3.2 Consequences and effects of the Aboriginal Protection Act 1869. The Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869 (hereinafter "the Act") made Victoria the first Australian colony to promulgate a framework in which to officially regulate the lives of Aboriginal people. According to the National Archives of Australia (2008), "This Act gave powers to the Board for the Protection of Aborigines which subsequently developed into an extraordinary level of control of people's lives including regulation of residence, employment, marriage, social life and other aspects of daily life" (Aboriginal Protection Act, p. 2).
The Act was passed during a period in Australia's history when the country was seeking to implement more enlightened laws for almost everyone else concerning the right to a popular and universal vote and the need for a free public education for all citizens - except Aboriginal people. In this regard, the Archives notes that, "For Aboriginal people, however, there was no such progress. The powers this Act gave to the Board for the Protection of Aborigines developed into controls over where people could live, where they could work, what kinds of jobs they could do, who they could associate with and who they could marry" (Aboriginal Protection Act, p. 3). The Act of 1869 was just the beginning, though. In this regard, Broome notes that, "Aboriginal children of mixed descent were always in danger of being taken from their mothers. The Western Australian Aboriginal Act of 1905, the Northern Territory Aboriginal Ordinance of 1911, and the Queensland State Children's Act of 1911, made the Chief Protector of Aborigines the legal guardian of all Aboriginal and 'half-caste' children. He had the right to remove them from their parents to an institution" (p. 1387).
According to Broome (2002), this approach to dealing with the indigenous people of Australia became standard over time.".. As protectors scoured the camps for light-skinned children to remove them and absorb them into the general population. The policy reached its height in the 1930s when increasing numbers of children were rounded up and sent to missions or south to Adelaide, far from traditional influences" (p. 138). In some cases, these forcibly removed Aboriginal children were subjected to the worst environments conceivable, including sexual and physical abuse (including flogging and death) (Attwood & Markus, 1999), as well as being denied freedom of movement in their own homeland (Broome). The impact of these early policies on the Aboriginal people of Australia today remains severe: "Although Aborigines are comparatively less disadvantaged in the early 1990s than they were a decade earlier, their hospitalisation and death rates were still four times higher, their infant mortality was three times higher and their life expectancy was about 20 years lower than other Australians" (Broome, p. 218).
Moreover, these historic disparities in treatment have resulted in some other adverse social outcomes as well. For instance, Broome emphasizes that, "Such disadvantages create stress and emotional problems. These are increased by alcoholism and substance abuse, cultural change and a breakdown in traditional values among some people" (p. 218). Although cultural change is a natural concomitant of life in the modern era characterized by globalization, these changes have been less than desirable among many Aboriginals and have contributed to an inordinately high incidence of violence and sexual abuse among these people. As Broome points out, "In 1990 the Queensland Aboriginal Coordinating Council reported some Aboriginal communities had very high rates of domestic violence, an alarming use of pornographic mail-order videos leading to sexual abuse of children, and rates of assault, rape and homicide 50 times higher than the average Queensland rate" (p. 218).
Reparation.
4.1 Public awareness. Over the past four decades or so, the Australian general public has become increasingly aware of what transpired with the Aboriginal people of Australia over the past two centuries. According to Wilson, "Since the mid-1970s, Aboriginal adults who were taken from their families as children have increasingly used mass media to tell other Australians about the experiences and the ongoing effects of separation on generations of Aboriginal families. At the same time, historians have uncovered archival evidence that separation was nationwide and systematic" (p. 79). Indeed, in his essay, "The Return of the Stolen Generation," Read (1996) reports that public awareness concerning the manner in which the states and territories of Australia have historically treated the people who were there before them has reached a peak in recent years:
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