Assimilation and resistance: housing indigenous Australians in the 1970s

During the early 1970s, large numbers of Aboriginal people became tenants o f the Housing Commission of New South Wales under the Housing for Aborigine s program. Most moved from government reserves or dilapidated and overcrowd ed private rental dwellings to broadacre suburban estates. As public housin g tenants, they encountered considerable pressures to become 'respectable' citizens, to build their lives around privacy, sobriety, moral restraint, t he nuclear family, conventional gender roles and wage labour. For many indi genous Australians, these expectations-which were based as much on class re lations as on colonialism-represented a threat to their conventional ways o f life and their obligations to extended family and community. This paper e xplores the patterns of conformity and resistance amongst Aboriginal tenant s. It draws on the sociological and cultural studies literature on youth su bcultural resistance and compares anthropological theory about indigenous r esponses to the pressures of modernity.