Brian, totally agree, and I admire your fortitude in writing what most of Australia think, in the face or accusations which usually accompany any doubting or skepticism of the wisdom of the aboriginal victim industry (AVI).

"It is time to fully integrate." yep, this is what everyone except those in the AVI believe.

The AVI though, want to pick and choose what aboriginals are allowed to have and where they can have it, which has been a total failure and a disaster.

The original inhabitants were evidently nomadic, so I struggle to understand why they are now determined to stay in one place, in one area, and demand housing of a particular standard .. when historically, that was the exact opposite of their "culture"

I guess they have chosen, or had chosen for them, some aspects of western culture and only adapted to what's readily available.

I suspect though, the original inhabitants "adapted" to their surroundings and moved where and when they needed to.

Why can't they adapt now? Surely integration is adapting?

Are they given the choice of adapting? I suspect not. Tribal obligations and such are all recently manufactured inventions, as we are constantly told the original inhabitants were smaller groups who moved around. I know this won't suit those who insist there were "nations", in need of a "treaty", but there were no permanent settlements (towns or villages), nor was there any farming done (no edible grasses).

It seems the real answer is because that would not suit the people most able to profit from them remaining where they are, in the conditions where they attract the most for the profiteers.

So let's have some more meetings and fora with a conference on the side and lashings of sympathy and buffet of wise head nodding, with a desert of finger wagging at everyone who disagrees with continuing the handouts to those best suited to speak on behalf of the poor downtrodden.

Half an hour on the back patting machine for everyone involved.

Thanks Brian for a very incisive article.

But let's remember that only a tiny minority - perhaps 10-15 % ? - of the Indigenous population live in remote settlements (I won't dignify them with the term 'community'), and the great majority of those people would have visited a large town in the last three months, perhaps many times. I suspect that the 2011 Census will show that close to half of the entire Indigenous population now live in metropolitan areas, and most of the rest in large towns and cities, like Cairns and Dubbo and Broome and Port Augusta.

Even so, at least a third of the Indigenous population remain trapped in lifelong welfare-dependence, thanks to forty years of misguided policy.

You make this very interesting observation:

"Around 1950 it was believed by my teachers that only about 10 per cent of the Caucasian race were intellectually capable of gaining a university degree. Now we know that it is over 50 percent of all races. The genetics are much the same...."

In 2009, according to DEEWR data, 3,755 Indigenous people commenced university study at degree-level and above. 2,955 were enrolled at degree-level, most of whom would be enrolling at unis for the first time - let's say 2,700. The median age of Indigenous commencers is about 26 (i.e. born in 1983). There would be about 8,000 Indigenous people in that median age-group across the country.

So the participation rate of Indigenous people at universities in Australia is equivalent to about 35 % of the median age-group (one of the criteria for 'mass tertiary education', by the way). Since 1990, when the proportion would have been under 20 %, this relative participation rate has been rising, particularly since 2005, after the abandonment of an implicit policy of channelling Indigenous students into Indigenous-focussed courses - thankfully, that policy had to be abandonned, if only because standard-entry Indigenous students usually wouldn't touch such courses with a forty-foot (12 m) pole.

[TBC]

[contd.]

The Indigenous birth-rate rose rapidly after 1985, 50 % by the mid-nineties, from about 8,000 to 12,000. Those babies will hit tertiary age between now and 2020. So we are still at the beginning of a major boom in Indigenous participation at universities.

Even so, Indigenous commencements in degree-level courses rose by 30 % between 2005 and 2009, close to 7 % p.a. So there is every likelihood that that rate of increase in commencements will continue, as those 1985-1995 babies reach university age.

The proportion of Indigenous secondary students completing Year 12 has been rising rapidly too, 10-15 % p.a., and retention at university is improving as well. Standard-entry students tend to persist in their studies longer than special-entry students, Black or White.

So, as commencements increase at 6-7 % p.a., graduations will increase at a higher rate, perhaps 8 % p.a. Fifty thousand Indigenous graduates by 2020, one in every six adults, is very much on the cards. The great majority of these graduates will spend their working lives in the cities, in Australia's open society.

