The Forum > Article Comments > Say 'No' to 'Recognise' > Comments
Say 'No' to 'Recognise' : Comments
By Syd Hickman, published 6/3/2015To 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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"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]