What is a Part Aborigine?

Abstract

There can be no ethnic group in Australia that displays as much diversity as the Australian Aborigines. Their lifestyles range from hunting and gathering in the most remote corners of Australia, through a more settled existence in outback country towns and on the fringes of towns and cities, to an ongoing struggle to survive in the hearts of Australia’s biggest cities. What is it that unites all Aboriginal people regardless of where they live? Many people, white Australians especially, seem to think that it is the racial characteristics, skin colour and “blood”, which makes an Aborigine. To these people, the darker a person’s skin is, the more Aboriginal they are. When this sort of thinking predominates, as it so often does, many Aboriginal people start finding themselves robbed of their Aboriginality. People tell them that they are only half or a quarter Aborigine, or a “part Aborigine”.