AJ,

Wow, I haven't heard or read that term 'full-blood' except in its contextualised form, for quite some time.

If you know anything about Aboriginal people in the 'South', you would know that 'full-bloods' are pretty thin on the ground. I reckon there are more than people might think, out in the rural areas, but the vast majority, while they would have very few non-Aboriginal birth-relations that they knew actively, would overwhelmingly have non-Aboriginal ancestry going back nearly two hundred years.

Since you are interested, my wife's ancestry would have been similarly mixed, and amongst her great-great-grandparents would have been English, Scots, Chinese and Italian. She could trace her Aboriginal ancestry easily back to the 1830s, perhaps even the 1820s, (Aboriginal people are far better documented than people think), back to a half a dozen of those gr-gr-grandparents, mostly Ngarrindjeri (in fact, mostly from the Jaralde dialect group of the Ngarrindjeri (Narrung Peninsula, Lakes), and at least one from the Ramindjeri dialect group of the Ngarrindjeri (South Coast)), with one Narrunga gr-gr-grandparent as well, from northern Yorke Peninsula here n SA. In terms you seem to be familiar with, you would have been classed her as 'quadroon'. So to continue in the same vein, I guess you would call my kids 'octoroons'. We called them 'kids', 'people', vibrant human beings like other Aboriginal people of all manner of fractionations.

Having got that out of the way, to LEGO's comments: no, I don't see much wrong with them. I'll check again. Nope, sound good to me.

Joe

LEGO,

Thanks for that. I guess that’ll have to do for now. I find it a bit odd that this Ion Filings guy (or whatever his name was) witnessed so much, though.

Joe,

So let me get this straight. In indigenous culture, Aborigines would:

- anally penetrate young boys as a part of their initiation ceremonies;
- blame one of their own for the death of someone who died of natural causes and then kill them for it;
- club old women to death simply for being too old;
- make slaves of their young men?

Interesting.

So what are the primary sources for this? These are the claims that I can’t find any evidence for and would be interested in reading about.

AJ,

You're asking, did any of these occur ?

- anally penetrate young boys as a part of their initiation ceremonies;
s
Yes, in some part of Australia, usually the areas under patriarchal rules.

- blame one of their own for the death of someone who died of natural causes and then kill them for it;

Yes, this seems to have been fairly common: death wasn't considered 'natural', except perhaps for small children and old women. So obviously, someone must have caused any derath. Amongst the Ngarrindjeri, a council, called a 'tendi', was called (pretty much solely for this reason) of all the relevant elders, i.e. heads of families, and someone had to be blamed, often a sort of 'outsider', and then pursued and killed. This usually set off an inter-clan feud in which every one merrily participated.

- club old women to death simply for being too old;

No, I haven't heard of this: often they would be put out in the sticks, under a bush. They weren't all that important in traditional life, so they often weren't given the standard drying/smoking treatment more commonly employed in the funerary ceremonies for men.

- make slaves of their young men?
No, I haven't heard of 'slaves'. There was no point, in hunter gatherer societies, in holding slaves, so when one group raided another, the men were usually just killed and the women taken as wives. Except maybe for the old women. [see above] But the young men were often made to wait for decades until they could get wives (unless they could capture them from neighbouring groups). So they were probably at the beck and call of the older men, the 'elders', who often had several wives, from several neighbouring groups.

Dig around, you can find reports of all of these in early writings. And of a lot worse.

[TBC]

[continued]

That's how it was. A very ingenious people with incredibly limited technology, in a very harsh, unpredictable and limiting environment, no animals or plants to domesticate so that they could conceivably become agriculturalists. A dreadful human tragedy. Humans like us, you and me, condemned to be stuck on an island with no economic or social innovations diffusing from the outside world. People who deserved better.

I don't know why some people make out how idyllic life was in traditional times. And in confirmation of that, I also don't see too many people going out and trying to live like that - no welfare cheques, no Toyotas, no fast food, no government services, just a plain, traditional life. Perhaps you could try it :)

Joe

To Aj

Ion idriess is a world famous author. Even if you have never read his books, I am surprised that you never heard of him. Why don't you just look him up in Wiki?

Aboriginal people did not live a hobbit like existence, communing with nature, and living in peace with each other. Why don't you just get a copy of "Australia's living Stone Age" and read for yourself how life was in the remotest parts of Australia where some aboriginals had never seen a white man?

"Over the Ranges" is very good too. Idriess accompanies a patrol officer into tribal lands to arrest a half dozen aborigines whom the Old Men had asked the whites to capture and jail. The patrol officer himself claimed that aboriginal people were not dumb, they were smart in a different way to whites. The prisoners he arrested and chained together proved his point. The arrested aborigines were chained with a lock which had been the standard prison lock for 200 years because it was unpickable. Two aborigines picked the locks and escaped.

They did not know what keyways, tumblers or springs were, but they divined how the lock worked and they used human hair to pick the lock.

Another amusing bit was when the patrol officer got his remaining prisoners back to the coast road and a truck came along. The aborigines had never seen a truck in their lives and they climbed a tree in panic. They were put in the truck and were astonished at the experience of travelling in a truck. They were eventually released, and they must have returned to their tribes with the sort of tales one would expect of one abducted by space aliens.

Another amusing example was when Idriess asked three stone age aboriginal men, how did they track over solid rock? The three aboriginal men looked at each other in consternation. Idriess knew from the looks they were giving each other that the aboriginal men were thinking "What! White men can't even track over rock? Hey, how dumb are these guys?"

It looks like Andrew Bartlett has slunk away to wherever the Australia haters reside. Hey Andrew! If you are still around, don't think that you can sneer at my people and my culture and then expect the people that you despise to be nice to you.

I had a funny feeling that you would stick around not trade broadsides with us. It is OK sticking your face on TV and wagging your fingers at everybody else, but you don't want your own behaviour examined or criticised.

Perhaps it is time that you did a Jimmy Swaggard and prostrated yourself in front of a Green audience screaming. "Ah have sinned, Lord!"