The name is absent

309

This group of people have shown themselves able to turn away
from alcohol overnight, once they are ’converted’.

Other Aborigines, however, not of the fundamentalist persuasion*
believed that this group got ’hooked on religion' in the same way as
they had been ’hooked on alcohol’. They had exchanged one addiction
for another.

Alcohol and religion may be seen as identials in securing a
particular identity, the former into an identity that is negative,
but ’human’. ‘

4

Both alcohol and ’religion’ are identials that distance the person
from a traditional world of meaning.

However, the seeking of identity as a 'human being' does not take
the people into a white world; the fundamentalist church groups are
for black people, not white. They are a further element in the building
of a parallel society.

18.55 Employment as an idential

There is massive unemployment among Aboriginal people documented
by the reports quoted in Chapter V and at the beginning of this
chapter. There has long been hostility among Aborigines because
jobs have been given to migrants, rather than to Aborigines.

Gale (1972:220) points out that, because of past deprivation
many Aborigines are virtually unemployable, and many others are
seriously handicapped by a lack of education and training.

Gale and Wundersitz show that only 16.3 per cent of the Aboriginal
adults in their study were employed in 1980 compared with 54.8 per cent
of the total adult population resident in Adelaide at that time
(Gale and Wundersitz, 1982:142).

Their study of the ElizabethZSalisbury area in 1981 found marginally
more households containing employed persons, and fewer depending on
social security benefits, than did the main survey (ibidil46).

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