Racism can ‘destroy the personality and scar the soul.’
Martin Luther King
Australian society is made up of a wide variety of groups. These groups of people have different cultural traditions and economic and social background. The success of the communication and interacting of these groups depends largely on the attitudes, values, and behaviour of people towards different groups.
Racism is probably the first form of discrimination we think of. It is the belief that some races of people are inferior to other ‘races’. Racism usually involves negative acts against the group of people considered inferior. Genocide is the deliberate extermination of a whole race or ethnic or religious grouping of people. The impact of racism on the Aboriginal people is not just horrific but genocidal. Racism is a problem for Aboriginal Australians. This includes occupation of Aboriginal land under the ‘Terra Nullius’ principle, assimilation, the stolen generation, and Aboriginal Australian’s health.
Before the arrival of European settlers, Australia was probably inhabited by as many as 500 different tribal groups of Aboriginal peoples. Many of these groups, their cultures, and their languages have been wiped out by white settlement.
Aboriginal Australians traditionally owned land on a group or tribal basis according to birthright. Being a member of a tribe entitled an individual to dwell on a certain designated area of land and to utilise the natural materials from that land.
The land was inalienable, that is ownership could not be transferred, because no one really ‘owned; the land in the European sense of the word therefore disputes about land did not arise between Aborigines. Upon European settlement in Australia, all useful available land was carved up by the settlers according to the notion of possession of land based on English law. This division of land failed to recognise any land rights held by the original dwellers. Dispossession had a devastating effect on Aboriginal society
To the Aborigines the land was part of their very being. It had a special religious significance and they believed there was a direct relationship between the spirit and the site from which the spirit came. That place was the person’s life force and that person was inseparable connected with it and these sites were considered sacred.
Within a generation of the first white settlement, many tribal groups were decimated or wiped out. By the 1850s many were on the point of extinction, others were extinct. In the Port Phillip area, for example, government records show that a pre-contact population of about 10000 was reduced to less than 2000 in only eighteen years.
The National Apology of 2008 is the latest addition to the key aspects of Australia’s reconciliation towards the Indigenous owners of our land. A part of this movement towards reconciliation is the recognition of Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders rights to their land. Upon arrival in Australia, Australia was deemed by the British as terra nullius, land belonging to no one. This subsequently meant that Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were never recognised as the traditional owners. Eddie Mabo has made a highly significant contribution to the rights and freedoms of Indigenous Australians as he was the forefather of a long-lasting court case in 1982 fighting for the land rights of the Torres Strait Islanders. Eddie Mabo’s introduction of the Native Title Act has provided Indigenous Australians with the opportunity to state claim to their land, legally recognising the Indigenous and the Torres Strait Islanders as the traditional owners.
Eddie Mabo is widely known for his plight to regain land rights for both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In 1982, along with four other Meriam people from Murray Island, he initiated legal proceedings in the Queensland Supreme Court claiming customary ownership of their lands on Murray Island. This original claim was rejected by the Supreme Court, but rather than backing down Mabo chose to present his case to the High Court of Australia. The basis of his case explores how “’Australia’ is morally illegitimate to the extent that it is founded on European denial of the continent’s prior ownership by indigenous people…” (Rowse, 1994)
Key events in Aboriginal Australian history stem from the time Australia was first discovered in 1788. For instance, when Federation came into existence in 1901, there was a prevailing belief held by non Aboriginal Australians that the Aborigines were a dying race (Nichol, 2005:259) which resulted in the Indigenous people being excluded from the constitution except for two mentions – Section 127 excluded Aborigines from the census and Section 51, part 26, which gave power over Aborigines to the States rather than to the Federal Government. Aboriginal people were officially excluded from the vote, public service, the Armed Forces and pensions. The White Australia mentality/policy Australia as “White” and unfortunately this policy was not abolished until 1972. REFERENCE
As European domination began, the way in which the European’s chose to deal with the Aborigines was through the policy of segregation. This policy included the establishment of a reserve system. The government reserves were set up to take aboriginals out of their known habitat and culture, while in turn, encouraging them to adapt the European way of life. The Aboriginal Protection Act of 1909 established strict controls for aborigines living on the reserves . In exchange for food, shelter and a little education, aborigines were subjected to the discipline of police and reserve managers. They had to follow the rules of the reserve and tolerate searchers of their homes and themselves. Their children could be taken away at any time and ‘apprenticed” out as cheap labour for Europeans. “The old ways of the Aborigines were attacked by regimented efforts to make them European” . Their identities were threatened by giving them European names and clothes, and by removing them from their tra...
