Missions and Institutions

The research team will spend more than four years visiting locations across NSW where Aboriginal missions and reserves were established to collect personal oral histories and family/community recollections and records, letters, documents and photographs

Suicides in First Nations communities are linked to extreme poverty and disadvantage from the beginning of life, intergenerational trauma, cultural identity, racialisation and racism. Often alcohol and substance abuse are considered by many as underlying causes but these are not underlying causes and rather they are at best contributing factors borne symptomatically of the conditions above.

This article and links to all many other articles by First Nation suicide expert Gerry Georgatos. [node:read-more:link]

Some people know about the South Sea Islander slaves but most are ignorant that many thousands of First Nations people were also used as slaves right across Australia, in settlement, on pastures and in industries. Even First Nation children were used in most industries and often kidnapped by 'blackbirders' - the children received no wages and had no opportunity to attend school. The adults often died of slavery or abuse. Here is an article by Alecia Simmonds, Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. [node:read-more:link]

A new report says Mental health services for Aboriginal Australians are "both inadequate and inappropriate", and immediate changes are needed to address growing rates of suicide, depression and other mental health issues among Indigenous youth. The report also highlighted several shortcomings in efforts to improve mental health among Indigenous Australians and cited "dramatic" increases in recent years in Indigenous rates of youth suicide, anxiety and depression and other related illnesses. [node:read-more:link]

Children were "chained like dogs" and sexually assaulted at a government-run home for Aboriginal children in Darwin, a child sex abuse inquiry has heard.
A former resident of the Retta Dixon home in Darwin told the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. First Nations girls were chained to their beds, starved and flogged with leather belts until they bled, as punishment at the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin. [node:read-more:link]

In the seven years the Bogimbah Creek mission was open, more than 100 First Nations people perished from illness and malnutrition - the result of appalling living conditions ... Now scientists from the University of the Sunshine Coast will try to return that knowledge to the island's K'Gari community, with the help of ground-penetrating radar.
In 1897, members of Butchulla clans on the island and on the mainland were rounded up and forced to live in the notorious Bogimbah Creek mission, under governments genocidal policy. [node:read-more:link]

There must be thousands of reasons why many First Nations people haven't been able to live as comfortably in a 'white mans world' or establish themselves financially as well as their non-Indigenous counterparts, here is just one of those reasons.