How Is Indigenous History and the Current Situation of Indidenous Essay

How Is Indigenous History and the Current Situation of Indidenous Peoples in Victoria Presented at the Melbourne Museum's Bunjil - Essay Example At present, there are six such exhibitions, of which four permanent and two temporary. If you ckeck them out you will find that they deal with a great variety of subjects: history, legislation, rituals and ceremonies, art. The Aborigines have a very troubled history behind them and they still have unsolved issues that do not allow them to fully move forward and face the new times. Throughout time they passed on their artistry, they taught their children their stormy history, they fought for the recognition of their wrights and, generally, they remembered everything that was ever theirs, including the lands they "lost" to the sea, during the Holocene (15,000 to 10,000 years ago). (Singh et al., 2001, p.22) That may be so because for the Aborigines land also provided spiritual strength. (Singh et al., 2001, p.32) Indeed, a people which remembers and preserves its past so vividly deserves to be presented to the large public, because it is the recognition of this public that will help it move on into the future, while at the same time trying to hold on to the past, as well. The Aborigines and their early history Although none of the six exhibitions focuses on the early history of the Aborigines, a minimal knowledge of it could benefit anyone willing to visit the Indigenous exhibitions. ... With only a few carnivorous predators present, the settlers flourished. Some of them lived in a nomadic style, moving for access to water, food and resources. Where they could, the Aborigines made semipermanent dwellings, moving out only during the annual wet season. Very few of them lived by the sea and struggled to make out a living in permanent villages. We know that they used to burn the land in order to renew it, thus being also safe from major fires that appeared naturally in the dry season. It can be said that the Aborigines did not have the conditions to settle down properly and build cities, like other ancients peoples. Generally speaking, for a city to exist you must have a specific social class system, a geographical division into sections with administrative/ military functions, a religious space of some sort. (Levy, 2008, p.8) The Stolen Generations Between 1910-1970 around 100,000 Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families. (Singh et al., 2001, p.26) According to the laws of the time, Indigenous children could be removed from anywhere and at any time, without a court order, as the parents had no legal rights to the children. The purpose appears to have been to take the children, teach them to live like the whites and then turn them into domestics or labourers for the whites. In 1995 there began an inquiry into these matters, which was finalised in May 1997 with schocking results. (Singh et al., 2001, p.26) The report published stories of sexual abuses and excessive physical punishment. Sources say about the stolen children that "Despite claims that it was for their own good, they were not better educated, nor more likely to be employed and not receiving significantly higher incomes than people who were raised in their