The second belief which has influenced European attitudes
is that the Aboriginal people are 'doomed to extinction', so
that as a distinct community they will eventually die out and
be assimilated within the white community. The smallness
of the number of Australian Aborigines (150 000 in 1980) and
the division of the Aborigines into very small groups has
supported the belief that they do not have a future as a distinct
and separate people. Thus, as recently as 1965, Paul
Hasluck, then Minister for Territories, wrote:

The Aborigines today are a remnant of a people whose own culture is crumbling away and whose own curiosity or appetite is bringing them more and more closely into association with the rest of the Australian community. Nomadism has ceased for all except a few hundreds tribal authority over the younger people is dwindling . . . many of them no longer have
any link with any particular tribal territory, all of them have
undergone so much change in their way of living that many
of their hopes can be met only in association with the rest of
the Australian community.

The third influential belief is that the Aborigines are essentially
a nomadic people who are prone to 'go walkabout' and who
therefore do not have any interest in owning and exploiting
land in the way in which whites do. (In fact the Aborigines
are not nomads in the sense of being random wanderers
since they hunt and gather in a systematic way within a
defined and restricted territory.) Because of this belief, and
because of ignorance of Aboriginal attitudes to the land, many
whites refuse to take Aboriginal land claims seriously.

During the first phase of white settlement, the Aborigines
attempted to fit the Europeans into their own cultural
categories.

In Aboriginal Australia individuals were believed to belong to
their country by powerful spiritual bonds. The unexpected
arrival of Europeans caused many to conclude that they too
must have belonged to the land in question, or at least know
of it, in a previous life . . . George Grey sensed the logic in
the Aboriginal view point. 'They themselves,' he wrote, 'never
having an idea of quitting their own land, cannot imagine
others doing it and thus, when they see white people suddenly
appear in their country, and settling themselves down in
particular spots, they imagine that they must have formed an
attachment for this land in some other state of existence, and
hence conclude the settlers were at one period black men,
and their own relatives'.

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