The preceding three chapters have been concerned with Aborigines in ‘remote’ Australia. In Chapters 5 and 6 attention is directed to Aborigines in the more closely settled areas which Taylor (1947, p. 4) has called ‘economic’, in contrast to (on the basis of land use patterns) ‘empty’ Australia. The Aboriginal inhabitants of ‘economic’ Australia are predominantly of part-Aboriginal descent, whereas those in ‘remote’ Australia are mostly of full Aboriginal descent.

In Map 1, the heavy line represents the division between ‘remote’ and ‘settled’ Australia; it will be noted that New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory and parts of South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland are within settled Australia. This division between remote and settled regions seems important since there are distinctions between the Aboriginal populations in the two parts. In the northern and inland regions, Aborigines often form the majority of discernible population groups, especially away from urban areas. By contrast, in ‘settled’ regions, as Monk (1974, p. 158) has noted, Aborigines are usually in small minority groups of one or two hundred people in ‘white’ towns or increasingly (as discussed in Chapter 6) as migrants to capital cities.