COMMENT: The invisibility of Aborigines

Above all, what is perhaps oddest to the outsider is that Aborigines just aren’t there. You don't see them performing on television; you don't find them assisting you in shops. Only two Aborigines have ever served in Parliament; none has held a Cabinet post. Indigenous peoples constitute only about 1.5 per cent of the Australian population and they live disproportionately in rural areas, so you wouldn't expect to see them in vast numbers anyway, but you would expect to see them sometimes – working in a bank, delivering mail, writing parking tickets, fixing a telephone line, participating in some productive capacity in the normal workaday world. I never have; not once. Clearly some connection is not being made.

(Bill Bryson, p. 283)

The above of course has to be qualified in some ways. There are a fair few Aborigines in the public eye, be they actors, sportspeople or, to a lesser extent, politicians. However, Bryson's central assertion still holds: as an outsider, the sheer invisibility of Aborigines, and the resolve of non-Aboriginal Australians to keep them invisible and ignore them and everything about them (unless it’s a safe tourist-friendly stereotype) is striking in the extreme.