With Australia day bearing down on us with the heat of a thousand hot takes, you could do worse than checking out this chat between comedian Aamer Rahman and Yorta Yorta rapper Briggs over at Vice.
The pair muse on how they’ll spend the national holiday, with a novel idea that’s sure to catch on in the tourism industry: fill a bus up with those who won’t be celebrating colonialism and drive around watching white Australians completely lose the plot. “Like a white Australia safari,” Rahman says.
In the short clip the pair also discuss the Australian flag, the absence of Aboriginal history in schools, and explain why they won’t stand for the national anthem.
“Number one, it doesn’t represent me or my people. It doesn’t pay respect to my people,” Briggs says. “Number two, I’m mad lazy”.
The rapper wasn’t exactly impressed by the representation of Aboriginal Australians he came in contact with in the classroom either.
“[At] my school, learning about Aboriginals was them pointing at me: ‘there he is!’,” he says.
Rahman’s lessons were no more enlightening.
“We had this history book and it was about Aboriginal Australia or whatever, but the picture was Aboriginal people with spears, clearly fighting settlers. And I asked the teacher, ‘what’s happening in this picture’ and he said ‘time for recess’.”
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