The Voice of Apartheid — Dark Emu Exposed - And the Assault on Australian History

Sep 27

Sep 27 The Voice of Apartheid

This post is inspired by one of our readers, Jack Tubb, and his wife, who were both born in South Africa in the 1940s and have ‘lived-the-experience’ of Apartheid. They have kindly provided some of their thoughts on the upcoming Voice referendum.

Needless to say, they recognize in the Voice proposal, “the evils and dangers of a nation divided by race.”

Perhaps Australians should heed the ‘voice of these New Australians’, who immigrated here in 1986?

Perhaps their views might be more weighty than those of some young, naïve, self-identifying, Aboriginal activist who we find knocking on our door, imploring us to vote Yes?

Jack Tubb writes:

Apartheid in South Africa

History has taught us that racial division never ends well.

Post-war Baby Boomers in South Africa were born into the Apartheid era, where division of the races was informally the norm under the British Commonwealth United Party, a continuing legacy of colonialism.

In 1948, the Afrikaans-dominated Nationalist Party gained power and then formally started to legislate for the separate development and domination of the other races by the whites.

The description Apartheid was coined.

Born in the late ‘40s, my wife and I grew up accepting that Apartheid was how things should be. Our parents had live-in Zulu maids and man-servants and, although they were not mistreated, they were never treated as equals. The attitude was one of paternalism.

It was interesting how this lasted well into the ‘50s and ‘60s, before the cracks in this philosophy started to show. The blacks, Indians and coloureds had ‘known their place’ and, on the surface, all had been well.

As our generation of white Baby Boomers grew up, got married and entered the big, wide world, it became apparent to us that all was not right. Our exposure to the different ethnicities enabled us to appreciate their hardships and our initial response was to increase our paternalistic hand-outs and assistance. But this was not minimising the problem of white domination and black oppression.

The predominantly Afrikaans police and army soon had to assert this dominance by force - and lethal force if necessary. This led to resentment and resistance, and much of the cooperation and goodwill in the nation was stretched.

As with many of our white, English-speaking friends and family, the flaws and injustices of Apartheid were becoming very apparent. We soon realized that we needed more than lip-service to combat this idea that a minority could dictate to the majority and enjoy a vastly superior lifestyle.

South Africans all had to carry an ID book, which had a number and a letter suffix.

W meant you were white [top of the hierarchy] – C for Coloured, [next step down] – and, at the bottom of the pile – Bantu/Xhosa/Zulu/etc [black people by tribe]*

This Apartheid, where citizens were identified and divided by race, for the purpose of giving some (a minority) preferential treatment and better opportunities, was abhorrent to us.

Initially our response was to express our views and condemnation, but this attracted the attention of the Nationalist government’s law agencies (we were spreading misinformation and disinformation). We were on their watch list.

Many other white folk actively resisted, and the response could be swift and deadly.

Our next-door neighbour, Rick Turner, was assassinated in his home.

He was shot through the window and died in the arms of his 13-year-old daughter. The police investigations led to nothing. He had been a well known academic and anti-apartheid activist.

My wife’s cousin, Neil Alcock together with a number of Zulu chiefs that he was taking to peace talks, were ambushed and all shot dead.

All parts of the government clamped down on dissent. Apartheid laws were more strenuously applied to uphold the racial divisions.

For example, our new church was without a priest, so we engaged the services of a coloured priest from the nearby coloured township. The police objected, but we ignored them. Then one Sunday, they pulled him up on a traffic pretext, hauled him out of his car, and beat him up.

During those times schools were strictly segregated. My wife took a job as a teacher in a coloured school. The first and only white teacher, at that time, in a coloured school. This displeased the authorities – and caused concern when the rioting and boycotts grew.

This, together with my friendly relationships with my coloured colleagues, was too much for the authorities. We were threatened, interrogated and had our phone tapped.

For our own safety, and the future of our three young children, we had to leave South Africa. Our emigration papers were processed post haste by the South African government. They were pleased to see us go.

We arrived in Australia in 1986 and were delighted with the friendly and peaceful new home we had come to.

I share all this to point out the evils and dangers of a nation divided by race, where one group seeks to dominate and gain advantage over all the other racial or ethnic groups.

We are alarmed and deeply disappointed at how unity in Australia is failing, and how divided we have become, especially during the Voice referendum campaign.

