When Europe designed itself as the centre of ‘Enlightenment’, also know as the Age of Reason, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it did so with the knowledge that an ‘unenlightened periphery’ was thereby constructed. Thus an irreducible and fundamental bipolar structural opposition was constructed. ‘Enlightenment’, by definition, was characterised by light, and assumed that all human beings were equal in so far as they were led by the light of reason. As such it was distinguished from the darkness, which supposedly characterised the Middle Ages, but also ‘primitive’ peoples. Kant, one of the last Enlightenment thinkers, said that the enlightenment is the emergence of man from his self-imposed infancy.

The current disadvantage experienced by the Indigenous peoples is the legacy of Australian colonial history, marked for Indigenous people since 1788 by discrimination, forced dependence and disempowerment. Reconciliation thus, must reverse these historical trends by facilitating the empowerment of Indigenous communities through the promotion of self-determination. And this is what is meant by post-colonialism: a new paradigm and the need, in nations or groups which have been victims of imperialism, to achieve an identity uncontaminated by universalistic or Eurocentric concepts and images. And a country like Australia has almost no possibility of entry into the post-colonised condition. Although there is still much that can be done to redress the abysmal situation, for example, Indigenous control of Indigenous culture, a self-sustaining and independent economic base, political empo

Some topics in this essay:
Australia British, West’s West, Adorno Horkheimer, Age Reason, Kant Enlightenment, Joseph Conrad, , Benjamin Europe, Middle Ages, indigenous people, eurocentric community, indigenous societies,