Coombs believed that the Whitlam government's policy of indigenous ‘self-determination’ would be realised primarily at local and regional levels of political organisation. Commitment to this view soon exposed him to the policy's practical difficulties. To understand the problems that preoccupied him, as self-determination became the current policy rubric and ‘assimilation’ was consigned to the past, we must first appreciate the continuities and differences between the practices of those two policy ideals. Assimilation and self-determination are variations – significantly different, it could be argued – on an inexorable governmental imperative: the modernisation of indigenous society.

The new acculturation

In advocating the incorporation of locally based indigenous groups, the CAA was influenced by CD. Rowley's commendation of corporate personality as the indispensable ‘carapace’ of indigenous Australians' surviving group traditions. The CAA's March 1968 ‘Outline of Commonwealth Policy’ – a paper effectively suppressed by Wentworth – had advocated incorporation. The Gurindji strike and walk-off soon offered the chance to test the usefulness of incorporation to Aboriginal people who were seeking to represent their interests to government. Though Wentworth and Nixon rejected the CAA's advice, the CAA never let indigenous incorporation drop from their reform agenda.

In one of their first substantial policy papers for the McMahon government's Ministerial Committee, in July 1971, the CAA called for a ‘shift in emphasis’ from programs ‘narrowing the social gaps which handicap Aborigines’ to programs that enabled them to ‘find ways to organise themselves for effective social action’.