Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Inequality: an overview
- 2 Remote Australia I: government settlements and missions
- 3 Remote Australia II: pastoral stations
- 4 Remote Australia III: decentralised communities
- 5 Settled Australia I: urban and rural communities
- 6 Settled Australia II: the major urban areas
- 7 Some economic issues
- Appendixes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Settled Australia II: the major urban areas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- List of Maps
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Inequality: an overview
- 2 Remote Australia I: government settlements and missions
- 3 Remote Australia II: pastoral stations
- 4 Remote Australia III: decentralised communities
- 5 Settled Australia I: urban and rural communities
- 6 Settled Australia II: the major urban areas
- 7 Some economic issues
- Appendixes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For them Aboriginality is a fact primarily of being racially different from the white community - rather than deriving from cultural and historical tradition.
H. C. Coombs, The Future of the Australian Aboriginal (The George Judah Cohen Memorial Lecture, 1972)The dominant class asserts a set of values that prizes thrift and the accumulation of wealth and property, stresses the possibility of upward mobility and explains low economic status as the result of individual personal inadequacy and inferiority.
O. Lewis, ‘The Culture of Poverty’ (Scientific American, 1966)Australia ranks as one of the three most urbanised societies in the world, and in 1971 some three-fifths of the country's population lived in metropolitan centres. Economic developments in the post-war period have increased the pace of urbanisation and, in relative terms, the rural population of Australia has been declining rapidly. Although, as noted in Chapter 1, the Aboriginal population is predominantly rural, in 1971 some 15 per cent of Aborigines (compared with 60 per cent of the total population) resided in major urban areas, defined as centres with populations in excess of 100,000 (1971 census; ABS, 1973, p. xiv). Because of the marginal economic status of Aborigines in rural areas, especially in settled Australia, it might have been expected that the ‘push’ to migrate to cities would have been stronger than for other Australians as a group. However, as Rowley (1971a, p. 362) has noted, certain influences act to discourage the migration of Aborigines to the cities: kinship ties and community loyalties attach Aborigines to rural areas, while greater difficulties (such as the sheer economic cost of migration) deter many poor potential migrants.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Economic Status of Australian Aborigines , pp. 143 - 173Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1979