Word: australia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Aborigines are a very old people. their ancestors colonized Australia from the north, by sea, tens of thousands of years ago--nobody can say just how many. At the time of the first white contacts in the 18th century, there were perhaps half a million of them divided into hundreds of tribes, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, thinly scattered across the vast hot skin of Australia. They lived by hunting and gathering. These seminomads were, even by the lowest standards of Africa or the Americas, almost incredibly low tech. They had fire, sticks and stones, and little else. Yet their traditional...
...having been in Australia for 40,000 years or more, in contrast to the whites' 200 or less, the Aborigines were not giving up. So the policy changed to assimilation. First, the Aborigines were deprived of their nomadic tribal life and concentrated in "mission stations," communities run mainly by Protestant evangelists, where they were taught the Gospels, shown white ways and prepared for low-level jobs as servants...
...government into admitting that the Aborigines owned their land before white arrival--that the doctrine of terra nullius (no- man's-land) was legally invalid. This finally happened in 1992, when Eddie Mabo, a member of the Meriam clan on the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait off northern Australia, successfully argued before the high court that his people had been there before the whites and had never given up their ancient rights of ownership. This was the first "native title" victory in Australian...
...results have been explosive. Huge deposits of minerals, including, at Jabaluka in the Northern Territory, the richest known uranium deposits in the southern hemisphere, lie beneath the earth. No less than 15% of the total land area of Australia is owned or controlled by Aboriginal groups and councils. Some 700 land claims, covering 50% of the Australian landmass, await determination by the courts, and more are coming in every day. This avalanche has caused legal and bureaucratic gridlock. Few Aboriginal groups accept mediation by whites. No two groups agree on land use. Some, for instance, think that tribal land should...
...point is, however, that this and a hundred other issues between blacks and whites in Australia can be worked out only in an atmosphere of reason, trust and reconciliation. The time of name calling should be over. But despite the dignity and moderation of Aboriginal leaders, and the goodwill of so many whites, it is manifestly not over. Finishing it off, at last, is work that will take us into the millennium. But it has to be done, or we are a much lesser nation...