[Continued]

Killarney,

Another unsettling fact for you: even back in 1996, according to Birrell (2000), almost half of all Indigenous adults were marrying non-Indigenous partners. Yes, you've guessed it, the great majority of urban Indigenous women were inter-marrying.

Inter-marriage is nothing new, of course: most of my wife's siblings and at least half of her cousins inter-married, some marriages going back to the fifties. Again, inter-marriage is very low in remote areas, but in the cities is around 80-90 %, for both men and women.

So this touches on your 'colour-card' concept of Aboriginality: most young Indigenous people now have been born and bred in the cities, and commonly with one non-Indigenous parent, often three out of four non-Indigenous grandparents. But Indigeneity being more social than strictly biological, the great majority of those young people have no trouble as honestly and forthrightly counting themselves as Indigenous.

Of course, that may change as Indigenous people move up the social scale, from a welfare- to a work-orientation, from the working-class into the middle class. In another generation, say by 2038, there could be at least 120,000 Indigenous graduates, one in every three adults, overwhelmingly urban - and inter-marrying.

And certainly none of them, victims.

I hope this gives you something to think about :)

Joe
www.firstsources.info

Jo

I didn't really want to get drawn into this debate. I was just making a comment about statistical distortion - not race.

Your methodology is a bit like an actor's age - highly elastic. However, if indigenous people are getting more 'white' and 'middle class' and the divide between urban and remote-area indigenous people is widening, then of course that will have all kinds of effects in the future - just as it's had in the past.

I don't think you've given me much 'to think about', other than what I already know. Historically, all colonially dispossessed people go through an almost identical pattern of some choosing assimilation (or having it chosen for them) and others remaining close to what's left of their ancestral and cultural way of life. The latter group, being cut off from the mainstream colonial culture and economy, pays the heaviest price.

Hi Killarney,

I don't think I'm distorting anything: the stats are there, once you've checked them out you either provisionally accept them or deny them. Nothing all that elastic about it at all. It's your call.

As for assimilation, as you call it, on the one hand pretty much all Aboriginal people have been happy to grab onto Toyotas, fridges, TVs, the latest IPod, as much as the next person, and on the other hand my inclination, after fifty years, is to agree with them: why shouldn't they if they wish ?

Question for you: should Aboriginal people have ........ choice ?

Nobody is ever going to go back to, day after day, collecting grass seed and pounding it into a flour, then making it into a damper on a stick fire. Human societies have developed more economical ways of earning a living, from agriculture, to industrial activities and beyond. Nobody has to die in droughts as people did pre-colonial. Children don't have to be knocked on the head, nor old women.

All humans are entitled to the benefits of modern production, science, medicine, opportunities, including all Aboriginal people. They're not just some helpless bunch for anthropologists to seal off from the rest of the world and study, much as (I suspect) they would like. Everybody is entitled to hold up all the baubles of modern society and say yea or nay. Everybody is entitled to aspire to a McMansion.

And, Killarney, everybody is entitled to a Soy Latte Guatemalan Espresso whenever they like.

Joe

'Nobody is ever going to go back to, day after day, collecting grass seed and pounding it into a flour, then making it into a damper on a stick fire.'

Oh, I don't know. Day-to-day scrounging and hunting is the way we lived for about 99% of human history and it's the lifestyle we physically and emotionally evolved from.

What anthropologists have found is that virtually all hunter-gatherer societies fiercely resist being forced, either overtly or covertly, into a sedentary farming/industrial/urbanised society. They finally capitulate only after the colonising society has made it impossible for them to continue their hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

What anthropologists have also found, almost universally, is that hunter-gatherer societies only need to work a fraction of the weekly hours that supposed advanced societies do. Rather than the civilisation myth of life in those societies being 'nasty, brutish and short', those people actually spent much of their time engaged, not in work, but in spiritual pursuits, emotional bonding, personal grooming, art and craft etc. Analysis of skeletons from the Paleolithic period found that people of that time were much healthier than their Neolithic descendants. On this basis, they more than likely lived happy, 'unbrutish', long lives .

