95
t
The people were deprived of their land and their source of
food, and were treated as if they were bad providers, always looking
for handouts.
They were forced to seek seasonal employment and were typified
as unreliable at keeping jobs, unreliable as an authority figure
in the home.
L
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I
Social legislation took away the autonomy of the people and
then treated Aborigines as inferior, as lacking in intelligence,
as having perpetually the status of a minor, as having disorganized
family structures, as needing the restrictions imposed on criminals,
lunatics or animals.
With reference to identity, the typifications contained within
the legislation offered to Aborigines two possibilities:
1) Negative identity*
2) Identity diffusion
We shall now examine the various Governmental policies which
were codified in the legislation described above.
8.4 Government policy: Management of Aboriginal society within
the symbolic universe of the dominant society
The hypothesis is addressed that policy and practice, codified
in legislation, created a world in which the Sumbolic universe
of Aborigines was nihilated and Aborigines themselves were typified
negatively as the ’scum', the unwanted, the bottom-of-the-heap
(Perkins 1975:17) .
The theorizing, basic to policies concerned with the management
of Aborigines up until 1967,nay be categorised in terms of nihilation.
See Chapter III, p.31-32 above, for definitions.
The interaction of Aboriginal people with the ’world’ constructed
for them, and their appropriation of identity, will be examined
in Chapters XV, XVII and XXIV.
