flair, including two that parodied the country’s slang — “He’s blotto,” for instance, means someone is too drunk to stand. But as I looked closer, another postcard stood out, and not for its playfulness. “Australian Aborigines,” it read. It featured pictures of shirtless, dark-skinned people engaging in all manner of bush activities: throwing spears, carving tools like boomerangs, and fishing. I had been traveling to indigenous communities across the country filming [a documentary]( in collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Foreign Correspondent television news magazine. I met a range of indigenous Australians: Aboriginal youths raising horses in a remote town, young men earning a sparse living as fishermen on the Torres Strait, and a university lecturer in suburban Brisbane striving to hold onto a middle-class existence for her family. I heard stories of frustration and anger, resistance and resilience. What I saw was a complex reality for Australia’s First Nations people. It was far from what the postcard depicted: primitive bush dwellers, stuck in a culture and society unfit for today’s globalized, tech-savvy world. Yet stereotypes like these continue to complicate the lives of indigenous Australians. “It’s that hum of racism that people deal with every day,” said Stan Grant, a television journalist and one of the country’s best-known Aboriginal people. “It’s not that, you know, this is necessarily going to ruin someone’s life. But it makes you defensive. And it reinforces the message that if you’re Aboriginal, you’ll be seen differently or treated differently.” Mr. Grant and I exchanged frank stories of encountering racism, and you can watch the discussion in this [exclusive video](. As I have discovered as a national correspondent covering race in the United States over the last several years, racial stereotypes have real consequences. They prevent people from getting jobs because of false perceptions of how capable they are. That makes it difficult to level a playing field made uneven by violent colonization. From what I saw, it would seem laughable to question the abilities of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. I saw it when I was riding through an outback area with Ted Hall, an Aboriginal elder, who described the medicinal uses for every plant and tree that he saw. Or when I was speeding through the Torres Strait on a dinghy, and the young boy with us was able to point out oyster shells amid vast underwater coral reefs. Yet I also saw the country’s First Peoples scarred by the images that white colonizers thrust upon them. Take what Chelsea Bond, a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland, told me about a school assignment her daughter got when she was about 7. She had to draw a picture of her culture. She sketched stick figures of her father as a man in the bush holding two spears and her mother as a woman holding a boomerang. They were surrounded by bush animals. Here was a girl who had lived her entire life in Inala, a suburb of Brisbane, with a mother who has a Ph.D. and a father who was a police officer, yet she represented her culture with a drawing of a scene she has never known. “I use that to teach students about how we’ve come to know the Aborigine so much so that we don’t even recognize ourselves, our lived cultural story, as authentic, as legitimate, as real,” Ms. Bond told me. “And this is a 7-year-old girl. That’s how quick, how early it starts.” Creating change can be difficult for indigenous people, who make up only 3 percent of the population. That seems to make it harder for them to establish a broad resistance movement. The country is just so white. Virtually every news reporter I saw on television was white, as were all of the politicians I saw stumping during elections in the state of Western Australia. Even when I arrived on the Torres Strait Islands, the unique place in Australia where almost everyone is black, I was taken aback to see that many of the restaurants, shops and hotels were run by white people. That lack of ownership creates a palpable frustration among Torres Strait Islanders — seen most clearly in their efforts to control the fishing on their seas. They own some of them, but white fishermen with more resources still have a deep hold on the trade, even though the High Court has ruled that the Torres Strait seas belong to its indigenous people. “Now if we controlled the economics in this region, we can solve the problem,” of indigenous plight, said Maluwap Nona, a Torres Strait Islander and activist for fishing rights. “If the High Court can recognize that we have ownership and we have management over natural resources in the water for 9,000 years, isn’t that an indication to anyone out there to say this: ‘Well, these people can manage themselves.’?” That’s a message I heard from indigenous people all across Australia. But that change starts with trust, a bridge that white Australia has yet to cross with its First Nations people. [John Eligon]( Gregory Nelson/Australian Broadcasting Corporation [Stories of Indigenous Millennials]( By JOHN ELIGON Meet those who exemplify the challenges and promise that Australia has yet to fully embrace. ADVERTISEMENT We want to hear from you. We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [racerelated@nytimes.com](mailto:racerelated@nytimes.com?subject=Newsletter%20Feedback). Want more Race/Related? Follow us on Instagram, where we continue the conversation about race through stunning visuals. [Instagram]( [INSTAGRAM]( [A still image from the documentary “Through American Eyes.”] A still image from the documentary “Through American Eyes.” Gregory Nelson/Australian Broadcasting Corporation Connect with us. Join us at 9 p.m. Eastern on Wednesdays as we examine topics related to race and culture on The Times’s[Facebook page](. Our correspondents Rachel Swarns and John Eligon were joined this week by a reporter with Australia’s National Indigenous Television. [[WATCH]( Like Race/Related? Tell us what you’d like to see by writing to racerelated@nytimes.com, and help us grow by forwarding our newsletter to five of your friends and have them sign up at: [( Is your college student home for the summer but changed by a university environment, with political or social views you don’t recognize? Or are you a college student who returned home to find yourself at odds with your parents on topics like gender, race, sex or the Trump administration? How have those conversations played out at home? We'd like to hear from you. Share [your comments here]( and a Times reporter may contact you to hear more. Around the Web Here are a few of the stories that we’re talking about, beyond The Times. Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech But Not Black Children [[Read]( When Is It “Terrorism”? [[Read/Listen]( A Presumption of Guilt [[Read]( The Ken Doll Reboot [[Read]( In The Times The Times publishes many articles that touch on race. Here are a few you shouldn’t miss, chosen by Race/Related editors. [Young Asian-Australians Carve Out an Identity of Their Own]( By ISABELLA KWAI They call themselves the “little girls” and “little boys” of Sydney and Melbourne, who have grown up melding Asian heritage and an Australian identity. [Tragedies and Triumphs: Canadians Tell Their Family Histories]( By DAN LEVIN July 1 is the 150th anniversary of Canada’s founding as a nation. Readers shared stories of their relatives’ earliest histories there. [With 3 Words, Supreme Court Opens a World of Uncertainty for Refugees]( By MIRIAM JORDAN The “bona fide relationship” standard in the Supreme Court’s travel ban decision could shut out thousands of refugees who lack family ties in the United States. [To Make Sense of American Politics, Immigrants Find Clues From Lands They Left]( By MANNY FERNANDEZ AND DAVID MONTGOMERY As immigrants in Houston follow Washington’s political turmoil, some find ominous echoes from their homelands. Others find a reminder they are lucky to be here. Opinion [Sacrificing Black Lives for the American Lie]( By IBRAM X. KENDI Justice for Philando Castile would have required whites to give up the myth of a post-racial nation. Nonfiction [Why Did Lincoln Move So Slowly to Abolish Slavery? Because He Was a Racist, This Book Argues.]( By ERIC FONER Fred Kaplan’s “Lincoln and the Abolitionists” emphasizes the distance between them. Nonfiction [A Powerful, Disturbing History of Residential Segregation in America]( By DAVID OSHINSKY In “The Color of Law,” Richard Rothstein argues that government at all levels and in all branches abetted residential segregation, and the effects endure. ADVERTISEMENT The next edition of the newsletter will be published on July 9. 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