Meanwhile, back in the 'communities' .........

Joe Lane

Amicus:
The Aboriginal people who were the original inhabitants were not 'nomadic' in the technical sense; they were hunter-gatherer family groups, usually 30-70 people in the dryer regions, who lived, foraged and hunted at a number of places on clearly defined 'estates'. Thus they used their family's own land, or estate, in ways not entirely dissimilar to many landholders in feudal and modern agricultural societies, using different parts in appropriate seasons, or when the locally occurring food supplies had replenished. They continually defined, ritually cared for, and physically defended, these estates, and maintained structured relationships with adjoining groups.

This is not to say that relationships with adjoining groups were always easy or harmonious, but on the whole there were processes and ceremonial occasions for the maintenance of viable continuation of the family estate lifestyles and traditions. This was the pattern throughout Australia.

For present day Aboriginal people to wish to stay in one place (i.e. on or near their ancestral estates) is not out of keeping with their history or tradition at all: it is completely within those traditions, as that has been their normal practice through many generations. Living in permanent housing may be seen as a departure from the traditional ways, but staying within their ancestral domains is a very strong tradition which has a strong social, legal and cultural hold on the consciousness and behaviours of many surviving Aboriginal people. Nowadays this is one of the powerful psychological factors which help make it very difficult for contemporary Aboriginal people to adapt to the modern Australian way of life, which is increasingly premised on atomisation of families (the acceptance of complete responsibility for themselves and their actions by the adult individuals); and adaptability of residential and occupational status and the fluidity of family arrangements and identities. That is, hyper 'individualism', which is radically different to Aboriginal traditions and in some ways is painfully contradictory to the behavioural norms and emotional needs of many Aboriginal people even in the present day, despite their having grown up ostensibly surrounded by the new alien socially and culturally dominant ways of being

Dan, yet aborigines who are taken out of the "estates" and live in cities or elsewhere seem to thrive?

I think you are defining what you would like to think, is the aboriginal psyche and not the reality of how they behave, because in reality, they are the same as the rest of us. Lazy, scheming, corrupt, grateful, happy sad .. they are us, except, they need help to get out from where they are, and we're not helping anyone except the AVI.

It is that desire to see them as different, as special, so they must be pandered to that is the problem most of us see.

They are not unique special species of humans, they are the same, the same race and the same people .. why do we need to try to separate them from the rest of the human race? They are not zoo exhibits.

I'm sure if you wanted to find all the signs within a group of any people, as you describe, you could .. if you start out with that in mind.

You are unfortunately giving justification to why they are OK to stay where they are, dysfunctional, and needing of every type of care in existence.

It's just not right to keep people like that, justified by romantic notions of how different they are and how unusual and so special they are that they must be mollycoddled.

The human condition is to want more, and they do, but there are so many barriers in their way on the settlements, and one of those barriers is the charity and handouts of the rest of society.

You would be correct to justify them staying in the same place, if they behaved and worked at living, in the old ways .. but they don't so your examples and gentle scolding is pointless. Food now comes from shops, there is grog and nothing to do .. idle hands and all that.

(More for Amicus to chew on, continuing from the above)
However, some elements of their family's traditional beliefs, practices, obligations, and customary rights and responsibilities assert great influence over present day Aboriginal people.

When these are combined with the understandable, and completely justified, consideration of their ancestral entitlements to land, stories, status, designs, songs, ritual knowledge and, not least, associated resources and benefits, the powerful influence of these various influences leaves many Aboriginal people now literally dazed and confused by the choices confronting them, and disoriented by the contradictory forces pulling them between the opportunities and enticements of modernity and equally magnetic attractions of their Aboriginal heritage and its legacies.

I believe that many people become paralysed by these conflcting and often seemingly irreconciliable tensions.

Amicus, many Aboriginal people who leave remote "estates" and live in cities don't thrive. Uneducated people often have not had the knowledge injections needed to survive urban social viruses, and often come to grief, via addictions and associatedillnesses, at an even greater rate than those remaining on isolated communities: they don't possess the resilience needed to cope in urban environments.

