Aboriginal People In Australia Research Articles

Expanding knowledge among Aboriginal service providers on treatment options for excessive alcohol use

Approaches to the prevention of alcohol problems among Aboriginal people in Australia have tended to emphasize primary and tertiary prevention, while neglecting secondary prevention or early intervention. In contrast, members of the wider Australian community can now access a variety of early interventions through general practice, in hospital settings and through drug and alcohol treatment agencies. As part of a survey of the use of brief interventions, 178 agencies throughout Australia were interviewed, and findings are presented from the 29 agencies in this sample which provided services primarily for Aboriginal people. Approximately half offered a variety of approaches including brief interventions, with goals of moderation; the other half were entirely abstinence-orientated. These findings are discussed in the context of expanding the options that might be offered by Aboriginal-run agencies.

Creating Multicultural Societies

THE WORLD IS MULTICULTURAL, as are most of the states that make up the international community. People within national boundaries have diverse origins, languages, religions, histories, and traditions. This variety is often compounded by shifting national boundaries which are a result of warfare, conquest, liberation, and the break-up of empires - a process still actively affecting the character of states in the former communist world. In the more settled politics of the developed world, change increasingly reflects international migration. But growing political awareness among long-established minorities which either lost their identities or were prepared to submerge them within confines established by the dominant majority also effect change. Most nation states have devoted educational and cultural resources to homogenizing a 'national identity' which is now under challenge from recent trends.Australia, Britain, Sweden, and Canada are among the oldest democracies. This did not prevent them from seeking cultural uniformity in the past, a process which was easiest for Sweden but involved draconian policies towards Aboriginal people in Australia, language repression in Britain, and constant tension in Canada between the two founding nations of anglophones and francophones. Although these policies have rarely been as drastic as the genocide or ethnic cleansing found in Europe, parallels have been drawn by minority activists, especially in relation to Australian Aboriginal affairs and to the tortured relationship between Britain and Ireland. All four societies have experienced discomfort in integrating immigrants and refugees, despite official initiatives designed to control and to accommodate new arrivals.(f.1) As in the United States, which exerts an influence on all of them, arguments about multiculturalism, assimilation, immigration, and tolerance influence political debate and will continue to do so.INDIGENOUS ESTABLISHED AND IMMIGRANT MINORITIESEthnic groups vary greatly in their definition, character, and role in society. In political terms they are always seen as minorities, even when they form a numerical majority in some regions. Because ethnicity embraces cultural difference, it must remain an elastic description. Cultures change rapidly in an era of mass education and mass media. Immigrants cease to be like those they left behind and are often confused and disappointed when they return 'home' to a society they no longer recognize. Their children may or may not be attached to the parental culture; after all, many children of the majority turn against their parental inheritance. Deliberate efforts to force aboriginal populations to assimilate have radically changed their cultures and often fractured their social structure. In a multi-ethnic society, cultural isolates such as the Old Order Amish in Ontario are rare. Assimilation, syncretism, cultural blending, and confusion are the common experience.Yet many of those in multi-ethnic situations continue to classify others as different even as they make excuses for individuals known to them personally. At the extreme this leads to organized racism, currently most virulent - though still marginal - in Britain. More commonly, it produces the 'I am not a racist but' preface to an argument about cultural incompatibility or the need to control immigration or to educate children to be 'real' Australians, Britons, and so forth. In political reality the perception among citizens is that ethnic groups exist even if they exclude themselves from membership. Usually they rank differences on a scale of acceptability based on 'distance' from themselves. Thus English-speaking immigrants have always been acceptable in Australia, and (if white) were able to enter without effective control until the 1960s, as are Nordic immigrants to Sweden.Public policy reflects this widespread perception of ethnic variety and cultural distance. While each state determines ethnic categories in the light of its own history and experience, some broad categorization is helpful in distinguishing among ethnic groups in terms of their impact on public policy. …

Native Daughters: My Place and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

