A Global View: Australia’s Aboriginal People

Aboriginal policy has followed a very similar history to Native American policy in the United States. Both lands were explored and colonized by various European powers until the British came to dominate. This introduced diseases that neither native American nor Australian populations had immunities to. While Europeans like the French, Portuguese, and Dutch were mainly concerned about claiming land for trade purposes, British colonies were more geared towards permanent settlement, featuring women and children as well as men. These white settlers weren’t content to remain in their coastal port cities. They needed to develop agriculture to support a further growing and expanding population, in both North America and Australia. They did this by any means necessary. Natives voluntarily handing over their land, perhaps for something in exchange, adds much more legitimacy to European expansion, but most of these “fair deals” were in fact scams. Whites in both the U.S. Congress and Māori Australian Parliament used plenty of loopholes and vague wording to legally choke the natives to get what they wanted. Both the Native Americans and Aboriginal peoples were forced to relocate from their resource-rich homelands on the coasts to resource-scarce, desolate environments inland (Indian Territory and the Outback respectively). 

One difference that exists between Australia and the United States is that the later granted citizenship to all tax-paying males in the 1860’s (women in 1920), while the former only granted Aboriginal suffrage in 1967. In the 1960’s, with the civil rights movement, the attitudes of both countries became more pluralistic and accepting of other people and their ways of life, including those of their indigenous peoples. To this day, these groups are among the most impoverished in their countries, with problems in drug abuse, education, health care, the environment, resources, and unemployment.

Compared to Australia and the U.S., a country like New Zealand has had a more accepting relationship with the native Māori people. The Māori became renowned as fierce warriors amongst their Anglo-New Zealander neighbors, and fought a series of bloody conflicts with European settlers in the 19th Century, not too dissimilar from the American Indian Wars or Australian Frontier Wars. The Māori people definitely experience some of the same struggles that natives in the U.S. and Australia face, in matters of land, culture, language, religion, etc. New Zealand is a smaller country than either Australia or New Zealand. Therefore, the Māori are more present in New Zealand culture than Native Americans or Aboriginal peoples. The silver fern, which had been a part of Māori art for centuries, has become a symbol of New Zealand, appearing on potential flags, sports teams, etc. New Zealand feels more like a hybrid Anglo-Māori culture than the U.S. and Australia have with their indigenous peoples.