Remembering Babylon

After a national tragedy has struck the United States, a group of survivors now has to learn how to survive on their own. In Alas, Babylon a nuclear war has just started that has majorly decreased the population in countries around the world leaving nuclear fallout in its path. Alas, Babylon takes place in the United States, Florida in a small town called Fort Repose. Frank writes, in his book Alas, Babylon, about Randy Bragg and a small group of survivors from River road that band together to take on all the changes that face them without the help from the government. The three methods of survival that Randy and his band of survivors use are making ways to process items and recharge batteries; reinventing old ways of transportation and replacing

Significant cultural differences between the Indigenous Australians and the free settlers caused immediate impacts upon the Indigenous Australians, causing disputes and even death. The free settlers didn’t understand that the Aboriginal people had strong connections to the land and this resulted in many Indigenous people becoming dispossessed from the land and free settlers using the land for their own uses. Because of

-White settlement affected the Indigenous people in a number of ways”{They} made them (the Aboriginals) outcasts on their own land*” by calling it terra nullius under the English Law, despite knowing the existence of the Aboriginals. Terra nullius is a latin term that means “land that belongs to no one.”They believed it belonged to no one because the Aboriginals didn’t use the land in the same way as the British. The Aboriginals believed that Mother Nature would provide them with what they needed, so they didn’t need to hunt and mark the land. The British completely ignored the deep spiritual connections the Aboriginals had with the land. They cut down trees, put up fences and built towns. They believed they had to own the land. But the Aboriginals were outraged when saw the settlers building farms where they had originally been hunting and gathering at, this was because there wasn’t enough food for them. They killed many white settlers in revenge and a clash of cultures began. Pemulwuy was an Aboriginal warrior that lead raids against the British. He also speared John McIntyre, Governor Phillip's gamekeeper, in December 1790. When the Indigenous people resisted the British, it lead to many conflicts which eventually left a irreversible damage to the lives of Indigenous people.

Indigenous people were in Australia a long time before white settlement arrived. In the speech by Stan Grant the truth about the way the white settlement invaded the land of the Wiradjuri people was exposed. In the Blue Mountains there was an Indigenous settlement which was invaded and cleaned out by the white settlement. This is exemplified in the speech as Grant mentions “I come from those plains, I come from a place west region of the Blue Mountains, the Wiradjuri people, where in the 1820’s the soldiers and the white settlers waged a war of extermination against my people. Yes, a war of extermination!” This communicates the horrifying experiencing the indigenous people had as

When drastic times occur and sweep one of everything they own, do they have a plan of action? Will they be prepared for a life without power, resources, and stability? Many times when people are faced with this situation they find themselves unprepared and unable to live in such conditions. They lose the connections with the world, the water they drink is likely to get contaminated, and the scarcity of goods is a threat to themselves and anyone left alive. Everywhere around them there is death and destruction leaving them isolated in their own dystopia. Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon illustrates a nuclear bomb simulation. In such a way, he gives the readers a taste of isolation and survival needs when facing such drastic times.

Tom Dystra, an Aboriginal Elder recalling the differentiating the differences of land uses: “We cultivated our land, but in a way different from the white man. We endeavor to live with the land; they seemed to live off it” (Koori, 2012). The entire continent was under the control of the British Monarchy and was declared “Crown Land” being deliberately ignorant towards the Aborigines and their traditional custodianship. Invasions on the Indigenous land started when the colonists started clearing land, sacred sites and fencing properties which cut access to waterholes and hunting grounds without the permission of the elders. The Europeans didn’t obey the rules set by the Aborigines, held no respect for their traditional rituals and sacred places and started killing vast numbers of innocent Aborigines for hunting for food or trespassing on the ‘European’ land. Their anger and emotion can still be felt today as describe by F. Gale: “Sacred place. All over our Aboriginal land was sacred, but we see now they have made a map and cut it up into six states” (Gale,

Knowing the historical context of a work is crucial to understanding both its general meaning and its deeper essence. Often times, authors use their works as outlets to freely express their personal feelings toward a social trend or issue. As such, the time in which a story is written can have a strong influence on the message the author is trying to convey to his or her reader. Their personal reflections can be asserted in many ways; among the most common being through the characters themselves and their development throughout the work, the setting, and the implied themes.

30 years after the colonisation of the Wurundjeri peoples land, Simon Wonga, the Ngurungaeta or headman of the Wurundjeri people, was determined to attain land for his people and applied to the board for a piece of land on which they could farm and maintain. Wonga befriended a Scottish pastor named John Green and his wife Mary Green who shared a common interest in attaining land with him. With Wonga’s approval, they set to educate the Wurundjeri children so that they could adapt to this new colonial world, Mary educated her children along with the Wurundjeri children on the property that they were temporarily residing in, today known as Yering located 50km from Melbourne (Wurundjeri council?). After waiting tirelessly for the government to instruct them on which land they could settle on, Wonga led his people back to their country in 1863 located on the Yarra river in the area known today as Badger

In 1883, the colonial government granted Nathaniel Buchanan – Australian pioneer pastoralist, drover and explorer – 3000 square kilometres of the Gurindji tribe’s traditional land, (National Museum Australia, 2016). In 1884, cattle and bullocks were placed on the land, which disintegrated the environmental system that the Gurindji people had developed and sustained. “Basically, the land was stolen off them and if they wanted to stay on their land, and have that connection to country and that connection to spirit, they actually had to work for free for the person who stole it.” (Warwick Thornton, Aboriginal director).