This essay considers two autobiographies, My Place by Australian writer and painter Sally Morgan (1951-) and Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl by the American abolitionist and ex-slave Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897). The argument is that these texts resemble, illuminate and confirm one another, despite huge differences between their origins in space and time. To study these books together shows that not only are novelists revisiting the fugitive narratives, but autobiographers are, too. The comparison also convinces me that fugitive narratives, or at least some such narratives, are not written from a viewpoint the quintessentially 'other' as William L. Andrews proposes; instead they occupy intimate, intermediate position which I call a thou position. My Place and Incidents in the Life a Slave Girl exhibit a striking likeness, namely, a common origin in struggles to retrieve repressed memories from personal silences and install them in the center public memory. The repressed memory on the private side in both is childhood sexual abuse. On the public side in both is a half-remembered national atrocity, chattel slavery in America and slavery in all but name over aboriginal people in Australia. The American memory gap erases the positive accomplishments Reconstruction, and elides the daily business slaveholding and maintaining the ideology slave-owners from history. Anglo-Australians similarly elide Aboriginal people's labor from their origin myths about their pastoral wealth. The autobiographies considered here disclose close links between those family secrets sexism protects and public atrocities racism excuses. In stories like these, which are between domestic and national crimes, aporias and displacements are rife because the authors struggle against the dominant public narratives. Though all autobiography has rifts and discontinuities, fugitive narratives arguably have more due to the circumstances from which they spring. Autobiography which aims to overturn a repugnant ideology must expose dirty secrets, secrets every ideology has. As Pierre Machery observes in A Theory Literary Production, an ideology is made what it does not mention; it exists because there are things which must not be spoken of (132). The act writing to impugn ideology resembles psychoanalysis because such writing tries to analyze the political unconscious. An autobiographer in so doing probes taboos like analyst. To decode her culture's dreams, she has to pry open ideological silences, those aporias in public discourse, and gouge out new pathways. (Aporia comes from the Greek a, not, and poros, passage or ford. An aporia marks the end the road, hence a logical impass.) Morgan and Jacobs arrive at repeated aporias; they count on sympathy to fill in where narrative falters. They want readers to realize that sexual abuse and political injustice are alike. They expect readers might make the cognitive leap the analogy involves because that ideology which shields the patriarch in his homestead resembles the historiography that masks him and his in national myths. Patricia Williams observes: Self possession in the full sense that expression is the companion to self-knowledge. Yet claiming for myself a heritage the weft whose genesis is my own disinheritance is a profoundly troubling paradox (Signs 6-7). In other words, the impasses that confront autobiographer whose own body is supposed to be illegitimate cast doubt equally on claims to descent and the ability to bear witness. To complain is to risk making yourself a spectacle and confirming the ideology which occludes you; even to tell the facts dispassionately requires a novelist's skill. William L. Andrews frames the problem finding the right rhetorical stance for a fugitive narrative in terms the self and its others: During the ante-bellum era, when black narrative in the United States developed into a highly self-conscious and rhetorically sophisticated tradition, black writers who aimed at a serious hearing knew that the authority they aspired to was predicated on the authenticity that they could project onto and through a text. …

Enduring Moments of Aboriginal Dominance: Aboriginal Performers, Boxers and Runners

In the very dangerous process of coming to terms with an invading people and their culture, Aboriginal people in Australia have used a great variety of survival strategies, most notably work: paid and unpaid. Sometimes work took the guise of performance. This chapter will examine how Aboriginal Australians have articulated with European Australians through show and sporting performances with a special emphasis on their experience of professional boxing and running. By its very nature, this investigation of Aboriginal people performing and playing sports poses Aborigines as active subjects. I will argue they experienced moments of dominance in these performances and that these moments endured in the minds of all Australians black and white modifying the power of white racial dominance.

Entrepreneurial development in Aboriginal communities in Australia and Canada

This article examines efforts to stimulate entrepreneurship among Aboriginal people in Australia and Canada. It describes the history of the relationship between Europeans and Aborigines in the two countries, including past efforts at economic development, and then compares two quite different approaches being used in the two countries to encourage entrepreneurial ventures among native peoples. Both approaches are in the experimental stage, so it is too early to draw firm conclusions about their usefulness. Preliminary indications are that each approach has strengths which might serve as valuable input to policy-making in the field of economic development strategy.