It is immediately apparent to my wife and I that many Australians, who claim some Aboriginal heritage, are working with their supporters to introduce a version of Apartheid here.

They might not recognize that what they are doing is basically Apartheid, but the push to ‘label’ Australian citizens as Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islanders, or non-Aboriginal will divide us by race and ethnic origins. This racial and ethnic division will be further entrenched when there is a requirement to treat those from each racial or ethnic category differently.

Having lived through forty years of Apartheid, and having seen its effects at close quarters, I can assure you that Australia is following the Apartheid path. The divisions are being widened and communities are being pushed apart.

We now even have three different flags. That is hardly an act of unity.

My wife and I endured decades of the lived-experience of Apartheid, and we didn’t like it. We don’t want it here in our new home. We resisted Apartheid in South Africa and we will resist it in Australia.

White domination ended in South Africa in 1994 when Nelson Mandela became president. However, the legacy of Apartheid still exists, with division and corruption leading South Africa, year by year, towards the status of a failed state.

History has taught us that racial division in a society never ends well.

We will be voting NO.

Jack Tubb, formerly of Durban, South Africa, now a South Australian

* See Further Reading Section below for examples of ID cards sourced by Dark Emu Exposed

Until recently in Australia, ID documents were issued only on the basis of membership to things such as, citizenship (for example, an Australian passport), or as part of a civil society grouping (e.g., Labor Party card or workplace/company ID tag) or a skill or trade grouping (e.g., driving or shooting licence and ID).

None of these ID categories had anything to do with race, ethnicity or ancestry. There were no comparative ID’s in Australia that one could equate to South Africa’s racially motivated, Apartheid Identity Cards.

Until now.

Consider the new, dark shoots of raw racism that are starting to appear in Australia.

A consequence of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and its first offspring, the Voice, is that a special “voice” for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders will need be enshrined within our Constitution.

The Prime Minister and his Labor Party are committed to this enshrinment “in full”.

Therefore, to be effective politically and administratively, Australia will need at some stage to define who those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australian’s actually are.

The current accepted definition is the 3-part rule for the Definition Aboriginality, one part of which is measured by descent - that is, ancestry, genetics, DNA, race or ethnicity.

As our South African contributor warned us above, this is the slippery slope of “the evils and dangers of a nation divided by race.”

The Voice is not the “modest and gracious” first child of the Uluru statement.

Instead, it is the evil changeling that will morph over time into an Australian version of Apartheid.

As evidence for our fears, consider the appearance of a new type of ID certificate in Australia, one based solely on identifying its recipient by race - the Confirmation of Aboriginality.

Critics of our fears, such as Chris Kenny (see Section 2 below), can scoff all they want every time we raise the issue of Apartheid, but Figure 4 shows the type of ‘race-based’ ID being steadily introduced into Australia.

This Confirmation of Aboriginality is a legally acceptable, and often a compulsorily required, document relied upon by many government departments in Australia (see here for example).

In our opinion, the Confirmation of Aboriginality is an early precursor of a future Apartheid-style, race-based ID card, something that will become more commonplace in Australia should the Uluru Statement from the Heart be implemented in full.

**Figure 4 - Said to be an Australian “Confirmation of Aboriginality” of ‘Aboriginal’ man Lance Puckeridge.** ***Source***

Section 2 - Will the Adoption of the Voice Really create an Apartheid in Australia?

Two SkyNews commentators, Andrew Bolt and Cory Bernardi, have used the analogy that the Voice will create an “Apartheid” state in Australia.

There has been much criticism of this view.

**Figure 5 - Excerpt from an article by journalist Chris Kenny.** *Source: The Australian 3 June 2023*

**Figure 6 - David Penberthy in the Adelaide Advertiser.** *Source:* *Adelaide Advertiser, 2 Sept 2023*

The notion that the Voice is being promoted by the No-campaign as an Australian version of Apartheid, is of considerable concern to those in the Yes-campaign, so much so that a formal ‘fact-checking’ exercise was undertaken by recognised* fact-checker ‘experts’, RMIT University.

