Aborigines

It is known across the world that Australian people are laid-back, good-humored, affable peoples. However, despite their self-confidence and good humor, all Australians attempt to cover up a disconcerted history, full of maliciousness and brutality. When the first Europeans began coming over to Australia, they found a major obstacle preventing them from being able to colonize this fantastic country. This obstacle was the indigenous people of Australia, the Aborigines (Wikipedia).

It is thought that the Aborigines had lived in Australia for around 60,000 years, and it is widely acknowledged that these people have the oldest surviving continuous culture in the history of the world. In spite of that, within a hundred years, the near annihilation of the Aboriginal culture almost occurred. This event in itself, the attack of the Australian continent by the European settlers, forever changed the lifestyle, the culture, and even the fate of the Aborigines. Their entire lives, as they knew it, were in essence taken away and they were forced into a white, European world where the lifestyle change could not have been any more different from their own. Aborigines in Australia today are struggling to deal with a past in which they lost touch with their culture and they are now trying to regain some of that cultural identity ("Australian aborigines").

"As a result of forced assimilation, by the late 1880s most aborigines had joined white rural and urban communities. Aboriginal people became economically marginalized and were exposed to new diseases. The consequence was massive depopulation and extinction for some aboriginal tribes" (Siasoco).

Without a doubt, Aborigine culture is out of the ordinary of any other widely none culture. The Aborigines seem not to have pondered on time, or the changes that came along with it. For around fifty thousand years they had lived unscathed and on their own, now, within a time frame of thirty years, from the first visits, by Europeans, to the complete colonization of Australia, they would have to adapt to the authority of the white man (Australian Aborigines).

Aborigines were seen as inferior. They were hunted down and killed in their thousands. In the early 1800's settlers were butchering Aborigines for dog food, for lebensraum, living space, or purely for sport - in one instance, Europeans chased an Aborigine woman up a tree, and then fired pot-shots at her. Every time a bullet hit her she would pull leaves off of the tree and shove them into her wounds, until she fell, lifeless, to the ground (Wikipedia).

Unbelievably, this kind of behavior was not considered a crime. Indeed, in 1805 the Judge-Advocate for New South Wales, the highest judicial figure in that country, made a comment that Aborigines were too stupid to even enter court, and that the settlers may begin to administer punishment as they saw fit. This is unmistakably the only place in English history or law that there is such an outrageous statement, a statement as close to an invitation for the settlers to commit genocide without actually using those words. Fifteen years later the was a law that was passed that allowed soldiers to shoot any group of Aborigines that was larger than six, regardless of the sex, age or even motives of the group (Wikipedia).

In the short 200 years of European existence on the Australian continent, Aborigine numbers were devastated. Indeed, if we take a look at the time span of the Aborigine inhabitancy of Australia, compared to the European inhabitancy, we see that Aborigines had Australia to themselves for 99.7% of the total inhabited history of the country. On the arrival of Europeans, there were between three hundred-five hundred thousand Aborigines; today there are just around forty thousand ("Australian aborigines").

By the mid 1830's, attitudes were beginning to quickly change. City dwellers were becoming horrified by the complete disregard of human life, and in 1838, a prominent Sydney journalist by the name of Edward Hall tracked down a story about 30 Aborigines being butchered, and brought the perpetrators to court. All nine of them were put to death by hanging. This did not, however, stop the killings Ð'- they went on randomly for another hundred years, the most recent of which was in 1928, when a group of 70 Aborigines were killed as a reprisal attack for the suspicious death of a white dingo hunter ("Aboriginal Australia: History, Culture, and Conflict.").

It was not until 1967 that Aborigines were on the Australian consensus, up until this point, they were simply considered not human. As recently as the early 1960's, school textbooks were relating to the Aborigines as "feral jungle creatures" (Siasco).

For much of their history, Australia's major political parties did not perceive a need to have Aboriginal affairs policies, but this was modified in the 1960s and 1970s as the Aboriginal interest came to occupy a more leading position in politics. The policies of recent major governments, those being the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the Coalition, consisting of the Liberal Party and National Party, have changed drastically since the Federation of Australia (Australian). In today's modern society, Aborigines are still not thought of as highly as the white Australians. Despite having the same rights as white Australians, they are often looked down upon. They are often seen to be stupid, reckless, and prone to violence and aggressiveness, some what like how the Iraqi's are viewed in France.

In spite of these unimaginable hardships faced by these amazing