BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY The Black People of Australia who happen to have lived in that country for thousand of years, are still been insulted by been called " ABORIGINES " they are Native or Black Australian, not the very insulting name of Aboriginal People.
The Issue of Aboriginal people gaining recognition for their full
rights on land held under pastoral lease in the Northern Territory of
Australia will become a major battleground for human rights in the 1990s
and beyond.
When considering the relocation and resettlement of the Aboriginal
people of Australia, any pattern of movement away from their country can
only be seen as part of a boomerang movement of return. To accept any
invitation to contemplate the separation of people from country is
pointless. Likewise, it is equally pointless to contemplate the
separation of the country from the people.
The Aboriginal people of Australia are not merely "simple
hunter-gatherers" wandering the face of the earth in search of daily
food. They are a people with a highly developed "non-material" culture
that integrates individual and collective subjectivity into the
structures of the environment. They are not so much part of nature as
they are its intelligence, playing a vital role in the self-government
of the interactions between species and environment.
When a wedge is driven between the Australian people and the
Australian country, both suffer traumatic changes and go into decline.
The land has a great a longing for there turn of the Aboriginal people
as the Aboriginal people have for their return to their country. No
government policy and no "whitefella" (Anglo-Australian) ploy has yet
proven stronger than this longing.
White Cattlemen/Aboriginal Country
In the Northern Territory of Australia, the white pastoralists
(cattle and beef barons) presently stand poised to drive even deeper the
hundred-year-old wedge that separates the Aboriginal people from their
country. In many cases they have succeeded in forcing a temporary
retreat by Aboriginal people from land under pastoral lease.
The Northern Territory, an administrative division of the colonizing
Anglo-Australian government, was granted self-governing status in 1978.
It was formerly administered by the Commonwealth Government of
Australia, which acquired it from the South Australia, which acquired it
from the South Australian government in 1911. South Australia, then a
colony of Great Britain, acquired it from New South Wales in 1863.
Neither New South Wales nor the British government, however, took the
trouble to acquire it from the Aboriginal people. Probably for this
reason, Aborigines do not concede that the white claim to their lands is
well found.
Immediately upon achieving self-government in 1978, the white
interests that had underwritten the Country-Liberal Party government set
about consolidating the hold they had acquired on Aboriginal countries.
The "locked-gate" strategy of the pastoralists, combined with bluff and
intimidation, was directed to ensure that once the "property" had been
rid of Aboriginal inhabitants, it remained so.
Aboriginal people on some pastoral leases refuse to accept that they
may only remain on their country if they are "workers" (and, as such,
liable to dismissal); their continued presence has been a thorn in the
side of the whites. The other thorn is the reservation in the pastoral
lease that guarantees the legal right for Aboriginal people to live on
their land. Although this has long been abused, with N.T. Aboriginal
people being shot and otherwise mistreated during the last hundred years
without the forfeiture of the lease, the continued presence of the
reservation serves to complement the on-the-ground efforts of the
Aboriginal people to maintain their relationship with their country.
Although the Crown did not acquire the land from Aboriginal people in
the first instance, it made provision in the pastoral leases which, if
adhered to, would have produced a very different history of human rights
in Australia. The genesis of the reservation in the lease is found in
the instructions from the British secretary of state for the colonies to
the governor of New South Wales in 1848 (Earl Grey to Fitzroy, 11
February 1848). (At this time, the whole of the Northern Territory was
still part of New South Wales.) Grey wrote:
I think it essential that it should be generally understood that
leases granted for this purpose give the grantees only exclusive rights
of pasturage for their cattle and of cultivating such land as they may
require within the large limits thus assigned to them but that these
leases are not intended to deprive the natives of their former right to
hunt over these districts, or to wander over them in search of
subsistence in the manner to which they have been accustomed, from the
spontaneous produce of the soil, except over land actually cultivated or
fenced in for that purpose.
Clearly, the white interests are to be protected by fences; the
Aboriginal interests are to continue to range over the country. The
history of the Northern Territory has been such that the inverse is the
result
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