In my experience and opinion the Australian Aboriginals probably get about the worst deal that I have every seen any indigenous people group get. Like many indigenous peoples they are over represented in jails, in deaths whilst in custody, in unemployment, child and spouse abuse, alcoholism, etc etc. I once had the honour of visiting a Aboriginal Mission, it was a desperate and sad place unlike anything that I have seen since. According to a Radio New Zealand doco a van selling alcohol follows the van that delivers the benefit payments to these Missions.

One of the things that the Australian Aboriginal people desperately want is to hear the Australian Government say the words “we are sorry”. We are sorry means, sorry for the many many things that we have done to reduce your life to this, sorry for stealing your land, stealing your kids and especially in the early days, for treating you like animals. But the simple sorry would probably be fine.

So I wonder if Kev will make a difference to these people. I wonder if he will whisper those three magic words and I wonder if he will have the guts to drag the nation through the healing process that reconciliation and compensation brings.

Anyhow this was a hard cartoon for me to draw. I am still trying to gain experience and am not feeling that happy with this genre of art. I need to be a lot freer and need to start taking risks with actually turning people into caricatures. I will try again later.

As per usual this was created on a Monday with coffee, the difference is this time I did the initial sketch listening to jazz and my attempts of colour and shading were made while watching an averagely boring Hallmark movie.