I don't pretend to know that much about aborigines but what I can understand is that if you happen to be born in a remote community a few hundred k out of Darwin then most probably you are never going to be equipped to want to leave and get a job in the outside world. The lives of many people are probably determined by where they happen to be born. Fortunately my ancestors were farm labourers and fishermen in Scotland, that most if not all were illiterate was no bar to them joining in the industrial revolution or as some did, emigrate to the colonies. I'm lucky that my ancestors could surf the waves of change but they were not born in what in another context Paul Keating once described as the arse end of the world.
