Academic literature on the topic 'Aboriginal Australians. Government relations'

AbstractA classroom can be a place to belong. Students become settled, ideas become familiar, relations become belongings. Teachers attentive to belonging can support critical conversations without fear that students will accidentally stumble onto alienating terrain. But the desire to settle, to make familiar, and to belong is not without its own ambivalence. For example, should non-Indigenous Australian students feel they ‘belong’ when engaging with the legacies of settler colonialism? Is learning about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and communities a desirable way for non-Indigenous students to feel settled in Australia? Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work interrogates two impulses towards belonging among non-Indigenous Australians. On the one hand, she considers the erasure of Indigenous belonging through the legal fallacy of terra nullius and its subsequent variations in myths of British belonging to Australia. On the other hand, the essay questions non-Indigenous appeals to Indigenous communities as potential partners in national projects of collective belonging. Moreton-Robinson shows that non-Indigenous Australians ‘possess’ their symbolic home in the nation-state at the expense of Indigenous belonging. In what ways can non-Indigenous students be invited to question practices of belonging? What new classroom might this produce, and would everyone need to belong?

This chapter examines the diverse features cited to justify the idea that inscriptions on the surfaces of the monoliths could convey meanings into the future. Experts and government agencies changed their cited models multiple times, finally arriving at the Athenian Acropolis and Australian aboriginal rock art as unlikely paired models, after considering the tomb at Newgrange and Spanish Levantine rock art. All the archaeological sites mentioned were either named or nominated as UNESCO World Heritage sites, suggesting a shared common sense about archaeological sites. In addressing these varied analogues of the marker, the experts employed specific theories of communication based on presumed universals in the use of pictographs and narratives, understood today to be questionable. The chapter ends with an interlude considering Australian response to plans to place nuclear waste repositories in aboriginal land, and how aboriginal art can be understood in relation to such planning.

Aboriginal rights activist, poet, educator, and environmentalist Oodgeroo Noonuccal became the first Indigenous Australian to publish a collection of poetry. Noonuccal's work can be understood as “literary ethnobotany” that gives prominence to the plant-based cultural knowledge of Indigenous people. Her work expresses the idea of plants—and the multidimensional knowledge systems surrounding them—as embodied figures exerting material agencies in discourse with other beings and elements. This chapter reinterprets Noonuccal's poetry as literary ethnobotany that boldly asserts the vibrant materialities of the botanical world. In its emphasis on Indigenous Australian traditions of plants, her writing exemplifies biocultural activism in which native plants serve as potent reagents of cultural sovereignty for Indigenous Australians. Going beyond the dominant Western view of plants as mute objects of appropriation, Noonuccal's narratives of botanical life thus contribute to the revitalization of human-flora relations in Australia.

Abstract At the time I conducted eleven months’ fieldwork in the region ofUluru (Ayers Rock, Australian Western Desert) between 1977 and 1979, half a century had passed since colonization by pastoralists had irrevocably changed the indigenous way of life. Uluru itself had been subject to tourism for twenty years. East of Uluru lay cattle stations while to the west and south, the Petermann and Musgrave Ranges were former Aboriginal reserves which once again belonged to their traditional Aboriginal owners since passage of the Northern Territory Land Rights Act in 1976. One of the purposes of my research was to obtain evidence for a land claim on Uluru and Katatjuta (the Olgas). Much of this claim was unable to proceed because the Federal Government transferred ownership to the Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service before the claim came to court. Surrounding areas were none the less granted to the claimants and title to the Park area was returned to its traditional owners in 1985. The senior men and women with whom I worked were already young adults when they first came into lasting contact with White people. During their adult lives, however, they have seen their way of life transformed in many ways. Although men still hunt regularly, imported flour has largely replaced the wild vegetable foods, traditionally gathered by women, which once provided 80 per cent of the diet. Children are born in hospital rather than in the bush, a change which has created major difficulties for maintaining personal affiliation to the land. Life on settlements has curtailed some ceremonies, while the introduction of motor vehicles has greatly expanded the opportunities for maintaining ceremonial links between communities.

Australia is a nation of 20 million citizens occupying approximately the same land mass as the continental U.S. More than 80% of the population lives in the state capitals where the majority of state and federal government offices and employees are based. The heavily populated areas on the Eastern seaboard, including all of the six state capitals have advanced ICT capability and infrastructure and Australians readily adopt new technologies. However, there is recognition of a digital divide which corresponds with the “great dividing” mountain range separating the sparsely populated arid interior from the populated coastal regions (Trebeck, 2000). A common theme in political commentary is that Australians are “over-governed” with three levels of government, federal, state, and local. Many of the citizens living in isolated regions would say “over-governed” and “underserviced.” Most of the state and local governments, “… have experienced difficulties in managing the relative dis-economies of scale associated with their small and often scattered populations.” Rural and isolated regions are the first to suffer cutbacks in government services in periods of economic stringency. (O’Faircheallaigh, Wanna, & Weller, 1999, p. 98). Australia has, in addition to the Commonwealth government in Canberra, two territory governments, six state governments, and about 700 local governments. All three levels of government, federal, state, and local, have employed ICTs to address the “tyranny of distance” (Blainey, 1967), a term modified and used for nearly 40 years to describe the isolation and disadvantage experienced by residents in remote and regional Australia. While the three levels of Australian governments have been working co-operatively since federation in 1901 with the federal government progressively increasing its power over that time, their agencies and departments generally maintain high levels of separation; the Queensland Government Agent Program is the exception.

