Why isn’t the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community?
Aboriginal people are key because they have a different sense of where we belong and how we interact with nature.
In 1976 I was working in the Gulf Country around Cape York, in an aboriginal community of about 300 people. The Health Department sent around a team and vaccinated about 100 of them against flu. Six were dead within 24 hours or so and they weren't all old people, one man being in his early twenties. They threw the bodies in trucks to take to the coast where autopsies were done. It appeared they had died from heart attacks.
We owe the Aboriginal peoples a debt that is four centuries old. It is their turn to become full partners, in developing an even greater Canada. And the reconciliation required may be less a matter of legal texts than of attitudes of the heart.
Unlike aboriginal hunters, commercial seal hunters leave the carcasses on the ice to rot.
What is important is that I have been able to demonstrate to other women and also to Aboriginal people generally that Aboriginal people are capable of doing these things and women are capable of doing these things and Aboriginal women are capable of doing these things.
It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case
My best friend was Aboriginal.
Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal.
In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food.
One of my earliest memories is being backstage at Bran Nue Dae in Darwin when I was about eight. Its such a fun, happy show and a real celebration of being Aboriginal. . . it felt really great and achievable as a career. It all felt normal.
As far as I'm concerned, any Aboriginal that gets out there and accepts money that has been put out as a package for this bicentenary is actually accepting blood money. We've still got people with leprosy and we still got tremendous problems. These problems have not been our problems, they're the problems of the European population of Australia.
We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently.
A lot of my identity as an Aboriginal person is about family.
I'm going to win it for my country. I'm the first Aboriginal to win this. Isn't that something? I wish my Dad was alive to see it. He'd be as proud as I am.
There may not be a great job for [Aboriginal people] but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it’s picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done.
In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world.
If you are sitting on the title of any block of land in New South Wales you can bet an Aboriginal person at some stage was dispossessed of it.
I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art, but I'd like even more.
Urban artist have to face the stigma not only from white Australia but black Australia too; that's horrific when people say that their art isn't "Aboriginal" if it doesn't have dots or lines or moieties in it.
