Cause to celebrate: Australia's Indigenous population is on the rise
Cause to celebrate: Australia's Indigenous population is on the rise
Paul Daley
Monday 8 August 2016 23.42 EDT Last modified on Monday 8 August 2016 23.57 EDT
There was a time, far more recently than many Australians would care to admit, that this country’s policymakers and anthropologists believed they were witnessing the vanishment of the continent’s Indigenous people.
The Tasmanian Aboriginal people had already (wrongly) been declared extinct with the passing of Truganini in 1876.
To describe as unedifying what happened elsewhere in the early to mid-20th century in the haste to document the assumed “passing of the race”, is a dramatic understatement.
Anthropologists from Australia and elsewhere embarked on a race to document those that autodidact researcher, Charles Mountford, called the “last of the stone age men”. Little was off limits: the sexual habits of Indigenous people were charted in painstaking detail; hair and blood samples, and facial moulds, taken; their art – its value becoming apparent on the international market – was “traded” for pennies’ worth of tobacco while ancestral human remains were stolen by the crate-load and shipped to institutions here and abroad; secret and sacred rituals were intruded and trampled upon.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/postcolonial-blog/2016/aug/09/cause-to-celebrate-australias-indigenous-population-is-on-the-rise
No thanks to the dirtballs who nearly destroyed them, and stole their country.
