Indigenous people of Australia

Indigenous people of Australia

Indigenous people of Australia

Introduction

The Indigenous people of Australia which refers to as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander have been living in the continent for somewhere around 40,000 years before the European colonizers finally found the way to Australia. Until the 18th century, the Aborigines inhabited the continent alone with a rich and developed culture. The arrival of Europeans in 1788 changed this scenario, and led to the destruction of the Aborigine culture. Thousands of Aborigines were slaughtered following the invasion, and what followed in the preceding decades was a rule of brutality and oppression in which they continued to face excessive persecution and were denied social and political rights in their own land (www.historystudycenter.com).

Discussion

The long years of oppression brought great sufferings and misery for the indigenous people as they were moved away from their lands, and were barred from practicing their customs or communicating in their own language. The settlement of Europeans into the Australian land continued. The colonizers used the term Terra Nullius which meant land of no-one in order to provide justification for dispossessing the Aborigines of their lands. These colonizers disregarded the traditional system of land ownership of the indigenous people as they continued to overtake their farms and lands. The development and ownership of the lands were based entirely on the legal system of England. The Aborigines soon found themselves to be homeless in their own country where they had been living for thousands of years (aec.gov.au).

From 1850 and onwards, the Australian colonies were allowed to self govern. This meant that all adults aged 21 were entitled to vote in the elections. Though the indigenous people were allowed to vote, yet they were usually discouraged from doing so in policy. In 1885, the Queensland Elections act barred all indigenous people from voting. (aec.gov.au).

Persecution did not abate and in the 20th century, Aboriginal children were forcibly taken away from their families, and aboriginal families and communities were destroyed. Stolen generations later went on to be the term coined used to refer to those children who had been taken away from their families by the state and federal agencies along with the church. What was worst was the fact that such acts were fully supported by the parliament (www.humanrights.gov.au).

The long years of colonial rule often brought massacres of the local pollution through spearing and shootings. Such isolated cases of massacres numbered thousands. Apart from this brutality, the indigenous population also suffered massively on account of the diseases like influenza, smallpox and measles. The local population had been crammed up in land reserves, and this allowed diseases to spread rapidly which was further increased by the fact that these indigenous people were less immune to diseases (Blainey, 2004, pp 55).

Conflicts constantly broke out between the Aboriginal people and the foreign settlers resulting in massacres that led to the decline of the Aboriginal population. Another reason behind their decline in population was their immunity to disease that was introduced by the ...