Australian Aborigines

Aborigines are the main group of indigenous Australians.

Archaeological evidence has led researchers to conclude that there has been 40 to 45 thousand years of continuous occupation of the Australian mainland by indigenous people. However, others contend that the universe is only 6,000 years old, so this conclusion is often considered to be mistaken. Since the colonisation of Australia by Britain in 1788, the original inhabitants of Australia have been known until recently as “Aborigines”. They make up about 2.4% of Australia's population.

History

Before white settlement of Australia, the distribution of the Aboriginal population was much the same as the modern population distribution, but at a much lower level. Today, the fertile regions with a temperate climate are dominated by the white Australian community. In most southern and eastern areas, Aborigines have either assimilated, died out, or been pushed out. Only in the central and northern parts of the country are there significant communities of Aborigines living on and in control of their traditional lands.

Most traditional Aborigines were nomadic over the range of their clan, however there are also several archaeological sites of permanent settlements in Victoria.

Aborigines had no written language before contact with Europeans, but have a rich oral history. Their traditional creation stories are based on "The Dreamtime". Many of the modern Aboriginal communities in outback Australia are on the sites of Christian missions set up in the 1800s and early 1900s.

Modern customs

Since the 1980s indigenous Australians have been differentiated as “Australian Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders” and more recently the acknowledgment of local tribal groups and languages has become normal. It has become customary for important public meetings and gatherings to begin by acknowledging “the customary owners of this land, the NAME people” where the local tribal name is given.

Stolen Generation

In the early 1990s Australians came to recognised the wrongful practice of the late 1800s through to the mid-1900s, for Aboriginal children to be taken from their homes and placed in foster care arrangements, typically on Christian missions or state Government homes.

A prevailing view held that there was a hierarchy of human races. This notion supposed that Northern Europeans were superior in civilization and that Aborigines were inferior. According to this view, the increasing numbers of mixed-descent children in Australia, labeled as 'half-castes' (or alternatively 'crossbreeds', 'quadroons' and 'octoroons'), were widely seen to be a threat to racial purity. In the first half of the twentieth century, this led to policies and legislation that resulted in the removal of children from their parents. The stated aim was to culturally assimilate mixed-descent people into contemporary Australian society. These children came to be called the Stolen Generation.

A Royal Commission was instituted by the Government of Australia under the auspices of the (Australian) Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, headed by Sir Ronald Wilson, a former Judge of the High Court of Australia and former President of the Uniting Church in Australia. The commission took public testimony from around Australia, including visits in tribal lands, and its 1997 report ’’Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families’’ has been seen to have re-shaped Australian’s internal race relations.

Aborigines in the media

Various Australian films have significantly changed perceptions of Aborigines.

• Jedda (1955) by the Australian filmmaker Charles Chauvel. The film is most notable for being the first to star two Aboriginal actors (Robert Tudawali and Ngarla Kunoth) in the leading roles, and also to be the first Australian film shot in color.
• Storm Boy (1976) which tells of the interaction between an Anglo boy and a local Aborigine.
• Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) is an Australian film based on the book Follow The Rabbit Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It concerns the author's mother, and two other young mixed-race Aboriginal girls, who ran away from a residential school that is located in Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, Western Australia, in which they were placed in 1931, in order to return to their Aboriginal families. The film follows the girls as they trek/walk for nine weeks along 2,400km (1,500 miles) of the Australian rabbit-proof fence to return to their community at Jigalong.
• Ten Canoes (2006) by Rolf de Heer. The film is narrated in English by David Gulpilil; all protagonists speak in indigenous languages, with English subtitles.

David Gulpilil is recognized as a very important Australian Aboriginal actor, whose work has changed perceptions of Aborigines. His films have been:

• Walkabout (1971)
• Storm Boy (1976)
• The Last Wave (1977)
• The Right Stuff (1983)
• Crocodile Dundee (1986)
• Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002)
• The Tracker (2002)
• The Proposition (2005)
• Ten Canoes (2006)

Stan Grant is an Aboriginal television personality who had international recognition as a presenter for CNN in Bejing, China in the mid-2000s.

See also

• Great Flood (which mentions some aboriginal flood stories)