When Captain Cook arrived in 1770, there were about 300,000 Aboriginals. The British and white Australians hunted them like animals, forced them from their land, massacred them, and kidnapped the children (known as the Lost Generation). As a result, by 1965, the population of "Pure Aboriginals" was little more than 40,000 people.
Fortunately, there are now anti-discrimination laws that protect Aboriginal people. Today, the population has rebounded to about 200,000.
Australian Aborigines were almost exterminated by the English colonizers. Today, they represent only 1% of the Australian population, roughly estimated at around 200,000 people. When Captain Cook arrived in 1770, there were about 300,000 of them.
By 1806, racism from colonizers and soldiers reached a very high point. Not only were sacred Aboriginal places violated and desecrated, the Aboriginals themselves became hunted like animals for pleasure and fun. The soldiers would visit Aboriginal villages under the pretense of offering gifts. However, the real purpose of the visit was to contaminate the village water supply with arsenic. Entire villages, including children, elderly, women and men were killed by arsenic poisoning.
After Australia gained independence from England, something much worse happened to the Aborigines. It is known as "The lost Generation"; where Aboriginal children were kidnapped never to be seen again by their families. This amounted to genocide for the Aboriginal people. The government’s goal was to destroy any interference from Aboriginal people in "white" politics.
By 1965, the population of "Pure Aboriginals" was little more than 40,000 people. They were literally massacred by the colonizers and expelled from their land, especially from productive land. They were pushed to the North of the country, where temperatures reach 50 degree Celsius in very wet or extremely dry areas.
In Feb. 2007 the Australian Government finally apologized for “successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.” However, no reparations were offered to those Aboriginals affected by those practices.
Aborigines were the native inhabitants of Australia, who were settled in the continent before the white settlers arrived to Australia. Like other native inhabitants of many places, the aborigines also endured the same fate of drastic decrease in their numbers in the upcoming years to come.
Nevertheless these adverse repercussions were not due to any repressions or any kind of bigotry on the behalf of the white settlers. From the very outset, the intentions of the whites were not malicious at all. However the vision of the white administrator had a dearth of thoughtfulness, which could have enabled them to understand the quagmire that the native inhabitants were undergoing as a result of the presence of the white settlers with whom they would have to share their native homeland for good or worse get ruled by them. Whatever the reason was, the aborigines race fell dramatically from 350000 in the 18th century to some 40000 in the 1930's. It was then when the white administrators displayed their thoughtfulness and sympathy towards the aborigines and instilled in them their lost self-confidence, enabling them to shed the mindset of an underprivileged minority and in lieu realize their doubtlessly myriad inner worth.
They were subjected to mass, persistent unadulterated genocide beyond what any modern historian could possibly imagine. Evidence points to it being absolutely brutal.
