Indigenous People In Australia Essay

For thousands of years people have struggled with accepting people of colour and their place in society. There was a big issue in Australia in the 20th century with accepting the Indigenous people into the communities in a country that had been invaded by Europeans 200 years earlier.
In the years before World War One, British-Australians believed themselves to be superior to the Indigenous People of Australia, the Australian constitution excluded Aborigines by not regarding them as Australian citizens. Indigenous Australians had few rights, low wages and poor living conditions compared to British-Australians. The Defence Act 1903 provided a compulsory military training scheme but this didn’t include Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders. When war was declared in 1914, Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders were barred from enlisting because of their colour. However, many men would try to enlist anyways, …show more content…
The exact number of Indigenous men that enlisted in the war will never be known as the army didn’t record the race of the enlistees. The reasons that men wanted to enlist may have included travel, regular pay and a chance to be equal to other Australians. Indigenous man Reginald Rawlings from Victoria was killed in action as he led his team into German trenches, defeating them and won himself a military medal. Aboriginal men served in ordinary units with the same conditions of service as their British counter-parts. During the war, British-Australians and Indigenous Australians lived and fought beside each other never once thinking that one was superior to the other. There are only 5 known Indigenous Australian men buried at