The whole program is fake as we know but the premise of "First Contact" was flawed, most if not all White Australians have met Aboriginals and a lot of us are related to them, we just don't realise it or don't know.
Looking at my old school photos there are quite a few little kids with streaky dark blonde hair, olive skin and Aboriginal features but nobody ever called them "Abos" or treated them differently.
There is also a large extended family of Aboriginals in town to whom I'm distantly related through intermarriage about 100 years ago and I'm sure a great many Whites would discover similar relationships if they looked into their family tree.

Hi Jay,

In the early days, once the first generation of Australian-born whites reached a mature age, organisations were set up, the Sydney Natives' Association, I think, and ultimately the Australian Natives' Association, formed in 1871, which were exclusively white and whose members called themselves Australian Natives. A local member of the Genealogical Society here found, to her surprise, that her great-grandfather had "Australian Native" on his death certificate. Aboriginal people were almost always referred to quite specifically as "Aboriginal Natives". It was an anti-British thing, local-born people smarting under the smug heel of some blow-in Pommy, sent out to rule over the colonials.

Of course, very many white people in Australia have now worked with, or for, Aboriginal people, or had fairly close relations with the odd family or individuals. That might come as a surprise to the Carlton St latte set, who have rarely had that experience, and so would be easily taken in by carefully-doctored programs like 'First Contact'.

In country towns, most whites would have gone to school with Aboriginal kids. Their fathers might have worked together. So there are very many white people (and other non-Aboriginal people) who have more concrete knowledge than would have been required to swallow the stuff on that program.

On averages: pretty much everything we know is a sort of aggregation or average of complex data. Yes, there are around 38,000 Indigenous university graduates, but two-thirds are women; 80 % or so are in the cities; the mix of study areas is much more towards Education, Nursing and the Social Sciences than the 'average' Australian graduate. While the 'average' graduate out there may have been in the work-force for twenty or thirty years, the 'average' Indigenous graduate has graduated only in the last fifteen years.

Averages conceal rather than reveal.

Joe

Joe,
Apologies, I edited my previous post on the fly and it doesn't make sense now.
Yes, exactly, I grew up in a small country town and my ancestors were among the first Whites to settle the district, if I recall the story correctly my great, great grandfather was widowed and his second wife whom he married when he was middle aged was Aboriginal and he had some kids with her, the descendants of those people, though related to the rest of my family now identify as Aboriginal rather than White.
I'm just pointing out that the way race relations are shown in these staged encounter groups is very much a black and white situation when in reality (in the southern states at least) Aboriginals and Whites lived side by side and were heavily intermarried and on friendly terms for the most part.
The other glaring issue is that only a minority of Aborigines live in places like Yuendemu or Wadeye, that those communities are purposely segregated and mostly closed to outsiders and have their own peculiar issues, as you've pointed out there's a wide variety of different experiences of growing up Aboriginal.

I reluctantly watched that show, because I knew it would be heavily staged and edited, and so it was. I have seen many communities and outstations but never one that looked like the Yolgnu one shown on the program. Obviously the cleaning crew had been in first and when I saw the toddler in a disposable nappy I laughed. Kids in outstations usually run around naked until they are toilet trained, at a minimum, sometimes longer. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that, quite the reverse actually, but the show was dressed up for white consumption and to satisfy the cultural yearning of the large number of urban Indigenous. And why did no one ask how the children were being educated when they live in an outstation with only 20 people. They wouldn't qualify for a teacher, not enough kids, so obviously the kids either don't get educated or the outstation is close enough to the main community for the kids to travel into school daily. Hardly that isolated then. And how does SBS reconcile that pristine, utopian outstation with John Pilgers view of remote life?
Likewise the larger community. No sign of the inevitable card game, no stats on school attendance and it wasn't mentioned that although crowded houses are harder to keep clean, the disposable income is far greater than it would be in a typical nuclear family scenario. Even 5 adults in a house means over $1000 per week Income, then if you add Family Tax Benefit for the kids you are looking at thousands of dollars/ fortnight.
Sorry, but from my 40 plus years experience, that was fiction, and not very entertaining fiction either.

Hi Jay,

I'll stick my neck out and suggest that, up until the seventies, the 'lower classes', rural workers and the working class generally, often worked alongside Indigenous fellow workers - the first Indigenous generation after the war tended to inter-marry with working class people, very often NOT Anglo - Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs, Indian-Fijians, Australian Chinese, Swedes, Maltese, 'Afghans', Japanese, Maori, Filipino.

Ironically, the Great Flowering of the intellectual class, under Whitlam, coincided with a decline in Indigenous access to working-class jobs, i.e. in the early to mid-seventies. And even as the intellectual/professional class was growing, it was still another generation before the Indigenous population followed suit: there were still only three thousand-odd Indigenous graduates in 1990, compared to 38,000 now. So the first generation of those rising professionals, now aged 40-60, had very little contact with Indigenous people, either as fellow-workers or as fellow-students. There is indeed a Gap between the Indigenous population and the experience of many professionals (except as indigent clients), let alone inter-marriage, which - I suspect - they would be horrified at the very thought of.

So the professional class, by its nature anti-government, is likely to believe the most outrageous assertions about the history of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations. Since so many of them are in human services, i.e. the Welfare Industry, they tend to perceive Indigenous people as ONLY remote, welfare-oriented, and truly-ruly 'cultural' - to the point where, I suspect, they believe Indigeneity is innate, inescapable - pitiable, yes, but still they love it as authentic. Of course, little of it is.

Ergo: the new racists.

Joe

Typical use of data by governments plus many corporations. Look at the changes in CPI, UNEMPLOYMENT FIGURES, etc over a few decades. It is the old story "LIES, DAMM LIES AND STATISTICS"