Paul 1405,
Ah, well you see I'm only a whipper snapper of forty six, I started school in 1973.
Your post explains a lot about your generation's attitudes toward race and how these things are suddenly "discovered" by people of a certain age. I've known nothing but multiculturalism my whole life, I have no memory of the old Australia and your post is something of a revelation in itself, I had no idea that things were as you've described.
That begs the question though, why should we listen to people your age talk about race? It doesn't seem like a good idea to trust our elders on these matters if you're still learning at sixty what we all understood at sixteen.

Jay, one is never too old to learn. and remember "Einstein plus an Idiot is smarter than Einstein on his own." So you can indeed learn from an idiot.
I am pleased to hear your knew it all at 16. I thought I knew it all at 16 to, but when I got to about 25 I realised I didn't, and when I got to about 46 I realised I didn't know it all at 25 either, and when I got to 60 I realised I did know it all at 46 as well. In fact I don't think I'll ever know it all. even if I live to be a 100.
One thing I have learned is never confuse Political Philosophy with History, they are two entirely different subjects. Some people have a bad habit of confusing the two. Especially when history might be inconvenient when it comes to their own political philosophy.

Paul, yeah I didn't start my "examined life" until about ten years ago, after we had the kids these social issues really took on a new dimension.
Hey a comrade and I want to look a bit deeper into this issue of who knew what and when, so to speak. I know it's along time ago but you wouldn't happen to recall the names of any of the textbooks you had at school? We want to look them up in the university or national library collections and compare them to the course materials used today so any keywords or fragments of titles would be a help.

Dear Individual,

The following link may help answer your question:

http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/people/aboriginal-identity-who-is-aboriginal

Dear Paul,

Henry Reynolds talks about what people of his generation
were taught at primary school and of course you'd have
to read his work to get the full picture. It makes for
interesting reading. Still I wonder how much people today
really know about the contribution or the size of the
Indigenous labour force in those early pioneering days.
As Reynolds tells us "the labour was very cheap and the
workers could be co-erced with fist, boot, stockwhip and
revolver without fear of social opprobrium or legal action.
The gap between the productivity of black labour and the
return to the Indigenous worker was striking."

"In modern-day terms, Indigenous labour must have
contributed tens of millions od dollars to white bosses
and to the settler economy as a whole. One day someone
should attempt to estimate just how much that figure
might have been."

Reynolds tells us a great deal of the exploitation of
Aboriginal workers - especially in the pastoral industry.
he speaks about the fact that the industry owed a
profound debt to Aboriginal Australia which has never
been acquitted. This Reynolds feels is due to the fact
that many graziers either don't know or deny this history.
He recalls the deep sense of injustice he felt
when he first visited the Stockman's Hall of Fame at
Longreach, which for a long time scarcely mentioned
Aborigines. He says, "Even now there is no real
indication there of the critical role played by black
labour in the foundation and survival of the industry."

It was at the Hall of Fame that graziers from many parts of
Australia gathered in 1997 to demand that the Prime Minister
legislate to extinguish all Aboriginal rights over the land
held under pastoral leases. The cultural links between
Indigenous people and land had survived all the trauma of
colonisation - but what the graziers were asking would
sever these links with just one new law."

Dear Paul1405,

As a primary aged kid in the NT in the early 70s I spent nearly three years at a school where about a third of the students were indigenous. I certainly can't remember any racial tension only that if things ever came to blows then the Aboriginal kids stuck by each other. Some of them were obviously from families who were doing it tough but there were more than a few white kids in the same boat.

I also remember a clan/tribe who lived near the mangrove swamp around from us. Only some of those kids came to school but more than a few spent their time fishing, hunting and playing instead. I recall being envious wishing I could do the same.

The thing is it didn't matter how many indigenous mates you had in school you really didn't mix with them much outside those hours. The only time I did talk a mate into dropping in on the way back from school I could see he was terrified and likewise I knew I would have got a belting if I had gone to the camp he was from. The unspoken rules of that period seemed to emanate from the adults of both groups.

Dear Foxy,

We are on holidays at the moment and we recently called into an exhibition at the Ballarat Art Gallery titled For Auld Lang Syne. celebrating “the role played by Scots in development of the Australian nation from the First Fleet to Federation”. Having lots of Scottish ancestry I found it particularly interesting.

One of the points raised by the guide was the clearances of vast tracts of land of Aborigines particularly in Queensland. She noted that many of the Scots were complicit in the removal of so many of indigenous folk had been themselves victims of the 'Highland Clearances' where a shift from cropping by 'Crofters' to sheep saw thousands ripped from their lands.

“The clearances are particularly notorious as a result of the brutality of many evictions at short notice (year-by-year tenants had almost no protection under Scots law), and the abruptness of the change from the traditional clan system, in which reciprocal obligations between the population and their leaders were well-recognized. The cumulative effect of the Clearances devastated the cultural landscape of Scotland in a way that did not happen in other areas of Britain; the effect of the Clearances was to destroy much of the Gaelic culture. The Clearances resulted in significant emigration of Highlanders to the sea coast, the Scottish Lowlands, and further afield to North America and Australasia. In the early 21st century, more descendants of Highlanders are found in these diaspora destinations than in Scotland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances