The South West Corner Of Wa

Since the time of federation the Aboriginal people have been fighting for their rights through protests, strikes and the notorious ‘day of mourning’. However, over the last century the Australian federal government has generated policies which manage and restrained that of the Aboriginal people’s rights, citizenships and general protection. The Australian government policy that has had the most significant impact on indigenous Australians is the assimilation policy. The reasons behind this include the influences that the stolen generation has had on the indigenous Australians, their relegated rights and their entitlement to vote and the impact that the policy has had on the indigenous people of Australia.

After many years of European settlement in Australia, many Aboriginal people had been removed from their families and placed into schools with white Australians. This was due to the ‘protection policy’ laws that encouraged the removal of Indigenous children. Because fewer indigenous children were able to learn about their own culture, there was a slow decline in the culture of the indigenous people. As a result of this, there were continued tensions between the free settlers and Indigenous people as they had no roles in the government and couldn’t vote. This made them feel as if they were excluded from greater society and had long term negative impacts upon their sense of belonging to the new

At the turn of the twentieth century the systematic forced removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers, families and cultural heritage was commonplace. There were several reasons that the government and white society used to justify the separation but the prevailing ideology of nationalism and maintaining Australia for the ‘whites’ was the over-riding motivation and justification for their actions[1]. Progressive sciences such as anthropology espoused such theories as eugenics, miscegenation, biological absorption and assimilation which legitimated governmental policies relating to Aboriginal affairs[2]. It was

Long histories of colonisation and discrimination have resulted in marginalisation of Indigenous Australians and Torres Straight Islanders from dominant societies (GrantCraft, 2015). Indigenous Australians communities lost their culture and values through forced assimilation and lost

In the early 1890’s, protectionism gave way to state and commonwealth government regimes of segregation. In the development of the constitution, politicians included sections specifically excluding Indigenous Australians, such as the white Australia policy, ensuring that racism became entrenched in the new nation’s future. Reserves and missions were set up far from white settlements, to exclude and control Indigenous Australians, especially those of mixed descent (Hampton & Toombs, Racism, colonisation/colonialism and impacts on indigenous people, 2013).

Throughout the early 20th century, the Australian public was led to believe that Aboriginal children were disadvantaged in their communities, and that there was a high risk of physical and sexual abuse. Aboriginal children were being removed in order to be exposed to ‘Anglo values’ and ‘work habits’ with a view to them being employed by colonial settlers, and to stop their parents, families and communities from passing on their culture, language and identity

The policy gave the government extensive powers over Aboriginal people with regards to residence, employment, marriage, education and nutrition (Kidd, 2000) thus promoting dependency and demoralization among Aboriginal people. Late 1800s through much of the twentieth century, the suppression of the rights of Aboriginal people continued with government control of wages and pensions, a practice now called ‘stolen wages’( Attwood, 2003). This imposed poverty on Aboriginal people and established the exploitation phase of fraudulent activities by governments and their public servants and the starving of Aboriginal communities of essential funds for survival (Kidd, 2000).

Originally, Australian Indigenous peoples were left to die out by a natural process of elimination where they are assimilated by the white people. Children were taught to lose their identity by rejecting their indigenous heritage, their names were changed and that they are to be adopted by the white families where instead of living a pleasant life, they were used, neglected and some of them end up in the institutions.

The assimilation policy that removed Australian Indigenous children or children of Indigenous descent from aboriginal communities began in the late 1800s. This formally ceased in the 1970s but some would argue that it continues to this day. This essay will present evidence including the stolen aboriginal children's experiences in life and what changed in their life from when they were home to where they were taken. It is hypothesised that the Stolen Generations have had a live much tougher than most and should be fully reconciled for the damage done by the Government. It will also examine the Government's roles have been and how they have changed from during the period of stolen generations to their current standpoint on the reparations of the stolen generation.

In 1937 Conference of State and Federal Ministers of Native Welfare, the debate about the policy for indigenous people, the aboriginal issue has been divided into two populations, the ‘full-bloods’ and the ‘half castles’ (Hollinsworth, 1998). The first group was assumed would be die out eventually, and the second group can trained and absorbed into white family as a servant. In fact, Indigenous children kidnapping as servants was existed since European new arrival. And the removals and the blocking of return to Indigenous families was became common while the growth of ‘mix race’ people (Hollinsworth, 1998). In NSW, the legislation trying to remove the ‘mix race’ children from their family and placed them in foster care (Haebich 2000), while the prohibition of marriage and contact between racial categories has been legislated. Removed children are broken emotionally by told that their parent were dead out or abandoned them, and forced to neglect their own culture, as well as physically, as

In the 1860s across the state of Victoria, the First Australians were just trying to hold on. The European settlers have only been around for thirty years and their population was already half a million. On the other hand, during the same period of time, the First Australians have been reduced from 60,000 people to just 2,000. Since there was a significant decline in the Aboriginals’ population, the white people believed that the Indigenous people were on their way to extinction, however, this was proved

The Cheyenne tribe lived in Minnesota by Lake Superior. Some of the tribe moved to Colorado. They were nomadic. They were known as the plains tribe.

The policy revolved around segregating aboriginal populations from the rest of society, removing inhabitants from their sacred land and transfer them to reserved facilities that were run by church groups or by the state where strict rules were placed and enforced upon them, controlling many aspects of their lives, these included control over; marriage, movement, work, earnings, leisure

64, Commonwealth of Australia 2011). Policy then moved towards more assimilationist strategies in which attempts were made to convert Aboriginal Australians into ‘responsible citizens’ (Gilbert 2005, Haebich 2000). The protectionist and assimilationist policies share the core values that Aboriginal culture is inferior and on its way to an ‘evolutionary end’ (Gilbert 2005, p. 64).

Australian Aborigines are thought to have the longest continuous cultural history in the world. Yet, within a hundred years, the near extinction of the Aboriginal culture almost occurred. This single event, the invasion of the Australian continent by European settlers, changed the lifestyle, the culture, and the fate of Australian Aborigines. Their entire lives were essentially taken away and they were forced into a white, European world where the lifestyle change could not have been any different. Aborigines in Australia today are struggling to deal with a past in which they lost touch with their culture and now are trying to regain some of that cultural identity.