Thanks Helen, it's a relief to hear from someone who knows what she is talking about.

It baffles me why Aboriginal community councils can't figure out ways to recognise long-term leases over housing blocks, leases exclusively to Aboriginal people, for say, ninety nine years. Once a community member had leasehold rights to the land they are living on, they could build and own their own home, a right that we take for granted elsewhere across Australia.

And why can't royalties accruing to Aboriginal people be used to pay off a house in this way ?

Helen puts her finger on another related issue: Aboriginal communities are connected to the outside world by public roads, and provided with a range of publicly-funded services. By law, publicly-funded services are available to the public, all of it, Aboriginal or otherwise, therefore not requiring permits to visit such communities.

In the twenties here in SA, the Aboriginal Protector tried to bar travelling hawkers, mostly 'Afghan' and Indian, from entering Aboriginal settlements. But the Education Minister pointed out that all public schools had to be accessible by public roads, and anybody could use public roads, including Afghan hawkers, including roads which ran through Aboriginal settlements.

Are Aboriginal communities more segregated now from the outside world than government-controlled settlements and missions used to be, in the bad old days ?

Thanks again, Helen.

Joe

There has been many brand new houses built in Regional Centres for Aboriginal housing. Within a couple of years (at the most) many of them are totally trashed, are filfthy and not at all looked after. The occupants often sleep outside. Life skills are needed to be taught from a young age before more money is wasted.

We Europeans came to this continent, pushed its inhabitant out of their land and, with it, out of their basic sustenance and their social and spiritual parameters.

Is there one of the posters or repliers or users of this electronic publication or, for that matter, anyone in the world, that can deny this fact?

After such a plunder, at a distance of only two to three hundred years we now want them to be well adjusted and happy with their misery.

My fellow contributor to Online Opinion, do please keep in mind this little piece of history before you attempt any pronouncement about the people who were here before us.

Also remember that it all happened only two or three hundred years ago and, while three hundred years are too many to remember by one whose life cannot go that span, it is very short a time not to influence the behavior the ones who are part of a race.

Hence we cannot ask them to behave ‘good and proper’ in the same way that we cannot ask an injured person to behave like a healthy one.

We plunged them into misery and it is our duty to pull them out of it by restoring their trampled dignity and offering them leverage to rise to what we expect from them.

I have read some of us say ‘They haven’t yet learned our ways’ while I was musing at what we have lost by not trying to learn their ways.

Yet, we can rejoice that Aborigines are still with us. The Americas cannot boast such treasure.

Aboriginal people in remote areas are often very mobile, moving from community to town or out-station and back, and to another community and back, over and over. This gives the impression of temporary over-crowding in many houses, while others are vacant.

'Traditional' rules demand that travellers are put up by relations, whenever and for as long as they want. So the resources of a house - kitchen, bathroom, toilet - are over-utilised. And if you are the renter, why clean up if you expect yet another mob to land on your door-step at any moment ?

So here's a crazy idea: provide one- and two-bedroom houses for very small families, couples and single people. After all, a one-bedroom house still has one kitchen, one bathroom, one toilet - adequate for a few people. But if it has only one or two bedrooms, then fewer people can cram in and over-use the facilities.

Alternatively, recognise that larger houses are going to house lots of people occasionally, and put in extra-large kitchens, double-bathrooms and -toilets.

Alternatively again, allocate funds (from royalties?) for white people to come in and clean up houses, say once a week. Perhaps they could clean up the yards and streets while they are at it. To the untrained eye, this might look like paternalism, but it might be what many people in communities would like the government to do for them, so clearly it is self-determination in action. Yeah, right.

Meanwhile, the great majority of the Aboriginal people in the cities are getting on with their lives, looking after themselves, making their own way. University enrolments are at record levels. Total graduate numbers could reach thirty thousand by the end of next year. If anything, the 'Gap' is widening.

So what's working and where ? And what isn't working, never has, and where ? Should we keep throwing good money after bad ?

Joe

skeptic

'We plunged them into misery and it is our duty to pull them out of it by restoring their trampled dignity and offering them leverage to rise to what we expect from them.

Fair point especially when we introduced alcholol to them. However you offer no solutions except to deride those who seem to have a lot more contact and experience. So your solution is? Besides blaming those wicked whites. It certainly was not rosy before Europeans arrived by anyone's measure.

Skeptic,

There is a certain arrogance in how you phrase your comment, about the all-powerful whitefella and what he has done to the [passive] helpless Blackfella.

I don't think relations were ever that black and white, so to speak. Aboriginal people made choices, often within tight constraints certainly, but choices just the same: do they come into these new towns or do they stay away ? What are all these strange things, tobacco, all sorts of food, alcohol, garments ? And you can travel all over the place with these cart things, and on horses, and on huge ships. What do these whitefellas want us to do, why do they need us, to get some of those things ? Work ? Okay, no problem.

And often whitefellas didn't get it all their own way. Very often, especially in the early days, they had to rely on Aboriginal people for guidance, for labour and for sustenance.

By the way, it wasn't illegal for Aboriginal people to drink alcohol in the earlier days - but it was illegal to supply Aboriginal people with grog.

I used to believe that, as the frontier moved out, Aboriginal people moved away, further out. I didn't have any evidence of that of course, it was just a gut feeling, something apocryphal, it seemed logical. It probably wouldn't be difficult to prove it one way or the other, from early ration records.

But now I do suspect that the reverse was true: as the frontier moved out, people from further out still came in to the towns. In the 1840s, Aboriginal people in Clare, for instance, could have come from god knows where, out towards Broken Hill, up in the Flinders, from the West Coast, the Murray: few if any were 'Kaurna', from Adelaide.

So, in about 1950, instead of fifty thousand 'tribal' or 'wild' Blackfellas still being out there, 'beyond civilisation',

[TBC]