When the whites decided to settle in Australia they had the problem of who owned the land this was a major event in the 1900’s. So to this day there some aboriginal and white people that don’t agree on the law that has stated who owns what land. Gary Foley, a Gumbaynggirr historian, recalls “In the 60s and 70s, we were talking about real land ownership; land that we could have control over, so we could say ‘no, you can’t come in here’ or ‘we want to do this with our land’. That’s what self-determination is – the power to control your own affairs. Ownership of land is fundamental to this in terms of creating the basis for people to survive the attack of colonialism. Land rights are important because it would provide the means by which the Aboriginal community could go through the process of reconstruction and recuperation”. In August 1966, Aboriginal pastoral workers walked off the job on the vast Vesteys' cattle station at Wave Hill in the Northern Territory. At first they showed their unhappiness with their poor working conditions and disrespectful treatment they became fed up with all of the land rights issue. The next year the group moved to Wattie Creek, a place of significance to the Gurindji people. When aboriginals were ‘kicked off’ their rightful land they were very furious with the

The settlement of white Europeans in Australia was one of the most notable yet swept-under-the-rug events in history, just like other instances of he theft of land from rightful indigenous people. To Australia, Europeans brought with them disease, violence, and widespread turmoil, but also mechanic technology and advancements in communication and medicine. There are multiple sides to this debate, from the perspective of a native Australian, European invasion was horrific and ruined the natural order in place within the land, but a modern white man may say that settlement increased international ties and evolved the nation and functionality of Aboriginal life with

In the story F. Scotts Fitzgerald dubbed, "Babylon Revisited" a story about a man named Charlie Wales who goes on a quest to go to Paris and bring back his daughter, Honoria, back home to live with him instead of his sister and brother-in-law. Charlie was a man who had a drinking problem when him and his wife were still together even when they had Honoria. Eventually, Charlie 's bad temperment led him to lock his wife out of his house which indirectly led to her untimely death and Honoria being taken away from him and put into the care of his sister/brother-in-law in Paris. Charlie tries to convince his brother and sister-in-law, Lincoln and Marion, to release Honoria into his custody to return back home in Prague. Charlie eventually convinces the both of them to give him back Honoria, but in the end after reflecting on the things that Charlie has done in the past and is current state the couple change their mind and tell him to first completely fix his drinking problem. Before diving into the analysis, a little background context for this time era is neccessary before going any further. This story occurs towards the end of the Great Depression where Charlie returns to Paris from a sanitarium because of his alcholism problem. The Great Depression was a time where the stock market crashed in 1929 and as a result, Charlie 's money crashed along with it which could have been the cause of his severe alcholism. Now that Charlie has returned to Paris though after a few years, he

The British were looking for a new settlement from 1788 and it was around this time that Australia was founded. On the arrival and colonisation of Australia, the British took over the aboriginal land, due to the land being ‘terra nullius’ which mean ‘land of no one’ in Latin. It was because of this reason that the new British settlers justified their take over of the aboriginal/Torres strait islanders land. The British believed that their culture was superior to all others as they had a modernised society back in the United Kingdom. It was for this reason that the British took half-caste (Mixed race) aboriginal children from their families, and took them to settlement camps run by the state government between the 1900’s and the 1960’s.

Land is considered mother earth to Indigenous Australians, the source of all creation, yielding all the necessities of life- food, clothing and shelter dated back since over 40,000 years ago when Aborigines first came to Australia. In present period, Indigenous still are spiritually linked to the land rights of this country, which will be further discussed and analysed throughout this ethnographic report. Shortly after the arrival of the Indigenous, the white settlement invaded on the 26th January 1788. Although the white settlement almost created the extinction of indigenous, still in the 21st century their culture and traditions are practiced and recognised. The indigenous have a different connection with the land, a more spiritual connection

Whether or not Aboriginal people had left the land to dry for itself is not our concern here. Nor is the aim of this paper to prove the English were right in claiming sovereignty over Australian land, since there is much proof they hadn't even been the first Europeans to meet with "terra nullius". Nevertheless, as history speaks for itself, there's clear evidence Aboriginal people endured immense changes during colonization years, on the land where they stood, cultures unshaken, for thousands of years, before Europe had a say in that. Indeed, what we aim for is to examine some ideas perpetrated along the years in regards to the devastating effects that emerged once the first ship of colonizers arrived.