AustLit

'Australia and New Zealand are linked by their South Pacific setting, English-speaking populations, and shared histories of hope for cultural diversity and social equality, in a context where history, starting with the appropriation of land from the Indigenous peoples, has often challenged those hopes. But Australia and New Zealand also have great differences. Maori (the Indigenous people of Aotearoa / New Zealand) and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European origin) have been in a legally constituted — albeit contested — relationship since the foundational Treaty of Waitangi of 1840. It was not until 1967 that Indigenous Australians were included in Australia's census, however, and not until 1976, with the first Land Rights Ad, that Indigenous Australians' dispossession saw major legal redress. And it was only in 1992, with the Australian High Court's decision in favor of the claim of Eddie Koiki Mabo to land on his Murray Island home, that settler Australia's occupying doctrine of terra nullius was overturned. Te reo Maori (the language of the Maori people) is one language, related to other Polynesian languages. It has the status of an official language in New Zealand, and public signs and documents are often in both English and Maori, the way English and French are both used in Canada. On the other hand, Australian Aborigines and Tones Strait Islanders speak a multitude of languages. That diversity has allowed the hegemony of English to be less challenged than in virtually any other English-speaking country. Of Australia's fifty officially surviving languages, only ten have recorded speakers of one thousand or more, and, of the two strongest, neither Arrernte from central Australia nor Dhuwal-Dhuwala from Arnhem Land has more than four thousand (Population Composition). Migrants from Europe and Asia have played a prominent role in Australian culture, but in more significant numbers only since the dissolving of the White Australia policy from the early 1960s; in New Zealand, contemporary cultural formations reflect a significant history of migration from the Pacific Islands.' (Introduction)