# Tell me about Australian Aborigines **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [February 26, 2014, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336 "2014-02-26T17:56:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![kambuckta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/53a042/32.png) [@kambuckta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kambuckta)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2014, 6:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/21 "2014-02-28T06:58:31Z")
> [@bengangmo](#): > > You missed out rather startling rates of child sexual abuse that are added into the equation. > > Complicating the matter, there are still rather startling amounts of racism in Australia, and there were a lot of cases of institutional racism in the not very distant past My post was not meant to be exhaustive…to detail the ‘plight’ of the Aborigines would take many, MANY pages, with even more footnotes. And you are correct re the institutional racism and how it has affected not only generations past, but those in the present as well. To mouth platitudes here would be an injustice, so suffice to say Aborigines have gotten the raw end of the deal historically, and that continues into the modern day. ---
**Author:** ![Thylacine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thylacine/32/1143_2.png) [@Thylacine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thylacine)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2014, 8:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/22 "2014-02-28T20:35:49Z")
If you have a nose around the site of National Indigenous Television [http://www.nitv.org.au/](http://www.nitv.org.au/) you may find some interesting vision. When I worked in Financial Literacy we had a lot of materials aimed at trying to change the way money worked in indigenous communities, the sharing of all resources may have been great before drugs, alcohol and gambling came along but if you have a portion of the community blowing money on such things and then looking to the rest of the community to support them for the rest of the fortnight there is little incentive for anyone to earn more and no real chance of anyone in the group escaping poverty. ---
**Author:** ![jimbuff314](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/c57346/32.png) [@jimbuff314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jimbuff314)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2014, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/23 "2014-02-28T20:51:45Z")
No snark - I just love that **Thylacine** is weighing in on this thread. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Thylacine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thylacine/32/1143_2.png) [@Thylacine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thylacine)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2014, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/24 "2014-03-01T00:30:28Z")
Nobody will ever believe you saw me 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Poysyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/f4b2a3/32.png) [@Poysyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Poysyn)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2014, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/25 "2014-03-01T00:54:37Z")
It sounds like a remarkably similar situation, certainly as tragic, as the Aboriginals in Canada. ---
**Author:** ![kambuckta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/53a042/32.png) [@kambuckta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kambuckta)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2014, 5:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/26 "2014-03-01T05:01:54Z")
> [@Thylacine](#): > > Nobody will ever believe you saw me 🙂 I saw you today at the Melbourne Museum!! 😃 ---
**Author:** ![China\_Guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/779978/32.png) [@China\_Guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/China_Guy)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2014, 5:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/27 "2014-03-01T05:56:34Z")
> [@kambuckta](#): > > I saw you today at the Melbourne Museum!! 😃 I was there about 20 years ago. Really interesting. Aussie dopers, what do you think of the book My Place by Sally Morgan? I thought it was an outstanding read. It’s kind of a Roots journey of a book of a personal awakening told through 3 generations. [My Place (book) - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Place_%28book%29) ---
**Author:** ![araminty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b5e925/32.png) [@araminty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/araminty)\ **Post date:** [March 1, 2014, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/28 "2014-03-01T06:56:48Z")
> [@kambuckta](#): > > I saw you today at the Melbourne Museum!! 😃 I used to work there 🙂 OP, some white Aussies (myself included) might seem a bit weird and stand-offish about Indigenous issues. Some of it is straight-up guilt. Some of it is lack of understanding - I myself really know very little about Indigenous culture despite growing up in the NT, including living 3 years in a remote, majority Indig community, and having taken undergraduate and postgraduate uni courses in ATSIS (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies). Partly it’s because, as alluded to above, there isn’t just one Aboriginal culture. Australia is the size of the continental US, and groups from the Top End had/have very different lives from those in the central deserts or on the East coast. There are hundreds of Aboriginal [languages](http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/). I will say that in the last 10 years or so, better understanding has led to some positive changes. One example I am familiar with is cross-cultural training for primary school teachers - everyday, common Western teaching practices, like praising a child publicly for doing well, are not viewed in the same way through an Indigenous lens, e.g., praise is seen as embarrassing, “a shame job.” This book - “[Why Warriors Lie Down and Die](http://www.whywarriors.com.au/products/)” was really popular amongst a certain set in my hometown on its release in the early 00s. ---
