Indigenous Australia moving in

The face of indigenous Australia is changing rapidly.

The face of indigenous Australia is changing rapidly. Some beliefs may need adjusting.

It is not that indigenous Australians are abandoning small towns and their traditional lands in droves. The numbers of indigenous people in Australia’s remote and very remote places are predicted to continue to climb everywhere, except in Katherine in the Northern Territory.

But over the next 12 years that growth will be outpaced by indigenous population increases in major cities. Australian Bureau of Statistics modelling suggests by 2031, four out of 10 indigenous people will call a major Australian city home. The growth will be fastest in the Australian Capital Territory. By then only 15 per cent of indigenous people will live in a place categorised as remote or very remote.

What this means for policymakers and people who devote their careers to indigenous health is fascinating. If the overall circumstances of indigenous Australians lift as the proportion living in cities rises, researchers and program designers will need to be shrewd in identifying where the disadvantage remains and how to target it. Of course, some public health advocates dispute that disadvantage is less crushing in cities.

We know for many indigenous children it is not. Western Australia’s only juvenile detention centre today holds indigenous children from the far-north Kimberley, the remote Pilbara and small towns further south. But Aboriginal boys from Perth’s southeast corridor are heavily over-represented. They are kids who have truanted and slipped through the cracks in built-up areas awash with government resources. Their family stories are often every bit as bleak as the circumstances of remote inmates.

Regardless, there are going to be many more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, and more are going to live closer to non-indigenous Australians. This is an exciting prospect for researchers such as Lisa Jackson Pulver, an indigenous woman who sees great benefits to Australian society when more indigenous people join the mainstream.