Aboriginal languages and culture are a living national treasure that represent forty thousand years of unique and endangered human knowledge. They are at least as important as any world heritage site, and deserve the same level of respect and protection. The world heritage convention requires that we protect important cultural sites, but we violate the spirit of that convention if we preserve only cultural sites while we kill off cultures.

I am not suggesting that Aboriginal culture should be preserved like a museum specimen. A living culture must continue to evolve and change to ensure its survival. However, they should be allowed to evolve and change on their own terms and in their own directions. They should not be held back, nor forced to "join the mainstream" and loose their unique identity. Instead they should be given the freedom and authority to control their own destiny.

Australia is a multi-cultural society and proud of it. According to the 2006 census, more than three million Australians (more than 15%) speak a language other than English at home. Of those, less than fiftysix thousand (less than 0.3%) speak an Australian indigenous language, and those languages are not spoken anywhere else in the world. Multiculturalism is not about integrating everyone into a single homogenious mono-culture, but is about allowing different cultures to coexist while maintaining their unique identity.

The World Heritage Convention <http://www.environment.gov.au/heritage/about/world/convention.html>

Greek Australians <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Australian>

2006 Census Table: Language Spoken at Home by Sex - Time Series Statistics (1996, 2001, 2006 Census Years) <http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/ABSNavigation/prenav/ViewData?action=404&documentproductno=0&documenttype=Details&order=1&tabname=Details&areacode=0&issue=2006&producttype=Census%20Tables&javascript=true&textversion=false&navmapdisplayed=true&breadcrumb=TLPD&&collection=Census&period=2006&productlabel=Language%20Spoken%20at%20Home%20by%20Sex%20-%20Time%20Series%20Statistics%20(1996,%202001,%202006%20Census%20Years)&producttype=Census%20Tables&method=Place%20of%20Usual%20Residence&topic=Language&>

A common false belief about AboriginalCulture is expressed perfectly in this tweet::

Phil Anthropy @philantopical
Replying to @Coppahanya1

@skepticdropbear and @clairegcoleman
No aboriginals practice their 'civilisation' once they learnt about ours.

Not a single one has returned to a traditional hunter gathering lifestyle.

They all vote with their feet for the progress and modernity they failed to develop for themselves.
8:38 PM Mar 21, 2022 Twitter Web App

There is so much wrong here that it takes more than a tweet to respond.

• They are confusing technology and culture into their own one-true "Civilisation" and assume you can't have their technology without also having their culture. But technology is just a tool that different cultures can and do adopt and use in their own ways to build their own definition of "Civilisation". Technology is science and engineering; the knowledge of how something works and how to apply it. Culture is a combination of language, history, stories, traditions, beliefs, attitudes and priorities. Culture can modify how people value and apply technology, but it doesn't prevent you from understanding and using it. China has a completely different culture to white Australia with a different flavor of "Civilisation" and arguably even more advanced industry and technology. Do we have to adopt Chinese culture to adopt and use their technology?
• While Aboriginal people have widely adopted and adapted white technology, but they have definitely not surrendered their culture. The push to make Aboriginal people "join the mainstream" is a poorly disguised effort to force Aboriginal people to abandon their culture, because clearly they haven't.
• Aboriginal people had their own technology that white Australia has ignored and denied to their own loss. They eliminated recessive genetic disorders with their highly advanced skin-name system. Their knowledge of Australian plants, animals, geography and geology was unparalleled. The most successful early explorers and geologists befriended and learned their "discoveries" from Aboriginals. Pharmaceutical companies globally are now in a mad gold-rush to claim indigenous medicinal knowledge. So much knowledge...
• Historically, "switching of civilisations" has actually gone the other way. If you ignore people being forced to switch (stolen children etc), there have been far more incidents of people voluntarily choosing to join and live with indigenous people than indigenous people choosing to live with white "civilisation". The records of this in Australia are pretty poor, but in the colonisation of USA it was a source of white consternation that there were many examples of white people choosing to live with native Americans, but not a single instance of a native American choosing to "become civilised".