Aboriginal Housing

Abstract

Aboriginal people constitute only a very small and socioeconomically atypical portion of the Australian population. In the 1986 Census, they numbered 227,000, or just 1.5 percent of the total, and were disproportionately young, poor and unemployed. They also resided disproportionately in smaller urban and rural locations, and in northern, rather than southern Australia (see Tables 10.1 and 10.2, and Figure 10.1). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, Aborigines also display a very atypical position in relation to the provision of housing in comparison with other Australians. Gray (1989) estimated, on the basis of the 1986 Census, that of the approximately 50,000 Aboriginal households then in existence, only some 27 percent owned or were buying their dwelling, while 39 percent were renting from public housing or other government authorities and 31 percent occupied private or community rental dwellings (see Table 10.3). This tenure division is, of course, very different from that pertaining for the total Australian population. It suggests just how different the social relations of housing provision are for Aboriginal people in Australia, when compared with those of the total population. Indeed, the starkness of this difference is one of the major reasons for addressing the housing of Aborigines as a separate chapter.