[* Until recently, but that is another story]

**Figures 7 - RMIT Fact-checker : Conclusions on Equating The Voice to Apartheid.** *Source*

The RMIT Fact-checkers concluded that these claims were ‘false information’ and consequently, they successfully obtained a ‘false information’ block on Facebook for the SkyNews Apartheid claims.

Welcome to the world of ‘free-speech’ in Australia today.

**Figure 8 - Successful ‘false information’ block obtained on *Facebook* of Cory Bernardi’s comments that,**
***“… if [the Voice] succeeds it is going to divide our nation along racial lines creating an apartheid system of governance. It’s flat out racist … “*** *Source*

In our opinion, the RMIT Fact-checkers are incorrect in condemning correlations being made between the concepts of Apartheid and the Voice.

Their error lies in adopting a definition of Apartheid that is anachronistic.

They do this consciously, we believe, so that they can setup a straw-man argument based around modern definitions of Apartheid - the argument that the Voice as proposed is merely a ‘modest and generous request’ that is inclusive, whereas Apartheid, as defined by their preferred United Nation’s definition, is “crime against humanity” and describes it as divisive and “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”.

Thus, many commentators are convinced by this ‘fact-checked’ argument and they condemn Voice and Apartheid comparisons as , “grotesque”, “absurd” or “overblown” (see Figures 5 and 6 above).

This then becomes a straw-man argument in contemporary Australia, where our critics can quite logically strike down our Voice/Apartheid analogy by saying, “look how crazy you are to equate the Voice with the Apartheid system - the Voice is a modest request for Aborigines to be heard on matters that affect them, whereas you crazy No-voting people are saying it will be like South Africa’s repugnant Apartheid system, with its “inhuman acts”, “crimes against humanity” and “racial oppression.”

But the Yes-campaign don’t know their South African and Commonwealth history and consequently, in our opinion, are spreading misinformation and disinformation themselves.

History shows that Apartheid did not start out as the “inhumane” and “racist” ideology that it ultimately became.

In fact, it started as a “modest” and in many ways a logical policy for a perceived problem - how do disparate races, or ethnic groups, from vastly different socio-economic and ‘civilizational’ back-grounds, live together honourably and peacefully in one country.

This is a fundamental and persistent ‘problem’ we modern humans have had to grapple with on a regular basis over the past 3000 years or so.

Get it wrong and a society ends in chaos, slaughter and Hell on Earth (think Jewish pogroms in medieval times, WWII and the Nazis, the many Balkan Wars, Lebanon, Rwanda and those still on the potential path to Hell today, South Africa, Sudan, Zimbabwe & Ukraine).

Get it right and mankind can achieve that rare-flowering of freedom, equality and the full human potential of Heaven on Earth (think Australia and….. ? - keep thinking and let us know if you find another that equals us).

It was true that the definition that the RMIT Fact-checker’s used, when they compared Apartheid to the Voice, is the definition of what Apartheid became, but it is not the definition of what Apartheid was when it was conceived.

And that is point that we, and commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Cori Berardi, are making. We are all sounding a warning that this “modest and generous” proposal called the Voice will ultimately morph over the coming decades into the racist ideology that was Apartheid.

We are asking Australians to compare what we are being offered today in 21st century Australia [the Voice proposal as a solution to a perceived political problem], with what was offered initially to South Africans by the proponents of Apartheid as a political proposal to their perceived racial and ethnic problem in the early- to mid-20th century Southern Africa.

In the following sections, we will provide excerpts from a number of sources as evidence for our thesis that Australia is at a critical political and economic crossroad - one of those existential times in our history where we, the average voting punter, has the destiny of our country in our hands [think the 1975 constitutional crisis, the decision to de-colonise and federate in 1901, the choice of a working & middle class, settler society over an elite, aristocratic squattocracy in the 1840-60s, a free-trade & open economy over a high-regulated, closed one in the Hawke/Keating years, et al].

South Africa could have decided to lead the way in de-colonising and federating a number of the multi-racial/ethnic states and colonies that were in existence in the early 1900s in Southern Africa.

The Australian project took that fork in the road in 1901, with the aim of opening up its society to include all classes of people equally, admittedly based around a more homogenous initial population. Australia therefore ultimately had the correct systems in place so that it was able to cope with, and indeed thrive despite, the socio-cultural changes that were to come with the mass, post-war migration of many races and ethnic groups.

