Suppression, Survival and a Living Law

European settlement broke bora practice across large parts of its former range. Pastoral and agricultural clearing destroyed many bora grounds outright, missions and government policy discouraged or actively suppressed ceremonial life on the reserves and stations where Aboriginal people were concentrated, and the forced removal of children under twentieth century assimilation policy cut some lines of transmission from senior men to the boys who would have been initiated. Ronald and Catherine Berndt's survey of Aboriginal Australian society, written decades after Howitt, already described bora as discontinued across much of its former range while noting its continuation in other communities.

Where it continues, bora survives as a living body of law rather than as a museum reconstruction, taught and conducted by senior men within the communities that hold it, and the atlas describes it, deliberately, in general terms rather than attempting to specify which communities currently practise it or in what form, since that specification is not the atlas's to make. A number of former bora grounds, no longer used for ceremony, are recognised as Aboriginal cultural heritage sites in New South Wales and Queensland today, a preserved trace of a practice that in other places has continued rather than stopped.