Indigenes have a magnificent boon denied the rest of us.
They have a guaranteed home, a place, property in the nation.
We have no such thing. We can pay millions for a home and if we don’t continually pay the taxes and charges eventually it’ll be sold up to pay them.
Hence whatever we call ‘home’ is only ever on loan to us. We are leasing it.
But indigenes have common land granted to them upon which they can very largely live as they wish.
In whatever kind of home they choose to build.
And they’ ll never get put off that land, thrown out of that home.
That’s generally true I think. It follow from this being ‘tribal’ land belonging to them and from which they can ban access to anyone else.
The situation gets very complicated of course because it is a whole industry making profits from this situation and these people and organisations and offices and officers and publications abound.
And you can read them until your eyes fall out and you still won’t really know what’s going on. Except that quite obviously there’s a hell of a lot of people doing fine out of this.
Here’s one: The National Indigenous Australians Agency. I won’t put the link here because the system will make it open up right here in the middle of my text.
But it mentions all kinds of things and gives me the impression that there could be communities where housing is not free. Well I know there are.
And I suppose it could even be that not paying rent could cause the council in such a place to tell the occupiers they’ll have to get out.
I doubt that they’d pay rates anywhere because that’s a tax on the ‘value’ of the land and and that isn’t traded wouldn’t have a value in that way.
But the same thing: if they didn’t pay the rates perhaps they’d be ordered out, kinda ‘sold up’ as we would be.
But in either case, if true, the people ‘ordered out’ find themselves standing on a land they own. That they are said to own. That you and I are banished from.
And right there and then they can start building whatever they like, one assumes, all the way from a wurley to a shed to a shack to a home… wherever they like.
Leave aside the question of any hassles they may get from their local ‘council’ (a western imposition on their traditional life) or from , more properly you’d assume, the tribe as a whole in the traditional sense, for we know nothing of this and don’t much care.
What we know is that the land is ‘theirs’ in a communal sense of the most basic kind: i.e. each and every member of the community can take as they wish.
We don’t have that communal sense any more. Our nation is ‘ours’ in a communal sense that doesn’t allow of us helping ourselves.
But we assume they still cling the more closely to the original meaning of the word and the original habits of human beings.
So to our mind at least any aboriginal on tribal land always has a ‘home’ on that land whereas we don’t on our land.
And that’s a root difference of the most important kind.
That’s a boon of the most enormous size.
Now here’s a link to that agency as an example of the agencies that exist. You’ll see here they claim that aboriginals have influence over 40% of Australia’s land mass.
Well what do you know. It hasn’t automatically opened up. I think it will if I make it a link. I didn’t realise/remember that I must choose to do that.
Well I won’t. If you are interested to look then cut and paste.
🙂
https://www.niaa.gov.au/indigenous-affairs/land-and-housing