Aboriginal Australians and Charles Perkins

In the history there has been always a conflict between two or more groups everywhere. Those problems could be religious, cultural, economical, political, racial, or of any kind of ideology. Australia isn’t the exception, and there have been problems since the British arrived. The first and maybe the most important is a racial problem between two groups that should be tied, it’s the problem between ‘British’-Australians and aboriginal Australians.  There are many reasons why that problem is so important and it still exists in our times. There are many people and organizations that worked, and still work in the world, and Australia to eliminate discrimination. In this essay I’ll present one person who tried to eliminate discrimination in Australia against aboriginal people trough the ‘freedom rides’, also how discrimination was born, and the impact of the freedom rides into Aboriginal, and non-Aboriginal Australians’ life.

This problem started when British colons arrived to Australia, they evaluated this land and they proclaimed Terra Nullius to establish colonies. That signified that Australia was uninhabited, but it wasn’t. In fact British colons saw that it was habited by Aborigines, the problem was that they told to their government that Aborigines hadn’t any kind of government, or the requisites for Britain to consider them as a civilization or civilized humans. This was the start of the problem. They were considered as ‘inferiors’, or worse they weren’t considered as humans.  The government took aborigine’s land to establish colonies, and they didn’t care that those lands had Aboriginal habitants. That’s one of the right’s that Aboriginals lost when Europeans came. There have been many violent repressions and massacres against Aborigine resistance to lose their lands, and rights. First Australians didn’t have interest in aborigines, they didn’t care about them, but then they saw them as people who needed protection, and later as a problem to solve. They tried to destroy aboriginal culture and identity by many ways. One of them was taking the children from their own families and to give them to white families. Some aborigines grown with the European culture, but many didn’t, and in general they hadn’t rights. Something similar was happening in the United States with black people, they didn’t have the same rights as white people, but in USA they started to defend their dignity and protest against inequality.