The Modern Legacy
Flickr
It goes without saying that populations don’t just bounce back from a century like this, and Australian policy throughout the 20th century didn’t help. The official policy of treating Aborigines like children in the custody of various appointed bureaucrats changed only very slowly, and it hasn’t completely ended even today.
For one, the first version of the Australian constitution excluded Aboriginal people from representation in government, as well as specifically depriving them of the vote. And in a country where it’s against the law to not vote, the government only granted Australians of Aboriginal descent suffrage in 1962, though they remained non-citizens regulated by the Flora and Fauna Act until 1967.
In the 1970s, the governments in Canberra and London made a few largely symbolic gestures to try to put things right, largely by returning the preserved remains of murdered Aborigines who had been put on display in museums and allowing traditional burials for them.
The de facto apartheid state gradually eased until full civil and legal equality was granted in every state, though not without a lot of strenuous objections in Queensland, which has a very high population of native people.
Today, things in Australia continue to move forward but are still far from fair. Aboriginal artifacts and possessions continue to legally belong to the Crown, and deceased natives’ property still goes into receivership rather than being inherited by the next of kin, though in 2012 the Australian government admitted it was “considering” changing this law.
With a virtually annihilated culture and history, and with extremely tenuous property and voting rights, Aboriginal communities are rife with alcoholism and drug abuse, as well as all of the vices and afflictions common to impoverished ghettos around the world.
Fixing the problems that still kill thousands of aborigines a year does seem to be on the Australian authorities’ agenda, even if only on a “considering it” basis, but progress is slow and prone to reversal.
It is possible that the descendants of Australia’s first people, after 60,000 years of isolation ended with 200 years of deliberate genocide, will continue picking up the pieces for centuries to come.
Next, see what North American indigenous tribes looked like before the U.S. government largely eradicated them. Then, see some heartbreaking photos from the Armenian Genocide that much of the world needs to stop ignoring. Finally, learn about the brutality of Belgium’s Leopold II and his genocide in the Congo.
