Australia's Aboriginal Small Business Owners: Challenges for the Future

Abstract

The Aboriginal peoples of Australia have faced a variety of different social, legal, and economic challenges in adapting to European settlement over the last two centuries. However, despite the removal of legal impediments and a revival in Aboriginal culture and population in recent years, the number and success rate of their small business owners remain limited. This article provides an overview of Australia's Aboriginal business operators: the causes of success and failure, and the future opportunities and problems that they confront. Background Australia's indigenous peoples are one of the oldest cultures in the world. Their presence on the continent goes back at least 40,000 years. In contrast, European settlement only began in 1788, with the arrival of the first English settlers in Sydney. At the time, the Aboriginal population was estimated to be about 750,000 (McGrath 1989). It was characterized by a complex social structure, a rich religious and ceremonial life, widespread hunter-gatherer economic activity, and a strong attachment to the land (Rickard 1992). As in so many other parts of the globe, European settlers quickly had a dramatic and largely negative impact on Australia's indigenous peoples. New diseases, displacement from their original lands, and armed conflict began the process of social destruction (Reynolds 1982). This was so extensive that by 1900 the indigenous population had declined to less than 40,000 (Dingle 1988). During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, successive state and federal administrations also intervened by forcibly removing many Aborigines from their homelands, relocating many onto reservations and separating children from their families (McGrath 1989; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1997). Until 1967, most Aborigines were not permitted to vote or to claim Australian citizenship, nor were they included in the Commonwealth census. As a result, most Aborigines were forced into a marginal existence. Those in rural and regional communities often found employment working on European pastoral stations set up on their own land. Most of this work was unpaid; remuneration was largely in kind. It was not until the 1940s that Aborigines began to receive monetary wages for this work, and such a practice did not become widespread for another twenty years. In contrast, Aborigines living in urban areas found themselves in a variety of poorly paid jobs, where work was usually marginal and uncertain. Participation in the white Australian economy almost exclusively took the form of providing labor for European businesses. There were few opportunities for Aborigines to establish their own independent enterprises. As a result, many became dependent on welfare programs provided by governments and charity organizations for their survival (Graetz and McAllister 1994). Coupled to this was the widespread usurpation of Aborigines' legal ownership of their land. Unlike many other countries (such as neighboring New Zealand), European colonization was never formalized by any formal treaty between the occupying colonial power (in this case, the United Kingdom) and the original inhabitants. As a result, Aborigines were not held to have valid claims to their own land. This doctrine of terra nullius was finally thrown out by the nation's High Court in 1992. By that time, it was impossible to provide effective restitution for much of the lands already lost. As a result, Aborigines today have only limited rights to claim back some land, such as vacant Crown (public) properties (ATSIC 1998a). Despite all this, Aboriginal society has shown itself to be a remarkably resilient and robust culture. In recent years it has become clear that the decline in the indigenous population has been reversed (Graetz and McAllister 1994). The number of Aborigines is still small, and represents only about 2 percent of the nation's total population, but is J growing rapidly. …