2020 IB Extended Essays

control over their jobs, housing and families. The enforcement of this law gave white Australia the power to assimilate the Indigenous culture into their own, by forcefully removing children from their families to raise them in white institutions. Today this

period is known as the ‘Stolen Generation’. Since the abandonment of this policy in

1966, the Australian government has made efforts to recognise their unjust and ignorant actions of the past by slowly introducing legislations which do more to recognise the traditional custodians of the land. Despite the key initiatives that have

been made by political powers like Gough Whitlam’s 1975 beginning of land reform,

Kevin Rudd’s 2008 Apology and the Australian courts decision to recognise Native

Title in overturning the doctrine of terra nullius in 1993, the government of today are

yet to progress in recognising Aboriginal’s prior occupation in the constitution and

make real change. Whilst, attempts have been made to compensate for the intergenerational trauma that colonisation has created for the First Nation peoples of today and the ongoing future, by providing them with government programs which focus on improving their socio-economic disadvantages, these programs only do so much in address Indigenous Australian’s disadvantage in health, education and employment ( Closing the Gap - Health System - Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet, 2020 ).

The importance of Art in Indigenous communities Despite belonging to around 363 dialects, no written language is documented prior to

colonisation. It wasn’t until post colonisation that phonemic orthography, the process

of writing down a language to best record how it’s pronounced, was developed by

both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The of an alphabetic writing system within the culture meant that there was high importance in the portrayal of