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The Forum > Article Comments > Say 'No' to 'Recognise' > Comments

Say 'No' to 'Recognise' : Comments

By Syd Hickman, published 6/3/2015

To try and cast three per-cent of the Australian people as 'ATSI' people, separate from the rest of us and needing public campaigning to make them feel better, is appalling.

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Hi David,

"Joe, your figures may be technically correct, but the above comments also apply. This is not to denigrate those who are successful".

Yeah, you raise a very thorny issue, which has plagued all administrations in Australia almost from the outset: crudely put, if children have non-Aboriginal ancestry, to what extent are they Aboriginal ? And if their 'Aboriginal' parent is in that situation and has children by a non-Aboriginal person, to what extent, then, are those children Aboriginal ?

And so on, now for six or seven generations. Six generations back, we each have sixty four gr.-gr.-gr.-gr.-grandparents. If sixty three of those are not Aboriginal, to what extent can someone say they are Aboriginal ?

Of course, if children are raised by an Aboriginal mother, and never really know their non-Aboriginal parent, then socially they are embedded in an Aboriginal upbringing. And so on, 'all the way down'.

My kids had a very strongly Aboriginal mother, who in turn had a very strongly Aboriginal mother, who in turn .... going back to their gr.-gr.-great-grandparents. Their Aboriginal ancestry includes groups from the lower Murray, Yorke Peninsula and perhaps the upper Eyre Peninsula.. They also have Italian, Chinese, British (the lot) and perhaps some Jewish and African ancestry. In that sense, they are certainly Australian. But we are all usually raised by our mothers (and often by our grandmothers as well) and imbibe our culture at her breast, and throughout our lives.

On the other hand, there are many Aboriginal people who either have no - or no recent - non-Aboriginal ancestry, or know nothing of it, and have always, for their entire lives, taken for granted - from not just their mother but from all of their known relations - that they are Aboriginal. Andrew Bolt would suggest that most benefits and scholarships and other assistance intended for 'Aboriginal people' are intended for precisely this population, and not the one-sixty-fourth people, who may know how to get those benefits.

[TBC]
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 8 March 2015 8:35:16 AM
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[continued]

On the latest figures, something like ninety per cent of Aboriginal people (however defined) in the big cities marry non-Aboriginal people. Often, of course, so did one of their parents, and perhaps one of their grandparents. Their children will most likely marry non-Aboriginal people.

At the 1967 conference of officers working in Aboriginal welfare, there was some wrinkling of brows over how to define, and therefore provide benefits for, Aboriginal people. But by then, the issue had probably got away from them: anybody with any Aboriginal ancestry (and many without) could claim to be Aboriginal and therefore entitled to any benefits that accrued.

Back in the 1970s, a good mate (now deceased), who had also married an Aboriginal woman, agonised over whether their kids, blonde and blue-eyed, living in the city with few Aboriginal relations, could really be entitled, as they grew up, to any benefits as Aboriginal people. Like us, they never claimed any benefits for themselves by virtue of one partner being Aboriginal, but their kids also came up against one huge obstacle:

To elucidate: Thirty-odd years ago, I had one Aboriginal student, studying Secondary sScience Teaching, and when she was finishing, I rang the Education Department about placing her: the bureaucrat was surprised and said, "I'm terribly sorry, but we don't have any Aboriginal secondary schools.' So she became a social worker.

[TBC]
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 8 March 2015 9:02:07 AM
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[continued]

Often being Aboriginal can be a trap: once employers know it, one can be gradually channelled, bit by bit, into Aboriginal-only fields, regardless of what one may have graduated in. It's as if there is a paddock for Aboriginal horses, and another much larger one for non-Aboriginal horses, with one-way gates.

I long for the day when any Aboriginal graduate - and the vast majority are now coming through mainstream, non-Indigenous fields of study - can get any damn job they are qualified for, and to hell with their Aboriginality. The late, wonderful and loved, Faith Bandler lamented that, spending all her labours battling for Aboriginal rights precluded her from doing what she really would have liked to do. But she kept at it.

One day, people will, be valued, not by their ancestry, but by their skills and the content of their character.

But, David, as you point out, so many of those forty thousand Indigenous graduates are sort of 'Indigenous at a distance', not just in terms of ancestry but in terms of experience. After all, if, say, someone finds out in their forties that they have Indigenous ancestry, how 'Indigenous' are their kids ? To what extent can they put their hands up for any benefits which - let's be honest - have been initiated implicitly for people who have been embedded in Indigenous environments all their lives ? And for how many more generations will that go on ?

Yes, close to forty thousand people of Indigenous descent have now graduated from universities round Australia, but how does one differentiate between people ? Clearly, the vast majority of graduates have been urban, and nowadays from mixed-marriages of working people. The tyranny of averaging conceals the fact that very few Indigenous people from rural and remote settlements get to university: one could even say, at the risk of sounding racist, that the less Indigenous one's roots are, the more likely one can go to university, and vice versa. The task for hot-shot 'leaders' will be to turn that around. But don't hold your breath.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 8 March 2015 1:29:14 PM
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Thanks for that Joe. As you rightly point out, averages are not good things to rely on. It is often that one finds the right answers only by looking at individual cases in most fields of endeavour.

In the case of aboriginal education and jobs, one size definitely does not fit all any more than it doesn't work for the rest of the community.
David
Posted by VK3AUU, Monday, 9 March 2015 8:56:11 AM
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You're onto something, David :)

To combine the above with the topic: On the whole, urban Indigenous people from working backgrounds are not doing too bad. Yes, they and their ancestors have probably experienced far, far more of colonisation, etc., over a much longer period, and they may have issues and causes quite different from rural and remote people, perhaps more to do with opportunity and status than with violence, addictions and chid abuse.

Genuine leaders seek out the most genuinely critical issues affecting their people and hammer away at them. BS 'leaders' will phart around about woolly, symbolic fripperies, Soy latte issues, in the company of their comfortable white acquaintances. They can be forgotten about.

Any genuine leader, in my opinion (after all, this is OLO), would be agonising over the viability of remote 'communities', and the issues which spring from that: child abuse, substance abuse, domestic violence, phenomenal wastage of resources. They would be, at this very moment, trying to nut out some of the ways of providing incentives for people to get off their backsides, in vocational education leading directly to employment, and in the massive development of women's education; they would be focussing on getting across the imperative that people everywhere have to work for a living, therefore their kids have to get a decent education, in order to get skills, in order to get employment, in order to provide for their families, like other human beings all over the world.

Clearly, the 'Recognise' campaign will contribute little or nothing to that herculean and sustained effort - if either effort ever gets going. But it will get a very strong vote, no matter how it is eventually framed, from the comfortable white intelligentsia, towards whom it is primarily directed by 'leaders', to their mutual gain.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Monday, 9 March 2015 9:24:01 AM
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I can't be bothered to read all the waffle on this thread.
At some time in the future the only way to determine if someone is
an aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander will be if they have a very
good genealogical record. Perhaps a DNA check.
Because the records are available I can prove my self to be a Somerset
man, but I would not dare to claim any form of assistance from the Bath council.

How ridiculous can it get ?
Posted by Bazz, Monday, 9 March 2015 12:46:44 PM
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