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From The Times
May 17, 2006

A clash of cultures that shows no sign of a solution

By Bernard Lagan
TRIUMPH in the Tropics, an Australian school textbook in the 1960s, lauded the white man’s dominance over Aboriginal people.

The Aborigine could be intimidated by a direct and confident stare, but he would attack if an opponent were disabled or ran away, according to the book, whose stereotypes reflected nearly a century of white antagonism and paternalism.

By then, however, the old order was crumbling. Later in the 1960s the Aborigines were given full voting rights and included in the national census. Ever since William Dampier shot an Aborigine dead as he came ashore in 1697 in Western Australia, white Australians have had a troubled relationship with their indigenous people, who colonised an empty continent about 40,000 years ago.

As white people arrived in great numbers from 1788 onwards the Aborigines were hounded — and, on occasion, massacred — by farmers and graziers who were eager for arable land.

A policy of assimilation was adopted in 1951. The intention was to integrate Aboriginal people into mainstream society, but the policy was largely abandoned in the early 1980s, after the parliament of New South Wales decided that assimilation had failed and should be replaced by greater self-determination for Aboriginal people.

An early step was the creation of Aboriginal land rights that attempted to compensate Aboriginal people for the loss of their lands. The historic Mabo High Court judgment of 1992 held that Aborigines had rights to lands taken from them and that Australia was not empty and uncivilised when white men arrived.

Although such landmarks have empowered the Aboriginal people, and more of them are entering universities, the reality for most continues to be a cycle of deprivation far removed from the lives lived by most white Australians.

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