the Greater Nomadic Council

Australian Aborigines

Jonathan of The Head Heeb has penned an detailed look into the history and contemporary plight of Australian aborigines:

Aborigines are black. Their features aren't particularly African, but the first impulse of a visitor from the United States is to analogize them to African-Americans, with all the implicit assumptions about their history and social position. Those assumptions are entirely wrong.

As an indigenous people, the aborigines' history is closest to that of the native Americans, but not even that captures their experience. In some ways, settler-aboriginal relations in Australia unfolded more like Brazil or the Southern Cone than the other British settler colonies. In the United States, Canada and New Zealand, the settlers' first encounters were with farmers who had organized societies and, at least in some cases, significant military strength. In Australia, the first encounters were with small hunter-gatherer tribes. This set the tone for the following centuries.

The post has lots more fascinating facts about these groups of people and the challenges they face today.