AustLit

'In traditional Aboriginal societies identity was rarely ambiguous. Each individual's identity was constituted in the social realm through kinship ties and passage through a variety of distinct roles and statuses. In the spiritual realm through fundamental responsibilities and direct linkages to the Dreaming, and even geographically in binding associations with particular places and regions. When Europeans began to arrive, the traditional social systems, which so clearly established the Identities of Aborigines, were elastic enough to account for (and often Include) these new arrivals, thus overcoming the ambiguity-at least temporarily-of the Europeans' positions In the Aboriginal social order' (Introduction)