Indigenous peoples of Australia, comprising
Aboriginal peoples and
Torres Strait Islanders, have lived in Australia for at least 65,000 years before the arrival of the
First Fleet in 1788. The colonisation of Australia and development into a modern nation, saw explicit and implicit racial discrimination against Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians continue to be subjected to racist government policy and community attitudes. Racist community attitudes towards Aboriginal people have been confirmed as continuing both by surveys of Indigenous Australians cashless welfare cards trialled almost exclusively in Aboriginal communities, with a record class action settlement of $30 million awarded to victims in May 2018. The raids were found by the court to be "racist" and "unnecessary, disproportionate" with police having "acted in these ways because they were dealing with an Aboriginal community." Though the so-called Treaty was objectionable on many grounds, it was the first, and until the 1990s, the only time that an attempt was made to deal directly with the Indigenous peoples.
Historical relations English navigator
James Cook claimed the east coast of Australia for the British Empire in 1770, without conducting negotiations with the existing inhabitants. The first
Governor of New South Wales,
Arthur Phillip, was expressly instructed to establish friendship and good relations with Aboriginal people and interactions between the early settlers and the Indigenous people varied considerably throughout the colonial period – from the mutual curiosity displayed by the early interlocutors
Bennelong and
Bungaree of Sydney, to outright hostility of
Pemulwuy and
Windradyne of the Sydney region, and
Yagan around Perth. Bennelong and a companion became the first Australians to sail to Europe, where they met
King George III. Bungaree accompanied the explorer
Matthew Flinders on the first circumnavigation of Australia. Pemulwuy was accused of the first killing of a white settler in 1790, and Windradyne resisted colonial settlement beyond the Blue Mountains. With the establishment of European settlement and its subsequent expansion, the Indigenous populations were progressively forced into neighbouring territories, or subsumed into the new political entities of the Australian colonies. Violent conflict between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, described by some historians as
frontier wars, arose out of this expansion: by the late 19th century, many Indigenous populations had been forcibly relocated to land reserves and missions. The nature of many of these land reserves and missions enabled disease to spread quickly and many were closed as resident numbers dropped, with the remaining residents being moved to other land reserves and missions in the 20th century. According to the historian
Geoffrey Blainey, in Australia during the colonial period: "In a thousand isolated places there were occasional shootings and spearings. Even worse,
smallpox,
measles,
influenza and other new diseases swept from one Aboriginal camp to another ... The main conqueror of Aborigines was to be disease and its ally, demoralisation". From the 1830s, colonial governments established the now controversial offices of the
Protector of Aborigines in an effort to conduct government policy towards them.
Christian churches sought to convert Aboriginal people, and were often used by government to carry out welfare and assimilation policies. Colonial churchmen such as Sydney's first Catholic archbishop,
John Bede Polding, strongly advocated for Aboriginal rights and dignity and prominent Aboriginal activist
Noel Pearson, who was raised at a
Lutheran mission in
Cape York, has written that Christian missions throughout Australia's colonial history "provided a haven from the hell of life on the Australian frontier while at the same time facilitating colonisation". The
Coniston massacre, which took place near the
Coniston cattle station in the then Territory of
Central Australia (now the
Northern Territory) from 14 August to 18 October 1928, was the last known officially sanctioned
massacre of
Indigenous Australians and one of the last events of the
Australian Frontier Wars. The
Caledon Bay crisis of 1932–34 saw one of the last incidents of violent interaction on the "frontier" of Indigenous and non-indigenous Australia, which began when the spearing of Japanese poachers who had been molesting
Yolngu women was followed by the killing of a policeman. As the crisis unfolded, national opinion swung behind the Aboriginal people involved, and the first appeal on behalf of an
Indigenous Australian to the
High Court of Australia was launched. Following the crisis, the anthropologist
Donald Thomson was dispatched by the government to live among the Yolngu. Elsewhere around this time, activists like Sir
Douglas Nicholls were commencing their campaigns for Aboriginal rights within the established Australian political system and the age of frontier conflict closed. Frontier encounters in Australia were not universally negative. Positive accounts of Aboriginal customs and encounters are also recorded in the journals of early European explorers, who often relied on Aboriginal guides and assistance:
Charles Sturt employed Aboriginal envoys to explore the
Murray-Darling; the lone survivor of the ill-fated
Burke and Wills expedition,
John King, was helped by local Aboriginal people, and the famous tracker
Jackey Jackey accompanied his ill-fated friend
Edmund Kennedy to
Cape York. 1938 was an important year for Indigenous rights campaigning. With the participation of leading indigenous activists like
Douglas Nicholls, the
Australian Aborigines Advancement League organised a protest "Day of Mourning" to mark the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the
First Fleet of British in Australia and launched its campaign for full citizenship rights for all Aboriginal people. In the 1940s, the conditions of life for Aboriginal people could be very poor. A permit system restricted movement and work opportunities for many Aboriginal people. In the 1950s, the government pursued a policy of "assimilation" which sought to achieve full citizenship rights for Aboriginal people but also wanted them to adopt the mode of life of other Australians (which very often was assumed to require suppression of cultural identity).
