Resistance Towards Aboriginal People Essay

Words: 1772
Pages: 8

Before the arrival of the British colonisers in the eighteenth century, observations of the population of Australia’s Aboriginal people numbered 315,000 to over one million people (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2008). By the next century, the Aboriginal population had dropped to an estimated 300,000 to 60,000 (Butlin, 1983); caused by a series of wars, violent engagements, massacres, disease, and land encroachment. Many Aboriginal people disappeared from the diseases introduced, caused by not having immunity (Australian War Memorial, n.d.). However, during this period known as the colonial frontier, despite the heavy casualties, the Aboriginal people did show resistance to the British occupation of Australia (Connor, 2002; Read, 1988; Clements, …show more content…
There was a fear that, due to the decline of the Aboriginal population, they could die out if no action was taken. The missions were operated by righteous religious groups who had the ultimate goal of indoctrinating Christianity and ‘civilising’ the Aboriginal people. It appears, although the mission’s motives were genuine in their desire to save the Aboriginal people from further harm, the trade-off for safety was the standard practice of having Aboriginal people reject their traditional culture. According to Klapproth (2004), this included having to “give up their vernacular languages and other indigenous cultural practices” (p. 6), which would lead to a collapse in “indigenous authority structures, languages, beliefs and practices” (p. 6). However, as time went on, the Aboriginal people did not want these missions to continue and resisted by demanding their own land (NSW Environment & Heritage, 2012). As a result, Aboriginal reserves and stations were created by the colonial government and in NSW by 1911, of the 115 reserves built, 75 were requested by the Aboriginal people (NSW Environment & Heritage,