Many reasons for the current appalling state of health and wellbeing of the Australian Aboriginal people can be explained by examining their recent history to the devastating impacts of colonisation, genocidal policy, loss of land and years of oppression. These several hundred years of cultural destruction, dispossession and social and political upheaval have resulted in generations of trauma and grief (Burke, 2006, para. 4). As reported by Forsyth (2007, p. 35-36), government policies enacted towards the indigenous population in the early 20th Century were concerned primarily with protection and segregation, as the prevailing attitude of the time was that the Indigenous people were largely inferior and were unable to care for themselves. Forsyth continues to explain of the injustice created by the New South Wales parliament with the Aborigines Protection Act of 1909, in which “every aspect of their lives was governed, regulated and controlled”
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