How many ordinary white Australians or new Australians are or were ever given land after the old squatter days.

I started my married life with $1.00 in the bank. I had nothing more than most aboriginal people and yet after working hard and paying a mortage for 20years my husband and I bought land and a home. Immigrants come here and still attend school no matter that they are anglo saxon schools. They also start with nothing and end up with land and a house. A lot of these immigrants face the same problems as aboriginals face fitting in with a new culture. How come they manage to make a go of it?

I am pleased that so many aborigines are now getting an educatiion and beginning to lift themselves up off the ground. There are still those, though who want to sit around drunk in the local parks and blame white people for their problems. It 's been 200years, time to get up, take the chip off their shoulders and do the hard work that the rest of Australia has to do to be able to own a relatively small piece of land of their own. Nobody gives land to anyone, white, black or in between, but everyone has an equal chance to obtain it by their own efforts. It's called equality.

Hi Cherful,

I was surprised to learn some years ago that a 'land grant' didn't mean that anybody got the land free (except state/privincial governments), but more like that it had been released for sale - it ewas no longer 'reserved'. Governments made their money by selling land, not by giving it away.

Here in SA, it was thought at first that a farmer cold make a go of forty acres @ (from memory) one pound/acre (when an annual wage would have been around twenty or thirty pounds), but pretty soon they realised that they needed far more than that. So they offered sales of 160-acre lots.

Very wealthy landowners back in Scotland and England bought huge areas, but they still had to pay for it, it wasn't free. George Fife Angas paid for hundreds, maybe thousands, of dissident Germans to come out and take up land from about 1840, and they were still paying him and his family back for decades.

Yes, it had been Aboriginal land, but at least down this way, the Aboriginal people tended to live along river and lake-sides and not to use the drier pasture and woodland more than five or ten km away from the water. People were enticed away from their land, and even from the river and lakes, by the new whaling stations and towns and all the strange things they had to offer, so once the whaling industry collapsed, they would have come back to find their lands already occupied.

But they still had the right, and were supported by the Protector, to use the river- and lake-sides: in order to hunt and fish, they were given a 15-20 foot tent, a 15-to-25-foot 'canoe' (more like a raft), and either a shotgun or a rifle every seven years, fishing lines and gear every year, and had their rifle or shotgun repaired for free, from the Protector. As far as I can tell, this was still going on in the early twentieth century.

[TBC]

[contd.]

Meanwhile, out in pastoral country, the rights of Aboriginal people were set out in all pastoral lease agreements - all over the country, in every state and territory [except for the period 1911-1924 in the NT]. This clause had to be in every pastoral lease:

"And reserving to aboriginal inhabitants of the said State
and their descendants during the continuance of this lease
full and free right of egress and regress into upon and over
the said lands and every part thereof and in and to the
springs and surface waters therein and to make and erect
and to take and use for food, birds and animals ferae naturae
in such manner as they would have been entitled to if this
lease had not been made."

What does that last phrase suggest ? " ... in such manner as thy would have been entitled to if this lease had not been made." That people had free access to all Crown Lands ? So where is the 'terra nullius' ? And if no enforced 'terra nullius', then what were the relations really like between people and pastoralists ? What really happened ? Or do we keep retrofitting history according to our beliefs and prejudices now ?

Then, after the Native Title Act of 1993, the lawyers come along and 'negotiate' ILUAs (Indigenous Land Use Agreements) on behalf of Aboriginal people: now, if you are Aboriginal and want to go on to a pastoral property, you have to front up to a committee. Where was the due diligence ?

Joe

I would just like to point something out to Bully, since he has alot to say on issues he knows little about. Bess Price most certainly does present herself as a leader in Central Australia. She is in fact a Consultant for the NT Government and Chair of the NT Advisory Committee on Indigenous Affairs. Bess is a totally assimilated Aboriginal woman who lives a middle class life in Alice Springs with her white husband. She has long ago abandoned her culture and does not speak on behalf of the people of the Centre. The signatures on a petition that was recently published purporting to show that the Walpiri support Bess Price were collected at a funeral and none of the signatories knew what they were signing. They were told they were signing something else entirely. I believe another Aboriginal Leader, Alison Anderson MP, collected these signatures on behalf of Bess. The people that need to be consulted about the needs of the people in the Bush, are not assimilated Aborigines but the Yapa that live out there, trying to retain a semblence of a traditional lifestyle. Bess is causing alot of trouble on the east coast amongst Aboriginal people who don't know who to believe. All I can say is, don't believe Bess.

Hi Snowy River,

Ah ! The passive voice ! How useful it can be to put someone down.

I should imagine that people on both sides around Alice Springs are campaigning like mad for and against the Intervention, schooling, employment programs, control of the grog and drugs and gambling, and a hundred other issues.

Meanwhile, mainly in the cities, people are getting on with life: record numbers at university, record numbers of graduates, maybe thirty thousand graduates by the end of next year, record numbers of kids finishing Year 12, record home-ownership, probably record low Indigenous unemployment, I wouldn't be surprised.

So what's really working ? Remote community life, or urban, participatory life ? Dependence or active agency ?

So what direction, what pathways, should Indigenous people choose to aim for ?

Joe

Aborigines should aim for excellence in education where they live, nothing less. This has always been the way, the model Europeans assimilated. Same rights for all citizens, equality. If Australians can't educate children in remote communities to post tertiary level they're not really trying. Half-baked solutions aren't what Australians are all about.