...So for over 40,000 years, the Aboriginal people lived as they always had on the continent of Australia--wandering the land, living on the food that they could find, and keeping their religion and their culture alive through the telling of their sacred stories. All that changed in the 1700s when Europeans first arrived on the continent.
When Captain Cook arrived in Australia, it is estimated that there were between 300,000 and 750,000 Aboriginals on the continent. By 1911, however, there were only about 31,000 Aboriginal people left. How and why did this happen?
Many of the Aboriginals died from European diseases such as smallpox. Whole tribes were wiped out after they had been exposed to this disease. But this only accounted for part of the deaths; many other Aboriginals were murdered.
The Aboriginals tried to fight back to save their land and their rights, but their primitive weapons could not compete with the guns that the Europeans had. Many of the Aboriginals were taken as captives to work for the English, but
others were simply killed on sight, or in large, organized massacres. Some people referred to the killing of Aboriginals as a "war of extermination," and in some cases, whole tribes were poisoned to death.
Amazingly,
this killing of the ancient people of Australia continued into the 1930s. By that time, most Aboriginals were living on "reservations," similar to those in this country that were set up for Native Americans who had also been driven from their lands. As they lost their land, they lost touch with their religion and their culture. As one Aboriginal said, "If you take away our land, you take away our soul."
As measures were finally established to try to protect the Aboriginals, it was decided that they needed to be integrated into white society. Therefore, between 1910 and 1970, many Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families and placed with white families in an attempt to teach them the ways of modern society. To a culture that was based on tradition, spirituality, ritual and continuity, this destruction of families was just another cruelty inflicted by those in power.
But the Aboriginals who were left survived. In 1967 they were finally recognized as citizens and given the right to vote, and many who had been taken away from their families as children returned to their tribes.
The cruelties of the past, however, cannot be totally undone, and many Aboriginals--especially those in cities--suffer from alcoholism, and live in extreme poverty. Despite new laws, Aboriginal workers still earn less money than those of other ethnic groups, and Aboriginal activists say that Australia continues to be the most racist society in the world.
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