Aboriginal are the original natives of Australia. They are the Indigenous Australians that lived in Australia and its islands prior to colonization by the European. Aboriginal people are characteristically different culturally and ethnically from Tiwi people, Torres Strait Islander people, and Noongar people (O'Halloran, 2012). Australian Aboriginal people are recognized as one of the oldest existing cultures in the world with approximations ranging from 450,000 to 110,000 years (O'Halloran, 2012). They relished a semi-nomadic way of life in community, family, or groups.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics approximates that there are 723,600 Indigenous individuals living in Australia and they are around 3% of the entire Australian population (Marrison, 2013). By 2012, around one-quarter of Indigenous individuals lived in Australian cities (O'Halloran, 2012). However, the Northern Territory in Australia has the biggest proportion of the Aboriginal population (30%), compared with 5.7% for the Australian Capital Territory and all other states (O'Halloran, 2012). About 59% of Australia's Aboriginal individuals live in Queensland. Research studies also show that the Aboriginal population is much younger in general than the non-Indigenous population (Marrison,
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The marginalization of Australian Aboriginal people was first illustrated when they were not recognized in the census only to exclude them from bureaucrat population figures, as stated in the Constitution (Scheele, 2010). The aboriginal people were confiscated from their homelands and relocated in compounds or townships that disrupted cultural roots, traumatized several generations, and mixed incompatible clans. Once Aboriginal people were migrated, systematized discrimination ensured they were barred from the schools, public facilities and residential areas utilized by the non-Indigenous people (Malcolm, Alexandra, & Michael,