I had no idea it was that diversified. Are most of the tribes related? Aborigines? How much mixture of the Aborigines has there been with the Europeans?
Hi there,
Sounds as though you're probably not that if at all familiar with what we call the "stolen generation" over here? Basically it was during the first half of the C20th where the state governments, particularly Western Australia took "half-caste" children away from their parents to "re-habilitate" them, and put them into church ministries and turned them into farmhands and the like. Most of those children never saw their families again. A very traumatic and disturbing past for most of those poor children and their families. The idea at the time was to "breed out" their "blackness", and they planned to do this over stages of generations by marrying them to white men. Miscegenation was happening all over Australia due to stations and the like that were set-up around Aboriginal camps. For decades after that, probably up until the early 1980s, government legislation and accademic literature refused to accept the status of the "half-breed" Aborigine as having any inheritance to their culture. Demographic Atalas's that were used when I was going to school for instance showed that Tasmania had no Aboriginal people, and yet there is plenty of Aboriginal culture flourishing down here. There was a big deal made about Trug-a-nan-er (also known as Truganini) as being the last living "full-blood" Aboriginie in Tasmania, and we're only talking 20years ago now.
Things have changed now in legislation and in accademic writing, although the pervading attitudes among the white population remain due to years of such understanding being common place. I had to write a paper at Uni on what this sort of "essentialism" does to rob the Aboriginal people of their culture and history, and forces them to hold on to a static view of Aboriginality that we impose on them.
frog x
