Most of Australia's residents live on the coast.
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The fact that they have any serious political power at all is remarkable because Australian whites, in the course of waging an undeclared war of conquest against the Aborigines, systematically denied them any access to the culture of politics right from the moment of settlement in 1788. Aborigines weren't mentioned in the Australian constitution when it took force in 1901. Not until 1962 were they given federal voting rights. The historical weight of discrimination against them is crushing.
A lot of white Australians think of this minority as a bunch of thievish, ignorant welfare bludgers who are played upon by a handful of black demagogues. They oppose the idea of a national apology for past treatment of the Aborigines--a deserved and, in liberal opinion, an essential gesture of goodwill--by saying all this happened in their grandfathers' time, and the living bear no responsibility for it. This is Prime Minister Howard's view too, although--significantly enough--he is quick to drape himself in the nobler emblems of Australian history with which his generation had nothing to do, such as the heroism of the soldiers at Gallipoli.
The Aborigines are a very old people. their ancestors colonized Australia from the north, by sea, tens of thousands of years ago--nobody can say just how many. At the time of the first white contacts in the 18th century, there were perhaps half a million of them divided into hundreds of tribes, speaking mutually unintelligible languages, thinly scattered across the vast hot skin of Australia. They lived by hunting and gathering. These seminomads were, even by the lowest standards of Africa or the Americas, almost incredibly low tech. They had fire, sticks and stones, and little else. Yet their traditional oral culture is of great antiquity; their structure of myth is remarkably coherent and continuous across millenniums, not just centuries; and as anyone can see who visits some of the sacred cave sites scattered across northwestern Australia, their traditions of rock painting--animals and fish of every kind, spirit figures and the imposing, fearsome effigies of the great Rainbow Serpent--are as impressive as anything in the caves of Lascaux or Altamira and tens of thousands of years older. As far as we know, the Australian Aborigines stood at the very dawn of human imagemaking.
Through most of the 19th century the Aborigines were driven off their ancestral lands by settlers, and when they resisted, they were killed. Many more died of disease or social despair. Nobody knows how many because no one bothered to count either the living or the dead; the whites were engaged in the more important task, as the history books used to say, of "nation building." By the end of the 19th century it was assumed that the natives would soon be extinct, and the whites' only task was "to smooth the dying pillow."
But having been in Australia for 40,000 years or more, in contrast to the whites' 200 or less, the Aborigines were not giving up. So the policy changed to assimilation. First, the Aborigines were deprived of their nomadic tribal life and concentrated in "mission stations," communities run mainly by Protestant evangelists, where they were taught the Gospels, shown white ways and prepared for low-level jobs as servants.