The urban and regional segregation of indigenous Australians: Out of sight, out of mind?

Abstract

That Indigenous Australians occupy the continent’s more remote spaces appears as something of a self-evident fact. In many ways this social and spatial disconnection has become an increasingly important in explanations for the dramatic gaps in life-chances and disadvantage of Aboriginal Australians. Yet it also underlies commonsense understandings of Indigeneity where it is seen as intransigent and its problems self-inflicted as the result of not joining mainstream white culture and market-oriented ways of being. Such perspectives lags a knowledge of the real spatial distribution of Indigenous Australians across its inner regional and urban areas. Life, for the majority of the Australian Indigenous population is, in fact, urban, and the lived experience of socio-economic disparities is particularly acute between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in urban locations. Yet such proximity is not generally matched by daily social contact or the entwining of white and black institutional contexts. Our analysis in this paper highlights how it is that socio-economic exclusion and political marginalisation for Indigenous Australians continues in large part because it is out of the sight of white Australians even while residing side by side.