Aborigines with animal status’

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32861, 9 March 1972, Page 15

Aborigines with animal status’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright)

ADELAIDE, March 8. A British Broadcasting Corporation television producer has described the central Australian town of Alice Springs as “an Aboriginal disaster area.”

Bob Saunders, of the BB.C.’s travel and exploration unit, said in Adelaide today on his return from a filming visit to Alice Springs: “You Australians should throw out the Aboriginal Welfare Department and send in the Red Cross. ‘1 left the town with a feeling of appalling disgust uid disappointment at the tonditions in which the Aborigines were living. "They are people stripped )f all dignity, and relegated to the role of tramps. “Something has gone terribly wrong in Australia. The Wrong decisions have been Hade, and now the problems

Australia is having with the Aborigines are almost irreversible.”

Mr Saunders, who said that the position could only worsen, recalled that when he was last in Alice Springs, in ’'63, he had been impressed with what was then being done for the Aborigines.

“The system has now fouled up — the Aborigines were given too much too soon without being given the right kind of informative education,” he said.

“I have never seen anything quite as bad anywhere else in the world. The Aborigines at Alice Springs have the status of animals.”