AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1578, 25 November 1924, Page 3

AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES

FEW CHANCES OF MARRIAGEs

According to Professor Griffith Taylor, of Sydney, the teaching of anthropology indicates that in a generation or two the full-blooded blacks in New South Wales will have entirely vanished, and that somewhat later the half-castes will be merged into the dominant white race. His statement follows upon an arresting article in the Sydney Morning Herald, d’recting attention to the problem in its relation to the aboriginal girls and their chances of marriage. The system, it is pointed out. which aims at the of the aboriginal sexes not only denies to them the same opportunities for love, courtship, and marriage among their own kind that the whites possess, hut also presents an obvious factor in the hastening of the end of the aborigines as a race. About a dozen couples were married last year, but under existing conditions an aboriginal maid rarely meets an aboriginal youth. An affaire de coeur is therefore out of the question. What happens is that the girls are .taken from the camps and reserves, and, after training, come to the city as nursegirls and servants, while the aboriginal young men are scattered far and wide in the country. Thus, most of these luckless young black girls must dismiss from their minds all thoughts cf matrimony, and the passing of a race which Australia ought to befriend, is celebrated. The problem is a difficult one, for the departmental attitude is that 'to allow the young black people of both sexes freedom on the reserves would simply conduce to immorality. All the same, the young aboriginal girls do not appear to be getting a very fair chance in this their native land. Even the wages they would get, starting at 2s 6d and rising to ss, would be laughed to scorn by white girls.