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Unit : Changing rights and freedoms: Aboriginal people

Topic 1 : The Aboriginal experience

Pictures

Chapter: 19th century historical background

Image 1 - Before 1788 and the arrival of the First Fleet, Indigenous people lived all over Australia and the islands around it.
Image 2 - The First Fleet arrived in Sydney in January 1788.
Image 3 - The white settlers believed that Indigenous people should be educated to live in a more "civilised" manner.

Chapter: Dispossession and the frontier war

Image 1 - The white settlers began fencing in land, grazing cattle and denying Indigenous peoples access to their traditional hunting grounds.
Image 2 - Pemulwhy, leader of the Darug people, led a long resistance campaign against the dispossession of his peoples' traditional land.
Image 3 - Myall Creek was the scene of a massacre of Indigenous women and children in 1838. It was different from the other massacres because seven white men were tried and hanged for their part in it.

Chapter: Paternalism and protection policy

Image 1 - Charles Darwin's theories on evolution made white settlers believe that the Indigenous population would eventually die out.
Image 2 - Like many of the white settlers, the missionaries believed that they were helping the Indigenous people, by making them live and behave in a 'white' manner.

Chapter: Life on the reserves

Image 1 - Life on the reserves was very different to the traditional way of life.

Topic 2 : Stealing a generation (asssimilation)

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Chapter: What was assimilation?

Image 1 - European migrants arriving in Australia after World War Two were expected to forget their own culture and adopt 'British' culture.

Chapter: Why were children removed?

Image 1 - Many Aboriginal children, especially those with fairer skin, were taken away from their families so they could be assimilated into white society.
Image 2 - This picture from A. O. Neville's 1947 book, Australia's Coloured Minority, illustrates Neville's theories on how the 'Aboriginal blood' could be bred into extinction.

Chapter: How were the children removed?

Image 1 - Children who were taken away from their families were often put into group homes like Cootamundra (for girls) and Kinchela (for boys). It was in these homes that they were prepared for 'assimilation' into white society.

Chapter: Consequences of removal

Image 1 - The extent of the assimilation policy of removing Aboriginal children was not widely known, until the late 1990s with the publication of the 'Bringing Them Home' report.

Topic 3 : Self-determination

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Chapter: The struggle for rights and freedoms

Image 1 - 26 January 1938 was a day of mourning for Indigenous Peoples, not a day of celebration.
Image 2 - The Second World War meant that the fight for Aboriginal equality had to be set to one side for a number of years. Nearly 2000 Indigenous Australians became involved in the war effort.
Image 3 - Charles Perkins led the Freedom Riders on their journey through country towns in the 1960s. They were highlighting segregation in rural areas.

Chapter: Land rights: the beginning

Image 1 - Wave Hill Cattle Station was the site of one of the most famous strikes by Indigenous people. Lasting nine years, the walk-off only ended when the Gurindji people had their traditional lands returned to them in 1975.
Image 2 - The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was erected on 26 January 1972. It helped focus international attention on the Aboriginal land rights issue.
Image 3 - The Aboriginal Flag made its first international appearance, flying over the Tent Embassy, in 1972.

Chapter: Gains from the protest movement

Image 1 - Many Australians campaigned against the Apartheid system in South Africa, but they ignored the treatment of the Indigenous people in their own country.

Chapter: The 1967 referendum

Image 1 - The Australian constitution prevented the federal government from making laws for the Indigenous population, or counting them in a population census. This was changed by the 1967 referendum.
Image 2 - By 1967 there could no longer be any justification for denying equal rights, under the constitution, to Indigenous people. There was no real 'no' campaign against the constitutional change.

Chapter: Self-determination

When the age of paternalism and protectionism finally came to an end in the 1970s, self-determination for Indigenous people became the new government policy.
E. G. (Gough) Whitlam. Prime Minister from 1972-1975, he initiated many of the new self-determination policies that began to improve the lives of Aboriginal people.

Topic 4 : Land Rights and Native Title

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Chapter: Land rights from the 1970s

Image 1 - Justice Woodward led the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Land Rights.
Image 2 - As part of the land rights gains of the 1970s and 1980s, the sacred Indigenous site of Uluru was returned to its traditional owners in 1985.

Chapter: The Mabo case

Image 1 - Eddie Mabo led the Meriam People in their High Court battle to be recognised as the owners of the Murray Islands. He died only 4 months before the landmark decision that would change Australian land law.
Image 2 - The 1992 Mabo Judgement

Chapter: The Native Title Act and Wik

Image 1 - The land on the Cape York Peninsula that was the subject of the High Court case Wik Peoples V State of Queensland and Others.

Chapter: Native title since Wik

Image 1 - John Howard's Ten Point Plan of amendments to the Native Title Act has made it harder for Indigenous people to claim native title.

Topic 5 : Terra Nullius: changed and changing views of history

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Chapter: The 'White' version of Australia's past

Image 1 - Sir Walter Murdoch was a prominent Australian academic and essayist. He referred to Indigenous history as being full of 'queer' legends and fairy tales.

Chapter: The black armband view

Image 1 - Henry Reynolds' 1981 book The Other Side of the Frontier was one of the first books on Australian history to look at events from the Indigenous viewpoint.
Image 2 - Geoffrey Blainey was the historian who coined the phrase 'black armband' history.
Image 3 - Writer Keith Windschuttle is a proponent of the 'black armband' theory and believes that Australian history books in the last 30 years have been politically motivated, not historically.

Topic 6 : Reconciliation

Pictures

Chapter: The Royal Commission

Image 1 - A step on the road to reconciliation, the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody published its report in 1991.
Image 2 - A graph showing the disparity between the number of deaths among Indigenous prisoners opposed to non-Indigenous prisoners.
Image 3 - In the 1980s Indigenous Australians were nearly ten times as likely to go to prison, as non-Indigenous Australians.

Chapter: The process of reconciliation

Image 1 - The 1988 Bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet were viewed as inappropriate by most Indigenous and some non-Indigenous Australians.

Chapter: The road to reconciliation

Image 1 - Paul Keating, made the famous 'Redfern Speech', a major step on the road to reconciliation in Australia. He officially recognised that Indigenous children had been taken from their families by the state.
Image 2 - The Sydney Olympics, in 2000, were an opportunity for reconciliation to take place in a global setting.
Australians working towards reconciliation

Study guides

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