(title image by author)

An early-morning flight takes me out of Hong Kong, and on to my furthest destination for this trip: Melbourne. As I head towards the city that is just about as far from Estonia as you could get, I reflect on the European's stereotype of Australia: rugged country full of Mad Max wannabes. This is reinforced by the Aussies we see, the ones who end up sticking around in the Old World. Hemingway wrote that in every port in the world you will find an Estonian; an Aussie friend of mine says that in every major world city you will find an Australian who technically should have been deported years ago, and he will be happy to tell you all the visa loopholes.

Of course, judging Australia by its backpackers is unfair, just as it would have been inaccurate for the Chinese in Canton to assume Europe is full of merchantmen for the British East India Company.

The first major landmark I visit in Melbourne is the Immigration Museum, located in a grand old customs house, right on the riverfront. I overhear a tour guide telling a group of schoolchildren what the museum is about: teaching them about different cultures, and reminding them that Australia welcomes all kinds of different people that want to come and live here.

Australia does appear unusually accommodating. There isn't a set of stairs in all of Melbourne that doesn't have a wheelchair ramp nearby. And while its exported movies and TV shows might leave you thinking it's an overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon community, there are actually quite a lot of ethnicities about. Australians of European descent are not as big a majority as I thought.

This level of multiculturalism and open-arms tolerance didn't come about naturally. It is usually ascribed to the results of WWII, when Australia realized that it could never hope to defend its territory without populating it. But there's another trauma in the Australian collective psyche, leading them to make exceptional efforts: their treatment of aboriginals.

As I wander around Sydney a few days later, I walk into a museum in The Rocks - the city's old harbourside slum, now renovated into a tourist playground. The museum happens to be hosting a series of talks, and I catch the tail end of a presentation by Nikita Ridgeway. She speaks about her experience, and that of her family, as Aboriginals in white man's Australia over the last century and a half.

There are a lot of remarkable things about Aboriginals (and it's somewhat incorrect of me to use the general term, as there is a significant number of different peoples among them, with their own languages and other differences). I'll just tell you the one that impressed me most, when I read a travel book about Australia by Bill Bryson. Some of the oldest recorded human works - cave drawings - that we know of have been preserved in Australia, and local Aboriginals have been able to decipher them for European scholars. Imagine if you go into an archeological dig site in Europe, somewhere in the Alpine foothills, and find twenty-thousand-year-old writing. A Frenchman from the nearby village then comes and reads it out to you. Not because he is an anthropologist or a specialist in necrolinguistics - but because this is the language he still uses today to buy bread.

The ability of Aboriginals to preserve their culture is all the more stunning when you consider that they hardly ever wrote anything down; everything is passed down in verbal form. Not just stories and myths, but an entire national consciousness, complete with a set of legislation, and guidelines for finding food in the Outback. It was this amazing continuity that the Australian government tried to interrupt in the early 20th century, by taking infants away from Aboriginal parents and putting them in orphanages and workhouses, training them up to be just like Europeans. That is the terrible legacy for which Australia now answers.

I could not even begin to approach the subject of the missing generations with any depth, but when I was in the Rocks museum, someone did ask Nikita about a topic I'd not heard before: stolen wages. The Aboriginal children weren't just taken away, they were put to work, and were supposed to get paid for their labour. The amounts due were recorded, but never paid, and later the government conveniently lost the records. Aboriginal community leaders are still seeking compensation, and that reminded me of something I'd seen in Europe.

Germany's reconciliation program started operating after WWII, but I'd only heard about it during the 90s. It was aimed at people who had been rounded up into camps: Germany knew it could never be excused for the atrocities of the Holocaust, but this was a lesser grievance that could at least be addressed. Those who were forced to work for Germany, under threat of execution, were paid compensation for their labour. It did not apply to descendants, only to survivors themselves. While the amounts given in the Wikipedia article about it, up to 2500-7500 Euro per person, seem meager, let me tell you: in Eastern Europe in the early-mid 90s, for people well into their retirement age, it did make a big difference. It made a difference between a paltry existence on a state pension that could never even adequately cover living costs, and some measure of comfort and stability.

I raised my hand in that museum, and asked Nikita if she thought the compariosn between Germany's reconciliation funds and the Stolen Wages struggle was fair. I also asked whether the Australian government's payouts will count. Or is it just too little too late?

What I got was a promise that Nikita would come and give an answer in the comments to this article.