The following series of posts by John Tracey are excerpts from a document by John Tracey entitled “Aboriginal Australia, Non-Aboriginal Australia”. - Sam Clifford

Firstly, for those who have not read a similar disclaimer in other things I have written, I am Irish and English by bloodline. I am the first of my family to be born in Australia.

The now defunct Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) defined Aboriginality – a precondition for voting in ATSIC elections – as being born of at least one Aboriginal parent and being recognised and accepted as an Aboriginal person by an Aboriginal corporation. This definition seems to have been widely accepted by Aboriginal people and the mainstream bureaucracy.

The first Aboriginal Protection Acts that were instituted around Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century identified “full blood”, “half cast”, “quadroon” and “octoroon” as being legally “Aboriginal” but if the Aboriginal bloodline was 1/16th or less then these people were legally white. The ATSIC definition of Aboriginality pays no such attention to what percentage “Aboriginal” a person is, only if a person in holistically Aboriginal based on a bloodline connection, no matter how distant or thin. Indeed the many fair skinned Aboriginal people today and their unrestricted involvement in Aboriginal culture, spirituality and politics indicates that “race” is not a key factor in “Aboriginality”.

There have been a few documentaries on television in recent times exploring the notion of “race” and genetics. Of the many facts presented in these are comparisons of genetic difference. Apparently the genetic difference between “Caucasian” and “Negroid” is less than the genetic difference between two individuals within either racial category. That is, genetically, there is less difference between Europeans and Africans generally than there is between different Europeans or different Africans amongst themselves. I assume that the same principle applies to “Australoid” - the category of which Australian Aborigines are sole occupiers in the genetic filing cabinets of Western science. These documentaries and their genetic research demolish the suggestion that genetics or “race” explains ethnicity in terms of human culture, consciousness and behavior.

As I understand it, within Aboriginal reality a person is connected to land by way of bloodline. A persons descendent’s down the generations from the first humans is a key element of the “dreaming”, as are the future generations. The land on which thousands of generations of ancestors were born and into which they were buried is the real vessel or container of human existence in material terms.Such a connection to land, and all the ecosystems in it, by way of bloodline is a different concept altogether from the genetic determinism of the Aboriginal protection laws.

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