Aboriginal Australians

1
Aboriginal Australians
This article is about a specific class of people in Australian law. For more general information, see Indigenous
Australians.
Aboriginal Australians
Notable Aboriginal Australians 1st row: Windradyne, David Gulpilil, Albert Namatjira, David Unaipon, Mandawuy Yunupingu
2nd row: Truganini, Yagan, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Bennelong, Robert Tudawali
Total population
670,000 (2011)
[1]
3% of Australia's population
Regions with significant populations
Northern Territory 29.8%
Queensland 4.2%
Western Australia 3.8%
New South Wales 2.9%
South Australia 2.3%
Victoria 0.9%
Languages
Several hundred Indigenous Australian languages, many no longer spoken, Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English, Kriol
Religion
Mixture of Christian, small numbers of other religions, various locally indigenous religions grounded in Australian Aboriginal mythology
Related ethnic groups
see List of Indigenous Australian group names, Tasmanian Aborigines
Aboriginal Australians
2
Aboriginal dwellings in Hermannsburg, Northern
Territory, 1923. Image: Herbert Basedow.
Aboriginal Australians, also referred to as Aborigines, are people
whose ancestors were indigenous to the Australian continentthat is,
to mainland Australia or to the island of Tasmaniabefore British
colonisation of the continent began in 1788. Aboriginal Australians are
a legally defined ethnic group in Australia.
[2][3]
Legal and administrative definitions
The category "Aboriginal Australians" was coined by the British after
they began colonising Australia in 1788, to refer collectively to all
people they found already inhabiting the continent, and later to the
descendants of any of those people. Until the 1980s, the sole legal and
administrative criterion for inclusion in this category was race.
In the era of colonial and post-colonial government, access to basic human rights depended upon your
race. If you were a "full blooded Aboriginal native ... [or] any person apparently having an admixture of
Aboriginal blood", a half-caste being the "offspring of an Aboriginal mother and other than Aboriginal
father" (but not of an Aboriginal father and other than Aboriginal mother), a "quadroon", or had a
"strain" of Aboriginal blood you were forced to live on Reserves or Missions, work for rations, given
minimal education, and needed governmental approval to marry, visit relatives or use electrical
appliances.
[4]
The Constitution of Australia, in its original form as of 1901, referred to Aborigines twice but without definition.
Section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth parliament power to legislate with respect to "the people of any race"
throughout the Commonwealth, except for people of "the aboriginal race". The purpose of this provision was to give
the Commonwealth power to regulate non-white immigrant workers, who would follow work opportunities
interstate. The only other reference, Section 127, provided simply that "aboriginal natives shall not be counted" in
reckoning the size of the population of the Commonwealth or any part of it.
After both of these references were removed by the 1967 referendum, there was no longer any reference to
Aboriginal peoples in the Australian Constitution. Since that time, there have been a number of proposals to amend
the constitution to specifically mention Indigenous Australians.
[5][6]
The change to Section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth parliament the power to make laws specifically with
respect to Aboriginal peoples as a "race". In the Tasmanian Dam Case of 1983, the High Court of Australia was
asked to determine whether Commonwealth legislation whose application could relate to Aboriginal peopleparts
of the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 (Cth) as well as related legislationwas supported by
Section 51(xxvi) in its new form. The case concerned an application of that legislation that would preserve cultural
heritage of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It was held that Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, together or
separately, and any part of either, could be regarded as a "race" for this purpose. As to the criteria for identifying a
person as a member of such a "race", the definition by Justice Deane has become accepted as current law. Deane J
said:
It is unnecessary, for the purposes of the present case, to consider the meaning to be given to the phrase
"people of any race" in s. 51(xxvi). Plainly, the words have a wide and non-technical meaning [...]. The
phrase is, in my view, apposite to refer to all Australian Aboriginals collectively. Any doubt, which
might otherwise exist in that regard, is removed by reference to the wording of par. (xxvi) in its original
form. The phrase is also apposite to refer to any identifiable racial sub-group among Australian
Aboriginals. By "Australian Aboriginal" I mean, in accordance with what I understand to be the
conventional meaning of that term, a person of Aboriginal descent, albeit mixed, who identifies himself
as such and who is recognised by the Aboriginal community as an Aboriginal.