Certainly, people who only know life in a farming/industrial/urbanised society would probably find the hunter-gatherer lifestyle too much to bear. However, if they ever had to, I'm sure they would make the adjustment and possibly even feel better for having done so.

As for today's indigenous people wanting to aspire to all the things that non-indigenous people do, I've got no problem with that at all. That's entirely their choice.

Hi Killarney,

Thanks for that complete rubbish, and quite irrelevant rubbish at that. But I think I can see where you are coming from: that Aboriginal people shouldn't live in modern society, but should return to a life hunting lizards and collecting scanty grass seed. Not going to happen, mate.

And that Aboriginal people who have moved to towns are not really Aboriginal ? Cities are really only for whites ? Perhaps you could tell that to the next Aboriginal bloke you meet :)

As you say, hunting, gathering, fishing and scrounging - and starving when food supplies failed - was "the way we lived for about 99% of human history". Yes indeed, my Scottish forebears were getting around covered in blue mud only a couple of thousand years ago. But my Scottish contemporary cousins live in modern society, speaking incomprehensibly to each other quite comfortably, warming their homes in winter, wearing warm clothes - barely any blue mud in sight - and earning their livings in a modern economy.

So it may help your cause if you could find any people in the world, including the Scots, who have returned to a hunting and gathering - or scrounging, as you all it - lifestyle, society, economy and political structure, freely, of their own volition. Good luck !

From my rudimentary studies, it appears that, from the earliest days, Aboriginal people, from their own viewpoint, managed their relationship with the new European society, technology and economy, coming and going as they felt like, working for farmers and pastoralists for a while then going off of their own free will whenever the mood suited. In the 'south', once Aboriginal people got a handle on this new society and its attractions, mainly grog and tobacco, from very early on, people were involved in harvesting, shearing, mustering, even in the whaling industry (one whale-boat out of Encounter Bay was crewed entirely by Aboriginal men).

In fact, the Protector here in SA provided Aboriginal people with perhaps a hundred 15-ft boats and fishing gear on all the major waterways, to

[TBC]

enable them to more efficiently utilise their resources, by switching from a hunter-technology to a, well, more efficient hunter-technology, with lines, hooks and nets rather than spears.

One time, the Protector, Edward Hamilton - he was Protector for 35 years, six or seven days a week, day in and day out, that would give him a pretty thorough knowledge of Aboriginal people during the Transformation - sends 50 lbs of netting twine down for the blokes at Goolwa, as usual, but gets a message that they each want their own twine, and he complains that Aboriginal people have little concept of working together, they are so individualist. He ignores the request.

As for your Sahlins' notion that everywhere, Aboriginal people lived a life of plenty, engaging in food gathering for barely one or two hours a day, I think he was on something when he wrote that. Try gathering a kilo of grass seed, Killarney: see how long it takes, and multiply it by the number in your family. Then spend time grinding it into a rough flour, gathering sticks for a fire, finding water, and baking a damper out of it. Sahlins, being a male-(i.e. 'culture')-oriented male, overlooked the fact that in traditional society, Aboriginal women collected by far the bulk of the food consumed.

People seize opportunities as individuals. They aren't stupid, and neither do they march to some hidden Leftist drum of resistance and cultural conservatism. Nowadays, Aboriginal people can see for themselves what is involved in modern society - after all, they are part of it - the great majority of Indigenous people alive today have been born and raised in modern, urban environments - and take its facets for granted as much as anybody else - and make their choices accordingly, like anybody else.

When you can perceive Aboriginal people as being people like you, raised in urban environments just like you, schooling and working, inter-marrying - and all the while remaining Indigenous, as they perceive it - then you can start understanding Indigenous people as people. Like you and me :)

Joe