Australian Aborigines: The Common Struggle for Humanity

Despite so much that is common to the cultural heritage and colonial experience of the Australian Aborigines and American Indians, the present legal and socio-political position of the Aboriginal people in Australian society remains even worse than that of the Indians in the United States. The rights of the Indian peoples to land, minerals, water, and a degree of self-determination and cultural dis­tinctiveness are far more secure than those of the Aborigines
(where the latter are considered to have any such rights at all). Moreover, the statistics concerning infant mortality rates, life expectancy, median incomes, education and housing which are rightly the object of much con􀀑ern amongst American Indians are only exceeded as measures of material poverty and deprivation in the so-called "developed world" by those for Australia's Aborigines.