The Decline and Rise of Aboriginal Families

The Decline and Rise of Aboriginal Families:   A Summary
Gray, Trompf and Huston (1991) outline “The Decline and Rise of Aboriginal Families” in chapter three of the book The Health of Aboriginal Australia. The authors aim to evaluate how the exposure of European settlement led to the deterioration and rise of Aboriginal families’. The chapter began by discussing the original concept of Aboriginal kinship systems. It was highlighted that nuclear family served as the fundamental kinship along with a social and economic function in Aboriginal communities. The term ‘nuclear family’ acquired a broader meaning in an Aboriginal social context due to the obligation that the Aboriginal men and women had of supplying food beyond the nuclear family. Aboriginals identified classes of people as their brothers, fathers, sisters, or mothers. These are classificatory relationships that governed all social interactions including marriages. Men often married women who were closely related in polygamous marriages. This meant that the women supported each other in child rearing, searching and hunting for food and other daily duties. These wider kinship roles of women carried economic value but it became apparent that the men’s role operated at a group level in contrast to the family orientated role of women.
After illustrating the nature of Aboriginal family unit prior to European settlement, Gray et al. (1991) go on to state that the history of change in Aboriginal population can be portrayed as the history of dislocation, desecration and destruction. Gray, Trompf and Houston reconstructed scenarios in order to draw out a conclusion on decline and rise of Aboriginal families, due to lack of information availability on Aboriginal families during colonial periods. They began the discussion with epidemics and diseases at the time of first European settlement, which disrupted Aboriginal society’s family, social and economic functions. The smallpox epidemic in 1789 was reported to...