Tasmanian Aborigines

Tasmanian aborigones were treated brutally by early settlers, murdered and driven off their land. The sorry and horrific history we read in the museum today is the same as we have read in many other museums in Australia. There are about 300,000 aborgines in Australia today, including many of mixed blood. They do not appear to be integrated into white society except as tour guides to aboriginal sites and culture, artists, and now as owners of some of the national park lands we have visited ( eg Kakadu, Uluru). The aborigines have been mostly invisible to us, except in Alice Springs where we saw many selling art, and many that appeared to be homeless. In addition to the shocking treatment during the 19th century, through much of the 20th century there was an national policy to remove aborigine children from their families, the Stolen Generation, and raise them in Christian missionaries and foster homes. This policy continued into the 1960's.
Over the last 20 years many aborgine groups have fought within the legal system to regain ownership of their tribal lands, with some limited successes. There are several sites in Tasmania that have be regained, but this amounts to less than 1% of the land. In the Northern Terrority the national park areas of Kakadu and Uluru are now owned by the local aborigine groups (and much other land), and the parks are jointly managed by them and the NP service.

Needless to say this is all very disturbing. It m,any respects it may be no worse than the way the US has treated native Americans and blacks. One thing that makes it more shocking is to see that these brutal policies continued into the 1960s.

It is especially disturbing to realize that cultures that evolved and survived over 50,000 years in a very harsh and unforgiving climate have largely been destroyed by European colonization in less than 200 years. Of course given that we seem to be inevitably moving to destruction of our climate, maybe in another 10,000 years it will only be aborigines that survive.