Last Updated on November 28, 2022 by Tabraiz
The Aboriginal community of Australia is basically the group of indigenous people living in mainland Australia and nearby islands including Tiwi island, Fraser Island, and many others. Indigenous communities from Torres strait island are also included in the term “Aboriginals” in the present Australian political context. These aboriginals have evolved across Australia in the last five thousand years and have a very complex generic history and western systems and structures impact on aboriginal and torres strait islander cultures and therefore they represent a distinct tradition of their own which is very contrasting to the recent western culture.
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Aboriginal Culture vs Western culture
Western culture and Aboriginal/traditional culture are entirely different from each other as they have different focus points in their ideologies. While western culture focuses on individualism, the traditional culture always chooses community as its focal point of growth.
This leads to a major shift in the way people lead their lives. Aboriginal people prefer to live in small communities and close to nature. They use the land for the purpose of food, shelter, and clothes. To summarize, they live a minimal life with community values and traditions. The marriage of the people of the aboriginals is also very different. Men marry women from other groups as they want to socialize and expand their territory.
And as opposed to this, the western culture is all about the aggressive way of living where the community and family sizes are shrinking with ongoing developments and the marriages and social traditions are being followed by individuals in their own discrete ways without really taking care of taking the legacy ahead.
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Impact of colonization on Aboriginals
The Australian colonization was had an exceedingly important impact of western systems and structures aboriginal. Before the British settlements, the Australian mainland was home to five hundred indigenous communities with a population of almost seventy thousand but post the British settlement, many European invaders started impacting the aboriginals in a violent way, and below were the major impacts of such invaders on colonization on aboriginals :
- European invaders confiscated the majority of the lands of aboriginals, which was their prime source of living.
- Also, there was an influx of many infectious diseases like Plague, flu, and smallpox which led to the death of many aboriginals in the first place.
- Lastly, the most horrible massacre of the aboriginals by Europeans for resiting to give their lands.
This overall led to a mass decline in the overall population and as per data, only ten percent of the population is still alive now which is also going through a major social, political, and mental trauma due to the historical incidents.
Impact of colonization on Aboriginals culture
Colonialism is answerable for generously modifying the normal direction of history and eradicating the indigenous culture in its rule. The prejudice held by Europeans is laid with tributes and created predominance over the common aboriginal community. This was made an establishment of legitimizing the takeover of antiquities of aboriginals. It prompts the crumbling of their predominant conventional social, political and monetary system.
The increment of satellite correspondence with TVs in country regions has some way or another additional tension on the existence of people.
Impact on Traditional Authority: It has been seen that the Aboriginal standard principles and customary authority is influenced extraordinarily by dispossession and settlement measure. The critical explanation for the disturbance of conventional authority is more profound when contrasted with those due to liquor or broad communications impacts. The obscure Aboriginal standard laws are quite possibly the main factors as well. Conceding of land rights was viewed as a restoration for Aboriginal culture and custom alongside the outstation development.
The Aboriginal Development Commission
Want to know more about how did European settlement impact aboriginal culture? Read the below details.
Today the development of the aboriginals or providing for their safety and basic rights is a political agenda used by the white governments. In the same line of action, in 1983, Aboriginal Development Commission 1983 was developed to protect the rights and safety of these indigenous communities. In June 1983, the then prime minister of Australia, Paul Keating started the aboriginal development commission which conducted an elaborate survey in June 1983 to understand the situation of aboriginals in Australia and suggest remedies to improve their well-being and social security. It was found that more than six thousand of them were waiting for housing arrangements and many were on verge of it. Below are some points highlighted in the survey :
- The overall unemployment rate of aboriginals was way higher than the others. The numbers showed that it was almost three times the normal unemployment rate of Australia.
- Almost 15 percent of aboriginals never went to school and have no education whatsoever.
- The aboriginals’ crime rate and drug reports are way higher than the rest of the country’s data.
- The life expectancy rate also for aboriginals is very low, only 55 years
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