Leaving the desert: actors and sufferers in the Aboriginal exodus from the Western Desertстатья из журнала
Аннотация: In 1980 the Australian Parliament passed the Aboriginal Development Commission Act providing for the establishment of a Capital Account to promote Aboriginal 'development, self-management and self-sufficiency . . .as a recognition of the past dispossession and dispersal' of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.'Dispossession and dispersal' is an apt summary of the experience of Aboriginal people as they came progressively into contact with settlers around Australia in the years after 1788 and most notably in the fifty years between 1830 and 1880 when the pastoral frontiers were expanding rapidly.But the emergence from their desert homelands of small groups of Aboriginal people in October 1984 and again in October 1986 provided reminders that 'dispossession and dispersal' was not the experience of all Aboriginal groups in all parts of the continent.Large tracts of desert and semi-desert country in the interior, and smaller areas of relatively rugged and inaccessible forest and swampy country in, for example, the tropical coastal regions, have never been settled and there has been no dispossession, no ousting of the original inhabitants.In a few parts of these remote regions settlement was attempted only to be abandoned in the face of Aboriginal resistance and a difficult environment, but for the most part no settlement has ever been even attempted.The Simpson Desert is one such region (Hercus 1985) and the Western Desert is another and the largest.Extending from the Nullarbor Plain in the south to the Kimberley cattle country in the north and between the limits of pastoral occupation in Western Australia on one side and in the Northern Territory and South Australia to the east and including the Great Victoria, Gibson, Great Sandy and Tanami Deserts, the Western Desert has remained for practical purposes part of 'Aboriginal Australia' rather than of 'White Australia'.* 1
Год издания: 2011
Авторы: Jeremy Long
Издательство: Australian National University
Источник: Aboriginal History Journal
Ключевые слова: African history and culture analysis, Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts, Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
Открытый доступ: bronze
Том: 13