Pilgrim, Having lived in the NT in years past, and visited fairly recently, I have personally observed that that many aboriginals can handle neither grog nor money, nor work either.

As an example of the first, just a short stroll around the street in Alice Springs will show you that.

For the second, one just has to visit the Alice Springs casino where the majority of the players are aboriginals, not tourists.

For the last, one has to visit the much lauded Wave Hill cattle station, where owing to the difficulty of getting aboriginal stockmen, most of the employees are white.

QED.

David

David, having lived all across Australia I have personally observed that great numbers of non-Aboriginal people cannot handle money, grog and play the pokies instead of looking for a job.

If you had a point to make you failed dismally.

And by the way it is offensive to use 'aboriginals' and the correct terms are Aboriginal people or Aborigines (and note with a capital A). Thanks for exposing your ignorance.

Hi Pilgrim,

Your point about " .... no workable knowledge of cause and consequence .... " is probably very close to the mark but needs to be teased out: is it likely that people with an ethic or cosmology (or epistemology ?) that relies on magic, on spells and ceremonies, on the secret wisdom of the elders (I haven't heard that term for a while, thank God), that they will tend not to try to look for causes, and be pretty casual about the effects of actions ?

Is it possible that, if people believed that, even when they put a lot of effort into hunting or foraging, any results were at the behest of some secret incantation of an elder ? That, effectively, everything dropped, and still drops, out of the sky ? Or not in the old days, of course, during droughts when the power of the elders seems to wane somewhat. Ration systems would have helped to counter the impacts of droughts, and ironically would have saved the political power of the elders from being shattered by natural events.

If people don't really understand where and why all this bounty, welfare, houses, ATMs, comes from, then they are likely to attribute at least some of it to the enormous powers of the elders: clever fellas, those elders, they know secret ceremonies to make Canberra pay out more and more. (I think one of the most powerful of those ceremonies is called 'poor bugger me').

The notion of a Cargo Cult is very relevant here: people may think that, if white fellas get free houses and cars and salaries for apparently not actually doing anything, then why can't we ? If all manner of bounty drops off trees for white fellas, then why not for us ? Poor buggers us.

White fellas doing nothing ? Yes, since after all, you rarely ever see anybody actually working on TV. And when someone goes to see a person in Centrelink, say, that person is sitting there doing nothing - except attending to them. Well, that's not real work.

[TBC]

[continued]

Or take health: hygiene, diet and exercise may do wonders for Indigenous health. But just in the last couple of days, there have been news stories about diabetes, trachoma and middle-ear infection. All entirely preventable, all to do with care for children, hygiene, diet and exercise. But again, people think that a nurse can give them a pill and it's all fixed. Anyway, the old fellas know better. They can pull stones out of your body. Clever fellas.

About otitis media, middle-ear infection, infection in the nasal passages, the Eustachian tubes and inner, middle and outer ear, mainly from the build-up of mucus: when my late wife ran an Aboriginal pre-school, she made sure from the outset that the kids' noses were always clean, unblocked every morning. She got into trouble with her supervisor who said that it was natural for Aboriginal kids to have runny noses. She politely ignored her supervisor.

But again, no perception of cause and effect. Runny noses. Middle-ear infection. Deafness. What has one to do with the other ? Grog and/or Coke, and white bread and junk foods, and nobody except kids moving above 1 kph. Diabetes. Who would have thought ?

So the epistemology goes.

Cheers,

Joe

Whitefella Joe has spoken...thus it must be true what he say!

Minotaur, if you need to argue about semantics, you are the one with a very poor argument. My observations were confined to many aboriginals. I would agree with your comments about some white fellas.

I think you will find that Joe speaks from a very wide range of experience and his observations should not be written off with flippant comments.

David