The name is absent

134

far as the! location of identity was concerned, and a movement,
inchoate in its beginnings, towards the development of a separate
Aboriginal identity. Culturally, and in so far as identity was

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concerned, active resistance was to replace passive resistance
4

with the possibility of socialization into a positive Aboriginal
identity.

Changes taking place in Aboriginal attitudes were supported
by the legislation of the late sixties in South Australia*, when
the Dunstan Government came to power. However, separate identity
for Aboriginal people, in its emergent state was not clearly articulated
as a concept. It was notional, emotional.

Ross Watson, speaking to Kevin Gilbert, asks a series of questions

growing out of'confusion, and a despairing need to come to grips
not merely with the question of ’identifying’ as an Aboriginal
person but seeking to know, to understand, what can be the components

*

of an Aboriginal identity, credible to an individual, which he
can select out of the many Aboriginal identities offered him,
and build on in order to attain to a personal identity.

For the Aborigine, who has been treated as a minor, as an

adolescent under the law, the ’crisis’ of identity usually thought
of as an adolescent phase existed through his adult life.

Few perceive, though, that these things (jobs, housing,
health-services) can help but do not heal, for the
thing at issue is the ruin of a frame of reference,
a culture, and the consequent devaluation of individuals.
Yet we can see the start of some slight search for
^tAboriginality*. But what is Aboriginality? Is
it being tribal? Who is an Aboriginal? Is he
or she someone who feels that other Aboriginals are
somehow dirty, lazy, drunken, bludging? Is an Aboriginal
anyone who has some degree of Aboriginal blood in
his or her veins and who has been demonstrably disadvantaged
by that? Or is an Aboriginal someone who has had
the reserve experience? Is Aboriginality institutionalized
gutlessness, an acceptance of the label ’the most
powerless people on earth’? Or is Aboriginality
when all the definitions have been exhausted a yearning
for a different way of being, a wholeness that was

See Chapter XI f°^r an account of ’contemporary’ legislation.

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