Joe what I meant was put it into the background, rather than the forefront.

They need to become a mechanic, professor or what ever, with some or a lot of aboriginal heritage, rather than an aboriginal who does mechanics is a professor. Fixating on that aspect of their lives is I believe counter productive

I know I have some Irish & some English heritage, but I know very little about anything else. I could have aboriginal heritage. My mother was an orphan, with no knowledge of her parents. Her sister spent years trying to prove her heritage was English aristocracy. We believed none of it, & it interested the rest of us not at all.

If my mother & her sister had lived their heritage it might be different, but it should never become all consuming.

Hi Has been,

Yes, if we've learnt anything from this citizenship fiasco, it's that almost all of us have relatively recent migrant ancestry. Yet, none of those involved seem to have ever acted on behalf of any other country, so .... ?

Many of us are quite proud of a particular ancestry and fair enough. For many southern Aboriginal people, pale as they may be, they don't know of any other living ancestors and relations but Aboriginal ones. They've usually assumed almost from birth that they're Aboriginal, however they may define it. It's up to them. We're all Australians, with those (if you like) mini-identities nested within a broad common identity. Fair enough.

Cheers,

Joe

One funny thing about social change is that it sort of sneaks up on planners, while they're preoccupied trying to bring it about - but it takes forms that weren't directly intended. Hence, urban Indigenous people have been quietly forming a substantial middle class, based on their own efforts, with little input from policy-makers - through a determination to get through university and trade-training and onto secure employment.

As the wonderful policy scientists Aaron Wildavsky and Richard Elmore insistently pointed out, social policies often, perhaps usually, have unintended consequences - and may not produce anything like the results that all the fanfare promoting a particular policy is accompanied with. Sometimes, sort of alongside policy, people themselves, en masse, bring about social change - which in turn has unpredictable consequences. Since people can't be tightly controlled, what they do, how they respond to opportunities, is out of the hands of planners and experts and elites: consequences follow regardless.

Building up stock of Indigenous graduates is a slow process: Whitefellas who are currently alive have had three generations to do it, Indigenous people maybe one and a bit. But from little things, etc. There are many steps between Indigenous graduations and satisfactory Indigenous employment, too many get sucked into the jaws of the Industry. Hopefully, that will change quickly as new graduate numbers out-pace the ability of families and cliques to entrap them all in lifelong but pointless jobs. Home ownership is another straw in the winds of opportunity and individual independence: clearly it's an urban phenomenon, and a very good indication that people don't ever intend to move out into the sticks, surely a logical cornerstone of the bankrupt notions of separatism and bogus 'self-determination'. So two distinct populations.

We can't tell the future but boy, will it be interesting.

Joe

Sorry. Way off topic, but it's not worth another thread: Pat Dodson has now been linked with other dual citizen MPs because of his father, John's, Irish heritage. Sheesh! See it today on ABC online.