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The purpose of this paper was to examine risk and protective factors associated with the consequences of card gambling and commercial gambling for Indigenous Australians in north Queensland. With Indigenous Elders' approval and using qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 Indigenous and 48 non-Indigenous Australians in three north Queensland sites. Risk factors associated with both card and commercial gambling consequences were found to be poverty and a reluctance to seek gambling help, while for card gambling only, generational influences was a risk factor. In contrast, protective factors for both card and commercial gambling consequences were reported as positive role models, family relatedness and cultural resilience. Culturally distinctive risk and protective factors, once identified, can be the target of public health strategies to promote responsible gambling awareness among Indigenous gamblers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both the colonial encapsulation and post-colonial recognition of North Queensland's Aboriginal population have been achieved through legislative demarcation. This paper explores the way such demarcation has extended the influence of the state within local Aboriginal life-worlds, focusing on the State of Queensland's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 and the Commonwealth's Native Title Act 1993. Drawing on ethnographic and historical material from Central Cape York Peninsula, and recent anthropological theorization of the state, I argue that anthropologists need to seriously consider Aboriginal claims about what Michel-Roiph Trouillot calls 'state effects'. But careful examination of these claims suggests that the state no longer simply imposes its projects on fundamentally distinct Aboriginal life-worlds. Not only is the state now deeply engaged within these life-worlds, it is also deeply interwoven into post-colonial Aboriginal subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]