This legal fiction persisted until the High Court judged in the 1992 Mabo case that native title to land still existed in Australia unless it had been extinguished by statute or by some use of the land that was inconsistent with the continuation of native use and ownership. The Wik Decision of 1996 went a step further, acknowledging that native title continues to exist on pastoral leases, though with the proviso that “pastoral interest will prevail over native title rights, wherever the two conflict”.
Disease has also been a powerful, if unintentional, weapon in the war against indigenous Australians, and has proved more effective than shooting or poisoning. Australia’s geographical isolation ensured that there were very few communicable diseases on the continent prior to the arrival of Europeans, and successive generations of indigenous Australians had developed resistance to these. The arrival of colonists and their diseases posed an almost insurmountable immunological challenge. Whole populations were wiped out by smallpox and malaria epidemics, and the diaries of officers of the First Fleet record the rapid destruction from smallpox of the Aboriginal camps in the Sydney hinterland within four years of the establishment of the colony of New South Wales. Those who didn’t die fled the area, unwittingly infecting neighbouring groups as they went. When Governor Hunter made the first exploratory expedition to western New South Wales in the 1820s, he recorded evidence of prior smallpox epidemics among Aboriginal groups who had not previously come into contact with European settlers. As recently as the 1950s desert peoples were severely affected by outbreaks of influenza and measles. The lack of immunity to these introduced diseases was exacerbated by the trauma of dispossession, the lack of availability of traditional food and water supplies, and the unhygienic results of being required to wear European-style clothing.
The interruption of traditional food and water supplies became progressively worse through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the pastoral industry expanded in rural Australia, and vast areas were stripped of vegetation to provide for grazing land. Grazing animals competed with local animals for food, fouled established water sources, and their hard hooves damaged the integrity of surface soil, contributing to substantial erosion and salinity problems. Other European animals, originally introduced to make the countryside seem more like “home”, rapidly multiplied and have now become ubiquitous throughout Australia. Cats and foxes, both vicious predators, have been blamed for the near extinction of small to medium-size mammal species throughout arid Australia. Rabbit populations have expanded to fill the niche the mammals vacated, and their destructive grazing habits have contributed to the increasing desertification of Australia’s arid rangelands. Aboriginal tribespeople in Central Australia have witnessed this ecological disaster within the last sixty years, and have lamented the loss of many animal species that sustained them in the past.
Australia’s Aboriginal peoples have also been subjected to various forms of incarceration, ranging from prisons to apartheid-style reserves. Much of this systematic incarceration was instigated between 1890 and 1950 as an official policy of protection, in response to the devastating impact of colonization. Missionaries and other well-meaning people believed that Aborigines were a dying race, and that it was a Christian duty to “soothe the dying pillow”. Parliamentary records of the time reveal a harsher mentality. Aborigines were viewed as a weak and degenerate people, little better than animals, who exposed white settlers to physical and moral disease. To “protect” the Aborigines and settlers from each other, various state governments enacted legislation for the protection of Aborigines, appointed official Protectors of Aborigines, established reserves in rural areas and removed Aboriginal people to them. In some parts of Australia these reserves were established on traditional lands, allowing people to continue to live relatively undisturbed. In other parts of the country, notably Queensland, people were forcibly removed from their home areas and relocated in reserves throughout the state. Families were brutally broken up and the ties with the land and religion shattered. The so-called protectors had virtual life and death powers over those they allegedly protected. In Queensland, for example, Aboriginal people required permits to marry and to move from one reserve to another. They were forced into indentured labour, and their wages collected and banked on their behalf by the State government. If they fell ill with a notifiable disease, they could be arbitrarily removed from home and family to a lock hospital, including the notorious Fantome Island, off the coast from Townsville. This treatment persisted in some areas until the late 1960s. Aboriginal people are still ridiculously over-represented in Australia’s prison population, a situation which led to a Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which reported to the Federal Parliament in 1991. It called for wide-ranging changes in police and judicial practice, and substantial changes to social programmes aimed at improving the lot of Aboriginal peoples in the areas of justice, health, education, economics and empowerment. Although there has been considerable government lip-service to the recommendations of the Royal Commission, this has not resulted in any substantial change to incarceration rates.
Also since the 1920s, Aboriginal children have been legally removed from their black mothers and given into the care of state institutions and white foster parents as part of a policy of assimilation. The practice began in Victoria in 1886 and has continued until remarkably recently (1969). This period of “taking the children away” still haunts the lives of many Aboriginal Australians who have lost contact with their natal families and their culture. The policy was the subject of a major government inquiry in 1997, bringing the issue to wider attention for the first time. The trauma suffered by the people now known as the Stolen Generation has received considerable media attention since the release of the report of the inquiry, and led to calls for a national apology to Aboriginal people. Prime Minister John Howard has consistently refused to acknowledge that the Australian people have anything for which to apologize, but his government has made funding available for link-up and counselling services for those who were affected. He has been publicly criticised for his heartless stance by a number of influential Australians, and many people have expressed their personal regrets to the Aboriginal community. The Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, won national praise when he led a National Sorry Day by formally apologizing to Aborigines on behalf on the people of Brisbane in 1998. Many ordinary Australians have joined the popular movement to apologize by buying brightly coloured plastic hands to “plant” in public events known as the Sea of Hands, where thousands of the hands are temporarily installed in parks in most State Capitals. The events are seen as a way of expressing personal sorrow to Aboriginal people, as well as castigating the Federal Government for their lack of offical response.
The result of two centuries of brutal mistreatment is that, by almost every statistical indicator, the Aboriginal population is highly disadvantaged in both absolute terms and compared to non-Aboriginal groups.
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