Ideas@TheCentre

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The forgotten Indigenous Australians

Sara Hudson | 23 April 2010
This week Channel Ten’s 7pm Project did a report on whether Australia is racist. It raised a few questions – specifically can you define a whole country as racist just because a proportion of Australians are? Clearly not – and that was the conclusion that the presenters ended up reaching.

However while overt racism is confined to a few, stereotyping of minority groups such as Aborigines is common.

Take for instance the recent case of a Queensland Aboriginal student who was given rocks and leaves to learn maths with instead of a calculator like his classmates.

This is an example of misguided cultural appropriateness at its worst and speaks volumes for how educators in Queensland view Aboriginal people.

Unfortunately, they are not alone in viewing Aborigines as being straight out of the bush.

Familiar with newspaper articles that paint a picture of remote, dysfunctional, and welfare dependent communities the general public is unaware that more Aboriginal people live in urban and regional areas than in remote communities in the Far North.

The perception of the remote Aborigine is enhanced by the virtual absence (or the invisibility) of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders from most suburbs and backyard barbeques.

Indigenous Australians only make up 2% of the total population of Australia. So part of this invisibility may be justified because there aren’t really that many of them.

The ghettoisation in big cities like Sydney and Brisbane also increases the estrangement between the average urban Aussie and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.

When the media are not portraying scenes of squalid town-camps in Alice Springs, they might turn their attention to welfare-dependant Aboriginal communities like La Perouse.

But there is hardly any recognition of the average Aboriginal battler who is working hard and trying to do right by his kids. They are the forgotten Indigenous Australians.

Yet, we cannot simply blame the media for promoting generalisations amongst the public. You only have to read a few government reports to see how one dimensional the governments portrayal of Aboriginal Australians is.

Rather than just focusing on the pockets of despair and disadvantage, the government should highlight the majority (some 60%) of Indigenous Australians who are doing okay. These Indigenous Australians don’t need government handouts but they do deserve some recognition.  Acknowledging their success may help counteract the negative perception of Aboriginal people that too many Aussies hold.

Sara Hudson is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.