Aboriginal Misconceptions

When I asked many of my Asian friends about their impression about Australian people, almost no one thought of Aboriginal people at first. I recalled a friend’s excitement about his first holiday last year down under where his only perception about the Aboriginal people is the boomerang bought from a souvenir shop in Melbourne. Before coming to Australia, my impression about them was limited to black curly hair people living in the outback, boomerang, didgeridoo, traditional dance typically portrayed in tourism brochures. I hardly knew that these are merely some of stereotypes about the oldest living people on earth. After living in this country for a while, I began to realise more serious misconceptions attributed to them perceived by contemporary …show more content…
Drawing on 2 key assumptions relating to the nature of knowledge and power by Michel Foucault (1972) and Orientalism by Edwards Said (1978), Attwood (1992) coined the term Aboriginalism which refers to a discourse - a formal discussion, a way to know about the Aboriginal people and culture. Within this discourse, there are 3 independent forms to know about the Aboriginalism: Aboriginal studies; the distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ and the corporate institutions that govern the Aborigines. Firstly, with regard to Aboriginal studies, all knowledge about the Aboriginal culture, including research and display, is written by non-indigenous people and dominantly by European scholars. This knowledge is interpretive and constructed by the British settlers after their arrival in ‘Terra Nullius’ in 1788, assuming that indigenous people were too primitive to represent themselves. It was bound to the context and aimed at a specific purpose. In this case, with a purpose to compete with other European rivals and to quench the thirst for market expansion, the British created such knowledge to justify the seizing of indigenous land and the denial of Aboriginal rights. Secondly, with respect to identity, the colonialists set the distinction between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. In order to confirm the identity ‘Us’ - European white settlers, it was …show more content…
ABC and SBS are one of the few media outlets that have shown effort in making Aboriginal cultural programmes more prominent. This also seems the case of travel brochures, a type of print media, for domestic indigenous tourism. Within the tourism and hospitality industry nowadays, even in digital media era, travelogues still remain a standard communication tool. It provides potential tourists with awareness of destination, knowledge, desire to actually purchase the travel product (…). In brochures, visual images including paintings, maps, photographs, landscapes used to ‘represent’ the world is a powerful tool (…). In the context of indigenous tourism for domestic market, in contrast with cliché imagery (didgeridoo, boomerang, corroboree) in brochures for international tourists, the images used for domestic Australian tourists have avoided those stereotypes. Most brochures tent to use dominantly romanticised images of landscape, fun, adventure that promote a hedonistic lifestyle. The Aboriginals are depicted as caring, friendly host community and serviant to the white. The portrayal is quite constrasting to what Aborigines are stigmatised in the media for crime, abuse, alcoholism. Why is there an abysmal gap between their current condition and what is depicted in the tourism brochures? The economic purpose could be the answer. Indigenous tourism a big business with a huge value