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Indigenous Australians Quotes

Browse 14 quotes about Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians Quotes

“In early-colonial Australia, invading colonisers regularly marvelled at the local environment’s park-like aspect, counting themselves multiply blessed that ‘nature’ (including divine providence) should have come to furnish them with ready-made grazing runs. In fact, the Australian landscape’s benign aspect was the cumulative consequence of millennia of Indigenous management, in particular the use of fire to reduce undergrowth and to contain spontaneous conflagrations within local limits. Within a few years of Europeans taking over the country and discontinuing Native fire-management practices, the current cycle of massive bushfire disasters was set in train. The land that settlers seize is already value-added. There is no such thing as wilderness, only depopulation.”

AustraliaColonizationSettler ColonialismIndigenous Australians
Book:Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race
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“She had thought about how everywhere in that place Romans had written the local people out of their history. She was trying to figure out how people valued a thing, what made something revered while other things were overlooked. Who decided what was out with the old, what had to have a replacement? What traditions stayed and what tools, household items, art, things, evidence of someone, languages, fell away. But when she tried to draw a vague line to the artefacts of Prosperous she was stumped — why the artefacts of Middlesbrough were important and not those from home.”

HistoryObjectsAustralian HistoryIndigenous Australians
Book:The Yield
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“She tried to keep herself and her life small and manageable. Much like a poem. The condensing of the wide, unknowable past that runs right up behind them. She doesn’t do that anymore, her life isn’t a poem, she knows it’s a big, big story. Her people go all the way back to the riverbank, and further, after all — the river and what happened at the river was a time traveller, their story has no bounds in time.”

Deep Human HistoryAustralian HistoryIndigenous AustraliansLanguage And CultureDeep History
Book:The Yield
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“August wanted to hand the papers back and to tell them everything, draw them close and whisper that their lives had turned out wrong, that she and her family were meant to be powerful, not broken, tell them that something bad happened before any of them was born. Tell them that something was stolen from a place inland, from the five hundred acres where her people lived. She wanted to tell them that the world was all askew and she thought it was because of the artefacts, that she thought they should understand it was all so urgent now, that they knew truths now tell them that she wasn’t extinct, that they didn’t need the exhibition after all.”

HistoryColonizationAustralian HistoryIndigenous Australians
Book:The Yield
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“The evidence of their civilisation, after so many years of farming, was difficult to find on the surface of the land. But they said it was embedded in the language of Albert’s dictionary, that with the Reverend’s list and all the words that Albert wrote, and other old people remembering the words too, that it would now be recognised as a resurrected language, brought back from extinction.”

EvidenceAustralian HistoryIndigenous AustraliansLanguage And Culture
Book:The Yield
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“Some say the idea that the world's trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit, and through that by political action, the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures might be more readily explained.”

CultureHistoryProgressSustainabilityImperialismColonizationIndigenous AustraliansAustralian Aboriginal
Book:Dark Emu
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“We were destined to have our own way from the beginning and America - two nations that have always had their way, for they killed everybody else to get it ... Here we have a symbol of nationality [Canberra, the national capital] ... The first historic event in the history of the Commonwealth we are engaged in today without the slightest trace of that race we have banished from the face of the earth.”

Australian HistoryIndigenous Australians
Author:William Morris Hughes
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