Aboriginal Australians Quotes

“Go to your elders. You should ask them about your country and your totem. Because that is your identity. A blackfella with no identity is a lost blackfella. He don't know where he belongs.”
― Gary Lonesborough, The Boy from the Mish

“They are caught between one world and another, and they no longer belong anywhere.”
― Alison Croggon, The River and the Book

“In short, connection to culture is so much more complex, rich and diverse than anyone who is non-Indigenous can understand. There's this unspoken feeling that comes with identifying as Aboriginal and being around mob that you'll never know if you aren't an Aboriginal person. Identity for us, is built on family lines, connection to country, stories, traditions and something that can't be measured according to levels of melanin.”
― Marlee Silva, My Tidda, My Sister: Stories of Strength and Resilience from Australia's First Women

“Aboriginal peoples, like the ancients, were not so concerned with the science of matter, but rather with the science of the mind. For to them, the universe was mind, and all that existed as physical reality was the product of mind and spirit. Everything physical and material was in essence, manifested thought.”
― Kenneth Meadows, Earth Medicine: Revealing Hidden Teachings of the Native American Medicine Wheel

“Were they really Aboriginal? Did they really belong to Warren Finch's ancestral country? Anthropologists, lawyers and other experts, like archeologists, sociologists and historians, were called to examine the genealogies of these people. And emergency legislation was bulldozed through parliament in the dead of night which claimed that Warren Finch was the blood relative of every Australian, which gave power to the government to decide where he was to be buried.”
― Alexis Wright, The Swan Book

“The idea of discovery and consequent possession is used by those with neither the intelligence nor sensitivity to see the value in lives other than their own. Anyway, there is no need to possess anything when there is access to everything. It is only when someone says that your mother belongs to them that there is a problem.”
― Donna Goddard, Nanima: Spiritual Fiction

“Van Diemen's land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population --Observation made by Charles Darwin, Feb 1836”
― James Boyce

“For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. But if their isolation were to end, as it ultimately had to end with a shrinking world, their whole way of life could be fractured. Even the arrival of a few thousand permanent settlers, whether from Europe or Asia, would be like the first tremors of an earthquake.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia's People Volume 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia

“Nothing in the traditional life of Aborigines was more impressive than their practical knowledge. They were masters of their environment even though they could do little to change it.”
― Geoffrey Blainey, The Story of Australia’s People Vol. I: The Rise and Fall of Ancient Australia

“Colonialism was a mass extinction event, yet no textbook has the spine to bear the burden. You demonize hitler for his measly 6m white body count! Americas were radiant with life, love and wonder, then columbus happened, and population dropped 90%, bengal had the world's finest silk industry, then churchill happened, and industry collapsed, 4 million starved to death, millions massacred across india, like australia, like leopold-infestation in congo. Everywhere the white man has laid his eyes on, plague, famine and massacre has followed.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat