Australia: Aboriginal Activity

The way most Australians see it, their only race problems are taken care of by the strict immigration laws that fence the country off from the dark-skinned peoples of Africa and Asia. As for the Australian Aborigines—the dark-skinned people who were already there when the first white men arrived—they have long since been driven deep into the arid outback. Hopelessly backward by the lights of European civilization, they have often been treated not as second-class citizens but as a subhuman species, a kind of ethnological curiosity.

“Dogs, horses, cattle and sheep get counted in the national census,” complains Aborigine Leader Charles Dixon, “but not Aborigines.” Now redemption of a sort seems close at hand. By a 9-to-1 majority, Australians last month voted two constitutional amendments that would 1) include the Aborigines in the next census, and 2) allow the federal government to spend public funds on Aborigine schools and housing.

Lizards & “Wurleys.” The flat-nosed Aborigine, with his receding forehead and his skin burned bluish black by the sun, may be slow to respond to such unaccustomed attention. He is unrelated to any of the world’s three major races. Some anthropologists, noting that his skullcap is much thicker and his brain cavity 20% smaller than that of European man, suggest that he is the last survivor of the primordial primates who succeeded Neanderthal man some 20,000 years ago.

Living as a nomadic scavenger in his tribal area, the Aborigine eats lizards, goes naked, sleeps in crude lean-to “wurleys” made of bark. His society is organized into a loose federation of tribal units and practices a form of basic communism that does not recognize private property. His language, over the centuries, has become divided into more than 500 separate dialects, some of which are among the world’s most complex and include as many as four genders of nouns declinable into as many as eight cases (v. six in Latin). He is also the inventor of such simple but effective instruments as the boomerang and the womera, a slinglike device for launching spears.

Queen’s English. Recently, however, the Aborigines have been wandering away from their tribes, seeking their place in Australia’s urban prosperity. Despite restrictions on their education, many have progressed from pidgin English (“Big feller rain bin come up”) to the less colorful but more practical Queen’s English (“I think we are in for a heavy downpour”). Several Aborigines are now serving with Australian forces in South Viet Nam. A 15-year-old Aborigine girl, Yvonne Goologong, is the national junior women’s tennis champion. A few, such as Public Health Official Phillip Roberts (known to his tribe as Wadjiri-Wadjiri), even hold government jobs. So far, though, only two have managed to break far enough into the white man’s culture to receive college degrees.

Their relatives are becoming impatient for more. Despite last month’s constitutional amendments, not a single bill for aid to the Aborigines has yet been proposed by any Member of Parliament, and last week Aborigine leaders began demanding action. According to one story circulating through Sydney, if the government does not quickly propose a specific Aid plan, the Aborigines will stage a curiously symbolic demonstration. They will march on the National War Museum in Canberra to demand the return of their collected boomerangs, womeras and spears.