the ahistoric, impatiently self-rightous settler perspective, which blames the survivors of decades of abuse for slow progress in getting their act together.
Andris,
I'm glad you stated that because in North Qld it was Labor who bitterly complained about progress in the indigenous communities. They dissolved organisations which worked with the indigenous to achieve self-determination & flooded the communities with bureaucrats, sub contractors & opened the flood gates for all the con artists. Look at the show now ? The communities are now more dependent on Govt funding than ever before & the reason why it is so costly is because most of the funding goes back South in the pockets of the afore-mentioned ! Labor politics & policies have severely dented if not totally arrested progress there !

Individual. I have no illusions about the ALP re Aborigine progress. I hoped as Whitlam came to power that at last then there would be effective policies empowering Aborigine self determination. But my experiences in the NT after Whitlam came to power shocked me and lead me to the conclusion that Labor in fact caused catastrophic deterioration of the Aborigine communities in the NT by mindless massive handouts which were supposed to be for self-determination projects, which however, were poorly planned and without any financial accountability. So much of the thoughtless handouts further worsened the already catastrophic alcohol problems in Aboriginee communities with concommitant worsening of domestic violence and hopelessness. I wanted to write a book then about how the road to hell was paved with good intentions on the part of Labor. I was given funding by pasturalists to support my project, but I returned the money, because my intention was to contribute to genuine Aborigine self-determination whereas the pasturalists were keen to return to keeping the status quo and prevent the granting of Aborigine land rights that would have resulted in the pasturalists losing some of the good stolen land. Nevertheless, the current Left seems to be far more interested in genuine reconciliation with the Aboriginees than the Right. See Keating's Redfern speech, Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generation, Labor's current commitment to the Ularu Staatement From The Heart as distinct from the Coalition's resistance towards empowering Aboriginees in spite of the fact that we have an Aboriginee minister supposedly in charge of Aboriginal Affairs.

Andris,
I agree with much of what you say however, my personal exposure & experiences lead me to believe that self determination is still in the impossible basket collectively. Individually, some Aborigines have what it takes but they're held back by their own & by the hypocritical forces of the Left who really don't want them to succeed as that would prevent too many Public Service careers. Do not for one moment forget that Labor (Left) depends on disunity & unequal distribution of common wealth as they are not part of the revenue producing side of society !
Sadly, the indigenous are hoodwinked at an early age in school & that's all the Left needs to continue on its insidious path ! Unfortunately for the young, the older people who still remembered pre-Labor times, are no longer around to open the eyes of the young !
How can we help the Aborigines when they're not enabled to progress at the pace that suits them ? They have been pushed & shoved by the hypocritical do-gooders who only have their own interests in mind !
Their "dedication" to work for the betterment of society only extends as far as their pockets.

individual: 'How can we help the Aborigines..?' By education to grasp the best of their history and the best in modernity. Stan Grant, Adam Goodes, Yvonne Goologong are shining examples. Aborigines, and us, need to learn critical thinking, so that we can discern truth from hubris. Self determination is crucial as an objective especially for denigrated sections of society. It is a slow and difficult process when the starting point is so much disfunction. But it must be the objective for dignity and to realise the Au dream of 'fair-go' for all.
The maximisation of getting Aborigine children to schools and helping them bilingually where appropriate is critical. From basic education, pride in their history and identity, to more tertiary education and good trade skills and to learning management skills to lead their people in their own hybrid ways are important. The maximisation of Aborigine leadership and accountability is critical. We need to listen to, not looking down on them. Aborigines have much to be proud of in their history:love of country, deep spirituality, tracking, medicine, bush tucker and fire management skills, etc. which we should admire and learn from them.
We need patience and remind ourselves that Rome was not built in a day. Where I live the initial policy of banning the use of native languages managed to make almost all Aborigines lose their Gundungurra language over a few short decades, a beautiful tongue that was spoken before probably for 60 thousand years! We hve no right to get on the high horse when our own'modernity' failed them. The intergenerational mass that now has been seeded by our settler predecessors in the first place and we still do not properly listen to even to the best minds amongst Aborigines. The Aborigine languages are not only rich and magnificent but some of them may be even more sophisticated that many of our modern languages. Lets do more listening and learning and helping and chuck out the noisy centuaries long tradition of put-downs.

Andris: "Aborigines have much to be proud of in their history:love of country, deep spirituality, tracking, medicine, bush tucker and fire management skills, etc. which we should admire and learn from them."

What are you going on about? There is next to nothing that we can learn from the aborigines. Western knowledge surpasses traditional aboriginal knowledge in just about every field. A point by point break down of the above:

1) history: Aborigines never invented writing so their own historical knowledge prior to European settlement beyond a few centuries back is extremely scant (basically it is non-existent). Indeed, most of what we know about aboriginal history exists because 1) Europeans wrote down what they saw when they first came here a few centuries ago and continued to document it until the modern day, and 2) for before that time we've used modern archaeological techniques to reconstruct plausible/probable scenarios about their lifestyles and history.

2) love of country: this is a very ambiguous term. If by it you mean an appreciation of the complexity of the living environment then this is nothing unique to aboriginals. Modern biologists commonly have similar sentiments. Indeed western science's understanding of this complexity far exceeds what the aboriginals ever knew.

3) spirituality: well this is just a nonsense- you can't demonstrate to existence of a "spiritual" element of nature. The environment just is what it is- nothing more nothing less. And the only attributes/elements of it that exist are those things that you can detect, ie: those things that can be scientifically measured in some way.

4) tracking: using western knowledge we can track animals over extremely vast distances with great precision. Scientists do this all the time. For example, we've tracked the migration paths of individual whales over 10s-of-thousands-of-kms. No traditional aboriginal method of tracking could ever achieve this.

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5) medicines: Do you think that traditioanl aboriginals even had the slightest understanding of the internal machinery of plants, animals and other life forms. Do you really think that they were aware that living things are composed of cell(s)? Do you think that they knew what bacteria are? Or what a genetic disorder is? Our understanding of how our bodies work is immeasurably superior than that of the aboriginals. Indeed, a perfect example of just how deep our understanding is is the present pandemic: western science has already created multiple vaccines for it. When the drug companies created these vaccines they didn't seek ancient advice/wisdom from some aboriginal elder in a remote community about how to do it- instead they consulted/employed university educated people with PhDs.

6) bush tucker: Modern biologists have classified and studied thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of Australian species. And because our society has developed writing we can pass this knowledge on effortlessly from person to person. We have libraries chock-full of these books. Here's one: http://web.library.uq.edu.au/locations-hours/biological-sciences-library. Also, because of the scientific method we've created vast amounts of knowledge about chemistry, bio-chemistry, physiology and other fields. The combination of this biological and chemical knowledge allows us to understand toxicity and nutrition at a foundational level and thus western science has vastly more knowledge about what foods are edible or not and their nutritional value.

7) fire management: because of we've developed advanced maths we can describe the physical world not just with word images like people from less developed societies did but with quantifiable relationships (these relationships are usually expressed as formulas). Such mathematical descriptions of fuel loads and fire risks surpasses anything the aboriginals understood. Our amazing ability to take accurate data measurements of surface topology and fuel loads and the current wind/temp/humidity, combined with the processing power of our computers even allows us to model the progress of fires in real time.