NorthOfNorth wrote on Apr 13
th, 2009 at 11:36pm:
However, we have to learn to stop seeing them as necessarily aspiring to be Europeans.
Well, most of them are far more European than anything else. Tallow's question of wrong skin or wrong totem is apt. Aboriginality today is a political stance, especially when you can claim aboriginality because one of your grandparents was half aboriginal.
"In 1972, Pat Eatock, founding secretary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, officially became the first Aborigine to stand for federal parliament in the ACT, even though she looked as white as her Scottish mother, or some of her father's British relatives.
Indeed, Eatock only started to identify as Aboriginal when she was 19, after attending a political rally, so little did any racial difference matter to her before her awakening to far-Left causes.
But she thrived as an Aboriginal bureaucrat, activist and academic, leading the way for Leeanne Enoch, who stood for Labor in last month's Queensland election as its "first Aboriginal candidate" in a winnable seat, despite looking as Aboriginal, or not, as Premier Anna Bligh.
The white Aboriginal artist, too, is more than 15 years old. Kim Scott was hailed as the first Aborigine to win the Miles Franklin Award, and calls himself a Noongar, despite conceding that the Aborigines who did not know him called him wadjila - a white.
No doubt he has Aboriginal ancestry, but why does he not also identify with his obvious European background?
That is now a question even for our most famous Aboriginal leaders. Geoff Clarke, the last chairman of ATSIC, the Aboriginal "parliament", had an English father. Lowtija O'Donoghue, another ATSIC chairman, had an Irish father. Fair Michael Mansell, the Tasmanian firebrand, clearly has more European than Aboriginal ancestry.
Even Professor Mick Dodson, the Australian of the Year and a fierce advocate for a treaty between black and white, had a white father and from the age of 10 was a boarder at a Victorian Catholic school. Sign a treaty with yourself, Mick.
Or take the most prominent Yorta Yorta leaders - Melbourne University academic Wayne Atkinson and Victorian Traditional Owners Land Justice Group co-chair Graham Atkinson. Both are Aboriginal because their Indian great-grandfather married a part-Aboriginal woman. "