Indigenous Queenslanders: Inclusion and Exclusion

The inclusion and exclusion of Queensland First Nations’ historically focuses on the legislative frameworks that impacted on their lives and on subsequent generations. Prior to European contact and colonisation, Australia’s First Peoples governance practiced a spiritual affiliation with the land of those places that they belonged to and had inherited, and their relationships to other people and places. Traditional and contemporary practices of their Dreaming were practiced in generational cultural codes of conduct in trade and ceremonial practice of lore and law. First nation’s hospitable generosity gave shelter and food to explorers, distressed settlers, or convicts absconding from colonial impoundments in the early years of the nineteenth century. Hospitality was not reciprocated when Aboriginal people became captives of the colonisers, instead they became imprisoned, and their movements restricted. The exclusion and inclusion of First Nations’ people through the legislative frameworks controlled their lives post colonisation, particularly from the historic legislative framework within the State of Queensland, but also other states. Wearne (A clash of cultures: Queensland Aboriginal Policy, 1824–1980. Uniting Church of Australia, Brisbane, 1980, 72) suggests three distinct periods from first contact to the late twentieth century, within the policies and practices of successive Queensland governments: