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17.5 Economic viability
Legislation, introduced in 1968, to ensure that Aboriginal
stockmen were paid the minimum wage, led to a lessening of jobs
available for Aborigines. Tonkinson (1974:149) discusses the
effects at Jigalong, which resulted in loss of employment.
The Strelley Mob had withdrawn from the stations in the mid-
forties. They first earned a precarious living at mining, then
• < J
moved to leasing stations, thus-having almost forty years'history
of self-employment. . For them, paradoxically, the current high
levels of unemployment work towards the possibility of their
⅛
maintaining their alternative identity. The depressed state
of employment in Australia as a whole, and the prejudice and
discrimination shown towards Aborigines, make it most unlikely that
Aboriginal people would gain employment in the wider society in
competition with white people.
While the attraction of the excitement of cities remains, there
is not in the eighties the attraction of employment, better living
conditions, better education that drew Aborigines to the cities in
the fifties and sixties.
The Strelley type solution offers a viable economic alternative
within certain restraints. So long as the sharing of their income
and social benefits (and hardships) obtains, so long as there is
an acceptance of a frugal life-style, the variety of station needs
makes it possible to provide work situations which are very diverse
in character and which contribute to the good of the whole. The
personal enterprise advocated by governments as a way out of
unemployment has already been adopted by the group as they strive
to make their ’world* operate within a viable economy, contiguous
to white society rather than integrated within it.
However, to implement their policies, the Mob must incur
certain expenses which are a drain on their economy.
P
In accordance with the Mob’s policy of not sending their people
*
away to white institutions for training, they themselves, for a time