Australian Aboriginals (Cross Cultural Analysis)

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINALS

Australia 's aboriginal people closely fit the definition of a minority because their collective experiences over the past two centuries includes forced relocations , dispossessions from their traditional lands , and a program of government-sponsored social , political , and cultural discrimination . Despite legal measures to remedy their situation , the aborigines still bear the marks of long oppression

Since the arrival of British colonists in the 1780s , the aborigines were long forced to relocate against their will . Initially , white settlers used violence , which was punished less frequently over time and ultimately condoned

in to enforce their will . In 1830 , whites created the Black Line ' in 1830 , a roughly 125-mile-long armed cordon that drove aborigines into the hinterlands (Macintyre , 1999 ,

. 62 After 1850 , mass killings of aborigines became increasingly common , and aborigines were forces to withdraw to infertile , inhospitable , isolated parts of central Australia (Beckett , 1988 ,

. 7

Early in the twentieth century , the Australian government began a policy that anthropologist Jeremy Beckett calls protective segregation ' in which the government displaced the aborigines by forcibly removing them from their homes . One facet of this involved removing aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in 'children 's homes ' and settlements where families might live throughout their lives (Beckett , 1988 ,

. 7 . Children were forced into institutions that trained them to become domestic servants for white families historian Stuart Macintyre claims that children 's physical displacement was essential to the policy of forced assimilation , in which native children were forced to become `novitiates to the Australian way of life (Macintyre , 1999 ,

. 221 . Meanwhile destitute adults would be forced into government settlements , which cared for them but denied their independence

In addition , the aborigines have long had their civil and human rights violated by the white-run government . The White Australia ' policies initiated upon independence in 1901 , systematically denied aboriginal people the rights of citizenship , including the vote , access to all social welfare programs , and physical segregation of residential areas and public spaces (Markus , 1994 , pp . 110-119 . Australia 's segregation policies resembled the United States ' Jim Crow ' laws , because aborigines were barred from amenities (like public schools ) or else forced to use separate and distinctly unequal facilities like railroad cars , hospitals , and motion-picture theaters . Already vulnerable to white violence , imported diseases , and alcoholism , Australia 's native population declined in population from about 95 ,000 in 1901 to fewer than 74 ,000 by 1933 (Markus , 1994 ,

. 152

Australia 's assimilation programs , enacted after World War II as part of an international questioning of racial attitudes , were little more than a form of paternalism that still violated aboriginal rights Removal of native children continued until 1971 , and these programs amounted to little more than cultural genocide ' by trying to separate young aborigines from their traditional cultural practices . Though the Australian government gradually granted them citizenship rights from 1948 onward , culminating with suffrage in 1962 and full citizenship in 1967 (Markus , 1994 , pp . 155-173 , the land question was not addressed until the 1990s and...