A scene from Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park - "living museum pieces"?

Walk into any tourist shop in Australia and you’ll most likely be bombarded by Aboriginal paraphernalia – from boomerangs to didgeridoos. The lives of this indigenous Australian people have been embraced by a tourist industry eager to tout Aboriginal encounters to the ever-greater number of modern eco-tourists. Tour guides around Ayers Rock will tell you of the appalling treatment Aboriginal communities received at the hands of the invading colonial masses – that Aborigines were still classed under flora and fauna until 1967; that a government bent on selectively breeding out this gentle people tore children away from their parents and put them into adoptive families, who all too often ended up treating the children cruelly, with stories of physical violence, and even rape, rife; that Aboriginals are still struggling for recognition which they are only finally, and grudgingly, receiving in the form of meagre land hand-outs in inhospitable areas.

But these stories, whilst all more or less true, avoid addressing the issues which still remain and which continue to ensure that Aboriginal communities are havens of alcoholism, sexual abuse, violence, and exclusion.

Having abandoned the philosophy of assimilation in the early 1970s, the Australian government have instead plumped for a multi-culturalist approach in which Aboriginals live in communities and are encouraged to maintain an individual identity, including teaching children their own language and traditions. Despite this approach the communities have not flourished, but instead have fallen by the wayside into a downward spiral of violence, arguably as the result of the schizophrenic nature of Australia’s approach to Aborigines.

On the one hand the Australian government is keen for the Aborigines to maintain their sense of identity, yet does this with a Rousseauian idealism born from both political expedience and a certain naivety. The idea has arisen of Aborigines as a gentle, spiritual people, a race of noble savages. Yet the truth is far more complex, and by Western standards many Aboriginal practices seem distasteful at best, abhorrent at worst.

Take one example: ‘marriage’ practices among Aboriginal tribes. Tribes were generally organised as gerontocratic institutions in which the male elders commanded not just power, but also rights over the tribe’s women. Usually this would take the following form: one man would agree to provide for another man’s ‘wife’ in the case of the latter's death, while the woman in return would promise the new husband her daughter in the future. The result was that men aged 30+ would end up with extremely young girls, the daughters of the widows they had agreed to care for. The highly complex and extensive religious rituals which young men went through served the purpose of distraction, preventing them chasing these young wives.

Now whilst the idea of elderly men shacking up with barely pubescent girls might seem quite obnoxious to us it’s not really that uncommon an idea: look at ancient Rome where women were often wed by 14 to much older men, or in India, where arranged marriages still occur. Nevertheless it presents the Australian authorities with a peculiar problem: on the one hand they claim to want to preserve Aboriginal communities, yet on the other hand they can hardly countenance a practice which effectively constitutes institutionalised paedophilia. Yet Aborigines, particularly men, are in many cases truculent at the thought of losing their particular privileges: witness the remarkably high number of cases of sexual child abuse found in the reserves (4.3 times higher than amongst Australia’s non-indigenous population according to one report). Other examples of practices now banned include the customary execution by spear, and genital mutilation of boys on reaching manhood. This inability on the one hand to allow Aborigines to practice ‘Aboriginal Law’, and the refusal on the other to attempt to properly integrate Aborigines into Western society is one of the major causes of the apathy and limbo in which many Aborigines find themselves, and the resulting symptoms of alcoholism and drug-abuse.

In any country in which different races and communities live together (i.e. pretty much all of them) there are always going to be sources of friction and misunderstanding, but simply ignoring them in this case out of a sense of post-colonial guilt or a naive belief in the noble savage is not going to change anything. Instead what is needed is a frank and open discussion within the country as to what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour. If that means encouraging Aborigines to adopt a more western lifestyle then so be it, but surely that is better than, in the words of a former Australian Immigration Minister, allowing them

"...to be living museum pieces? Or a sort of fringe community whose quaint customs are stared at by tourists? Will the drone of the didgeridoo, the clicking of the boomerangs and the stomping in the red dust in the red centre of Australia still be the sufficient employment for the grandchildren of the people of Uluru? Will the separate development that is being pursued with a beneficent purpose today have the result that after two or three generations persons of Aboriginal descent find that they are shut out from participation in most of what is happening in the continent and are behind glass in a vast museum, or are in a sort of open-range zoo?"

- Shades of Darkness (1988), Paul Hasluck

A policy of assimilation, if carried out sensitively, may still offer the best way forward.