Approaches to Indigenous Issues Some people have asked the question, how the Australian Aborigines helped shape

non-Aboriginal Australians. The response is to say that contact between the two races, both British and Indigenous Australians often resulted in bringing out the worst in people. Human beings have the innate capacity to be either moral or sinister. In 1788 Governor Philip arrived with the best of intentions in British treatment of the Australian Aborigine, however there was a determined effort by various governors, to drive the Aborigines from settlements and punish those who would not conform to the new 'way of life'. Often the Aborigines refused to accept British standards and could see no advantage in changing their ways. By the turn of the century, the settlers had no time for the Australian Aborigine. The Indigenous community was seen as being a pest and a nuisance, but of course, there were exceptions. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there was a belief in the colony, that the Aboriginal race was reaching its end. Until this had happened they were to be kept out of the way of the British population and were herded onto reserves and missions, to live out their days away from the Australian population where they would not interfere with progress.

The ethnocentric attitude that fuels the first racist statement by Cunningham in 1834, of allows an insight into the extreme racist views that were widespread within the colonies at that certain time in Australias history. The allowance of such views was rampant, and allowed for the negative actions to be supported in the racist colonies of Australia. The statement made by Cunningham would have had a frightening negative impact on the general community. Such a statement shows the ignorance of the British colonists, their total lack of knowledge of the Indigenous community around them, and furthermore a certain desire to keep an absolute view of a superior status, than that of their fellow mankind, those of the Australian Aborigines.

Let us make their passage to the grave as comfortable as possible, allows the reader to be left with no other choice, than that of a program of systematic genocide was well under way in the year of 1868, against the Australian Aborigine. This view was held open by the Illustrated Melbourne Post, a paper with a large reader contingent. Running through many of the speeches at this time was the powerful current of popular Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism was the application to society of the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and was first published in his 'Origin of the Species' in 1859. These ideas came to dominate Australian thinking from the late 19th century until the 1940s and can be found in both popular & scholarly work. Aborigines were seen by many as being a lower link of a static chain of being. Social Darwinists regarded them as an earlier, less evolved people. They were, as a result, doomed to die out. They could not compete in the struggle for existence with the higher European race. Humanitarian concern might ease the passing but nothing could bend the laws of evolution.

Henry Reynolds (1998) in his work, This Whispering In Our Hearts, goes on to describe the immoral violent behavior associated with the colonists in the call to exterminate all Australian Aboriginals call aloud for the extirpation of such lawless marauders, and do not lacerated remains of the

unburied corpses and mangled limbs of individuals, who have breathed their last in agony, in the lonely and sequestered forest.... kindle feelings indescribable in the breast of every generous member of our community and demand immediate punishment. This overview holds current when assessing the statement with relation to Curr 1886. The dominant discourse of the superior being, that was the British settlers over the original landholders those of the Indigenous land owners of Australia. The dissposseion of land and the lack of equal opportunities that were not given to any of the Indigenous community, allows for Curr to portray the ethnocentric belief of the Aborigine upon the fellow colonists at this period of time within Australia. The background to this was a hardening of attitude towards the Aborigines. The European mindset hardened at a time when there were many opportunities for emancipists ( time-expired convicts) and the free settlers who were arriving in the continent, for individual prosperity. Australia had become the land of opportunity for the English migrants, and a land of incredible hardship for the Australian Aborigine.

Pochs statements in 1905, would have capitalised on the growing concern of the destruction of the Australian Aborigine within the widespread community in Australia. The ideology of a lesser human race of peoples, being fostered to a family of racist Australians, hell bent on their destruction.Within a short time of settlers moving into the tribal territory of an Aboriginal peoples, the people were quickly reduced to pauperism. They were restricted from moving around their territory because it was fenced off into farms, towns grew up on traditional hunting grounds, animals and birds were scared away and their habitat reduced to vacuity. The result was an inability of the Aborigines to live their hunter and gatherer lifestyle and were reduced to begging for food. They also stole cattle and sheep which soon brought the wrath of the farmers who often massacred the culprits. Many Aborigines became the fringe dwellers of towns and farms and their despondency often led to many becoming dependent upon alcohol, tobacco as well as food and clothing.

