[continued]

And, of course, after World War II, people left Missions and dispersed all over South Australia (and probably other States as well, but I know little about that, being in South Australia, an insignificant state) in the late forties and fifties, before moving to the major towns and Adelaide by 1970.

As a consequence, Indigenous tertiary enrolments started as a trickle in the early sixties (my wife's first cousin, for example), but stepped up in the eighties. So across Australia, around twenty thousand Indigenous people are currently at universities, overwhelmingly in standard, mainstream degree-level and post-grad courses. Sixty thousand have already graduated.

So yes, cultural practices have changed drastically. Indigenous people have become aspirational like other Australians - and about one generation behind the working class, in university participation, but catching up fast. University participation growth rates are higher than those of Maoris in New Zealand. The Indigenous population is overwhelmingly urban, nearly half are living in metropolitan areas. So thanks, Paul, for catching up.

Joe

@Loudmouth,

And of course, when the label Indigenous is used, it covers a huge range of people, very few, who are 100% Aboriginal in ancestry up to those 1% or less in ancestry who are not Aboriginal in any true sense.

The majority of those called Indigenous are minimally Aboriginal in ancestry and unless one takes a racist position that the many different Aboriginal peoples here in 1788 have passed on to their descendants, a legacy where the slightest amount of Aboriginal ancestry will be the dominant ancestry - not sure how that could work anyway- then pretty clearly, most who are called Indigenous are not Aboriginal but just Australians like everyone else who have mixed ancestry.

I find the practice of praising those with the slightest smidge of Aboriginal ancestry for any achievement the worst kind of racism for it suggests, any Aboriginal ancestry, from any of the hundreds of different groups, predisposes to inferior function and so when someone with less than 1% Aboriginal ancestry, the remaining 99%+ being Anglo-European, achieves something, anything really, then they have remarkably somehow managed to rise beyond their inherited inferior function.

Let's all be Australians of mixed ancestry celebrating all of our ancestry and considering none of it to be superior.

Hi Rhross,

I'm not so sure about fractions etc. - if someone has been raised as Aboriginal by an Aboriginal parents, if their brothers and sisters are similarly raised, if their cousins and uncles and aunties etc. who visit are Aboriginal, if the local townspeople consider them to be Aboriginal and, of course, if they also, also, also, consider themselves to be Aboriginal - then no matter how pale or modern-cultural they may be, they're Aboriginal.

Of course, this is subject to abuse - people who claim, even as adults, to have found some (maybe) Aboriginal ancestry. No, they most certainly may not be Aboriginal, especially if they've never mixed with Aboriginal people, never bothered to chase up their ancestry, etc, and don't really know any Aboriginal people - no.

Anybody who has worked in an Indigenous program would be aware of phonies who want to get some benefit not available to non-Aboriginal people. Of course, they can claim to be part of the mythical 'Stolen Generation', to which anyone can reply: "Then go and get your file from the Archives and we'll see."

Joe

@ loudmouth,

You said: - if someone has been raised as Aboriginal by an Aboriginal parents, if their brothers and sisters are similarly raised, if their cousins and uncles and aunties etc. who visit are Aboriginal, if the local townspeople consider them to be Aboriginal and, of course, if they also, also, also, consider themselves to be Aboriginal - then no matter how pale or modern-cultural they may be, they're Aboriginal.

Of course. What you say makes sense. They are Aboriginal Australians but that is not what I am talking about.

Many of those who call themselves Indigenous, the new code-word for Aboriginal which strangely is said to be a negative term now? have not been raised in Aboriginal communities etc. Many, like Ash Barty, have a part Aboriginal great-grandparent - that is one out of eight - so pretty clearly there is a lot more of something else, usually Anglo-European than there is Aboriginal. How can someone like that grow up in an Aboriginal culture when most of the ancestral culture is Anglo-European?

And I wonder even about those who claim to be raised Aboriginal because it is no different to an Australian with Greek ancestry, even in both parents, claiming to be Greek. They are not Greek. They are Australians with an inheritance of some Greek culture, filtered through Australian culture.

Thanks Joe, I did have a read on the web site, under the "Protectors" letters. Not saying its untrue but the Protector is hardly likely to condemn himself. Yes, if it walks like a duck, and quacks like duck, then we'll have to call it a duck, If you genuinely identify as Aboriginal then your an Aboriginal, even if your DNA says you're an Eskimo.

"... have a part Aboriginal great-grandparent - that is one out of eight"

If a great grand parent is part Aboriginal then that's less than an eighth.