Aboriginal quotes:

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The problem with politicians getting to know the issues in indigenous townships is that we tend to suffer from what Aboriginal people call the 'seagull syndrome' - we fly in, scratch around and fly out. -- Tony Abbott
We owe the Aboriginal peoples a debt that is four centuries old. It is their turn to become full partners in developing an even greater Canada. And the reconciliation required may be less a matter of legal texts than of attitudes of the heart. -- Romeo LeBlanc
My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the pest. -- Steve Irwin
We have copped a lot of ignorant abuse in the past, but it makes you wonder when a former state coroner openly attacks Aboriginal families who have been through hell. -- Arthur Murray
As Aboriginal people we have always retained our resilience, our humour and our cultural integrity - we will always retain our dreams and a vision for the future for our people. -- Ken Wyatt
For Aboriginal leaders, the social and moral obligation that comes with community leadership is life-long. Those who lead, who have authority, must care for and look after those who come behind. -- Patrick Dodson
I'm going to win it for my country. I'm the first Aboriginal to win this. Isn't that something? I wish my Dad was alive to see it. He'd be as proud as I am. -- Lionel Rose
The concepts of community and community life, have since the Dreaming, always held special significance for Aboriginal people because both provided the physical, cultural, spiritual and social environments, which supported children, young people, families and the aged. -- Ken Wyatt
The coast of British Columbia was one of the three chief centers of aboriginal America. -- Ellsworth Huntington
Most Australians live in the cities on the east coast, where contact between black and white occurred as much as 200 years earlier than on the west coast - and where 95 percent of Australians are able to live 95 percent of their lives without ever seeing an Aboriginal face. -- Phillip Noyce
My best friend was Aboriginal. -- Isabel Lucas
Aboriginal Australia is a tough place to work, rough and tough. -- Sam Abell
Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British heritage -- Tony Abbott
A lot of my identity as an Aboriginal person is about family. -- Shari Sebbens
Genius . . . arises in the natural, aboriginal concern for the conscious unity of all phenomena. -- Mary Hunter Austin
People look at me and they dont see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. -- Shari Sebbens
The majority of Aboriginals do not want handouts because they realise that welfare is killing them. -- Pauline Hanson
In 1995, the Paul Keating Labor government commissioned an inquiry into the forcible removal of Aboriginal children. -- Richard Flanagan
We still have disgraceful policies on asylum seekers and Aboriginal Australians continue to die in custody. -- Justine Larbalestier
Yes, I am Aboriginal but I have the right to be avant-garde like any white artist. -- Tracey Moffatt
All industry, not just the mining industry, can get out and give Aboriginal companies a chance. -- Andrew Forrest
We also shot at a location that was an Aboriginal sacred ground for the shots coming up the cliff. -- Christopher Atkins
The families of Aboriginals who have died in custody in NSW will suffer again because of these white lies. -- Arthur Murray
Aboriginal people are key because they have a different sense of where we belong and how we interact with nature. -- David Suzuki
It's an old Aboriginal word meaning 'Let's get together and have fun'. They gave us the word because they had no further need for it. -- Barry Humphries
I have Aboriginal roots on my father's side, and have always indentified with that spirit. I feel a lot of my music comes from that place. -- Xavier Rudd
We must start understanding other cultures, such as the Aboriginal culture. They have a harmony with the Earth and from that harmony has grown a certain spirituality. -- Ian Cohen
People look at me, and they don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. I always thought I'd be the white person in a black play. -- Shari Sebbens
It is my hope that I could be not just a Prime Minister, but a Prime Minister for Aboriginal affairs, the first I imagine that we've ever had. -- Yitzhak Rabin
Gods of Wheat Street' has been described as an Aboriginal 'Neighbours' or 'Home and Away.' But on set, we were calling it 'Black to the Rafters.' -- Shari Sebbens
It's a really important thing for Aboriginal people to remember how stories are told and the power of stories, and make it an important feature in our world again. -- Alexis Wright
Within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience, as brought to us through plants long in the possession of Aboriginal people, appears to be the identical phenomena. -- Terence McKenna
If you are sitting on the title of any block of land in New South Wales you can bet an Aboriginal person at some stage was dispossessed of it. -- Paul Keating
My dad taught me from my youngest childhood memories through these connections with Aboriginal and tribal people that you must always protect people's sacred status, regardless of the past. -- Steve Irwin
