Lilla Watson

It's 1976, Lilla Watson is responding to questions about the process for choosing delegates to attend the International Tribunal in Brussels on Crimes against Women. She then talks about the issues that are of concern re: violence and racism towards Aboriginal women/people.

"Because the fairer skinned you are, the better treatment you receive by white people. Because they think she's got a fare amount of white blood in her, then she's got some intelligence, you can talk to her, almost as if you could talk to her as if she's a white woman.. And so, we would take care to not get too black if we went out in the sun.

There's just a whole lot of things that have been directed at Aboriginal women through colonization, the patterns of colonization that are continuing today to try to make aboriginal people fit into dominant society."

"The most visible enemy that Aboriginal people have in Australia are the police force and just what they're capable of doing to Aboriginal people. Its just really common for Aboriginal women to be raped by police men.

You know, you could go out and probably find groups of Aboriginal women that have been raped on one night by policemen. And this is really common knowledge amongst Aboriginal women. And Aboriginal people as a whole."

"......that's very hard for Aboriginal people, especially Aboriginal women to have any sort of credibility at all with the white power structure which is the white news media.

Reporters, they interpret, they are bad enough trying to interpret on the Women's Liberation movement as a whole. But to try and interpret Aboriginal women and what they're saying and what has happened to them, through their own racist concepts usually, distort the whole thing so completely."