Southern Africa instead, from around 1900 followed the other fork in the road - the states and colonies closing in on themselves and going for the divisiveness of “separateness” - each colony, state or tribe was to develop on its own, based around a particular race or ethic group. This separateness, or “apartheid” in Afrikaans, began slowly with what was probably considered at the time, “modest” and even “generous” logical pieces of legislation.

For example, intending Yes-voters in the Voice referendum should read the opening paragraph, and the other excerpts, from South Africa’s 1913 Natives’ Land Act (Figure 9). They undoubtably would get the ‘vibe' that the drafters of the 1913 Act had the best of intentions for the Native peoples of South Africa - guaranteed land rights, connections to country and exclusive land ownership and protections from usurpers.

In many ways, this legislation was 80 years ahead of the Native Title gains of Australia’s Aborigines.

“ TO Make further provision as to the purchase and leasing of Land by Natives and other Persons in the several parts of the Union and for other purposes in connection with the ownership and occupation of Land by Natives and other Persons.”

Figure 9 - First page excerpt of South Africa’s Natives’ Land Act 1913 with the same lofty ‘land rights’ and ‘connection’ to country by Natives as espoused in the rhetoric of the Yes-Campaign Voice supporters in Australia in 2023. *Source:* *Full File here*

The Act even contained a definition of “native” that would not have looked out of place in any legislation in the Australian context.

Yet this “modest and generous” South African Natives’ Land Act of 1913 went on to form a foundational piece of legislation that supported the full-blown, Apartheid regime in its goal of segregating blacks and whites into homelands and colour-coded townships in South Africa.

Like many Voice-supporting Australians today, it is quite possible that many South Africans of goodwill in 1913 hoped that this Natives’ Land Act would be a “modest and generous” offer that would ‘close the gap’ on the disadvantages between blacks and whites. How wrong did their hopes turn out to be!

Fast forward to Australia in 2018 and consider the news item in Figure 10, describing the restriction of access to the formerly publicly owned, Wollumbin Mountain [Mount Warning] National Park.

It is our contention that this is a perfect example of how the Voice will be further weaponised by Aboriginal activists to persue their version of an Australian-style Apartheid system across huge sections of our country and society.

The official Wollumbin National Park website tells us that,

Captain Cook named it Mount Warning, but to the Aboriginal community, it's a sacred place known as Wollumbin. The Wollumbin summit was declared an Aboriginal Place by the NSW Government in 2014, formerly recognising the cultural connection of this place to Aboriginal people. Wollumbin is of great significance to many Aboriginal communities across Australia, and particularly the Bundjalung and Githabul Nations. The Traditional Custodians and Aboriginal communities associated with Wollumbin continue to care for and manage Country, as well as their sacred spiritual sites and places.

Summarising this in racialized terms, terms that a die-hard, Apartheid-supporting Afrikaaner might feel comfortable using, we could say that, ‘white people’ are now barred from this public area, which in future is solely the preserve of ‘black people’.

This example of ‘segregation’ occurred even without a constitutionally enshrined Voice because of its high political value - it was a very popular area for ‘white’ people and tourists and it was named and ‘discovered’ by that arch-villain, Captain Cook.

The Aboriginal activists thus deemed it a worthy prize in the ‘war against modern Australia’ and they put in a large amount of effort to ‘reclaim this area for blacks’.

[We ask readers to excuse our overt racialised language - we are just trying to emphasis what is at stake here with the Voice. It will create massive divisions within our society based solely on race and ethnicity. This will invariably lead to racialised language becoming the norm, along with a push-back by non-blacks, who will now feel disenfranchised in their own country. Welcome to Apartheid and a new racialised South African-style Australia]

The sentiments illustrated above are why we claim that the Uluru Statement, and its changelings, The Voice, Treaty and Truth-telling are the dark raw racist shoots of Apartheid starting to sprout in Australia.

The Voice will not be full-on Apartheid at first to be fair, but it will be the slippery slope of what will become the same evil and racist Apartheid that the naive South Africans of goodwill in 1913 did not think they were signing up to.

Section 3 - An Insightful Book : Apartheid. A History by Brian Lapping

In 1986, the same year that our contributor JT above fled South Africa with his wife and three children, a book was published, Apartheid. A History, by Granada Television journalist and documentary writer, Brian Lapping.

