As a resident of Alice Springs who often reads Pilger's articles on world affairs, this article was as great a disappointment as are Germaine Greer's attempts to tell it like it is in Australia today.
Mr Pilger, with respect you do not know what you are talking about.

Raptor,

You are unjustly maligning the genuine left when you suggest that Pilger is part of it. It might be a broad church, but the more grown-up sections of it do have some sense of decency, and respect for the truth, and have not become lickspittles for dictatorships and anti-Enlightenment fundamentalisms.

You don't think so ? Then wait for Pilger's take on Libya, and on the execution of the war criminal Osama bin Laden, and his defence - by omission - of extreme right-wing reactionary ideologies.

Joe

Not everyone agrees with you that Aboriginal tradition is worthless, Loudmouth. Not John Pilger, not Aboriginal professors, high achievers, community members, spokespersons or the downcast and infirm. Not the overwhelming majority of Australian citizens who consider the tradition of equal rights between women and men of merit and that the gender apartheid Europeans introduced should once and for all be dismantled with the provision of women's legislatures to empower women equally with men. And not the generations of Australians over the past century who have accepted equality between women and men in bringing this about. In fact, apart from Rupert Murdoch and a meagre scattering of his supplicants, you're pretty much talking to yourself. I feel sorry for your eternal frustration over tradition but one day you'll get it, even if it takes the whole nation at a referendum on equal rights to convince you. You must miss your esteemed partner terribly.

Hi Whistler, still banging away on the same drum ? Good luck.

I didn't express any negative opinions about traditions, as far as I can tell. In fact, there are some that I find very attractive. Down this way, for example, amongst the Ngarrindjeri and the group up the Murray River, the Ngangaruku (and perhaps some other groups as well), there was a custom which I find quite charming, referred to in the anthropological literature as 'ngangaiampe'.

It worked like this: when a boy was born, his father would carefully preserve his umbilical string, wrap it and give it to a kinsman who had relations up (or down) the river. This kinsman would take the string up and offer it to a man of the other group. If he accepted, then there was this special relationship between the two men, called 'ngangaiampe'. It meant that, if ever one of the men or his close relations were travelling through the country of the other man, the giver or the receiver had to ensure that they remained safe, and that they had enough food. The two men were never allowed to communicate directly, but only through intermediaries. There were so many of these relationships that it fostered strong bonds of mutual, if unspoken, support between the groups: nowadays, they regard themselves as belonging to the one group, the Ngarrindjeri. Of course, nowadays the people speak to each other and frequently inter-marry.

On the other hand, I don't think it is appropriate to talk about gender equality in a traditional context: men and women had superordinate and subordinate roles, and since they came from different family groups, after all, they usually would not have had much authority in the country of the other, certainly not in patrilineal groups' country. Strictly speaking, gender equality, particularly the rights of women to do anything that men can do, is a modern phenomenon - a work in progress.

Still, keep banging away :)

Thank you for your kind thoughts, by the way. Yes, I do, and always will: it will always be like just yesterday ......

Joe

I commend Pilger for telling it like it is--especially since he is saying precisely what I've been saying in recent OLO threads: that the media is overwhelmingly right-wing in Australia; and that both "Labor and [the] Coalition [are] (conservative) governments".
And then there's the aboriginal "problem". Unpalatable or not, what he communicates are simply the facts about colonial Australia's dehumanising, exploitative, discriminatory and murderous dealings with the indigenous population to date.
This is not to absolve aboriginals of often being complicit in their own misery, but it is the essential fact-base we have to acknowledge, and from which the "vital question" ought to proceed: "why do so many indigenous Australians remain 'recalcitrant' when modern Australia has at least thrown money at the problem (money in the West is the cold cure, it solves everything)"?
The answer in my view is simple; because Australia largely retains an "uneasy" supremacist and xenophobic mentality. This is directed, albeit often incoherently, against Asians, Muslims, refugees generally, but with an especially visceral, largely unconscious, loathing and fear directed at our indigenous population--our only genuinely despised subaltern class. This kind of deep-seated racism is akin to what Conrad characterised in "Heart of Darkness" as "the horror".

I like to think of myself as above all this, but even I'm instinctively uneasy around aborigine's in a way that manifests itself to them, I think, as mannered indifference. But more assertive, or less sensitive, individuals than me turn their disquiet into open contempt, even bravado.
Anyway, this needs much more elaboration, what I want to get to is the "effect" of this "civilised disquiet"--at best! contempt at worst--on aborigine's and their culture..
My contention is that this eurocentric superciliousness, fear and condescension we project is "unerringly communicated" to our "benighted brethren", and this is "a" major root of their "self-destructiveness".
I often wonder how "I" would feel if I knew that my mere visage aroused fear and loathing among the other, different-looking, bipeds who dominated the scene, qualitatively as well as quantitatively, putting me decidedly in the shade--in the shadows.

We murdered the most courageous and intelligent of the Aboriginal Community just like Pol Pot,the US backed despot who killed the middle class in Cambodia.To this day,Cambodia has not recovered.

The Aborigines are now laden with European genetics with almost no pure blood of their ancestry left,yet they still get marginalised by an elite who see the mass of our humanity as being a blight on their planet.

Eugenics is alive and well in our post Orwellian world.The middle class of all societies are now in their sights,since perceived climate change and environmental degradation,will impinge upon their grand vision of their New World Order.