to Segregation Assimilation 0. What place for Indigenous Australians within a white concept of nation? For many whites an attempt to simply forget. 1. First decades of the twentieth century built on a heritage of `protection' legislation in the nineteenth. Bringing Them Home (1997) 2. Key element in protection legislation was the idea that the Aboriginal presence in Australia would disappear. Growing concern about `half castes' and attempts to eradicate Aboriginality. `Protection' criticised. 3. Segregation enforced by law and custom. Lack of funding and Aboriginal as well as white resistance allowed some to evade legislation. 4. By the 1930s a new direction in policy. Dying race clearly a myth anthropologists like A.P. Elkin influential. Policies of upliftment. 5. Aboriginal activism Australian Aborigines League and Aborigines Progressive Association. William Cooper, John Patten, William Ferguson. 1938 Day of Mourning. Activism in the 1930s 6. Focused on fighting segregation and denial of citizenship rights. Emphasised that Aboriginal people had the capacity for `civilisation'. A different outlook to later generations of activists. 7. How much was this political expediency in the face of a widespread disregard for Aboriginal cultural or identity amongst whites? Advent of assimilation. 8. War decisively put an end to the protection era. 9. Electoral Act amended in 1949 to give the vote to Aboriginal and Islander servicemen and women. 10. 1951 assimilation openly declared as government goal by Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck. Exemption 11. certificates issued to individuals from the 1940s derisively referred to as `dog tags' allowed them to escape the surveillance of protection acts. Assimilation in context 1 12. 1950s saw the beginning of decolonisation and the civil rights movement. UN declarations on racism. 13. Tempting to dismiss assimilation as a racist policy but should we have a more complex view? Within the context of its time it was in some senses radical certainly when compared to `dying race'. 14. Australia embraced assimilation at a time when South Africa entrenched apartheid and segregation defended in American South. Post-war Migration 0. At the start of WWII, Australia more ethnically homogenous than at any time in the 19th century.
1. Between 1947 and 1964 more migrants to Australia than in the 80 years after 1860. Fewer than half were British. 2. Fears of depopulation. Need to build an `appropriate' Australian popul...