You claim that "in reality, they are the same as the rest of us."
This is demonstrably untrue: they have had very different childhoods, education, socialisation, culturalisation, life experiences, compared to other Australians. Some may be "happy sad .. [like the rest of] us, [and]need help to get out from where they are", but this doesn't make them "the same" as other groups, any more than Kurds are the same as Sunni Iraquis, Tamils the same as Buddhist Sri Lankans, or Catholic/animist Sudanese the same as Islamic Arab Sudanese. There are significant differences between these groups, making integration based on theoretical equality of opportunity very difficult. We are not helping anybody if we fail to recognise realities. Nor do we help by dismissing everybody who disagrees as being members of "the AVI".

Recognising important differences is not necessarily a formula for seeing Aboriginal people as "special" in the sense of seeing them as "exceptional", or for pandering to their whims. It is necessary for realistic planning and problem solving. It's also important not to allow historic, economic, social, psychological and cultural differences to be magnified into essential racial or mystical differences; and of course people aren't, and shouldn't be treated as, "zoo exhibits", the way that some of their unfortunately infatuated admirers seem to do.

Conditions do need changing where they cause high levels of dysfunction. However, you must recognise that even in seemingly hopeless communities there are resourceful, capable people who contribute to the wellbeing of the wider community. These people must be supported, not destroyed by faraway people in broad brush efforts to solve misunderstood problems. Many do work for a living, are not idle, and are quietly desperate to find ways out of their dilemmas.

Dan you supply all the usual excuses of the AVI .. yes people who move to big cities from rural areas have trouble adapting, but you seem to say that it is only aboriginals who suffer this?

I moved from a small isolated town to Sydney, it was hard, I got over it .. I was 17 when we moved there.

Rubbish, it's just more fodder for keeping them in human zoos, because they are too fragile to leave their wonderful cultured and carefully nurtured estates.

I have rarely read such reasoning to excuse people from self determination.

Everyone has a cultural heritage, the aborigines no more or less than anyone else, stop making them more special than anyone else and face the reality that they are the same.

Of course not culturally, but they can learn and adapt, as everyone does, if they could just escape the do-gooders and excuse makers, who are convinced, like yourself, that they are incapable of doing anything for themselves.

Just treat them as people, get out of their way - stop putting impediments in their way, like withdrawing financial aid if they leave their "estate".

I'm sure you're well intentioned Dan, but I think you are completely wrong in your approach, which is the same as the do gooder approach for years .. it has not worked.

Remove the payments for sitting down, remove the special permits, and if there is no work, do what we are doing for the rest of Australia, if you don't move to where work is, you get cut off.

No one is entitled to have the rest of Australia pay for their lifestyle, merely because they are an object of sympathy, we need to give them some pride back, and stop the torrents of sympathy that does no one any good, except the AVI recipients.

When they are made the same as the rest of us, with no special conditions or anything else, then will they be able to hold their heads up and join society as equals, not like the compensated special treatment they get now.

Dan, forgive me but you write the most outrageous rubbish, as if it's all out of books, all beautiful theory, or you're commenting from overseas. I suspect that you are not even in Australia, or have ever been here :)

Meanwhile, DEEWR has just published university participation data for 2010: Indigenous commencements in award-level courses went up nearly 10 %, to 4,197. Continuations in such courses are up by nearly 8 %. Total enrolments in all award-level courses are up by 8.7 %, to just over ten thousand. At more than one full equivalent age-group, that's what they call mass Indigenous tertiary education.

Data for 2011 will probably show that there are something like 11,800 Indigenous students are enrolled in total, of whom nearly 11,000 are in award-level courses, 10,800 in degree-level courses and above (including about 1900 in post-graduate courses).

Enrolments in degree-level and above (9853) rose by 78 % between 2000 and 2010, from back when the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee (AVCC) lamented inconsolably (at the instigation of the academic elites) that Indigenous numbers were inevitably plummeting, implying that the noble gesture of providing tertiary education wasn't feasible for the great majority of Indigenous people, only for a Glorious Few (who happened to be the academic elite: so fortuitous !)

