Yet many aborigines support it, because at least in some places it has made things better.
Once places where desert aborigines came looking for work, they degenerated into pools of despair.
Australia's 500, 000 aborigines (about five times their number in 1901) comprise about 2.5% of Australia's 23m people.
ECONOMIST: More moves towards restitution for native Australians
The Wik judgment, by overturning paternalistic notions of aborigines' status, may force Australia to try a new approach.
ECONOMIST: The aboriginal patterns that haunt Australia | The
Australians voted overwhelmingly then to repeal a clause that had excluded aborigines from being counted in the census.
ECONOMIST: More moves towards restitution for native Australians
But a new deal based on enhanced rights for aborigines, combined with greater self-reliance, could be a hard sell.
ECONOMIST: The aboriginal patterns that haunt Australia | The
Cries of outrage from aborigines and artists had barely died down when an even more bizarre hoax was uncovered.
It is said to contain an apology to aborigines for past injustices and an acceptance by them of it.
Aborigines believe the spirits of their ancestors cannot rest in peace until their bones are buried in their native ground.
BBC: NEWS | UK | England | Devon | Aboriginal skulls to return home
It is also a place revered by Aborigines, who conducted spiritual ceremonies on the rocky outcrop until the early 19th Century.
The prime minister is not under attack only for his reverence for mateship, but also for his preamble's section on aborigines.
It is applied in the Northern Territory, which is home to about an eighth of the country's 500, 000 or so aborigines.
Two news items were removed from CNNI's newscasts in September: on Malaysian orang asli (aborigines) and the Pope's return to the Vatican from Paris.
At the 1998 convention, just under half the 152 delegates were women and five were aborigines (slightly more than their proportion in the population).
In fact, people have been living in the Pilbara for at least thirty thousand years, and there are still some six thousand Aborigines there today.
Mr Latham's earlier pledges to make a formal apology to aborigines and to restart the debate on an Australian republic have barely featured in his campaign.
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Others capture a sense of the sacred in the middle of Australia's Outback, where Ayer's Rock -- or Uluru, as it's known to the Aborigines -- stands.
She followed it with "Daisy Bates in the Desert, " an equally vivid historical portrait, this time of an Irish woman who spent 30 years among the Aborigines in Australia.
It is also the most controversial intervention in aboriginal affairs in the 40 years since Australians endorsed a referendum transferring power to legislate for aborigines from states to the federal government.
Among aborigines on the front lines however, opinion varies.
That judgment went further than a High Court ruling of 1992, known as the Mabo case, which established that aborigines had the right to claim native title to traditional lands, something never recognised before.
ECONOMIST: The aboriginal patterns that haunt Australia | The
The most likely interpretation is that aborigines may enter land to hold ceremonies, visit sacred sites and even gather bush foods as long as they do nothing to interfere with a farmer's livestock, fences and pastures.
ECONOMIST: The aboriginal patterns that haunt Australia | The
On the edge of town, a new cultural centre is due to open in early 2009 showing the history of aborigines, pioneers and writers such as Henry Lawson who came, saw and wrote about the region.
Forrest was joined earlier this year by fellow Australian billionaires James Packer, Kerry Stokes and Lindsay Fox in funding a philanthropic campaign called Generation One that was designed to raise awareness of the high unemployment and poor health of Aborigines.
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