Since being practically immobilised, I try to have a daily 'outing', however small, to retain some semblance of sanity in my brain, which would otherwise rapidly degenerate into a puddle of mush within the confines of my little bedroom. My outing today was to the Department of Immigration and Visas in Currie street to pick up a form to apply to extend my visa by 4weeks, to allow me to rest my foot fully for six weeks before moving on to NZ. Quite counter-productively, the office was in an awkward location, equidistant between bus/tram stops and requiring me to do quite a LOT of walking to get there!
I couldn't apply today anyway, as I have to have a doctors letter and proof of medical stuff, along with evidence of sufficient funds to support myself for the duration of my stay here and to purchase a flight onwards. So a return trip is necessitated and I must spend several more days in a state of uncertainty as to whether I must quit adelaide in just over two weeks time. My planning-personality does not like this state of affairs!

I took a different combination of free transport on the way back, which unfortunately involved equally much walking only in different directions. This route took me right past the doors of my gym, where I hung my head and gave a little sigh in rememberance of my more active days as I hobbled past. I must admit, I toyed for 30seconds with the idea of going in and explaining to the receptionists about my foot, that I wasn't just being lazy and had a valid reason for not turning up to work out, but what would they care?!

As I was sat at the tram stop waiting to catch the tram down to Victoria Square (Tarndanyangga), a tram pulled up on the opposite platform and disgorged its passengers, among whom was a group of 8-10 indigenous australians (most likely Aboriginals here in SA; the majority of the Torres Strait Islanders in Australia reside in far north Queensland, for obvious reasons). As with all of my previous encounters with the indigenous people, the first indication of their presence was their speaking. I think in general they speak more loudly than the English-speaking Australians.
In addition to that, many of the various aboriginal languages (of which there were less than 150 at the start of the 21st centuary, down from several hundred in the 18th centuary) have a very distinctive sound which, to my untrained ears resembles something like Arabic. They have a very fast, flowery and ornamented sound with a lot of tongue action that is unfamiliar to my ears and thus stands out amidst the other background noise. I did try to discover the linguistical explanation for this, but it's pretty technical and I couldn't hope to reproduce it to make any sense... so go look here: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Australian_languages) it's interesting! Perhaps it is owing to the "lack of glottal and rareity of fricative consonants... and the large number of places of articulation, acheived through the position and shape of the tongue", yes, I think that might be it... less hard sounds and more tongue waggling, basically!

This particular group was entirely composed of adults, both male and female. They were dirty, wearing tattered clothing, with their hair wild and woolly and unkempt. Most were barefooted, all were scruffy and I am not exaggerating when I say I could smell them from further down the platform, that smell of homelessness and lack of personal hygeine. I immediately noticed a feeling of nervousness inside my stomach, fear that they would come over and start hassling me and I realised that I was frightened of those Aboriginals.

Of this feeling I am ashamed!

It was not an isolated feeling; I have felt the same way on occasions when an extremely scruffy Aboriginal has come into one of my places of work and I have had to refuse service on the grounds of their attire not being neat enough, or BO too strong for the strict 'house policy'. I have felt the same way every time I have passed a group of them in the street, both when they were shouting obscenities and also when they were silent, kept a watch on them out of the corner of my eye and tightened my hold on my handbag.

I certainly did not arrive in Australia feeling like this. During my journey up the east coast, accross the top and down the middle to Adelaide, something has cultivated this fear within, in SPITE of my visiting various cultural centres along the way and alongside having learnt there and in museums quite a bit about the history and culture and developments in the rights and freedom of the indigenous people.
It strikes me that I can count on the fingers of one hand, the indigenous people I have come accross who did not fit the general dirty, scruffy, threatening vagrant image of the group I described above. There was one man at the Cutta Cutta Caves in the NT whose family owned the caves and the land in which they were found, he was highly knowledgable, informative and a great guide. In Adelaide I have encountered just two, who drink in the pub in which I worked. Both of whom are nice and pleasant, have jobs and are respectable members of society just like any other Australian.
I regret to say that the other 98% of my experience of the indigenous people has been negative. Of course, my encounters with them have been in the towns and cities; it is clear that were I to venture into the more remote communities where they are in the majority I would most likely find an entirely different picture.

Alcohol has played a huge part in fuelling the behaviour and habits on which many of the stereotypes of aboriginals are based.
Indigenous people produced and used mild plant-derived alcoholic drinks before the arrival of white settlers, but it was white man that really introduced them to 'heavy' alcohol, using it as payment for labouring or sex, thus introducing the most destructive element into their society (http://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/health/aboriginal-alcohol-consumption.html is pretty interesting).

Some aboriginal comunities are "dry" meaning that no alcohol is allowed within the community and heavy penalties apply for bringing it in, so if members wish to drink, they must leave the community and come into the towns and cities. They binge-drink (just as white people do) and like to drink in groups (like white people) and alcohol consumption invariably leads on to a range of menaces to society: violence, abuse, homelessness, crime etc.(in both indigenous and white drinkers). So why am I less afraid when I pass a group of drunken whitefolk in the street, and why is the drunkenness in groups of aboriginals the one that I notice? I think they are so marginalised in society that they instantly stand out as being 'different'. Difference and the unknown frighten people; no matter how many cultural centres I visit I do not feel as if I know even one iota what they are about. Read this definition, it is shocking, stereotypical, innacurate and racist but sadly widely held: (http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=aboriginal&defid=1938975).

The Indigenous cultures of Australia are the oldest living cultural history in the world, said to go back more than 50,000 years; white man arrived with the first fleet into Botany Bay in 1788. Yet in those 230 years, which represent less than 0.5% of their history in time, the indigenous people have been pushed into the interior and some individuals, most noticeably made the transition from what is widely described as a "proud" culture to the figures we see in the towns and cities today, in whom that pride is not evident. Of course, this is just those in cities, it must be different in the more isolated communities where perhaps that pride in their culture does still exist alongside the traditional ways of living. It is a shame, though, that the 'aboriginals in cities', poor representatives of the indigenous people are the face most readily seen by tourists and white australians.

Disclaimer: I don't really understand the situation that exists between the whites and indigenous people in Australia, I have only the slight impression that it has made on me in the past year, which I find very difficult to analyse and even harder to express. There are heaps other issues involved that I have not even touched upon, most noteably the history of contact between the white settlers and indigenous people, the memory of which still sits heavy on the shoulders of many. Perhaps this will account for any stereotypes/assumptions/judgements/inaccuracies I might have made.