Australia’s first Migration Museum in Adelaide recognised from its inception in 1986, that representing migration history could not be done without acknowledging its intimate association with colonisation and the dispossession of indigenous people. Their first move therefore, was to create a distinction between all migrants, a category that included British ‘settlers’, and Indigenous Australians. This was significant not only because it implicated colonisation within migration history but because it made all non-Indigenous Australians migrants. The move though, was not easy to establish, largely because, in the public imagination, migrants were the other to mainstream or ‘British Australia’. In the mid-1990s, however, it seemed to work as Australia was indeed seen as a country that was relatively successful in integrating various waves of migration into its historical narratives while valuing cultural diversity and recognising the prior occupation of the land by Aboriginal people. The ‘War on terror’, the arrival of asylum seekers and the threat of internal terrorist attacks, along with changes in immigration policy and a general climate of fear has changed that, and migration museums are now working to combat a new wave of racism. To do so, I argue, they have developed a new set of curatorial strategies that aim to facilitate an exploration of the complexity of contemporary forms of identity. This chapter provides a history of the development of curatorial strategies that have helped to change the ways in which relations between ‘us and them’ have changed over the years in response to changes in the wider public discourse. My focus will be on both collecting and display practices, from changes to what is collected and how it is displayed, to the changing role of personal stories, the relationship between curators and the communities they work with, and the role of exhibition design in structuring the visitor experience.

Indigenous/aboriginal/tribal people (IP) are the most important part of the ecosystems and environmental dialogue and praxis. They are inextricably linked to nature: practices among the Andean peoples’ world is divided into the human and domesticated: the wild—species, ecosystems, water; and the sacred and ancestral. Their goal is holistic wellbeing, which is achieved through balance between these three worlds. However, with the globalization there are direct impact factors on environment: 1. Population, 2. Consumption, and 3. Technology which decide how much spacious and resources are used and how much waste is produced to meet consumption needs. The direct impact factors on environment which is enjoyed in the current lifestyle of the developed countries if it were to be by everyone, more than three additional planets would be required. That is why Mahatma Gandhi said that the earth has everything but not enough to satisfy the greed of man. Thus, if the world is following the consumption pattern of greedy developed countries three additional planets are required. In my view, these additional planets can be the Mars, the Moon, and another planet may be explored. Are we ready for it, folks? The earth has water in abundance unlike other planets. Perhaps the Mars and the Moon are expected to have existed with the hope of water bodies. These planets are already attempted to be conquered with the countries’ flags pitched so far in different locations as moon imperialism and exploration, especially as the Chandrayan 3 soon lands on South Pole of the moon, Indian would be the fourth country to be there. As to the earth earth, land or more aptly homeland is attached with nationalism so are other planets in the process of colonization and imperialism. Land turns into territory only insofar as it is “monopolized” and ‘captured by any state and/or nation.’ Territory, unlike land, has a few characteristics. Territory is an object of ownership and ‘colonization’, while land is not. In any ‘communal mode of power’ as one’s entitlement to land follows from one’s membership to a particular community. Scientific movies are made depicting Aliens/ indigenous people on Mars. Collective ownership of land gives one only authority of using but not owning it. Then land belongs to community or community belongs to land? Here ethnographic and ecological interpretation on mode of use of land surfaces. Maurice Godelier identified land use in the hills as patterned after ‘kinship relations’ within the community in terms of its exchange and actual utility. There is a sort of segregating between land and labour apparently establishes a regime of individual ownership within the community that gives rise to an inevitable landless section. However, the protection of freedom to preserve land (land and territory borderline definition in mind) is enshrined in Indian constitution called Sixth Schedule for the tribes of Northeast India that recognizes traditional custom regulating outsiders access to land and its resources belonging to a community of a tribe per se. Many indigenous peoples live in forests that have become their traditional territories. Their way of life and traditional knowledge has developed in tune with the forests on their lands and territories. Unfortunately, forest policies commonly treat forests as empty lands controlled (Khas land) by the State that are available for ‘development,’ such as logging, plantations, dams, mines, oil and gas wells and pipelines and agribusiness. These encroachments often force indigenous peoples out of their forest homes and has led to the need to define why and for whom is ecological conservation and development important for. The work piece seeks to study how the policy of sustainable forest management seeks to addressing sustainable development through the diverse interest of protecting the human rights of indigenous people to inhabit their natural dwellings of forest, conserving the ecological concerns and sustaining development. The indigenous peoples’ place is rural in most cases. The care giving of the ecosystem is done by these people in terms of ecological balance in the integrated system of framework theoretical implication which is empirically practiced. Therefore, their welfare and survivalists approach to maintain ecosystem is of prime importance. After all they are human beings not animals. But even certain animals are considered as endangered species, why cannot be the case of these people? Indeed they deserve special law to preserve them so that the ecology and cosmological implications on earth can be maintained sustainably. Thus, ecology, bio-linguistic, and bio-cultural diversities play environmental solutions that transcend national boundaries as a feature of international politics. Ecology is the study of these relationships between plants, animals, people, and their environment. Among these, particularly indigenous people maintain ecological balance through their interaction by their constant touch with nature. But this kind of interaction between indigenous people and nature has been disturbed with the advent of globalization/government/corporate interference in the name of development in indigenous heartlands. Particularly with this came exploitation of their land and resources for the greedy capitalists/communists (they both are imperialists: neo-colonialism). Where land and resources are taken over by the corporate or otherwise and as such the indigenous people’s survival is threatened at the detriment of the ecological balance affected as they are inextricably linked.