Ancient Aboriginals were the first people to set foot on the Australian continent, over 40,000 years or more before Colonization (Eckermann, 2010). They survived by hunting and gathering their food, worshipping the land to protect its resources, and ensuring their survival. The aboriginal community had adapted to the environment, building a strong framework of social, cultural, and spiritual beliefs (Eckermann, 2010).
An issue facing society is whether legislation in place is sufficient in balancing the rights of Indigenous Australians and the rights of current land owners who will be affected by the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth). To determine whether legislation is sufficient and fair, an investigation into the current societal view point needed to be considered by legislators. These legislators needed to evaluate the ways in which other societies had catered to the needs of indigenous land owners. Through consideration of these points, recommendations and changes to legislation need to be debated and enacted to ensure more equitable legislation on land rights within Australia
Indigenous Australian land rights have sparked controversy between Non Indigenous and Indigenous Australians throughout history. The struggle to determine who the rightful owners of the land are is still largely controversial throughout Australia today. Indigenous Australian land rights however, go deeper than simply owning the land as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have established an innate spiritual connection making them one with the land. The emphasis of this essay is to determine how Indigenous Australian land rights have impacted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, highlighting land rights regarding the Mabo v. the State of Queensland case and the importance behind today’s teachers understanding and including Indigenous
In saying this, Aboriginal communities feel the need to be independent and seclude themselves from the rest of society as they proclaim and habituate on “their land” in the search for recognition and hierarchal treatment. Aboriginal peoples are constantly being stereotyped, ridiculed for their way of living, and essentially dismissed as human beings contributing to our society. These individuals get treated unfairly due to their upbringings and ways of living, leaving an unpleasant disconnect between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals, still today, many years
Within Australia, beginning from approximately the time of European settlement to late 1969, the Aboriginal population of Australia experienced the detrimental effects of the stolen generation. A majority of the abducted children were ’half-castes’, in which they had one white parent and the other of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. Following the government policies, the European police and government continued the assimilation of Aboriginal children into ‘white’ society. Oblivious to the destruction and devastation they were causing, the British had believed that they were doing this for “their [Aborigines] own good”, that they were “protecting” them as their families and culture were deemed unfit to raise them. These beliefs caused ...
We as Australians are completely unaware of all the suffering, sorrow and sadness we’ve placed upon the Aboriginal people since we set foot on their land. We’ve killed them in cold blood as we’ve had several disagreements with the Aboriginal people. Evidence even shows that all Tasmanian Aboriginals were killed and become completely extinct. We’ve given them diseases which they never used to contract and have wiped out the majority of their people and we even took Aboriginal children away from their own biological parents. The idea behind this was so they would then breed with other Australians which would rid of their full-tribal blood, making them become extinct. Thes...
Now I shall give a bit of a quick history lesson. The land of Australia had two types of people living there before the European settlers came to the country the Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Islanders and in 1688 a man named William Dampier was the first British man to explore Australia (Austrailian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade). This is similar to how America had Native A...
Since the time of federation the Aboriginal people have been fighting for their rights through protests, strikes and the notorious ‘day of mourning’. However, over the last century the Australian federal government has generated policies which manage and restrained that of the Aboriginal people’s rights, citizenships and general protection. The Australian government policy that has had the most significant impact on indigenous Australians is the assimilation policy. The reasons behind this include the influences that the stolen generation has had on the indigenous Australians, their relegated rights and their entitlement to vote and the impact that the policy has had on the indigenous people of Australia.
Aboriginals have inhabited Australia tens of thousands of years before any European powers had reached the land. Aboriginals lived simply lives and valued the lands which they lived on. Lifestyles of Aboriginals were threatened with the arrival of British colonizers in the late 1700s and early 1800s, who tried to integrate them into their society. The colonizers also saw the Aboriginals as a backwards, inferior people who were unable to develop. The notion that Aboriginals are inferior to whites may have caused the impacts Aboriginals have had in shaping modern Australia to be overlooked. This effect appears to be apparent in the development of Australian sport, however, Aboriginals have played a significant role in shaping Australian Rules
Australia’s Indigenous people are thought to have reached the continent between 60 000 and 80 000 years ago. Over the thousands of years since then, a complex customary legal system have developed, strongly linked to the notion of kinship and based on oral tradition. The indigenous people were not seen as have a political culture or system for law. They were denied the access to basic human right e.g., the right to land ownership. Their cultural values of indigenous people became lost. They lost their traditional lifestyle and became disconnected socially. This means that they were unable to pass down their heritage and also were disconnected from the new occupants of the land.
Land rights are defined as the entitlement to inhabit and use the land. Indigenous Australian communities seek to gain land rights or “Native Title” over certain parts of Australian land. This allows the Indigenous Australians the right to hunt, fish and inhabit the land and also gives them the right to contribute to decisions over construction, fishing or mining of...