Australia's treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians - Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history. -- Gough Whitlam
In many traditions, the world was sung into being: Aboriginal Australians believe their ancestors did so. In Hindu and Buddhist thought, Om was the seed syllable that created the world. -- Jay Griffiths
It is a shame that the Legal Aid Commission and the Aboriginal Legal Service are so poorly funded ....... State and federal governments should be addressing this issueThe Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 30 March 2014 -- Abdullah Reslan Lawyer
Why isn't the fact that 100,000 women choose to end their pregnancies regarded as a national tragedy approaching the scale, say, of Aboriginal life expectancy being 20 years less than that of the general community? -- Tony Abbott
I've never been one to bow down to people who try to question my identity because I don't fit their mould of what an Aboriginal Australian is supposed to be or look like. -- Shari Sebbens
I grew up partially in Switzerland but mostly in Australia. I lived in Kakadu for a short time - it's an Aboriginal community. My best friend growing up was Aboriginal. She taught me so much. -- Isabel Lucas
There may not be a great job for [Aboriginal people] but whatever there is, they just have to do it, and if it's picking up rubbish around the community, it just has to be done. -- Tony Abbott
Reconciliation will not work if it puts a higher value on symbolic gestures and overblown promises rather than the practical needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in areas like health, housing, education and employment. -- Warren Mundine
Through the 1990s, the fracturing of Tasmanian Aboriginal politics was given impetus by the ongoing corruption of a number of black organisations started under federal government programmes, with large amounts of public money being lost. -- Richard Flanagan
What I would like to see is sufficiently good education and health services being delivered to Aboriginal people so that they are prepared and ready to leave and join the economic mainstream if that's their choice. -- Tony Abbott
Over 120 Aboriginal communities run their own health services - some have been doing so for 30 years. They struggle with difficult medical problems. They also try to deal with counselling, stolen generations issues, family relationships, violence, suicide prevention. -- Malcolm Fraser
Urban artist have to face the stigma not only from white Australia but black Australia too; that's horrific when people say that their art isn't "Aboriginal" if it doesn't have dots or lines or moieties in it. -- Warwick Thornton
Prayers never bring anything... They may bring solace to the sap, the bigot, the ignorant, the aboriginal, and the lazy - but to the enlightened it is the same as asking Santa Claus to bring you something for Xmas -- W. C. Fields
My mum's from Broome, so I'm a saltwater person - Aboriginal people are either freshwater, saltwater or desert mob. So I always feel much more comfortable in close proximity to the beach, even if I'm not necessarily in the water. -- Shari Sebbens
I had spent some time in the outback, but to meet Aboriginals and work with them was wonderful. It gave me a great appreciation of how tough life is and about the indomitable spirit that the Aboriginal people have always possessed. -- Hugh Jackman
The most dangerous thing is a bored teenager. They have the stigma of being Indigenous, Aboriginal, and all the trappings that come with it. The connection does come a lot more from those kids, desert or not. They're stepping out into the world. -- Warwick Thornton
The children, each of those kids is in touch with nature and traditional aboriginal culture so a very important part of getting performances from them was just letting them be and trying to capture the unique spirituality that was in each of them. -- Phillip Noyce
The celebrated Aboriginal painter Albert Namatjira loved the Ghost Gums of the Northern Territory... They are evocatively Australian, their white trunks contrasting with the red earth and the deep blue sky of the Dreamtime region that has for centuries sustained Namatjira's Aranda people. -- Richard Allen
One of my earliest memories is being backstage at 'Bran Nue Dae' in Darwin when I was about eight. It's such a fun, happy show and a real celebration of being Aboriginal... it felt really great and achievable as a career. It all felt normal. -- Shari Sebbens
One of my earliest memories is being backstage at Bran Nue Dae in Darwin when I was about eight. Its such a fun, happy show and a real celebration of being Aboriginal... it felt really great and achievable as a career. It all felt normal. -- Shari Sebbens
It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case. -- Tony Abbott
It's very easy for Australians living in big cities to either romanticise or demonise the situation in Aboriginal places - to kind of look at things through the 'noble innocents' prism or through the 'chronically dysfunctional' prism, and I suspect that is so often the case -- Tony Abbott