Of course, it's a bit hard to keep massaging and pampering and promoting a handful of graduates when there are close to thirty thousand of the buggers :)

And we haven't really tapped into the 1980s-1990s birth-rate boom yet ! Even so, fifty thousand graduates by 2020 is very much on the cards. Whether, Dan, they will be miserable and bereft of culture, will be up to them. It will be their call, not yours or mine. My bet is that they will be a damn sight happier than the poor buggers still stuck up in isolated sh!tholes.

Joe

Loudmouth, it is much more difficult for an indigenous person to move to the city than it was for you. The rules of white behaviour are similar in the country and the city. The indigenous rules about how to behave are very different from the white rules and these rules are not easily learned by adults.

I am sure you understand that child brains are more 'plastic' than adults and consequently the best time to learn the rules of your culture is as a child.

Although indigenous brains are not different to yours and mine, the way they think is very different. Their lives, before we came were almost the total opposite to a white person's.

They did not have to work 40 hours a week. So they didn't teach their children about the benefits of hard work. Their society was based on a complex set of rules about responsibility toward other people so they had no concept, never thought of the idea, that people should be resonsibile for themselves.

It is not that they are special or people are making excuses for them but they are so different culturally that it is going to take time for them to adapt to our culture. The parents need to learn the new culture and be able to teach the child.

Surely it is better if they make the choice themselves, to adapt rather than being forced to do it. The forceful integration that was tried early in the century had some successes but overall the results were not good.

One can see that people who want to adapt to our culture do so in a couple of generations. Like the Greeks and Italians who came here. They quickly adapted because their culture was very similar to ours and also because they were motivated to adapt; it was their choice to become white australians.

Our culture is a very hard and selfish culture in their eyes and they give up a lot of spiritual and emotional comfort if they integrate.

Thanks, Mollydukes for having the courage to talk through your hat. Are you actually in Australia, by any chance ?

To repeat endlessly, the great majority of Indigenous Australians live in urban areas, maybe half in metropolitan areas and in large cities, and they have done so for decades. The vast majority of people in 'settled' areas have not practised much in the way of traditional culture for a hundred years and more. Nearly thirty thousand of them are university graduates.

'Forceful integration' ? How do you do that, I wonder. After being banned from living in towns and cities up to the fifties and beyond, most of the Aboriginal people I know were keen to get to the city and find their feet there. If anything, the force and inveiglement has been towards segregation, with policies promising people easy, work-free lives if only they would stay the hell out on isolated settlements.

I'm surprised that even Noel Pearson seems to be opposed to the most basic activities at settlements, with his rubbishing of vegetable gardens in today's Australian (in response to the SA Minister's suggestion about food shortages in the APY Lands). If no vegetable gardens, then what ? Grandiose tourist mega-plexes ? Vast cattle stations ?

If not the most basic economic activities, then what is self-determination ? Maybe I'm still a Marxist, but basic economic activity has always seemed to me to be the cornerstone of any genuine self-determination. Without it, what have you got but indolent, bored, increasingly unskilled people, with enormous amounts of time on their hands and auntie and grandma's incomes to spend on ganja and grog and gambling ?

Loudmouth So what that the great majority live in urban areas? When they get to the city they all live in the same slum suburb and they have few opportunities to assimilate or learn to negotiate the white culture.

And so many see it as being too hard. They tend to be so depressed and damaged that they just don't care about much except getting though each day and they really are killing themselves by neglect. They aren't having a good time you know when they sit around and drink themselves stupid. It's drinking to kill the demons.

And I have had experience working as a psychologist with urban indigenous people in Austalia.

There is little left of their culture, for sure, but the fundamental assumptions about what was important - that there are obligations to country and toward other people - are still passed down from parent to child.

Forcefull integration happened when they were taken from their indigenous homes and placed in white homes. Did you not notice that there has been a great deal of fuss about this issue? Some got lucky and were raised well and assimilated. Others weren't and didn't.

I'm not sure why you find it so significant that 30,000 are university graduates. Perhaps they are coconuts - you know black on the outside and white on the inside? I met many when I was at Uni. I even tutored some indigenous students. Just because they have a degree doesn't mean they know how to solve the problem.

