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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University, Wellington. Vol. 22, No. 6. Wednesday, June 24, 1959

Shocking

Shocking

So it is not exaggerating to say the situation is shocking.

Who is to blame and who should take the job of righting the wrongs? The Government? Our ancestors? The Australian people as a whole? The aborigines?

The reasons why Australia's first sons are in such a sad state today, and why "white" Australians have thought it necessary to discriminate against them through such legislation as we have discussed, are not simple.

Lack of understanding of a tribal culture, brutalities perpetrated by a minority of the early' settlers, false ideas of the inferiority of the aborigines, the thoughtless confiscation of tribal lands for industrial purposes—all these threads and more may be discerned in the past.

However one thing is clear. You can't blame the aborigines for their present plight.

Names like Nicholls, Blair; Namitjira and many others have proved both in civilian life and in two world wars that they can and will co-operate in building and defending a nation if we will only give them the opportunity.