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The Forum > Article Comments > Race baiters don't deserve the high ground on Indigenous policy > Comments

Race baiters don't deserve the high ground on Indigenous policy : Comments

By John Slater, published 20/4/2015

Any hope that Abbott's critics would offer a reasoned reply to the substance of his argument – that remote living places serious constraints on remedying indigenous disadvantage – were soon dashed.

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[continued]

About higher education since 2005: ironically, support programs at universities may have been winding down in the years between 1998 and 2006, as money from Canberra for that purpose was moved over to the teaching of non-Indigenous students.

BUT demography stepped in: the Indigenous birth-rate massively increased from about 1981 to 1991, perhaps by 60 %. Why ? Various factors have been proposed: re-identification; false identification by non-Aboriginal people; and inter-marriage. My money is on the last one.

In cities, more than 90 % of working Indigenous people inter-marry, so there is a massive boost to birth numbers thanks to non-Indigenous mothers. Nationally, the size of birth-groups rose from 7-8,000 in the late seventies to 11-12,000 in the nineties.

And inter-marriage was especially common amongst working people, working Indigenous people marrying working non -Indigenous people. Their families would be far more likely to have a work ethic than a welfare ethic. Those working families would have been far more likely to make sure that their kids finished secondary school and went beyond it. Hey presto ! Since around 2006, commencement numbers have risen (for standard degree-level courses) by more than 8 % p.a. i.e. by this year, they have probably doubled.

Again, why ? Why inter-marriage etc. since the late seventies ? Long story, but urban migration in the fifties and sixties may be the key factor.

Yes, false identification may be involved, but that's always been a problem. Some of those people have done very well as 'Indigenous'. They muddy the waters, but the proportion of genuinely Indigenous students is probably the same as it was in 1985 or 1990.

Sorry for this convoluted attempt at explanation: the point about many more finishing secondary school is that the flow-on to university also has increased. By the end of this year (as we will see in the 2016 Census figures, published in early 2017), there will be around forty thousand Indigenous university graduates across the country, overwhelmingly at degree-level and above, overwhelmingly in standard awards, (perhaps 98 %), two-thirds female.

All on www.firstsources.info - 21st Century page.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 26 April 2015 9:19:03 AM
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Banjo Paterson, "How else could they have survived for 60,000 years without destroying their eco-system?"

You don't think that fires that dramatically reduced and would eventually see the end of the rain forests counts as destroying the ecosystem?

I would also like to correct your belief stated earlier that farmers copied aboriginal land burn-offs to improve land.

Any burning by farmers and foresters is solely to reduce fuel to lessen the impact of highly destructive bushfires, NOT to 'improve' land or improve access. Humus is valued, holds carbon too, but fires are devastating so fuel is reluctantly reduced. It is risk management for farmers and foresters.

It was the low population density of Aboriginals which was a consequence of their lifestyle and ignorance, and fierce separateness of the hundreds of clans, that kept them going. Nature provided limitations as well. It was a daily fight for survival, not the idealised image of the 'noble savage' that some with a secondary agenda in mind would have the public believe. Those living in more advantageous areas, for instance coastal estuaries, would have been under constant threat of invasion from clans enduring a more stressed existence.
Posted by onthebeach, Sunday, 26 April 2015 2:04:00 PM
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Hi onthebeach,

To follow on from your last point, here are a couple of completely unrelated numbers:

* I transcribed a protector's report from NSW in 1882, which counted 8,664 Aboriginal people in the State.

* the recent terrible weather in NSW affected six million people.

Economic systems, dependent on different technologies, can support different-sized populations - not to mention, have something for export as well. I look forward to the day when it can be written that Aboriginal people are, and always have been, as intelligent as anybody else, but that their level of technology was miniscule compared to a modern society's (even with all the comparable environmental costs).

The nub of the actual topic: can remote settlements ever support any sort of population from their own resources ? After generations, it doesn't seem so. So, unless one Australian population is to be allowed to never have to work, to sink - on their own land - into the degradation of lifelong unemployment, idleness, boredom, grog, drugs, violence and abuse - with shortened lives as an obvious consequence - then how to get people out there into employment ?

How long will the pathway be from A to B ? Is the price of doing nothing too high ?

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 26 April 2015 2:27:37 PM
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Loudmouth,

As you most likely realised, I chose 'ignorant' - lacking in knowledge.

It was possibly because Aborigines lived in so many small, separate clans that they were unable to share the experiences and resources that could have allowed them to make progress on their own.

Did the interaction with visitors in the north result in appreciable practical transfer of technical expertise? If not, why not? Maybe others can comment.
Posted by onthebeach, Sunday, 26 April 2015 4:23:42 PM
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Hi OTB,

No, I don't think groups shared much - ideas, technology, common words, perhaps not a great deal. I transcribed the vocabulary of the language group, Ngangaruku, further up the Murray here in SA from my wife's group, Ngarrindjeri, and couldn't find a single word that was similar, except maybe the word for 'woman'.

I lived in New Zealand for a couple of years, where there was basically only one language, Maori: it seems that any new or unfamiliar words from outside were, from the earliest days, incorporated into Maori - 'poaka' for 'pig' or 'pork', for example; 'aeroplane' was easily translated into Maori as 'wakarere' - 'waka' - boat, canoe, and 'rere' - bird, or flying. So they could keep pace over there with incorporating any new words into their own single -living- language.

But it seems that in Australia, words from another language were not easily incorporated into one's own - to communicate, one spoke (as best one could) in that other language: in order to communicate, one learnt bits of the other's language.

In 1845 (in fact, in that vocabulary book mentioned above) the protector noted that when Aboriginal people met each other, they tended to speak to each other in English, the common language. Eight years after 'settlement'!

After all, mobile Aboriginal people seeking work or money to buy all those new things, would have had to immerse themselves in a European-style economy, of harvests and cattle and sheep and horses and ploughs and sickles and grog, tobacco, shearing, mustering, clothes, tinned food, grog, trousers, hats, etc. for which there were perhaps no Aboriginal words in any Aboriginal language.

So, in a real sense, people became bilingual - using one language in one context, their original language in traditional or familial contexts. As they mixed with Aboriginal people from other groups in the course of their work, they would have tended to use English more and their own language less, except when they were speaking to a countryman. Their kids would have grown up with English. The consequences are fairly obvious.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Sunday, 26 April 2015 6:00:46 PM
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Joe (Loudmouth),

Thank you for the information. It is always appreciated.

I second Banjo Paterson's plea for you to write a book.
Posted by onthebeach, Sunday, 26 April 2015 7:32:19 PM
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