Australia, Festivals, Aboriginal People In Traditional Dress

The government of Australia has a very poor record when it comes to treatment of its Aboriginal citizens. Indigenous Australians were dispossessed of their land, despised for their culture, and marginalized, abused, and murdered. Perhaps most notorious of all the Australian policies were those that led to what has become known as the Stolen Generations. Under several federal and state programs that continued into the 1970s, the government forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their families and sent them to white families and church-run institutions for cultural reprogramming. A recent national report on the policies found that there was not a single Indigenous family that did not have at least one child taken away. Despite the deliberate genocidal nature of these programs, the government for many years refused to apologize for them. That same hostile attitude toward Aboriginal peoples was reflected in the Australian government’s long and vigorous opposition to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.