Category talk:Indigenous Australian communities

Listing for deletion

I'm planning to list this at categories for deletion. There are many reasons for this:

1. First and foremost, we would not have categories called "Anglo towns in Australia", "Muslim suburbs", etc; precisely the same objections apply here, whether or not (as is often claimed) the indigenous people concerned don't mind. Anglos and Muslims may not mind such tags being applied to their communities either, but that is beside the point.
2. The issue is further politicised because the distinguishing of indigenous settlements from other towns tends to imply a lesser status; while this may be unintentional, it is the case. For example, federal, state and local governments refuse to provided full, standard services to the residents of some communities. Amanda Vanstone basically said as much in a speech recently. To cite a anecdotal example, a friend of mine worked for an Aboriginal corporation in the north west a few years ago and they struggled for months to get garbos to do pickups from a community which was not that far from the major town in the shire. I also recall that about 12 years ago, the city council in a WA regional city refused to provide services to a fringe camp on the very outskirts of the town. So I expect that many residents would be uncomfortable in lumping communities together.
3. There are a variety of land tenures that apply to remote indigenous communites, from pastoral excisions to communal title to standard freehold, so the "communal land" definition doesn't work
4. Ditto for the notion that these are communities where essential services are provided by ATSIS or state/territory departments; it isn't true for some communities on the fringes of metropolitan areas.
5. Therefore the only workable definition of "Aboriginal community" is simply that a majority of the population is Aboriginal. Many such communities started as non-Aboriginal communities, e.g. Roebourne and Nhulunbuy (neither of which appear in this category).
6. It is possible that, at some point in the future, such communities will become predominantly non-Aboriginal communities; we don't know what the future might hold. For example, as has happened in the past, they may become military bases, or mining/oil/gas towns.

Regards, Grant | Talk 05:11, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Do not delete: comments - I suggest that as the term is used officially by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and other bodies, your points above whilst trying to be PC, miss the point, try a search on google, for example searching for "indigenous communities" & ABS on Google found over 122,000 hits, specifically see

• 4710.0 - Housing and Infrastructure in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities, Australia, 2001
• Indigenous - Community Housing and Infrastructure Needs Survey (CHINS) 2006
• J. Taylor and M. Bell (2003), CAEPR Discussion Paper 243: Options for benchmarking ABS population estimates for Indigenous communities in Queensland

Paul foord 05:44, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

We could probably find some government papers on Italian or Vietnamese communities too. I think you are missing the key point about how controversial the definition of "indigenous community" is, and how there is no agreement on it. If we are going to have this category, perhaps it should include Redfern, New South Wales and other towns/suburbs with significant indigeonus populations. Grant | Talk 02:06, 26 June 2007 (UTC)