ABORIGINAL RESISTANCE IN NORTH QUEENSLAND

The history of frontier contact between white settlers and Aborigines in Australia used to be glossed over by historians until quite recently. Even today, when the violent and destructive nature of that contact is much more generally acknowledged, there is a tendency to treat it as an episode in the early history of Australia, regrettable perhaps, but of little relevance to the present. In reality attitudes deriving from European perception of frontier contact are widely pervasive in Australia today, and are of great significance for present and future race relations. Frontier history's contribution to white Australian historical experience and to each white Australian's knowledge (or false-knowledge) component of his attitudes will obviously vary greatly, both from Individual to individual and from one period to another. Some of the factors causing such variation in our attitudes resulting from frontier contact may be: personality factors of the individual processing the information the region in which the individual lives the region in which the individual and his family grew up formal and informal communication processes including schooling, degree of education, the media, churches, other organizations contact with Aboriginal people awareness of International race relations remoteness in time of a region from frontier experience These are only a tentative listing of possible factors. The transmission of ideas from one generation to another is a subject that should occupy the ethno-historian much more, especially in Australia