CHAPTER X
INTERACTION BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY AND
PSYCHOLOGICAL MODELS: ABORIGINAL RESPONSE TO
THE PRE-1967 CONCEPTUALISATION BY TIE DOMINANT
SOCIETY OF THE ABORIGINAL WORLD
10.1 Introduction
The denial of the presence of Aborigines in Australia through
Land Acts and census categories was continued in historical accounts
by a denial, a silence, about the resistance by Aboriginal people
to the invasion of the colonizers, and the resistance by Aboriginal
people to the destruction of their culture.
The typification of Aboriginal people has been one stressing
the passive nature of the people.
The evidence points not to passivity, but to resistance to
the incursions of the dominant group, whether these incursions
were physical or whether they sought the nihilation of the symbolic
universe of the Aboriginal people. The early history of Australia
was written by white historians for a white world. It was silent
about the resistance of Aboriginal people to alien power and culture.
10.11 Aboriginal response to mainstream theorizing - resistance
as a form of interaction
(i) Physical resistance
Mullard (1980) charts the parameters of resistance by Aborigines
to the world imposed upon them by the dominant white society.
He speaks (1980:2) of the cult of forgetfulness that conveniently
allowed historians ”a complete neglect or distortion of Aboriginal
contributions or resistance to Australian development”. Such
•forgetfulness’ can be explained in terms of the machinery utilised
to nihilate conceptually the Aboriginal world of meaning.