This article is about a specific class of people in Australian law. For more general information, see Indigenous Australians.
1st row: Windradyne, David Gulpilil, Albert Namatjira, David Unaipon, Mandawuy Yunupingu 2nd row: Truganini, Yagan, Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Bennelong, Robert Tudawali | |
Total population | |
---|---|
606,164 (2011)[1] 2.7% of Australia's population | |
Regions with significant populations | |
Northern Territory | 29.8% |
Queensland | 4.2% |
Western Australia | 3.8% |
New South Wales | 2.9% |
South Australia | 2.3% |
Victoria | 0.85% |
Languages | |
Several hundred Indigenous Australian languages, many no longer spoken, Australian English, Australian Aboriginal English, Kriol | |
Religion | |
Mixture of Christian, small numbers of other religions, various locally indigenous religions grounded in Australian Aboriginal mythology | |
Related ethnic groups | |
see List of Indigenous Australian group names, Tasmanian Aboriginals |
Aboriginal Australians are legally defined as people who are members "of the Aboriginal race of Australia" (indigenous to the Australian continent—mainland Australia or to the island of Tasmania).
Legal and administrative definitions
The category "Aboriginal Australians" was coined by the British after they began colonising Australia in 1788, to refer collectively to all people they found already inhabiting the continent, and later to the descendants of any of those people. Until the 1980s, the sole legal and administrative criterion for inclusion in this category was race, classified according to visible physical characteristics or known ancestors. As in the British slave colonies of North America and the Caribbean, where the principle of partus sequitur ventrem was adopted from 1662, children's status was determined by that of their mothers; if born to Aboriginal mothers, children were considered Aboriginal, regardless of their paternity.[citation needed]
The Constitution of Australia, in its original form as of 1901, referred to Aboriginals twice but without definition.Section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth parliament power to legislate with respect to "the people of any race" throughout the Commonwealth, except for people of "the aboriginal race". The purpose of this provision was to give the Commonwealth power to regulate non-white immigrant workers, who would follow work opportunities interstate.The only other reference, Section 127, provided simply that "aboriginal natives shall not be counted" in reckoning the size of the population of the Commonwealth or any part of it.
After both of these references were removed by the 1967 referendum, the Australian Constitution had no references to Aboriginals. Since that time, there have been a number of proposals to amend the constitution to specifically mention Indigenous Australians.
The change to Section 51(xxvi) gave the Commonwealth parliament the power to make laws specifically with respect to Aboriginal peoples as a "race". In the Tasmanian Dam Case of 1983, the High Court of Australia was asked to determine whether Commonwealth legislation, whose application could relate to Aboriginal people—parts of the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 (Cth) as well as related legislation—was supported by Section 51(xxvi) in its new form. The case concerned an application of legislation that would preserve cultural heritage of Aboriginal Tasmanians. It was held that Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders, together or separately, and any part of either, could be regarded as a "race" for this purpose. As to the criteria for identifying a person as a member of such a "race", the definition by Justice Deane has become accepted as current law.[6] Deane said:
While Deane's three-part definition reaches beyond the biological criterion to individual's self-identification, it has been criticised as continuing to accept the biological criterion as primary. It has been found difficult to apply, both in each of its parts and as to the relations among the parts; biological "descent" has been a fall-back criterion.
Definitions from 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:
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, was reported as saying:
O'Donoghue went on to say 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
source : en.wikipedia.org