Introduction
ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS have the lowest health and wellbeing indices of all cultural groups in Australia (Carson, Dunbar, Chenhall & Bailie 2007). Social justice is concomitant with health and wellbeing in their communities. However, two centuries of colonisation and racism have rendered many Indigenous communities impoverished and lacking the capacity to construct a national agenda that will put Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights to the fore of politics. Until poverty is addressed with a grassroots, meaningful approach, Indigenous Australians will remain at the bottom of the social strata. Community empowerment and development will be achieved when institutional social justice values are implemented throughout all communities.
Aboriginal Australians have been advocating for social justice since European colonisation 230 years ago. Aboriginal peoples have the longest continuous culture in the world and have lived in Australia for more than 50 000 years (Dorey 2015). Aboriginal Creation Stories begin in the Dreaming, or Dreamtime, the place beyond time and space, which contains the past, present and future (Berndt & Berndt 1994). Aboriginal consciousness emanates from the Dreaming, from where the ancestors came. Until Europeans arrived in Sydney in 1788, Aboriginal peoples followed strict lore established by the Dreaming. The Dreaming governed sacred sites and ceremonies, and protocol between men and women in the tribal groups and people of different tribal groups.
The tradition of all the dead generations
The arrival of Europeans led to massacres now known as the ‘Killing Times’. The 1991 National Inquiry into Racist Violence in Australia found that:
the process of colonisation was characterised by small scale but systematic physical violence as a ‘bloody frontier was moved across Australia’ for more than 160 years. It is estimated that during that time approximately 20 000 Aborigines and 2000 Europeans and their allies were killed in frontier conflict (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1991, p. 38).
The Killing Fields are embedded in the recent collective memory of Aboriginal people; they only came to an end in the 1930s (Reynolds 1981, 1998, 2000). The pioneering Aboriginal activist William Cooper (1860–1941) defined Aboriginality not in terms of culture or family ties, but as ‘the remembrance of a horror and fear of extermination’ and ‘a racial memory, which recalls the terrible things done to [us] in years gone by’ (Attwood & Markus 2004, p. 80).
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