Noel Pearson is just one fella isn't he? I don't understand why he doesn't want them to grow veges, perhaps he thinks it's a communist plot? Because of the terriffic vege gardens in Cuba, I mean.

Self-determination is our word, I found very few, even the people doing degrees, who fully understood white people and what we want them to do.

Thanks Mollydukes,

I don't know about other cities but here in Adelaide, Aboriginal people are living all over the place. Maybe in the late sixties, they tended - like new immigrants always have to do - to seek out accommodation in low-rent suburbs, but like many later migrants, they dispersed across the city, pleasing themselves where they lived, as they became more financially secure.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised (I'll check out the 2011 Census details when they come out) if there are far more Aboriginal people in say, Penrith than in Redfern, more in Epping than in Chippendale.

And why do you assume that all that may people were raised in white homes ? Very few Aboriginal people - even those taken into care - were raised in white homes, for all the propaganda otherwise. The great majority of Aboriginal kids taken into care for six months, or a year, or longer, were raised in church institutions, 'homes' if you like but hardly 'white', reformatories, convalescent homes, etc. I'd put the proportion of Aboriginal people who I have known who have been taken into care at about 5 %, and of those who have been raised in white homes, somewhat less than 1 %. But maybe I mix with the best of the best :)

Thanks too, Mollydukes for your slagging of graduates. I'm keeping a sort of file on the rationales that people use, usually on the pseudo-Left, for not considering increasing graduate numbers as positive. So they're all coconuts ? Perhaps you could tell them that :)

If the Gap is ever to be Closed, then how ? Isn't tertiary success a sort of surrogate, at least, for positive developments ? Or should we face the awful truth, known only to the Left, that Closing the Gap somehow disrupts Aboriginal culture, and therefore should be opposed ?

Or is it that tens of thousands of graduates can't be controlled by people who know better, but who have their best interests at heart ?

[TBC]

[contd.]

I must thank you sincerely, Mollydukes, for putting your prejudices in writing, but .....

Your statement: "Self-determination is our word, I found very few, even the people doing degrees, who fully understood white people and what we want them to do."

- this is amazing: " ... what we want them to do." Really ? What they want to do is up to them, it's none of your business or mine.

Mind you, I suspect that 'self-determination' as we understood it back in the sixties and seventies (or thought we understood it) meant something very different to many Aboriginal people, now wallowing successfully in lifelong welfare: as a Marxist, I had assumed all along that SD had to have an economic component, that it had to relate to community economic activity. What a complete fool I was ! Not many had the slightest intention of building economic enterprises: what people meant by SD was maximun political autonomy combined with maximum financial dependence (and minimum economic activity). SD meant doing as little as possible for themselves, getting whites to do more and more for them. After all, SD was interpreted to mean Power, and the more Power one had, the less one had to do for oneself: Power meant the ability to tell others what to do for you.

Idiot me, I always assumed that SD meant doing more and more for one's community, for one's group, putting more and more effort in, dispensing with more and more of the services of whites. I won't make that mistake again.

Meanwhile, individuals in the cities are coming on to tertiary study in record numbers. As human beings, they have stood up, resisting the racist temptations to live lives of indolence. Tertiary study is hard work, it needs sacrifice. So who should we admire most, those who put the effort in, or the loafers ?

Joe Lane

Loudmouth

Teaching a pig to dance is hard, and it irritates the pig.

Don't be so irritated. A dancing pig would be truly a wonderful thing. Nearly as interesting as a coconut.

Thanks, Mollydukes, but you lost me there. Are you comparing me to a pig [fair enough], or to a dancing pig [not so comparable, they would do it better] or are you suggesting that Indigenous people graduating from university courses are like, or as unlikely as, pigs dancing ?

Are you also saying that any Indigenous university graduate is a coconut ? Are you from the Left, then ?

Are you working in the Solomons ? Is that why you find coconuts so interesting ? I worked once in the produce markets here in Adelaide and one of my jobs was to cull rotten coconuts from overseas shipments, so I've never found coconuts all that exciting.

Joe