Outstation Movement

The Australian Outstation Movement , also known as the Homeland Movement , aims to encourage Aborigines to move back from cities to their ancestral lands. The settlement of their original habitats is not carried out on instructions from the government, but on their own responsibility and with the support of official bodies. The small homelands were mainly built in the Northern Territory , Western Australia and Victoria in rural areas remote from civilization. In the Northern Territory there are more than 500 outstations in which 30% of the local Aborigines live, including 16 spatially distributed outstations in the settlement area of Utopia .

Surname

The names Homeland or Outstation, also used as short names in Australia for this movement, are interchangeable. In the far north of the Northern Territory , the term homeland is primarily used, while other communities in central Australia prefer the term outstation. The Aborigines attach great importance to the fact that they are the traditional owners of Australia, have inhabited their land for millennia and that the continent was never Terra Nullius , a land that had no owners.

Development of this movement

Since the British colonization of Australia, the Aborigines have fought in different ways against the colonization of their country and later mainly for the recognition of their rights as citizens of Australia. After this succeeded at least largely until the 1970s before the law, the Aborigines expressed their right to land by building the tent embassy in front of the Old Parliament House in Canberra . Through these protests they got Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party to address the issue and negotiate with the Aborigines. He broke with the policy of assimilation pursued since 1930, which deported Aborigines from their ancestral areas to mission stations or cities. Furthermore, the 1966 law on equal pay for whites and Aborigines played a role, which led many Aborigines to relocate to the population centers of Australia. In 1973 the Commonwealth, the Australian government, announced that it would support the Homeland movement.

The starting point of the Homeland movement lay mainly in the poor social situation of the Aborigines, who had to live in the cities on the fringes of society and the danger from alcoholism, the use of intoxicants and a high suicide rate. Young people in particular were at risk. Another reason was the desire of the Aborigines to live their own millennia-old cultural customs, to keep the connection to their ancestral land in the immediate vicinity of their ritual places and to live there. This was only possible for them if they went back to their origins. Aboriginal elders played a leading role in the development of this movement .

How problematic the social and societal situation of Aboriginal Australians was, was expressed in the course of the investigation of numerous suicides by Aborigines in prisons by the government-appointed Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in the 1980s. It became clear what problems Aborigines have when they have to live outside their tribal area in the cities.

In the 1980s, numerous Aboriginal tribes established settlements in their ancestral land, such as the Pintupi in Kintore in the Northern Territory and Kiwirrkura in Western Australia or the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre in Utopia in the Northern Territory or the Martu in Kunawarritji in Western Australia, which hold one of the largest native titles with 136,000 km².

The Outstation Movement is part of the movement for aboriginal rights as a whole. This social movement began in 1946 with the Pilbara Strike , in which social rights and claims to the ancestral land were first demanded by the Aborigines. For the first time, the Aborigines were granted the possibility of a legal claim to land in the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 . A breakthrough in the recognition of original land ownership came in 1992 with the judgment of Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) . In 1993 the Native Title Act was passed, which can give legal titles to land. This legal title is the prerequisite for the indigenous Australians to be able to formulate legal claims to land of the Commonwealth, State or Territory. It is just the possibility that their traditional interests are upheld and legal property and land can be handed over.

The outstation movement made it possible for Aborigines to live again in their land, which is of special importance to them. Associated with this is an independent and relatively self-determined life, although the problems of education, work, language, life and culture, health and social security for the tribes of the Aborigines both in the outstations and in other places have so far remained unsolved. In many outstations there was an increasing return ( retraditionalization ) to the original traditions and values. This also includes the subsistence forms of hunting and gathering - of course in partially modernized forms - which are now used by many groups, especially in Arnhem Land and the Western Desert region, as an additional source of food (mostly well below 10%, but sometimes over 25%) becomes.

Most of the indigenous people in the outback make their livelihoods today mainly through unskilled work on farms and ranches, as tour guides or by selling handicrafts. Nevertheless, the traditional hunting and collecting techniques have played an important role in many local communities for several years. In largely assimilated groups, the men's hunt (with cars and rifles) is practiced as a socially highly valued weekend sport, but in the more traditional groups in the “outstations”, hunting and gathering serve to supplement subsistence . In some regions it comes after the clarification of land rights.

It was not until 2009 that the Australian government formally recognized the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples .

Article 3: Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Article 21 (1): Indigenous peoples have the right, without discrimination, to the improvement of their economic and social conditions, including, inter alia, in the areas of education, employment, vocational training and retraining, housing, sanitation, health and social security. (United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)

Political forces are now demanding that the Australian government fill the UN declaration with life so that the tribes can pursue their own self-determination and their own development.

The current (2015) ruling Prime Minister of Western Australia Colin Barnett plans to close around half of the 241 Out-Station settlements. He is supported by the Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott , both of whom are members of the Liberal Party of Australia .

Problems with the outstations

Since the homelands are located in remote areas, they cannot be reached overland for a long time during the rainy season. Flights are therefore the only and expensive way to stay connected to the outside world. It should be noted that satellite reception can fail in the rainy season and no message can be sent in an emergency. Only 6% of a small group of respondents in the homelands said they had a computer, and the rest of them wanted financial help to buy it.

In 2009 a delegation from Elders of eastern Arnhem Land called for the future of the homelands to be secured in a resolution signed by 27,000 people.

Amnesty International supports the homelands and stated in 2011 that it believes they make a significant and measurable contribution to the advancement of the health, employment and welfare of the Aborigines.

Web links

• Caring for Country: Connection to Land - Past and Present (Northern Land Council)
• Peggy Brown (Mt. Theo Outstation Co-Founder): Sustaining Aboriginal homeland communities
• Social Justice Reports 1994-2009
• Native Title Reports 1994-2009

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} amnesty.org.au ( Memento of the original from September 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : There's no place like homelands , August 5, 2011, in English, accessed July 22, 2012 
2. ↑ ^{a b} hreoc.gov.au ( Memento of the original from March 29, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 2.1 MB): Sustaining Aboriginal homeland communities , p. 5, in English, accessed on July 22, 2012 
3. ↑ ^{a b} creativespirits.info ( Memento of the original from July 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. : What homelands mean to Aboriginal people , in English, accessed July 22, 2012 
4. ↑ Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody ( Memento of the original from November 3, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
5. ^ Karl-Heinz Kohl : Ethnology - the science of the culturally foreign. An introduction. 3. Edition. Beck, Munich 2012, (first published 1993). Pp. 86-88.
6. ↑ Sibylle Kästner: Hunting foragers and foraging hunters: How Australian Aboriginal women capture animals. LIT Verlag, Münster 2012, ISBN 978-3-643-10903-3 . Pp. 135, 154-162.
7. ↑ Eckhard Supp: Australia's Aborigines: End of the dream time ?. Bouvier, 1985, ISBN 978-3-4160-1866-1 . Pp. 239, 303-306.
8. ↑ ^{a b} Information on humanrights.gov.au
9. ↑ Tony Abbott a 'disgrace', says Federal Opposition after comments that living in remote Indigenous communities was a 'lifestyle choice' . In: abc.net.au, March 12, 2015, accessed April 10, 2015