About the author: Jim McEwan is a retired minister of the Church of Scotland who, with wife Aileen, has spent much time with our congregation while visiting their daughter in Engadine over the years.
Some years ago Aileen and I led a group to the Holy Land. While in Tiberias we all went to see The Galilee Experience, a multi-media presentation of the history of the region. It was very professionally produced, and covered from Biblical times to the present day. As one would expect, the earlier material was consistent with the Old Testament, and brought it to life in a straightforward and uncontroversial way.
The problem arose when it came to the resettlement of the land by returning Jews in the twentieth century. It totally ignored the fact that when this happened there were people – Palestinians – already living on the land. Ben Gurion was mentioned as having at one point helped to put down `bandits` – and that one word was the only one in the entire presentation which could be taken to refer to the Palestinians. I wrote later to the company responsible, who were Messianic Christians, pointing out that as Christians we have a duty to the truth, but I received no reply.
I was reminded of this by `Terra Nullius` by Sven Lindquist, published in 2007, but which I only read this month. It is ostensibly a travel book, telling of Lindquist`s journey around Australia, learning of the taking over of the land by Europeans. It is, as one reviewer put it, `a devastating journey of historical exploration`.
Like the propaganda which pretends that the Jews resettled an empty land in Israel, many apologists defended the colonisation of the continent by contending that there was no significant population there, and that `we` had found an empty land. `This land now known as Australia`, as our friend Brooke Prentis usually refers to it, had a fully functioning, millenia-old, civilisation already, a civilisation which the colonisers disrupted and destroyed, frequently with great cruelty. Still today, as with the Palestinians, the Aboriginal people struggle to have that truth univerally acknowleged.
Jim MacEwan
Nethybridge
Scotland
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