Abstract
CORROBORATION in part of recent criticism of the treatment of the Australian aborigines (see p. 1029 of this issue of NATURE) comes from a source carrying a weight that cannot be disputed. Dr. Donald Thomson, an anthropologist appointed by the Federal Government to act as a special patrol officer in Arnhem Land, now relinquishing his post to take up a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Cambridge, has made a statement, according to the Canberra correspondent of The Times in the issue of December 9, in which he comments severely on the policy in aboriginal administration being pursued in the Northern Territories. His criticism, as reported, is directed mainly against encroachment on native lands. In the selection of Groote Eylandt as a flying-boat base, he maintains, every interest but that of the aborigines has been considered. It seals the doom of a tribe of three hundred aborigines, “in many ways the pick of the surviving Australian tribes"—a view which anthropologists conversant with the Australian material will endorse. He went on to state that the Arnhem Land Reservation is no reservation at all. It is being encroached upon in many ways, the natives are diminishing rapidly, while two watering places for pearlers, which have been established on the coast, are destined to be ‘plague spots’ which will extend throughout the reserve. That criticism is not entirely ill-directed has been admitted by Mr. Lyons, the Prime Minister, who, while deprecating exaggeration, concedes that there is room for improvement—indeed that improvement is ”imperative and urgent". He announces his intention of calling an early conference of Federal and State representatives to consider the future of the aborigines.
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Administration and the Aborigines of Australia. Nature 140, 1044–1045 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/1401044c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1401044c0