Which is the world's most indigenous city?

Submitted by Paul Daley on Wed, 29/06/2016 - 11:23pm

Most cities are indigenous, insofar as they are built on the lands of dispossessed first peoples. Paul Daley, Guardian Australia’s leading voice on Indigenous history, explores whether a city’s ‘indigeneity’ is just a matter of population – or if culture and equality count just as much

The perception of Australia’s indigenous people is that they live largely in deserts and other remote areas. And indeed, reflecting in part the necessity of Indigenous Australians to maintain strong physical links with traditional lands to retain native title, about four in 10 still live in traditional country, often remote from urban settlements.

But the flipside is equally telling: more than half of aboriginal Australians now dwell in the cities of the eastern seaboard. Long regarded as Australia’s indigenous capital, Sydney has been surpassed by Brisbane as host to the greatest number of Indigenous Australians (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) – as of 2011, there were 64,993 in Brisbane to Sydney’s 64,184. Fifteen years from now, Nicholas Biddle of the Australian National University’s Centre for Aboriginal Policy Research predicts Brisbane’s aboriginal population will reach 133,189 compared with Sydney’s 88,371.