Contemporary Australia: Women

37 New challenges in Indigenous affairs Aboriginal people began to enter the welfare economy, as there were few jobs for them in an age when racial discrimination was the norm and few had the levels of education required for the rapidly changing Australian economy. Then, two new forces collided with the Aboriginal world. Just as it seemed that perhaps the social and economic issues might be understood by more compassionate voters — 91 per cent of them had voted ‘yes’ in the referendum for Aboriginal rights in 1967 — the mining boom of the 1970s and the worldwide leftist civil rights and Indigenous movements precipitated a furious debate. Should Aboriginal reserves, freeholds and leases be readily accessed by mining companies without regard for the consequences on already impoverished and disadvantaged communities? Or, should there be a special category of rights for Indigenous people encapsulated in settler states, such as in Canada and New Zealand, where their fate was abuse and marginalisation? The situation is different, but only by a few degrees, from that which the Council for Aboriginal Affairs found in the 1960s and 70s when the first tentative steps were taken by the Commonwealth, following the 1967 referendum, to develop a federal policy and allowances. The Indigenous people who are unable to climb the ladder of opportunity remain entrenched in the poverty cycle, kept there by the expectation that welfare will provide a reasonable way of life. The evidence shows consistently that those trapped in the welfare economy suffer increasing levels of disadvantage. Welfare does not improve one’s life; it makes matters worse — and it does so over generations. In the mid 1970s, the Native Affairs administration was dismantled, the missionaries asked to leave the reserves and reserve superintendents replaced by village councils. Jobs held by Aboriginal people in managing cattle herds, sawmills, bakeries, butcheries, small cropping projects and cottage industries disappeared. Many ventures deteriorated slowly into a state of irreversible failure while others simply closed down overnight. The order, discipline and management culture of the old imperial hands formed the glue that, however tenuously, held together the imposed regimes of settlement on the scattered Aboriginal groups in the hinterland. Years of exclusion of Aboriginal people from the education system, job training, apprenticeships and employment resulted in a rapidly growing Indigenous underclass in the towns and cities as Aboriginal families fled from the reserves during the 1960s and 70s with the new wave of tolerance and thinking. This was when Rachel Perkins Australia b.1970 Arrernte/Kalkadoon people Radiance (production still) 1998 35mm, colour, stereo, 83 minutes Opposite Tracey Moffatt Australia/United States b.1960 Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (stills) 1989 35mm film and Digital Betacam formats, colour, stereo, 17 minutes