World War II to the 2000s , former
Governor of South Australia, and to date, the only Indigenous Australian appointed to vice-regal office The
White Australia policy was dismantled in the decades following the Second World War and legal reforms undertaken to address indigenous disadvantage and establish land rights and
native title. In 1962,
Robert Menzies'
Commonwealth Electoral Act provided that all Indigenous people should have the right to enrol and vote at federal elections (prior to this, indigenous people in Queensland, Western Australia and "wards of the state" in the Northern Territory had been excluded from voting unless they were ex-servicemen). In 1965, Queensland became the last state to confer state voting rights on Aboriginal people, whereas in South Australia Aboriginal men had had the vote since the 1850s and Aboriginal women since the 1890s. A number of South Australian Aboriginal women took part in the vote selecting candidates for the constitutional conventions of the 1890s. The
1967 referendum was held and overwhelmingly approved to amend the Constitution, removing discriminatory references and giving the national parliament the power to legislate specifically for
Indigenous Australians. In 1965, one of the earliest Aboriginal graduates from the
University of Sydney,
Charles Perkins, helped organise the
Freedom Ride into parts of Australia to expose discrimination and inequality. In 1966, the
Gurindji people of
Wave Hill Station (owned by the
Vestey Group) commenced strike action, known as the
Gurindji strike, led by
Vincent Lingiari, in a quest for equal pay and recognition of
Indigenous land rights. From the 1960s, Australian writers began to re-assess European assumptions about Aboriginal Australia – with works including
Alan Moorehead's
The Fatal Impact (1966) and
Geoffrey Blainey's landmark history
Triumph of the Nomads (1975). In 1968, anthropologist
W.E.H. Stanner described the lack of historical accounts of relations between European and Aboriginal people as "the great Australian silence". Historian
Henry Reynolds argues that there was a "historical neglect" of Aboriginal people by historians until the late 1960s. Early commentaries often tended to describe Aboriginal people as doomed to extinction following the arrival of Europeans. William Westgarth's 1864 book on the colony of Victoria observed; "the case of the Aborigines of Victoria confirms ...it would seem almost an immutable law of nature that such inferior dark races should disappear." In 1973, the
Black Community School, which was set up in
Townsville,
North Queensland for the education of local
aboriginal and
Torres Strait islander children was described by some as '
apartheid in reverse' and 'racist'.
The Stolen Generations The
Stolen Generations were the children of
Australian Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families by the Australian
Federal and
State government agencies and church
missions, under
acts of their respective parliaments. The removals of those referred to as "
half-caste" children were conducted in the period between approximately 1905 and 1967, although in some places
mixed-race children were still being taken into the 1970s. Official government estimates are that in certain regions between one in ten and one in three Indigenous Australian children were forcibly taken from their families and communities between 1910 and 1970. In April 2000, the Aboriginal Affairs Minister
John Herron, presented a report in the
Australian Parliament that questioned whether there had been a "Stolen Generation", arguing that only 10% of Aboriginal children had been removed, and they did not constitute an entire "generation". The report received media attention and there were protests against the claimed racism in this statement, and was countered by comparing use of this terminology to the World War 2
Lost Generation which also did not comprise an entire generation. On 13 February 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd presented an apology for the "Stolen Generation" as a
motion in Parliament.
Mabo Case In 1992, the
High Court of Australia handed down its decision in the
Mabo Case, declaring the previous legal concept of
terra nullius to be invalid. That same year, Prime Minister
Paul Keating said in his
Redfern Park Speech that European settlers were responsible for the difficulties Australian Aboriginal communities continued to face: "We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice". In 1999 Parliament passed a
Motion of Reconciliation drafted by Prime Minister
John Howard and Aboriginal Senator
Aden Ridgeway naming mistreatment of Indigenous Australians as the most "blemished chapter in our international history".
Current issues In response to the
Little Children are Sacred Report the
Howard government launched the
Northern Territory National Emergency Response in 2007, to reduce child molestation, domestic violence and substance abuse in remote Indigenous communities. The measures of the response which have attracted most criticism comprise the exemption from the
Racial Discrimination Act 1975, the compulsory acquisition of an unspecified number of prescribed communities (Measure 5) and the partial abolition of the permit system (Measure 10). These have been interpreted as undermining important principles and parameters established as part of the legal recognition of indigenous
land rights in Australia. The intervention, widely condemned as racist, failed to produce a single child abuse conviction in its first six years The Rudd government, the Opposition and a number of prominent indigenous activists condemned Anaya's allegation. Central Australian Aboriginal leader
Bess Price criticised the UN for not sending a female rapporteur and said that Abaya had been led around by opponents of the intervention to meet with opponents of the intervention. In the early 21st century, much of Indigenous Australia continued to suffer lower standards of health and education than non-indigenous Australia. In 2007, the
Close the Gap campaign was launched by Olympic champions
Cathy Freeman and
Ian Thorpe with the aim of achieving Indigenous health equality within 25 years. Since the defeat of the
2023 Australian Indigenous Voice referendum, there has been a significant calls reignited from
Conservative Politicians and Commentators to oppose or scale down
Indigenous Reconciliation, viewing policies like
Welcome to Country ceremonies and placing the
Aboriginal and
Torres Strait flags alongside the
National Flag as 'divisive'. ==European Australians==