Some people think that there aren't many Aboriginal actors around, and if there are, they're not that good. It's stupid. There's such an incredible pool of talent out there, and they're still coming out of drama schools. People just need to take a leap of faith. -- Deborah Mailman
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. -- Kevin Rudd
Now, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who aren't happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country's British Heritage. -- Tony Abbott
Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the things of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, Wendy said. They gave their children the land. -- Bruce Chatwin
Native people - about two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining. -- Winona LaDuke
My best friend was Aboriginal. She taught me about 'bush tucker' - the food of the land, the different things you could eat if you got lost in the bush, like grasses and berries. There's this tree called the billygoat plum - the fruit is quite nice. -- Isabel Lucas
I lived for a couple of years when I was 9 years old on beautiful Aboriginal sacred land in a town of a thousand people in northwestern Australia. It's where the Aborigines are still very connected to their culture, the Dreamtime culture. It was really quite a special experience. -- Isabel Lucas
We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe. -- Kevin Rudd
It's a very Aboriginal thing to do, to give younger people greater responsibilities within the community as they become able to take those responsibilities on. It is a culturally appropriate transfer of roles that involves respect in both directions.. from the younger to the older and the older to the younger. -- Jackie Huggins
I wasn't aware of the impact that I had made on the lives of Aboriginal people until I did a bit of travelling and visited various communities throughout Victoria. To see the way that my people looked at me and to know that I made a difference to them was an honour. -- Lionel Rose
It's something I've always wanted - to be known as an Australian. When I was younger I was always referred to as an Aboriginal tennis player. Now I think the award means that I have been recognised as an entertainer and that makes me happy... It's given me probably as big a kick as winning Wimbledon. -- Evonne Goolagong Cawley
So what is the Dreaming? I would say the Dreaming is a non-indigenous term used in its broadest sense to describe the stories of our ancestors and how they shaped the land and how they are still part of the land... Across Aboriginal Australia there are as many different terms for Dreaming as there are language groups -- Hetti Perkins
I'm getting offered roles that aren't designed for aboriginal people; they're designed for anybody. It's pretty surreal and mind-blowing. -- Bronson Pelletier
The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I know that a prime minister of Canada needs to be deeply respectful of the other levels of government - whether it be municipal, provincial, or even nation-to-nation relationships with aboriginal governments. -- Justin Trudeau
Even the Australians don't know how beautiful their own country is. Particularly where we were shooting 'The Straits.' Most of my stuff was done on an aboriginal settlement on the south shore, opposite Cairns, which I believe was the site where the last person was eaten in Australia. -- Brian Cox
It had never occurred to me that my colour - or lack of it - was an issue for some people, but then I moved to Sydney, and apparently it was. People look at me and don't see what they think is a typical Aboriginal. Thankfully, my mother raised me well in knowing where I come from and who I am, and I'm proud of that. -- Shari Sebbens
Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ. -- John Henry Newman
Wherever the European had trod, death seemed to pursue the aboriginal. -- Charles Darwin
I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art, but I'd like even more. -- Tori Amos
Unlike aboriginal hunters, commercial seal hunters leave the carcasses on the ice to rot. -- Paul Watson
The name Kylie can be used for Scrabble, as it is an aboriginal word for boomerang. Which is why Ms Minogue is so good at comebacks. -- Kathy Lette
In every civilized society there is found a race of men who retain the instincts of the aboriginal cannibal and live upon their fellow-men as a natural food. -- Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
The direction is going the right way for respect for aboriginal people in North America, and all we can do is stand up and say, 'Please do it faster.' -- Robbie Robertson
The adoration of the sun was one of the earliest and most natural forms of religious expression. Complex modern theologies are merely involvements and amplifications of this simple aboriginal belief. -- Manly Hall
The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness. -- John Zerzan
This bird sees the white man come and the Indian withdraw, but it withdraws not. Its untamed voice is still heard above the tinkling of the forge... It remains to remind us of aboriginal nature. -- Henry David Thoreau

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