[7]
Aboriginal Australians
3
While Deane's three-part definition reaches beyond the biological criterion, it has been criticised as continuing to
accept the biological criterion as primary. It has been found difficult to apply, both in each of its parts and as to the
relations among the parts; biological "descent" has been a fall-back criterion.
[8]
Definitions from Aboriginal Australians
Eve Fesl, a Gabi Gabi woman, wrote in the Aboriginal Law Bulletin describing how she and possibly other
Aboriginal people preferred to be identified:
The word 'aborigine' refers to an indigenous person of any country. If it is to be used to refer to us as a
specific group of people, it should be spelt with a capital 'A', i.e. 'Aborigine'.
[9]
While the term 'indigenous' is being more commonly used by Australian Government and non-Government
organisations to describe Aboriginal Australians, Lowitja O'Donoghue, commenting on the prospect of possible
amendments to Australia's constitution, was reported as saying:
I really can't tell you of a time when 'indigenous' became current, but I personally have an objection to
it, and so do many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. [...] This has just really crept up
on us ... like thieves in the night. [...] We are very happy with our involvement with indigenous people
around the world, on the international forum [...] because they're our brothers and sisters. But we do
object to it being used here in Australia.
O'Donoghue went on to say that the term indigenous robbed the traditional owners of Australia of an identity
because some non-Aboriginal people now wanted to refer to themselves as indigenous because they were born there.
Definitions from academia
Dean of Indigenous Research and Education at Charles Darwin University, Professor MaryAnn Bin-Sallik, has
publicly lectured on the ways Aboriginal Australians have been categorised and labelled over time. Her lecture
offered a new perspective on the terms urban, traditional and of Indigenous descent as used to define and categorise
Aboriginal Australians. She said:
Not only are these categories inappropriate, they serve to divide us. [...] Government's insistence on
categorising us with modern words like 'urban', 'traditional' and 'of Aboriginal descent' are really only
replacing old terms 'half-caste' and 'full-blood' based on our colouring.
[10]
She called for a replacement of this terminology by that of "Aborigine" or "Torres Strait Islander""irrespective of
hue".
Origins
See also: History of Indigenous Australians
The origin of Aboriginal peoples in Australia has been the subject of intense speculation since the nineteenth
century. Until recentlyWikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Chronological items, no theory of migration
had gained wide acceptance. Genetic studies had shown the Aboriginal peoples to be related much more closely to
each other than to any peoples outside Australia, but scholars had disagreed whether their closest kin outside
Australia were certain South Asian groups or African groups. The latter would imply a migration pattern in which
their ancestors passed through South Asia to Australia without intermingling genetically with other populations
along the way. A 2009 genetic study in India found similarities among Indian archaic populations and Aboriginal
people, indicating a Southern migration route, with expanding populations from Southeast Asia migrating to
Indonesia and Australia.
In a genetic study in 2011, researchers found evidence, in DNA samples taken from strands of Aboriginal people's
hair, that the ancestors of the Aboriginal population split off from the ancestors of the European and Asian
populations between 62,000 and 75,000 years agoroughly 24,000 years before the European and Asian
Aboriginal Australians
4
populations split off from each other. These Aboriginal ancestors migrated into South Asia and then into Australia,
where they stayed, with the result that, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have occupied the same territory
continuously longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal peoples are
the direct descendants of migrants who arrived around 50,000 years ago. This finding is supported by earlier
archaeological finds of human remains near Lake Mungo that date to 45,000 years ago. The same genetic study of
2011 found evidence that Aboriginal peoples carry some of the genes associated with the Denisovan peoples of Asia;
the study suggests that there is an increase in allele sharing between the Denisovans and the Aboriginal Australians
genome compared to other Eurasians and Africans. The Papuans have more sharing alleles than Aboriginal peoples.
The data suggests that modern and archaic humans interbred in Asia before the migration to Australia.
Groups of Aboriginal Australians
Main article: List of Indigenous Australian group names
Dispersing across the Australian continent over time, the ancient peoples expanded and differentiated into hundreds
of distinct groups, each with its own language and culture.
[11]
More than 400 distinct Australian Aboriginal peoples
have been identified across the continent, distinguished by unique names designating their ancestral languages,
dialects, or distinctive speech patterns.