Our Dark Emu Exposed copy was picked up in a second-hand book store. It was a cancelled copy from the Upper Murray Regional Library in Wodonga Victoria. Presumably some years ago, the librarian had thought it was time for the book to go, and off into the second-hand bookstore trade it went.

South Africa’s Apartheid system was no more, just a footnote in the political history of mankind, so what use could this old book have to modern Australians, the librarian perhaps thought.

Yet when I, the editor at DEE, first opened the front cover and read the inside dust jacket I nearly fell off my chair. Here were some words of the utmost prescience, in this year of the Voice; words that solidly confirmed in my mind that the Voice is the one of the stepping stones to an Australian-style Apartheid.

Figure 11 - Words from inside the dust jacket of Brian Lapping’s *Apartheid. A History*, Grafton Books, 1986. Words that would resonate with No-voters 40 years later in Australia, during the Voice referendum. “History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.”

These words, inside this humble dust jacket, are screaming at us today that the RMIT Fact-checkers are wrong. The Voice really is the start of Apartheid.

The Voice might sound like a good idea, a “modest and gracious” proposal, but it is in fact just one more ‘step along the fatal road that seemed to work’, as we head towards the evil disaster that will be Apartheid in Australia.

In the Introduction to his book, Brian Lapping speaks of Apartheid as a ‘strange disease that afflicted the South African body politic.’

It is our thesis that there are an increasing number (based on the increasing pre-poll results for the No-vote, as of 3 weeks out from the referendum date) of Australians who are recognising the Voice as a similar, ‘strange disease that is afflicting the Australian body politic.’

**Figure 12 - Page 1 of Introduction of Brian Lapping’s, *Apartheid. A History,* Grafton Books, 1986, p.xiii**

Another insightful observation that we took from Lapping’s book, is when he describes the Afrikaaner’s experience under British colonial rule.

It appears to us, that if we just substitute the word Aboriginal for Afrikaner in the following pages, Lapping’s commentary just as easily describes the situation in Australian politics today, as it did in South Africa back then.

The hatred by the Afrikaner of their status under the British colonial rule appears to match that, in thought, words and action, of the modern Aboriginal political activists, such as Marcia Langton, Thomas Mayo, Noel Pearson and Megan Davis. The perception these Aboriginal activists have of their people’s political status in Australia today, looks analogous to us to how the Afrikaner political leaders might have once felt.

**Figures 13A&B -** **Brian Lapping, *Apartheid. A History,* Grafton Books, 1986, p.xvi-xvii**

For those readers who are still not convinced that the seed of a future, Australian-style Apartheid system is contained within the Voice proposal, consider two politicians spruiking the reasons why their electorates should vote for their proposals for “separateness”.

In the following film clip, we can hear the words and sentiment of H. F. Verwoerd - commonly regarded as the architect of Apartheid in South Africa by the developments he undertook during the 1950s as minister of native affairs and then as prime minister. Verwoerd described Apartheid as a "policy of good neighbourliness."

We ask our viewers to compare, in the same film-clip, his words and sentiments with those of our Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, the political champion of The Voice.

Are the Uluru Statement, the Voice and Treaty, those “generous and gracious”, anti-assimilationist policies, proposed by our PM and Labor for Australia’s First Nations peoples, all that different to H.F. Verwoerd’s "policy of good neighbourliness", his Apartheid? We think not.

Section 4 - Further, Further Reading - Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and 1939 to 1948.

**Figure 14 - Daniel Malan's (left) pro-Apartheid stance won the Reunited National Party the 1948 general election against Jan Smut (right).** **Both added to ‘Apartheid’ in its early life.**

Jan Smuts ended his second term in office as PM, by losing to his political opponents, the National Party at the 1948 general election.

The Nationals then committed to the “implementation in full” of Apartheid to its logical and evil end.

Although Smuts was an internationalist who played a key role in establishing and defining the League of Nations, United Nations and Commonwealth of Nations, he supported racial segregation and opposed democratic non-racial rule.

We have taken some excerpts from Australian historian, Keith Hancock’s, two-volume biography of Smuts to illustrate some of the remarkable similarities between the words used to describe Apartheid and the status of black political power in South Africa in Smut’s time, compared to the commentary of Aboriginal political activists in Australia today.