The first Aborigine to be elected to Australia’s parliament yesterday said he was unworried by racist taunts that have followed his win, saying they were outweighed by messages of support.
Ken Wyatt won the seat of Hasluck in Western Australia for the conservative Liberal Party in the Aug. 21 polls, rising above childhood poverty to become the first indigenous person ever elected to the lower House of Representatives.
Since then, he has received at least 50 racist e-mails and phone calls from angry voters, with some saying they would not have voted for him had they known he was indigenous.
“They don’t perturb me,” 58-year-old Wyatt told Sky News of the jibes.
“Throughout my life I have experienced the sharp edge of some of the racist taunts that have come my way, but when I outweigh these by the hundreds and hundreds of e-mails and calls I’ve had, they are only miniscule in the bigger picture,” he said.
Wyatt rose from an impoverished childhood, during which he trapped rabbits and picked fruit for cash to help put food on the table for his family, to become a school teacher and later work in Aboriginal health and education.
When he recently attended the 70th birthday of his former primary school teacher, he brought her a gift that he would never have been able to afford as a child — an apple.
In claiming the seat on Sunday after a protracted vote count, he said he owed his success to his education which was made possible by a local charity that early on recognized his ability.
“I have come from a life of poverty and through my own individual efforts I stand now within the national arena,” he said.
Wyatt said he was naturally inclined toward the right-leaning Liberal Party, despite the fact that this placed him at odds with his father.
However, he said his first speech to parliament would pay tribute to the former leader of the center-left Labor Party, Kevin Rudd, who made an historic apology to the nation’s indigenous people in 2008.
“I think people really appreciate the fact that an apology was given,” he said yesterday, adding that his mother and her siblings were members of the so-called “Stolen Generations” — indigenous children removed from their families at a young age to be brought up by white people and in institutions.
“What made me extremely proud was the fact that her life, her experiences were recognized and the pain that she went through was acknowledged,” he said.
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