[12]
Historically, these groups lived in three main cultural areas, known as the
Northern, Southern, and Central cultural areas. The Northern and Southern areas, having richer natural marine and
woodland resources, were more densely populated than the less resource-rich Central area.
Names used by Australian Aboriginal people
There are a number of other names from Australian Aboriginal languages commonly used to identify groups based
on geography, including:
Anangu in northern South Australia, and neighbouring parts of Western Australia and Northern Territory
Bama in north-east Queensland
Koori (or Koorie or Goori or Goorie) in New South Wales and Victoria
Murri in southern Queensland
Noongar in southern Western Australia
Nunga in southern South Australia
Palawah (or Pallawah) in Tasmania.
References
[1] Estimates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, June 2011 (http:/ / www. abs. gov. au/ ausstats/ abs@. nsf/ mf/ 3238. 0. 55.
001), Australian Bureau of Statistics.
[2] Blandy, Sarah, and David Sibley. "Law, boundaries and the production of space." Social & Legal Studies 19.3 (2010): 275-284.
[3] Linnekin, Jocelyn, and Lin Poyer, eds. Cultural identity and ethnicity in the Pacific. University of Hawaii Press, 1990, p. 214 "Aboriginal
Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act of 1976 states that " 'Aboriginal' means a person who is a member of the Aboriginal race of Australia"
[4] de Plevitz, Loretta & Croft, Larry: "Aboriginality Under The Microscope: The Biological Descent Test In Australian Law" (2003) 3 QUT
Law & Justice Journal 105 (http:/ / www.austlii. edu. au/ cgi-bin/ sinodisp/ au/ journals/ QUTLJJ/ 2003/ 7. html) Accessed 22 November
2011.
[5] Gooda, Mick. Indigenous inclusion is good for our constitution (http:/ / www. smh. com. au/ opinion/ society-and-culture/
indigenous-inclusion-is-good-for-our-constitution-20100708-10275. html) smh.com.au. Published 9 July 2010. Retrieved 23 November
2011.
[6] Karvelas, Patricia. Strong constitution needed for national consensus on Aboriginal recognition (http:/ / www. theaustralian. com. au/
national-affairs/ strong-constitution-needed-for-national-consensus-on-aboriginal-recognition/ story-fn59niix-1226000030083)
theaustralian.com.au. Published 5 February 2011. Retrieved 23 November 2011.
[7] Deane J in Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam Case) (1983) 158 CLR 1 at 273-274.
[8] Re A-G (Cth) v Queensland (http:/ / www. austlii.edu.au/ cgi-bin/ sinodisp/ au/ cases/ cth/ FCA/ 1990/ 235. html) [1900] FCA 285; 25 FCR
125 (http:/ / www. austlii. edu. au/ cgi-bin/ LawCite?cit=25 FCR 125) (Federal Court of Australia, Full Court). The outcome was to fix the
Queensland government with responsibility for an "Aboriginal" death in custody, when the deceased was of Aboriginal descent but had
Aboriginal Australians
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himself denied being of Aboriginal identity.
[9] Fesl, Eve D.: "'Aborigine' and 'Aboriginal'" (1986) 1(20) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 10 (http:/ / www. austlii. edu. au/ au/ journals/
AboriginalLawB/ 1986/ 39.html) Accessed 19 August 2011.
[10] Charles Darwin University newsroom (12 May 2008) "First public lecture focuses on racist language" (http:/ / ext. cdu. edu. au/ newsroom/
a/ 2008/ Pages/ 2665. aspx) Accessed 13 May 2008.
[11] [11] Lourandos, Harry (1997) "New Perspectives in Australian Prehistory," Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom. ISBN 0-521-35946-5.
[12] Horton, David (1994) The Encyclopedia of Aboriginal Australia: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander History, Society, and Culture,
Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra. ISBN 0-85575-234-3.
Article Sources and Contributors
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Article Sources and Contributors
Aboriginal Australians Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=610901021 Contributors: 1exec1, 2fsdfsf, 5beauties, 7226red, A.amitkumar, A930913, Aaron north, Acroterion,
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Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors
File:Aboriginal Australians montage.jpg Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Aboriginal_Australians_montage.jpg License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0
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Denelson83, Fry1989, Greentubing, Homo lupus, Ninane, Sarang, Svgalbertian, Thecurran, Wereldburger758, Xufanc
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