They were forbidden to sit at the milk-bar tables, even with their white friends, and were banned from municipal swimming pools. At the pictures they sat on the hard seats of the roped-off front stalls while the whites sat in the cushioned seats behind. Those born in towns were not permitted to live in aboriginal reserves. Women going out with a white man were thrown into jail. The police objected to aborigines fishing in the Murray without a licence.
Today there are still many individual cases of discrimination.
At the Alice Springs conference in 1982 a political party for the first time involved aborigines in formulating its aboriginal policy. As a result Don Chipp was able to make a forceful response to the media on many national and local issues involving them. The Democrats committed themselves to making a decisive difference in the status of aborigines. That conference was followed up by Senator Michael Macklin's Platform on Aboriginal Affairs, which was later used as the basis for the AD policy. It was a very good policy that showed a great deal of concern for the plight of aborigines.