Rereading WEH Stanner's 1968 Boyer lectures "After the Dreaming" I came across the following comments that forty yeasr laer seem to be relevant to assessment of recent 'policy initiatives' by the howard government on indigenous affairs.
There is he observed "... a certain inability to grasp that on the evidence the aborigines have always been looking for two things: a decent union of their lives with ours but on terms that let them preserve teir own identity, not their inclusion willy-nilly in our scheme of things on a fake identity, but development within a new way of life that has the imprint of their own ideas." (pp.27-28)
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