**Author:** ![bathsheba](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/9e8a1a/32.png) [@bathsheba](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bathsheba)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 11:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/29 "2014-03-02T11:06:11Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > I don’t have any particular need for knowledge, I just realized in utterly ignorant of the topic. I would live to hear any observations you may have. Well I suppose the big thing to remember is that there are many tribes spread out across the country and Torres strait and that they can have very different cultures and language. I am only familiar with the pitjantjatjara and anagnu people. The biggest shock to the system was living in urban Australia and barely being exposed to aborigines at all and then finding myself in the middle of hundreds of thousands of remote kilometers of aboriginal owned lands. I had to have a permit to enter and no-one spoke English. In Australia! I really thought that every-one would speak the local pit language as a second language and not the other way around. I learned quick and it’s beautiful to listen to - like water running over rocks. If I ever hear people speaking pit (which is rare) I stalk them just to listen. I found them to be people with a strong self of self. One day we were sitting around a fire and there was a bird call which I recognized but which all the other white people thought was a cow. They were laughing at me for not knowing it was a cow. When noone was listening, one of the aboriginal ladies meant over to me and told me quietly that yes, it was a bird. It seemed to me that she thought it should only be important to me and noone else that I was right. And she was completely correct of course. They are very tied to their land. It always seemed as if every pebble and blade if grass was a sacred place and not just hills or waterholes like you would expect. History is oral, so there are often several versions of dreaming stories. Which explains a lot about the hindmarsh island bridge business. Healthwise when i was there petrol sniffing was a huge problem. Addicts would walk around with cans on wire around their necks and would often seize in the clinic floor for hours. Std’s were a problem too with unusual diseases like donovanosis being quite common. The smell was shocking to a white person. Everyone will tell you that remote aborigines have a particular smell and this is true although I’m pretty sure it’s the same way a white person would smell if they never washed or washed their clothes and spent a lot of time by the campfire. They share a lot too and didnt have any sense of personal property. If they liked something if yours they would ask you to give it to them and it was bad form not to. You could get round it by telling them you needed whatever it was and you also knew that you could ask for anything of theirs and they would give it to you. I dont know what the answers are to the questions of poverty, unemployment and life expectancy except to say that there probably aren’t any good solutions to the problem of a tribal society trying to exist in an industrial world. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/30 "2014-03-02T16:45:01Z")
Don’t google donovanosis, folks. Trust me. Are they related to the people of New Guinea? ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/31 "2014-03-02T18:20:37Z")
Would _[The Songlines](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songlines)_, Bruce Chatwin’s book, be a good recommendation? I found it engrossing. ---
**Author:** ![Belowjob2.0](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Belowjob2.0](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Belowjob2.0)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 6:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336/32 "2014-03-02T18:37:57Z")
> **[History of Indigenous Australians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indigenous_Australians)** > > The history of Indigenous Australians began 50,000 to 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses. This article covers the history of Aboriginal Australian and Torres Strait Islander peoples, two broadly defined groups which each include other sub-groups defined by language and culture. Human habitation of the Australian continent began with the migration of the ancestors of today's Aboriginal Australians by land bridges and short sea crossings f At the... > [@](#): > > In 2012, the results of large-scale genotyping has indicated that Aboriginal Australians, the indigenous peoples of New Guinea and the Mamanwa, an indigenous people of the southern Philippines are closely related, having diverged from a common origin approximately 36,000 years ago. The same studies show a substantial gene flow between Indian populations and Northern Australia occurred around 4,230 years ago. Changes in tool technology, food processing and the Dingo appear in the archaeological record around this time, suggesting there may have been migration from India.[15][16] > **[Aboriginal Australians](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Australians)** > > Aboriginal Australians are the various Indigenous peoples of the Australian mainland and many of its islands, excluding the ethnically distinct people of the Torres Strait Islands. > Humans first migrated to Australia at least 65,000 years ago, and over time formed as many as 500 language-based groups. In the past, Aboriginal people lived over large sections of the continental shelf. They were isolated on many of the smaller offshore islands and Tasmania when the land was inundated at the star... > [@](#): > > Genetic studies had shown the Aboriginal peoples to be related much more closely to each other than to any peoples outside Australia, but scholars had disagreed whether their closest kin outside Australia were certain South Asian groups, or instead, certain African groups. The latter would imply a migration pattern in which their ancestors passed through South Asia to Australia without intermingling genetically with other populations along the way.[11] A 2009 genetic study in India found similarities among Indian archaic populations and Aboriginal people, indicating a Southern migration route, with expanding populations from Southeast Asia migrating to Indonesia and Australia. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/tell-me-about-australian-aborigines/682336.md?page=1)