The ideology of Social Darwinism brought about the event of Eugenics. Derived from the Greek word meaning 'good in birth' or 'noble in heredity'. The term was coined in 1883 by English scientist, Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. He defined eugenics as the 'science of improving human stock by giving the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable'. On the premise of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, Galton believed that the human race could be improved by taking charge of its own evolution through the process of eugenics. The widely held view that Aboriginal people could be 'bred out' was based on the eugenics principle. Aboriginal people were subjected to experiments where skull measurements were taken. Those of mixed heritage were believed to be taking on 'white characteristics'. The view that was undertaken by Poch in 1905, would allow the readers of that article to once again force them into the belief of the deleterious views they already held over the Indigenous community of Australia.

This statement made by A.O. Neville, shows the relations of power, that were held over the heads of the Australian Aborigine during the course of the last century. To state that they the Australian government had the power to allow for the dispossession of Aboriginal children from their families was an extremely powerful position that was allowed for the total control of the Aboriginal

population here in Australia. In Queensland, the 1865 Industrial and Reformatories School Act authorised the removal of any destitute child under seventeen found wandering or begging in the streets (Kidd, R 1997:20). It can be argued that this allowed the view to the general public, that there was an air of charity given to the Aboriginal peoples and this only entrenched pauperism, by encouraging dependency and demoralisation.

The statements made by our two Prime Ministers of Australia, Mr. Keating and Mr. Howard, are as similar as chalk and cheese. The first allowed a dignified dialogue, while the latter allowed a motion of a dangerous silence, and a continual denial of Australias extreme racist past. Mr. Howards statement allows for Australias history, to be seen as a ethical country, and not to be allowed to be draped in a history of shame. The Australian Government as has been discussed throughout this paper, is a government involved with the eradication of a race of people known as Indigenous Australians. Both the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community has been deeply affected by the invasion of their lands and a program of systematic genocide and a policy of eradication of cultural Indigenous values, governments saw Aboriginals as a problem and they saw them as a problem that somehow had to be resolved or removed, those people whose very cultural foundations were regarded as taboo, as unacceptable and that they be destroyed and the peoples wiped out add to this the Assimilation policy, this then allows a past that the present Prime Minister Mr. Howard would like to keep locked in the cupboard.

Mr. Keating has allowed for a sharing of guilt within the Government, and has recognized the disgraceful action portrayed upon the Aboriginal community here in Australia. As outlined in the text, In The Age Of Mabo. Rather than feed the unconstructive emotion of guilt, Keating believed we must now open our hearts, there must be a historic turning point, the basis of a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians (Broom, R 1996:71). The Indigenous community I believe would welcome this for at the first time in Australias history has their been the leading spokesperson to freely admittting a history of dispossesion and national shame. Mr. Keating,was therefore just, he had allowed the overturning of a past racist government and recognised the fundamental truth of the oldest culture in the world, a truth embodied above all in a timeless association with the land (Morton, J 1996:118). Until the 1950s histories, encyclopedias and other popular works, informed by social evolutionary ideas, represented Aborigines as a primitive and passive people. From the 1950s new social, political and intellectual forces, urged historians to imagine Aborigines in new ways that increasingly brought Aborigines to the center of Australian history as active subjects.

The statement that Mr. Howard gave at the Reconciliation Convention in 1997, allowed only to open the wounds of Aboriginal people and allowed his power to be openly opposed to the reconciliation process. The Indigenous concern would, I believe, allow Aboriginal peoples the utter disgust in the countries leader. This approach undertaken by the current Prime Minister of Australia, volleyed in the ears of the Indigenous communities around Australia, that of a return to the past, a sense of

betrayal and a lack of regret to the past actions undertaken by government, adds fuel to the fire and allows a racist Australian Government to continue in office.