THE ADMINISTRATION AND THE PART‐ABORIGINALS OF THE NORTHERN TERRITORY

Abstract

IN many parts of Australia where there is any Aboriginal problem the problem for the administrators of Aboriginal welfare is not a problem of educating and training a stone-age for life in a twentieth century community but of motivating part-Aboriginals who have become habituated to poverty, dependence and a life apart to achieve to become fully productive members of the Australian community. Administrators, politicians and others still occasionally speak and write as if part-Aboriginals are handicapped by their inheritance of the traditions and habits of a hunting and gathering way of life, as if the process is still one of accustoming the aborigines to European society ,1 Most parts of the continent have, however, been settled for many generations and the origins of the present problems of part-Aboriginals lie rather in the practices and the attitudes of white people and governments and the reactions of the Aboriginals and part-Aboriginals during this period than in the nature of the traditional Aboriginal way of life. There has been little scientific examination of the results of past and present policies and practices in the field of Aboriginal administration and such studies as have been made have generally been studies of the failures in terms of the aims of these policies : studies of the Aboriginal communities that persist remote from or on the margins of white towns. These unassimilated communities of Aboriginals and part-Aboriginals are conspicuous and the various administrations have relatively good records of the numbers and the condition of the people living in them. The part-Aboriginals living in towns and cities, particularly if they are no longer clients of the Aboriginal welfare departments, are less readily studied and (apart from the census counts) only more or less well informed guesses have been made of their numbers.2 The Northern Territory is one area where partAboriginals are better integrated into the general community than in most parts of the continent. An examination of the processes at work there may well be more