Aboriginal Perceptions Of Their Stone Tool Technology: A Case Study From The Western Desert, Australia

The basic tools of subsistence used by Aboriginal people in Australia were made of wood and stone. Unfortunately termites, fires and the sun are harsh on wooden implements and none but the most recently discarded survive as evidence of prehistoric behaviour. Implements made of stone do survive and as a result are an important means of interpreting past Aboriginal in Australia. Not surprisingly, archaeologists spend much of their time trying to understand stone tools and so understand past human behaviour. In Australia, archaeological investigations of this kind have shifted from intuitive assessment of stone tools towards more sophisticated quantitive analysis of assemblages. Archaeologists employ a variety of techniques such as metrical examination of edge angles, edge shapes and stone tool morphologies (Jones 1971; White 1972; Lampert 1980) and there has been growing interest in techniques of stone tool replication and microscopic examination of usewear, polish and residues (Kamminga 1978; Fullager 1982; Loy 1987). Ethnoarchaeological investigation has also contributed to the debate (McCarthy 1946; Tindale 1965; Gould et al. 1971; Hayden 1979) as have the relationships between intrasite and intersite variations and the environmental, economic and social characteristics of traditional Aboriginal societies (O'Connell 1977).

Geographic location and Aboriginal economic status: a census-based analysis of outstations in the Northern Territory

The demographic and economic characteristics of Aboriginal people in Australia's remotest locations are examined from 1986 Census data. There are three objectives: first to argue the case for examining Aboriginal society in spatial context: second, to demonstrate how census data can be manipulated to isolate meaningful spatial sub-categories; third to consider the extent to which extreme remote location is associated with distinct social and economic characteristics. The conclusion is that on the whole, remote location is reflected in lower economic status but not in demographic structure.

Superseding Historic Injustice

The history of white settlers' dealings with the aboriginal peoples of Australia, New Zealand, and North America is largely a history of injustice. People, or whole peoples, were attacked, defrauded, and expropriated; their lands were stolen and their lives were ruined. What are we to do about these injustices? We know what we should think about them: they are to be studied and condemned, remembered and lamented. But morality is a practical matter, and judgments of just' and 'unjust' like all moral judgments have implications for action. To say that a future act open to us now would be unjust is to commit ourselves to avoiding it. But what of past injustice? What is the practical importance now of a judgment that injustice occurred in the past? In the first instance the question is one of metaethics. Moral judgments are prescriptive in their illocutionary force; they purport to guide choices.1 But since the only choices we can guide are choices in front of us, judgments about the past must look beyond the particular events that are their ostensible subject matter. The best explanation

ABORIGINAL EMPLOYMENT AND UNEMPLOYMENT AN OVERVIEW

Aboriginal people face an exceedingly harsh climate1 in the Australian labour market. They have lower employment rates, lower participation rates, and massively higher unemployment rates than non-Aboriginals. They have lower earnings, are employed in mainly unskilled manual occupations, in short-term dead-end jobs (except in the public service), often in seasonal work, and with no career structure. Life for Aboriginal people in Australia is, in Hobbes’ eloquent phrase, “nasty, brutish, and short”. Aboriginals have poorer health, higher mortality rates,2 less education, less training, poor housing and living conditions.

A unique mental health network for Victorian Aboriginal people

The Victorian Aboriginal Mental Health Network (VAMHN) is a unique mental health programme for Aboriginal people in Australia. The network was set up in 1987. The services and programmes developed include a community consultation service, a psychiatric inpatient unit; and educational, evaluative and research programmes. Utilisation of the network has steadily increased and the demand for both primary and secondary consultations continues to grow.

Lake Mungo

Lake Mungo, in New South Wales, is the home of the first known people in this country. Here, the oldest known evidence of Aboriginal people in Australia has been found. Because of its importance, it is a site which everyone should know about. To give us a feeling for Lake Mungo, Billy Reid, the illustrator of The Aboriginal Health Worker and The Aboriginal Child at School, came with me on a trip. We travelled west to the Darling River (whose Aboriginal name is Calewatta), and then south-east to Lake Mungo itself. Billy made wonderful drawings to represent the deeds and everyday life of those people. This can be reconstructed from the fossil evidence found at Lake Mungo. He has also drawn some scenes of life along the banks of the Calewatta - the river which is Billy’s own home. He hails from Bourke.