Who is "aboriginal"?

This is a question which needs to be addressed in this country. It needs to be addressed before the proposed referendum on a "voice" to parliament for aboriginal people. It is also a question which is not going to be easy to answer. 

The reason it needs to be addressed is not, as some will suggest, "racist" but because people need to know just who that "voice" will represent. We cannot simply continue to allow people to self-identify, or some to be accepted for political or activist reasons but others with almost identical ancestry to be denied.

I am not "aboriginal". My four grandparents were the first to be born in this country. 

It also seems I am not "indigenous" either - not according to the definitions which require some sort of association with the land here. I do not have that strong tie to "country" felt by some aboriginal people. I actually have no strong feelings about it at all. I am not someone who waves the flag - and I do not like the dirge which is supposedly our "national anthem". It is people who caused me to return here - not place.

I also know other people feel quite differently about all this. They are immensely proud of the country to which they "belong". For some of them it is their ancestral home stretching back far before records began. For some of them it is the country which has given them shelter as refugees. 

Between these two extremes there are all sorts of differences in association with "the land". It is an issue which has to be addressed. We need to know if someone who has a single great-great-great grandparent "who might have been born on an outback station to an aboriginal woman and a white man" has the same claim to being aboriginal as the person born to someone whose grandparents were the first to have any contact with white settlers.  (This happened as late as 1984 when contact was made with the Pintubi people in the Gibson desert.)

Where do we draw the line - and for what purpose?  It's going to be a hard question to answer.