I’d like to have an idea of where Australian Aboriginals live.
Do most of them live in the desert and grassland areas on this map? Australia - Wikipedia
By a one-drop rule, most mixed-ancestry Australians today self-identify as Aboriginal, and they tend to live in the coastal cities.
Those who prefer to live in traditional communities find better conditions in the outback, but their overall numbers are much smaller.
Disagree. What’s your source on that? I’ve met plenty of people with a small amount of Aboriginal ancestry, but I’ve never met anyone less than a quarter Aboriginal who identifies as Aboriginal. The elders are pretty strict about who they recognise as Aboriginal, and you need to be recognised by an Aboriginal organisation to get any of the benefits (such as ABSTUDY).
You’re right about that, though, most Aborigines live in the cities.
Aboriginals were living in the areas marked temperate on that map, because they were displaced by the first convict colonies. They lived all over Australia, and then were pushed inland to the less desirable areas, just as Indians were in the U.S. By the early 20th century they were down to 35,000, which meant they hardly lived anywhere. Now there are more than half a million and they are mostly urbanized.
Australia is a highly urbanised society; 89% of the population live in urban areas as compared to 82% in the US, 79% in the UK, 73% in Germany. Even the compact and densely-populated Netherlands only manages 83%.
Aboriginal Australians also mostly live in urban areas, but they are not as urbanised as the population as a whole. About 60% of Aboriginal Australians live in urban areas, 20% live in outer regional areas, and the remaining 20% in rural and remote areas. For non-indigenous Australians, the corresponding figures are 89%, 9% and 2%. The result is that there in many remote and rural areas, Aboriginal Australians are either a majority of the population, or a very significant minority. Certainly, they are much more highly visible outside the cities.
Plus, they are not evenly distributed, by comparison with the non-indigenous population. In Victoria, Aboriginal Australians make up less than 2% of the population; in the Northern Territory, 30%.
Can you provide any evidence at all for this claim? :dubious:
Can you name even one Aboriginal group that was pushed inland to the less desirable areas?
Can you name even one Aboriginal person who was pushed inland to the less desirable areas?
Seriously? You’re disputing that Australian Aborigines were relocated by the government?
Aboriginal Protection Act 1869
Half-Caste Act
Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897
Stolen Generations
Indigenous Australia Timeline - 1901 to 1969
Still waiting for a reference that says that Aborigines were relocated inland to a desert area.
Just one.
Some Aborigines were certainly relocated. No doubt about it. Just as some non-Aborigines were relocated.
If all you are claiming is that at one time an Aboriginal orphan or prisoner was taken from a coastal region to an inland region, well, maybe it happened, though we still have no evidence. Far more often it was the reverse: inland people taken to coastal settlements.
But that wasn’t what you claimed. You claimed that Aborigines, as a group, in a manner analogous to the American Indians, were relocated to inland regions,
Can we please see you evidence for that ever happening. Even once. Just name one time when one Aboriginal person was moved in a manner analogous to that of the American Indians.
Just one.
That seems like a tall ask, since nobody in the thread before you actually said “Aborigines were moved to desert areas”. The claim was they were move off more desirable areas - this is true. European settlers came and took over desirable areas, and said to the local tribes “you can kindly bugger off now, or be shot.”. By definition, anywhere they then went was “less desirable.”
Aboriginal communities were also moved around to reserves, or between reserves, to suit the convenience of European settlers.
If your point is just “there isn’t an Australian Trail of Tears”, I’m not sure if that’s a substantive difference. In both cases, the end goal was “lets get the settlers onto the land that they want, and remove any inconvenient local population that gets in the way” and the means were “whatever happens to do the job best”
The time has come to say fair’s fair.
I have an issue with that kind of statistics and it’s with the definitions. Some countries go by population density; some by population in the township; some by township type (and there’s countries where that isn’t defined by either of the criteria above)… so while we can tell that Australia and the Netherlands have high %s of urban population, if our data comes from their own governments it may very well use different scales. It could very well be that by the Australian definitions, the UK is actually more urbanised.
I’d be curious to know on what metric you consider the populations in “traditional communities” in the outback are actually living in better conditions than those residing in urban and regional communities.
Figure 3 on page 8 of the PDF linked below will answer most of the OP’s question.
Of the approx 520k national indigenous population approx 42k live in areas classified as arid/desert being less than the 250mm rainfall isohyet. An area of 3.5mil sq km and 45% of Australia, the South of USA including Texas is around 2.1mil sq km. The majority of that 42k would reside in & around regional centres like Alice Springs, Canarvon and Kalgoorlie.
He didn’t say “desert area”, so why would he need to give a reference for that?
The Australian Aboriginals were pushed inland exactly analogously to the way American Indians were.
The first Australian settlers, convicts under the authority of small bands of free English, found areas that they could build communities on. These were of course along the coast, preferably at spots with good bays for protecting ships. This is also what happened in the American English colonies. They had trade and other relations with the natives, but not integrated communities. In practice, they took over the land and kept the native population from these good areas. The populations quickly grew and the urbanized areas grew as well. This moved the natives ever farther away from the point of landing. More English arrived, leading to more settlements, and more areas where the natives were not wanted. All of this was a process that went on for a century or more before forced relocations were formally instituted by the federal governments.
I’m not saying this to refute you, Blake, because I am totally at a loss for what you think you are saying.
I’m not Exapno Mapcase.
Although I will admit it’s strange how we’ve never been seen in the same room together.
Better conditions for the “traditional” lifestyle, not objectively better standards of living.
And you know this how? Bwa-ha-ha!