There were a number of factors. Wages and racism get the top billing from ignorant anti-everything critics. I disagree. I observed it happening (for a long while before and ever since afterward). The real factors that made Aboriginal stock-men not-employed (not unemployable) were:
1. The introduction of the helicopter for cattle mustering which made the horse-back stock handler redundant ;
2. The success of the 1963-66 "beef roads" campaign which connected out-back cattle production areas with the markets and thereby made the overland horse-back stock drover redundant;
3. The introduction of the road train which made it possible to rapidly carry beef cattle over the beef roads to the markets without the help of horsemen;
4. The racism of Department of Social Security (now Centre Link) who have the mind set that Aboriginals are incapable of supporting themselves through real work and who have at all relevant times applied a blanket exemption from any work test to Aboriginal people globally thereby indiscriminately and unconditionally paying so-called unemployment benefits to all Aboriginal claimants (actually should be called non-employment benefits);
5. The juxtaposition of those factors with the virtually simultaneous loss of focus on the part of main-stream Australia with the practical progress of Aboriginal people and movement to the post 1972 Whitlam era obsession with a vision of the nobility of the nomad; and
