There is no Aboriginal Australian nation. Before 1788 the continent and Tasmania held several hundred distinct polities with their own languages, territories and laws, connected by trade and ceremony routes running for thousands of kilometres. The single category is a colonial administrative product, and it remains in use because governments, courts and censuses need one. That is why the atlas keeps it as a heading and files particular peoples such as the Anangu, the Yolngu, the Wiradjuri and the Kulin under their own names.
The Berndts wrote their survey across a period in which Aboriginal people were counted, moved and legislated for as a single class, and it documents both the diversity that the class concealed and the mission and reserve system that pressed against it. Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lectures gave that pressure its most quoted name, the great Australian silence, meaning the absence of Aboriginal people from the national history then being taught.
The legal position changed slowly. Land rights legislation in the Northern Territory from 1976, and the Mabo judgment of 1992 which rejected the doctrine that the continent had belonged to no one, opened a process by which particular peoples now hold or jointly manage their country. Religious consequences follow directly from it. Joint management arrangements at places such as Uluru give traditional owners standing to decide what visitors may do, what may be photographed, and what may be told.