Aboriginal Australians 2

Aboriginal Australians

Eve Fesl, a Gabi-Gabi woman, wrote in the Aboriginal Law Bulletin describing how she and possibly other Aboriginal people preferred to be identified:

The word ‘aborigine’ refers to an indigenous person of any country. If it is to be used to refer to us as a specific group of people, it should be spelt with a capital ‘A’, i.e., ‘Aborigine’.

While the term ‘indigenous’ is being more commonly used by Australian Government and non-Government organisations to describe Aboriginal Australians, Lowitja O’Donoghue, commenting on the prospect of possible amendments to Australia’s constitution, said:

I really can’t tell you of a time when ‘indigenous’ became current, but I personally have an objection to it, and so do many other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. … This has just really crept up on us … like thieves in the night. … We are very happy with our involvement with indigenous people around the world, on the international forum … because they’re our brothers and sisters. But we do object to it being used here in Australia.

O’Donoghue said that the term indigenous robbed the traditional owners of Australia of an identity because some non-Aboriginal people now wanted to refer to themselves as indigenous because they were born there.

Aboriginal Australians 3
Aboriginal Women’s Goods

Dean of Indigenous Research and Education at Charles Darwin University, Professor MaryAnn Bin-Sallik, has lectured on the ways Aboriginal Australians have been categorized and labelled over time. Her lecture offered a new perspective on the terms urban, traditional and of Indigenous descent as used to define and categories Aboriginal Australians:

Not only are these categories inappropriate, they serve to divide us. … Government’s insistence on categorizing us with modern words like ‘urban’, ‘traditional’ and ‘of Aboriginal descent’ are really only replacing old terms ‘half-caste’ and ‘full-blood’ – based on our coloring.

She called for a replacement of this terminology by that of “Aborigine” or “Torres Strait Islander” – “irrespective of hue”. It could be argued that the indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea and Western New Guinea (Indonesia) are more closely related to the Aboriginal Australians than to any tribes found in Indonesia, however due to ongoing conflict in the regions of West Papua, these tribes are being marginalised from their closest relations.

Origins:

Scholars have disagreed whether the closest kin of Aboriginal Australians outside Australia were certain South Asian groups or African groups. The latter would imply a migration pattern in which their ancestors passed through South Asia to Australia without intermingling genetically with other populations along the way.

Aboriginal Australians 4
Aboriginal Pathways

In a 2011 genetic study by Ramussen et al., researchers took a DNA sample from an early 20th century lock of an Aboriginal person’s hair with low European admixture. They found that the ancestors of the Aboriginal population split off from the Eurasian population between 62,000 and 75,000 BP, whereas the European and Asian populations split only 25,000 to 38,000 years BP, indicating an extended period of Aboriginal genetic isolation. These Aboriginal ancestors migrated into South Asia and then into Australia, where they stayed, with the result that, outside of Africa, the Aboriginal peoples have occupied the same territory continuously longer than any other human populations. These findings suggest that modern Aboriginal peoples are the direct descendants of migrants who left Africa up to 75,000 years ago. This finding is compatible with earlier archaeological finds of human remains near Lake Mungo that date to approximately 40,000 years ago.

Scroll to Top